Most Famous Marxism Philosophers

Marxism is a body of philosophical, political, and economic theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century, and elaborated by their successors over the following century and a half. Its central claims include the materialist conception of history, the analysis of capitalism as a system of class exploitation, and a vision of communism as the resolution of class antagonism. Marxist thought has shaped revolutionary movements, social democratic politics, sociology, history, and literary criticism worldwide. It encompasses many schools, including Leninism, Trotskyism, the Frankfurt School of critical theory, structural Marxism, and analytic Marxism. As a research tradition it remains influential in the humanities and social sciences.

Philosophers in this tradition

Jean-Paul Sartre 1905 – 1980 · French
Jean-Paul Sartre was a 20th-century French philosopher, playwright, novelist, and political activist, the leading public exponent of existentialism in the post-war period. His m...
Karl Marx 1818 – 1883 · German
Karl Marx was a 19th-century German philosopher, economist, historian, and revolutionary socialist whose work founded the tradition of thought that bears his name. With Friedric...
Max Horkheimer 1895 – 1973 · German
Max Horkheimer was a 20th-century German philosopher and sociologist, the founder of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt and the central organising ...
Antonio Negri 1933 – 2023 · Italian
Antonio Negri was an Italian Marxist political philosopher and revolutionary intellectual, a leading figure of the Italian operaismo movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and a co-au...
Leszek Kolakowski 1927 – 2009 · Polish
Leszek Kolakowski was a Polish philosopher and the most influential critic of Marxism from within the Marxist tradition. After early Marxist work that had brought him to a chair...
Alain Badiou b. 1937 · French
Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, a former student of Louis Althusser, and one of the leading figures of post-Maoist French philosophy. His Being and Event grounds an auster...
Antonio Gramsci 1891 – 1937 · Italian
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, and a founder of the Italian Communist Party. Arrested by Mussolini's regime in 1926, he spent the last decade of...
Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895 · German
Friedrich Engels was a 19th-century German philosopher, social scientist, and revolutionary, the closest collaborator of Karl Marx and a co-founder of the tradition of thought t...
Louis Althusser 1918 – 1990 · French
Louis Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher and a teacher at the Ecole Normale Superieure for nearly thirty years. His For Marx and Reading Capital, the latter co-written w...
Theodor Adorno 1903 – 1969 · German
Theodor W. Adorno was a 20th-century German philosopher, sociologist, musicologist, and a leading figure of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His ...
Ali Shariati 1933 – 1977 · Iranian
Ali Shariati was an Iranian sociologist and Islamic political philosopher, trained at the Sorbonne under Louis Massignon and Jacques Berque, who became the most influential inte...
Cornelius Castoriadis 1922 – 1997 · Greek-French
Cornelius Castoriadis was a Greek-French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and political theorist. A founding figure of the heterodox Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie in post-war ...
G. A. Cohen 1941 – 2009 · Canadian
Gerald Allan Cohen was a Canadian-British political philosopher and the leading figure of the school of analytical Marxism. Born to a Communist Jewish family in Montreal, he stu...
Georg Lukacs 1885 – 1971 · Hungarian
Georg Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic, one of the founders of Western Marxism. His History and Class Consciousness reintroduced Hegelian categorie...
Herbert Marcuse 1898 – 1979 · German-American
Herbert Marcuse was a 20th-century German-American philosopher and a leading figure of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, particularly in its American period. His major wo...
Henri Lefebvre 1901 – 1991 · French
Henri Lefebvre was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist whose work shaped the critical theory of everyday life and the philosophy of urban space. A long-time member of t...
Ernst Bloch 1885 – 1977 · German
Ernst Bloch was a German Marxist philosopher and one of the most original utopian thinkers of the twentieth century. After early association with Lukacs and Walter Benjamin, he ...
Slavoj Zizek b. 1949 · Slovenian
Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural critic, and one of the most prominent public intellectuals working in the broadly Hegelian and Lacanian tradition. The Sublime ...
Jose Carlos Mariategui 1894 – 1930 · Peruvian
Jose Carlos Mariategui was a Peruvian journalist and Marxist political philosopher and one of the most important Latin American thinkers of the twentieth century. Self-educated ...
Li Zehou 1930 – 2021 · Chinese
Li Zehou was a Chinese philosopher and aesthetician, the most influential figure of the post-Mao Chinese philosophical scene, who reconstructed the Confucian and Marxist traditi...
Alfred Schmidt 1931 – 2012 · German
Alfred Schmidt was a German philosopher and long-time professor at Frankfurt and one of the principal interpreters of the Frankfurt School in the second half of the twentieth ce...
Ferdinand Lassalle 1825 – 1864 · German
Ferdinand Lassalle was a German jurist, philosopher, and political organizer and the founder of the General German Workers' Association in 1863, the first political party of the...
Galvano della Volpe 1895 – 1968 · Italian
Galvano della Volpe was an Italian philosopher and aesthetician and the principal architect of the school of analytical Marxism that came to be known as the Della Volpian school...
Jacques Ranciere b. 1940 · French
Jacques Ranciere is a French philosopher, a former pupil of Althusser who broke decisively with his master in his collaboration with workers' archives in the 1970s. The Ignorant...
Lucien Goldmann 1913 – 1970 · Romanian-French
Lucien Goldmann was a Romanian-born French Marxist philosopher and literary theorist and the principal architect of what he called genetic structuralism. After early studies in ...
Mario Tronti 1931 – 2023 · Italian
Mario Tronti was an Italian Marxist political philosopher, the founding theorist of operaismo or workerism, and a senator of the Italian Republic. His Workers and Capital revers...
Miki Kiyoshi 1897 – 1945 · Japanese
Miki Kiyoshi was a Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto School and one of the most original Japanese interpreters of Marx, Heidegger, and Pascal. After studies under Nishida Kitaro...