Brian Leiter ran a poll on The 10 "Most Important" Philosophers of the Early Modern Period:
| 1. Immanuel Kant |
| 2. David Hume |
| 3. Rene Descartes |
| 4. John Locke |
| 5. Gottfried Leibniz |
| 6. Thomas Hobbes |
| 7. Baruch Spinoza |
| 8. George Berkeley |
| 9. Adam Smith |
| 10. Francis Bacon |
Thomas Reid was 11th, Blaise Pascal 12th. Henry More languished at 27th. Full rankings here. Rousseau was accidentally left off the list, I suspect he would have performed well, even though I am not a big fan of his.
I personally would have rated Adam Smith higher in influence than "tree in the forest" Berkeley, "God is everything but also looks a lot like nature" Spinoza and "the world is the best possible and also made up of tiny monads" Leibniz. Supply and demand certainly isn't as wacky and interesting as all those other ideas, but it appears to have lasted somewhat longer and been more influential. I also would have picked Hobbes to one-up Leibniz, if not Locke. I suspect I have a political philosophy bias however.
More to the point, the question was who was the "most important", so other criteria like influence on other philosophers at the time would likely complicate things more than I am really capable of assessing. Perhaps the answerers were also sceptical of conflating philosophy with economics, even though at the time this was the done thing. In this case Smith looks decidedly less impressive, although his more philosophical ideas have been getting some play from highly reputable sources of late.
Anyway, congrats to Kant.
