The Arts and Entertainment (A&F) television network, best known for its Biography series, has produced a list of the 100 most important figures of the millennium and devoted four hours of airtime to explain its picks. The list consists mainly of consensus figures: Beethoven, Columbus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Genghis Khan; and some 30 names are associated with the advancement of science. The list is heavily Eurocentric, which is not in itself a bad thing. European civilization came to dominate the world during this era, and A&E’s audience is privileged to live in the most prosperous and powerful offshoot of Europe.

Yet this insular focus can lead to a distorted view. Does Princess Diana really deserve to be considered the 73rd most important person to have lived during the last 1,000 years? Is she more important than other royals such as Elizabeth I (80), Peter the Great (83), or Isabella I (78) who actually ruled and accomplished great things for their domains? Even in this century, did she have more impact than Joseph Stalin (79) whose “evil empire’ was finally brought down by Ronald Reagan (85)?

Other questionable names on the list include Charlie Chaplin (95), the Beatles (76), Elvis Presley (57), Enrico Caruso (96), and Louis Armstrong (98). All were great entertainers, but unlikely to stand the test of time like Bach (26) or Shakespeare (5).

Removing such lightweights would open slots for more important figures. While George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are on the list, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton are not, despite their role in writing and promoting die Constitution. Hamilton’s economic policies, and his more realistic view of world affairs, laid the foundation for the strength and prosperity that has helped America maintain its freedom.

Henry the Navigator is not on the list. He funded improved shipbuilding and exploration down the coast of Africa, an effort which eventually opened the way to Asia. With the phrase “global economy” on everyone’s lips, it’s important to remember that a 15th-century Portuguese king laid the foundation for worldwide commerce, which nations and empires have struggled to control ever since. These bits of history armor us against claims that “globalization” is so new that we must abandon centuries of experience in the face of the “irresistible ” demands of an unhinged merchant elite who care nothing for the rest of society.

Other missing names include Pope Urban II, who in 1095 proclaimed the First Crusade against the advancing Muslims, creating Christian outposts in the Holy Land that endured for nearly two centuries. But then Saladin, who united the Arabs against die Second and Third Crusades, is also missing. Tamerlane is another Muslim warlord who learned from die Mongols and sought to replicate their empire. His importance to Europe stems from his 1403 defeat of the Ottoman Turks, who had broken off their assault on Constantinople and the Balkans to confront him in Syria. Even before the days of “trains, planes, and automobiles” (not to mention missiles), the course of civilizations could be affected by distant events.

Military leaders are conspicuously absent from the A&E list. But who can dispute the long-term impact of James Wolfe at Quebec or Robert Clive at Plassey, who ensured the influence of British civilization on such vast lands as North America and India? Even William Pitt the Elder, whose strategy they carried out, is absent. Abraham Lincoln (23) is credited with both freeing the slaves and preserving the Union, but could not have done either without Ulysses S. Grant, who is not on the list. Neither are the deans of modern strategic thinking, Karl von Clausewitz and Alfred Thayer Mahan—though there’s room for a ninny like Eleanor Roosevelt (93).

It is also odd that a list devoted to those who made 1,000 years of history does not include a single major historian. (I am discounting, not overlooking, #46 Machiavelli and #7 Marx.) My choice would be Edward Gibbon. His Decline and Fall of the Rome Empire is arguably the best known modern work of history. Its fame is the main reason most people even know there was a millennium before this one. The work itself covers more than the tide implies, tracing over a thousand years of history including that of the successor states to Rome and Constantinople, the Persian and Chinese empires, and the rise of both Christianity and Islam.

John Locke (18) is hailed as a champion of individual rights and democratic government who disputed the divine right of kings, but A&E fails to mention that one of Locke’s “natural rights” was that of private property. Locke believed man was endowed from birth with the property of his own body and that, when he combined his labor with natural resources, he was entitled to the fruits of his efforts.

Indeed, economic thinkers are largely ignored in a list otherwise heavily weighted towards materialism and modern times. Adam Smith (20) is the only name primarily associated with the “dismal science.” The absence of John Maynard Keynes is surprising, though not disturbing. Leon Walras, who married differential calculus to economic theory and revolutionized the field (for good and ill) is more deserving of mention.

I did not expect the German-American Friedrich List to be on A&E’s roll, yet his thought warrants our attention. By codifying the mercantilist experience that guided the West to the Industrial Revolution, his National System of Political Economy laid out the policies that not only made America the world’s leading economy by the end of the 19th century, but have underpinned the efforts of every other major country’ that has successfully industrialized. From an economic standpoint, this process has been the outstanding accomplishment of the millennium.

A&E did credit Karl Marx (7) for inspiring the monstrous tyrannies of Lenin (35), Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung (43). However, A&E implied that these were perversions and that Marx should be remembered for inspiring labor unions and a social concern for the poor. This is nonsense.

The Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, a year that Central Europe was swept with bloody revolutions, opened with the fiery sentence, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Marx himself set the stage for the murderous purges of “democratic” socialists, labor union leaders, and other reformers under communist regimes. His first book (The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847) was an attack on Pierre Joseph Proudhon, a middle-class socialist who advocated voluntary self-help organizations, easy credit so people could invest in their own enterprises, and representative government. Proudhon was also an anarchist. Such sentiments had little appeal to those seeking a war to the death against all class-enemies and an iron rule based on historically inevitable and “scientific” principles.

Marx was not even the first social critic in England. That honor goes to the great Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli, whose Sybil, or The Two Nations, published in 1845, is acknowledged as the earliest and best “Condition of England” novel. It exposed the plight of the working poor and the failure of a political elite corrupted by commercial greed. Contempt for those who work hard to make ends meet is not a proper conservative tenet, but one based on the 19th-century liberal (now called libertarian) embrace of the super-rich as social ideal.

The upstart Disraeli split with Tory leaders over the issue of “free trade.” Rejecting this core tenet of liberalism, he rebuilt the party and restored its principles. In The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk credits Disraeli with “saving [the Tories] from amalgamation with a utilitarian Liberalism.” Today, an errant Republican Party needs a similar savior. Kirk goes on to argue that “the kernel of Disraeli’s social theories, is the idea of the nation. Repudiating the social atomism of the Benthamites, despising the class hostility of the rising Socialists; he reminded Englishmen that they are not simply an aggregation of economic units, not simply soldiers in a class struggle; they constitute a nation.” As Disraeli himself put it, “I am neither a Whig nor Tory. My politics are described in one word, and that one word is England.” As the millennium comes to a close, we would be wise to remember both Disraeli and Kirk and carry their ideas forward. If only mainstream conservatives in this country still regarded themselves as Americans first.