>>2637368Augustus and Caesar, with Deng as a runner-up.
Augustus terminated the chaos of the Late Republic, a death spiral of privatized violence and aristocratic competition, and replaced it with the Principate. Before Augustus, Roman freedom was the freedom to be drafted and to die fighting in pointless civil wars against other romans. His fundamental act was to establish a monopoly on violence, subordinating the military to a central, predictable authority. This new system, whose stability depended on a productive and taxable populace, generated the Pax Romana. Its mechanisms of a professional army, rationalized bureaucracy, and integrated infrastructure produced two centuries of security and economic predictability, a vast material improvement for tens of millions over the preceding century of civil war.
Deng Xiaoping enacted a similar systemic replacement. He dismantled the dysfunctional mechanism of Maoist command economics, which generated chronic famine and scarcity, and substituted a hybrid system that harnessed market forces under state control. The core mechanisms of de-collectivized agriculture and Special Economic Zones fundamentally rewired the relationship between labor and reward. This systemic shift unlocked the productive capacity of the population, initiating the single largest and fastest poverty reduction event in human history.