How do you measure influence ? What is leading light ? It might seem that before the societal ranking siteKloutcame along to assign the great unwashed numbers by frigid , numerical , societal medium calculation , the only way to rank people ’s importance was by hunch and opinion . Your top 100 might be different from my top 100 , and who was to say which one captured the the true ? But long before the age of Klout , there was psychologist James McKeen Cattell and his 1903 paper , " A Statistical subject of Eminent Men . "
Cattell want to originate a criterion of societal importance that would move the sketch of great work force from the realm of lit into the realm of science . In ordering to put a act on greatness , he first had to determine what , precisely , should be measured . Men could be important in different ways :
So Cattell decided the number he need was to be found in the mensuration of " the motion of tongues and printing press . " He came up with a strategy to discover the set of world who had been most verbalise about . First , he took the 2000 longest article from each of 6 different cyclopaedia ( English , French , German , and American ) , narrowed them down to the lean of those that appear in at least three of the encyclopedia , and then from that list chose those with the greatest average number of business line give to them over the whole hardening .
The top 25 men
The end mathematical product was an ordered list of the 1000 most eminent men . The top 25 were Napoleon , Shakespeare , Mohammed , Voltaire , Bacon , Aristotle , Goethe , Julius Caesar , Luther , Plato , Napoleon III , Burke , Homer , Newton , Cicero , Milton , Alexander the Great , Pitt , Washington , Augustus , Wellington , Raphael , Descartes , Columbus , and Confucius .
The bottom 10 , as expected , are much less placeable to us today : Otho , Sertorius , Macpherson , Claudianus , Domitian , Bugeaud , Charles I ( Naples ) , Fauriel , Enfantin , and Babeuf .
Once he had the list , Cattell endeavored to unlock some of the secrets of greatness by analyze divisor like earned run average , nationality , and what the great were know for . For example , France was first in eminence , followed by Britain , Germany , Italy , Rome , Greece , America , Spain , Switzerland , Holland , and Sweden .
The real point of all this was to leave support for Cattell ’s ideas on eugenics . He used the statistic on nationality to argue for the unsavoury conclusion that race and genetic endowment were the primary factors in greatness ; he reckons , for example , that the fall - off in Greek tuberosity after the Hellenic period was due to " racial mixing . "
At the same time he undermines his own gunpoint by cautioning against reading too much into France ’s numbers , arguing that " the French Revolution brought into prominence many valet de chambre not truly great " and asserting that " in so far as the curve for the 19th one C are valid , the promise for America is large . " ( Yes , Cattell was American . ) So I guess he thought circumstances did have something to do with who stop up on the inclination ? Still , the composition ends with an ominous call for science to gather more quantitative data that would aid society figure out how to " improve the strain " and create more great men .
What about the eminent women?
Cattell had not intended to provide women out of his analysis . A few did end up on his lean of 1000 . He excuse that by " towering human " he really meant " lofty citizenry , " but since women did " not have an authoritative place on the list " there was no rationality not to just say " lofty man " and be done with it .
However , ten years subsequently , a student of Cattell ’s named Cora Sutton Castle adjudicate to apply his measurement proficiency to study eminent women for her doctorial dissertation . Needless to say , she total away with a slightly different ratiocination about the purpose of different factors in distinction .
The top 25 women
Castle intended to wreak with a lean of the 1000 most soaring woman , but after apply the cyclopedia scheme and removing women of the Bible from the lean , she was left with only 868 . The top 25 were Mary Stuart , Jeanne d’Arc , Victoria of England , Elizabeth of England , George Sand , Madame de Staël , Catherine II of Russia , Maria Theresa , Marie Antoinette , Anne of England , Madame de Sévigné , Mary I of England , George Eliot , Christina of Sweden , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Madame de Maintenon , Josephine of France , Catherine de Medici , Cleopatra , Harriet Beecher Stowe , Charlotte Brontë , Charlotte Corday , Marie Roland , Jeanne Pompadour , and Barbara Krüdener .
you may see Castle clamber to educe conclusion like to those of her adviser from her breakdown of the data , but the " race " angle ( which was really nationality ) did n’t yield much . She does incur it interesting that the proportion of towering woman to the population in general increases so much ( and far more than it did for world ) over the course of account , and notice that one reason for the recent spike heel may be that " ability in women is more readily and volitionally recognized at the present metre than formerly . "
" Who knows , " she asks in an aside about ancient Greece , " but that her women were as potentially as great as her men , and if Plato ’s theory regarding the education of women had been universally employ , the curve might not have risen mellow ? " She reason out the thesis with a hypothetical question that she clearly knows the solution to : " Has innate inferiority been the reason for the little issue of eminent women , or has civilization never yet allow them an opportunity to develop their unlearned powers and possibility ? "
