Global information publisher Thomson Reuters recently collected citations from the journal literature it indexed in 2007 — mainly academic / peer-reviewed journals — to books and their authors. Below is the list of the most-cited works/authors in the humanities and social sciences. (in the sciences, the journal rather than the book is the main communication vehicle).
For a measure of your canonical literacy, or perhaps your academic orientation, see how many of these authors you’ve read something by. I’ve been so bold.
From Times Higher Education (UK).
1 Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Philosophy, sociology, criticism”
2 Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) Sociology
3 Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) Philosophy
4 Albert Bandura (1925- ) Psychology
5 Anthony Giddens (1938- ) Sociology
6 Erving Goffman (1922-1982) Sociology
7 Jurgen Habermas (1929- ) Philosophy, sociology”
8 Max Weber (1864-1920) Sociology
9 Judith Butler (1956- ) Philosophy
10 Bruno Latour (1947- ) Sociology, anthropology”
11 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Psychoanalysis
12 Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) Philosophy
13 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Philosophy
14 Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) Philosophy
15 Noam Chomsky (1928- ) Linguistics, philosophy”
16 Ulrich Beck (1944- ) Sociology
17 Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Philosophy
18 David Harvey (1935- ) Geography
19 John Rawls (1921-2002) Philosophy
20 Geert Hofstede (1928- ) Cultural studies
21 Edward W. Said (1935-2003) Criticism
22 Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) Sociology
23 Roland Barthes (1915-1980) Criticism, philosophy”
24 Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) Anthropology
25 Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) Political theory
26 Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) Criticism, philosophy”
27 Henri Tajfel (1919-1982) Social psychology
28 Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Philosophy
29 Barney G. Glaser (1930- ) Sociology
30 George Lakoff (1941- ) Linguistics
31 John Dewey (1859-1952) Philosophy, psychology, education”
32 Benedict Anderson (1936- ) International studies
33 Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) Philosophy
34 Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) Psychoanalysis, philosophy, criticism”
35 Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) History and philosophy of science
36 Karl Marx (1818-1883) Political theory, economics, sociology”
37 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Philosophy