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Galileo (1564 - 1642)
We know today that the earth goes round the sun, but it is difficult for us to realize just how improbable this idea appeared at the beginning of the 17th century. Galileo, a mathematician and devout Catholic, began to be seen as a threat to divine truths by contesting, through experimentation, the pre-set theory that the earth was the center of the universe. By 1608 he had devised a powerful homemade telescope, which he used to discover findings such as sunspots and Saturn's moons. In 1633 Galileo wrote in favour of a sun-centred universe, in which the earth was one of many planets. The trial that ensued prompted the split that freed scientific knowledge from the restrictions of spiritual belief and medieval science. Galileo was forced to renounce his work as heresy and obligated to teach the traditional argument that if the earth were to rotate it would disintegrate and the clouds would be left behind. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest - but his ideas were free.

Nelson Mandela (1918 - )
"Robben Island was the harshest, most iron-fisted outpost in the South African penal system. Gone were the coloured wardens who had supplied cigarettes and sympathy. The warders were white and overwhelmingly Afrikaans-speaking, and they demanded a master-servant relationship. They ordered us to call them 'baas', which we refused. The racial divide was absolute: there were no black warders, and no white prisoners." Mandela spent a total of 27 years in prison for advocating a racially equal South Africa. Even while in prison, his influence was such that common prisoners on other wards began to educate themselves, and the warders grew to respect him. He consistently refused to compromise his political position to obtain freedom and, despite various offers of freedom, refused demands that he renounce his position of advocating violence in defense of his people until state violence against them had ended. By 1990, his reputation had grown so much around the world that the authorities had no choice but to release him unconditionally. Within a year, apartheid ended and Mandela was elected president of South Africa. He never sought to punish his abusers.

Karl Marx (1818 - 1883)
Having been expelled from Germany and France for concluding that history was a continual conflict between the majority who created wealth and the few who owned it, Marx moved to London in 1849. He was not the first to draw attention to the corrupting and exploitative nature of capital, but he was the first to advocate that the working classes revolt against the repressive capitalist classes. All class boundaries, he believed, would then be destroyed, and each individual would find his/her own personal fulfillment, having no need for religious or capitalist institutions. Whilst living in poverty in a loft in Soho, supported only by the contributions of his wealthier friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, Marx produced his most important body of work, Das Kapital (Capital). These thoughts - which became known as Marxism or Communism - were to be the greatest influence and impulse of social change in the 20th century, spurring revolutions all over the world and inspiring colonized countries to throw off their colonizers.

Mohandas Gandhi (1869 - 1948)
On 12 March 1930, with 78 followers, Mohandas Gandhi set off on a 241-mile march to the Arabian Ocean to protest the British salt tax and the law that prohibited Indians from making their own salt. Gandhi knew that picking up salt from the natural deposits would constitute an illegal act. Along the way, Gandhi addressed large crowds, and gathered an increasing number of people. On 5 April, Gandhi arrived at Dandi and picked up a small lump of natural salt. Of course, the British arrested him. But then, the thousands who had followed Gandhi began doing the same. The visual impact of wave after wave on Indians being attacked with police clubs and falling to the ground, only to be picked up by fellow protestors and put on stretchers before another line would come to receive a similar fate, just for picking salt, was perhaps the greatest example of Gandhi's non-violent strategy in action. This incredible demonstration of self control and non-violence against British brute force exercised in such a trivial cause could not help but reinforce the immorality and injustice of British rule. India gained its independence in 1948.

Simone De Beauvoir (1908 - 1986)
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxieme Sexe (The Second Sex) is perhaps the most influential work of feminist theory of the 20th century, inspiring the feminist movement in Europe and the US. Beauvoir based her understanding of the situation of women on descriptions of women's own experience, confirming the priority of the concrete over the abstract. She located her ethical enquiry within the historical context of man's definition of women as the 'other', and in so doing criticized traditional male-created concepts of philosophy, religion, psychoanalysis and even Marxism. Previous feminists wanted to share equality with men but never challenged their example, thus upholding a patriarchal world. De Beauvoir said it was not enough to have equality -society itself had to be feminized. She claimed that by eliminating male-imposed structures in family, society would be transformed into a more progressive alternative. Since women constitute the primary oppressed group, their liberation, in a domino effect, would spur the liberation of other oppressed groups.

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