Most Famous Political Philosophers

Philosophers in this tradition

• Edmund Burke 1729 – 1797 · Irish

  Edmund Burke was an Irish-born British statesman and political philosopher, often regarded as the founder of modern conservatism. As a member of Parliament he supported concilia...

• Noam Chomsky b. 1928 · American

  Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, political philosopher, and one of the most cited intellectuals alive. His Syntactic Structures and the theory of generative grammar transfo...

• Montesquieu 1689 – 1755 · French

  Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was a French philosopher and one of the architects of Enlightenment political thought. His Persian Letters satirized European cu...

• Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 1809 – 1865 · French

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French political philosopher and the first thinker to call himself an anarchist. Born to a working-class family in Besancon, he educated himself by ...

• 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...

• Reinhold Niebuhr 1892 – 1971 · American

  Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was an American Reformed theologian and the principal exponent of Christian realism in twentieth-century social thought. After thirteen years as a par...

• Roberto Mangabeira Unger b. 1947 · Brazilian

  Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a Brazilian philosopher and the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard, whose work has spanned legal theory, political philosophy, and Brazilian p...

• Carl Schmitt 1888 – 1985 · German

  Carl Schmitt was a German jurist and political theorist, one of the most influential and most compromised legal thinkers of the twentieth century. His Political Theology, The Co...

• Cornel West b. 1953 · American

  Cornel West is an American philosopher, theologian, and public intellectual whose work brings together pragmatism, the African-American intellectual tradition, and prophetic Chr...

• Kwame Nkrumah 1909 – 1972 · Ghanaian

  Kwame Nkrumah was a Ghanaian political philosopher and the first Prime Minister and President of independent Ghana. After studies in the United States and the United Kingdom, he...

• Muhammad Iqbal 1877 – 1938 · Pakistani

  Sir Muhammad Iqbal was an Indian-Pakistani Islamic philosopher, poet, and political thinker of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, widely regarded as the spiritua...

• Charles Fourier 1772 – 1837 · French

  Francois Marie Charles Fourier was a French utopian socialist and an extraordinarily original critic of early industrial civilization. Working as a clerk and salesman, he compos...

• Michael Sandel b. 1953 · American

  Michael Sandel is an American political philosopher, professor at Harvard University, and one of the most widely read public philosophers of our time. Liberalism and the Limits ...

• Robert Nozick 1938 – 2002 · American

  Robert Nozick was an American philosopher and a longtime professor at Harvard. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published in 1974 in part as a response to Rawls's Theory of Justi...

• Thomas Hobbes 1588 – 1679 · English

  Thomas Hobbes was a 17th-century English philosopher whose 1651 book Leviathan is one of the founding texts of modern political philosophy and social contract theory. Writing du...

• Niccolo Machiavelli 1469 – 1527 · Italian

  Niccolo Machiavelli was an Italian Renaissance diplomat, historian, and political philosopher of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, often described as the founder of modern...

• Sarah Grimke 1792 – 1873 · American

  Sarah Moore Grimke was an American abolitionist, philosopher, and one of the founding figures of nineteenth-century American feminist thought, the elder sister of Angelina Grimk...

• Henri de Saint-Simon 1760 – 1825 · French

  Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, was a French political philosopher, theorist of industrial society, and one of the founders of socialist thought. Born to one of t...

• John Rawls 1921 – 2002 · American

  John Rawls was a 20th-century American political philosopher whose 1971 book A Theory of Justice is the most influential work of political philosophy of the post-war era. The bo...

• Joseph de Maistre 1753 – 1821 · Savoyard

  Joseph-Marie, Count de Maistre, was a Savoyard lawyer, diplomat, and political philosopher and one of the most powerful counter-Enlightenment voices of the early nineteenth cent...

• 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...

• Amartya Sen b. 1933 · Indian

  Amartya Sen is an Indian philosopher and economist, Nobel laureate in economic sciences, and one of the most influential thinkers on famines, social choice, and the foundations ...

• B. R. Ambedkar 1891 – 1956 · Indian

  Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer, and the principal architect of the Indian Constitution. Born into the Mahar caste, he was the first Dali...

• Francesco Guicciardini 1483 – 1540 · Italian

  Francesco Guicciardini was an Italian Renaissance historian, statesman, and political philosopher and one of the founding figures of modern historiography. After a long diplomat...

• Michael Oakeshott 1901 – 1990 · British

  Michael Oakeshott was a British political philosopher and one of the most distinctive English conservatives of the twentieth century. He held chairs at Cambridge, Oxford, and th...

• Mikhail Bakunin 1814 – 1876 · Russian

  Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary anarchist and political philosopher and one of the most colorful figures of nineteenth-century European radicalism. Af...

• Paulo Freire 1921 – 1997 · Brazilian

  Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher and one of the founders of critical pedagogy. After early work with adult literacy programs among the poor of ...

• Roger Scruton 1944 – 2020 · British

  Roger Scruton was a British philosopher, public intellectual, and the foremost philosophical exponent of conservative thought in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centur...

• Alexander Herzen 1812 – 1870 · Russian

  Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was a Russian writer, philosopher, and revolutionary, often called the father of Russian socialism. The illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman, he was...

• Alexis de Tocqueville 1805 – 1859 · French

  Alexis de Tocqueville was a French aristocrat, political philosopher, and historian. After a long study tour of the United States, undertaken nominally to examine its prison sys...

• Giorgio Agamben b. 1942 · Italian

  Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher whose Homo Sacer project, begun in 1995, has reshaped contemporary political philosophy through a radical genealogy of sovereignty, bar...

• Hans Kelsen 1881 – 1973 · Austrian-American

  Hans Kelsen was an Austrian-American jurist and legal philosopher and the principal theorist of the pure theory of law. He drafted the federal constitution of the Austrian Repub...

• Peter Kropotkin 1842 – 1921 · Russian

  Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian geographer, naturalist, and anarchist philosopher and one of the founders of anarcho-communism. After early fieldwork in Siberia...

• Charles Mills 1951 – 2021 · Jamaican-American

  Charles Mills was a Jamaican-American philosopher, distinguished professor at the City University of New York, and one of the most original political philosophers of his generat...

• Leo Strauss 1899 – 1973 · German-American

  Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish philosopher who emigrated to the United States in 1937 and spent most of his career at the University of Chicago. He devoted his work to the reco...

• Benjamin Constant 1767 – 1830 · Swiss-French

  Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque was a Swiss-French political philosopher, novelist, and statesman and one of the founding theorists of modern liberalism. After an erratic ea...

• Eric Voegelin 1901 – 1985 · German-American

  Eric Voegelin was a German-American political philosopher whose work ranged from political theology to a vast philosophy of history. After the publication of his Political Relig...

• Hugo Grotius 1583 – 1645 · Dutch

  Hugo Grotius was a Dutch jurist and philosopher who is widely regarded as the founder of modern international law. Against the religious and dynastic justifications for war that...

• Virginia Held b. 1929 · American

  Virginia Held is an American moral and political philosopher, distinguished professor emerita at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and one of the leading philosop...

• Enrique Dussel 1934 – 2023 · Argentine-Mexican

  Enrique Dussel was an Argentine-Mexican philosopher and theologian and the principal architect of the philosophy of liberation. After studies in Mendoza, Madrid, and Paris, he t...

• Wendy Brown b. 1955 · American

  Wendy Brown is an American political theorist and UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, whose work has shaped contemporary critical reflecti...

• Iris Marion Young 1949 – 2006 · American

  Iris Marion Young was an American political philosopher and feminist theorist whose work reshaped late twentieth-century thinking about justice, oppression, and democratic inclu...

• Louis de Bonald 1754 – 1840 · French

  Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald, was a French traditionalist philosopher and statesman and, with Joseph de Maistre, one of the principal theorists of the post-revoluti...

• Olympe de Gouges 1748 – 1793 · French

  Olympe de Gouges, born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political philosopher of the Revolution, the author of the 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Fem...

• Charles Taylor b. 1931 · Canadian

  Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher and one of the most influential figures in late-twentieth-century political philosophy and the history of ideas. Sources of the Self tra...

• Jeremy Waldron b. 1953 · New Zealand

  Jeremy Waldron is a New Zealand-born British and American legal and political philosopher, University Professor at the New York University School of Law and emeritus Chichele Pr...

• Martha Nussbaum b. 1947 · American

  Martha Nussbaum is an American philosopher whose work spans ancient Greek ethics, political philosophy, the philosophy of emotion, and feminist theory. The Fragility of Goodness...

• Norberto Bobbio 1909 – 2004 · Italian

  Norberto Bobbio was an Italian legal and political philosopher and one of the principal voices of postwar Italian liberal democracy. After clandestine resistance to Fascism in h...

• Achille Mbembe b. 1957 · Cameroonian

  Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist, professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, and one of the most influen...

• Cesare Beccaria 1738 – 1794 · Italian

  Cesare Beccaria was an Italian philosopher, jurist, and economist and the foundational figure of modern criminology. His treatise On Crimes and Punishments, published anonymousl...

• John Finnis b. 1940 · Australian-British

  John Finnis is an Australian-British legal and moral philosopher, emeritus professor of law at Oxford and a long-time professor at the University of Notre Dame. Natural Law and ...

• Pierre Leroux 1797 – 1871 · French

  Pierre-Henri Leroux was a French philosopher, journalist, and one of the founders of nineteenth-century French socialism. Often credited with introducing the word socialisme int...

• Anna Doyle Wheeler 1780 – 1848 · Irish

  Anna Doyle Wheeler was an Irish-born British socialist and feminist philosopher of the early nineteenth century, the principal philosophical collaborator of William Thompson and...

• Anne Phillips b. 1950 · British

  Anne Phillips is a British political philosopher, Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science emerita at the London School of Economics, and one of the most influential contemp...

• Augusto Salazar Bondy 1925 – 1974 · Peruvian

  Augusto Salazar Bondy was a Peruvian philosopher and educator and one of the founding voices of Latin American philosophy of liberation. A long-time professor at San Marcos Univ...

• Avishai Margalit b. 1939 · Israeli

  Avishai Margalit is an Israeli philosopher, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and former permanent fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton...

• Catharine Macaulay 1731 – 1791 · English

  Catharine Macaulay was an English historian and republican political philosopher whose eight-volume History of England from the Accession of James I to the Hanoverian Succession...

• Felicite de Lamennais 1782 – 1854 · French

  Hugues-Felicite Robert de Lamennais was a French Catholic priest, philosopher, and journalist who moved across his career from ardent ultramontane defense of the Church to a rad...

• 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...

• Hassan Hanafi 1935 – 2021 · Egyptian

  Hassan Hanafi was an Egyptian philosopher and Islamic intellectual of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, professor of philosophy at Cairo University and one of...

• Hippodamus of Miletus c. 498 BC – c. 408 BC · Greek

  Hippodamus of Miletus was a Greek architect, urban planner, mathematician, and political philosopher of the fifth century BC, traditionally credited with the design of the recta...

• Inoue Tetsujiro 1855 – 1944 · Japanese

  Inoue Tetsujiro was a Japanese philosopher of the Meiji and Taisho eras and one of the founders of academic philosophy in modern Japan. After early studies under foreign teacher...

• 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...

• Jose Vasconcelos 1882 – 1959 · Mexican

  Jose Vasconcelos Calderon was a Mexican philosopher, writer, and educator and the most influential intellectual of post-revolutionary Mexico. As Secretary of Public Education fr...

• Kang Youwei 1858 – 1927 · Chinese

  Kang Youwei was a late-Qing Chinese scholar, reformer, and political philosopher who reimagined Confucianism as a modern civil religion and engine of political transformation. H...

• Kwame Anthony Appiah b. 1954 · Ghanaian-American

  Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Ghanaian-British and American philosopher whose work has reshaped contemporary debates on ethics, identity, race, and cosmopolitanism. In My Father's H...

• Liang Qichao 1873 – 1929 · Chinese

  Liang Qichao was a Chinese reformer, journalist, and philosopher and one of the leading intellectuals of the late Qing and early Republican period. A student of Kang Youwei and ...

• Lord Bolingbroke 1678 – 1751 · English

  Henry St. John, first Viscount Bolingbroke, was an English Tory statesman, political philosopher, and one of the most influential public writers of his generation. Secretary of ...

• Mahmoud Mohamed Taha 1909 – 1985 · Sudanese

  Mahmoud Mohamed Taha was a Sudanese Islamic reformer, philosopher, and engineer, the founder of the Republican Brothers, a small but intellectually powerful movement that defend...

• 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...

• Marsilius of Padua 1275 – 1342 · Italian

  Marsilius of Padua was an Italian political philosopher and physician, one of the most original thinkers of the late Middle Ages. His Defensor Pacis, completed in 1324, construc...

• Maruyama Masao 1914 – 1996 · Japanese

  Maruyama Masao was the most influential Japanese political philosopher of the postwar period and a long-time professor at the University of Tokyo. His Studies in the Intellectua...

• Miranda Fricker b. 1966 · British

  Miranda Fricker is a British philosopher, professor at the City University of New York, and the originator of the influential concept of epistemic injustice. Epistemic Injustice...

• Nakae Chomin 1847 – 1901 · Japanese

  Nakae Chomin was a Japanese journalist, translator, and political philosopher and one of the principal voices of the Meiji-period Freedom and People's Rights movement. After stu...

• Nancy Fraser b. 1947 · American

  Nancy Fraser is an American philosopher, professor at the New School for Social Research, and one of the leading contemporary critical theorists working in the second generation...

• Nikolai Chernyshevsky 1828 – 1889 · Russian

  Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a Russian revolutionary democrat, materialist philosopher, and novelist and the most influential radical Russian thinker of the 1850s and 1...

• Onora O'Neill b. 1941 · British

  Onora O'Neill is a British philosopher and Crossbench member of the House of Lords, formerly principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, whose work has shaped contemporary Kantian ...

• Samuel Pufendorf 1632 – 1694 · German

  Samuel Pufendorf was a German jurist, political philosopher, and historian, the principal continental developer of the natural-law tradition that ran from Grotius to Locke. The ...

• Seyla Benhabib b. 1950 · Turkish-American

  Seyla Benhabib is a Turkish-American political philosopher long associated with Yale University, whose work brings together critical theory, feminist political philosophy, and t...

• Tan Sitong 1865 – 1898 · Chinese

  Tan Sitong was a late-Qing Chinese reformer and philosopher, one of the Six Gentlemen executed after the failure of the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898. In his major work A Study o...

• Will Kymlicka b. 1962 · Canadian

  Will Kymlicka is a Canadian political philosopher, Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University, and one of the most influential contemporary theorists of...