Critique of Modernity

Aldous Huxley

1894–1963

Brave New World author, perennial philosophy

Martin Heidegger

1889–1976

Martin Heidegger was one of the most influential and most troubling philosophers of the 20th century, whose Being and Time reshaped philosophy and who was also a committed Nazi who never meaningfully repudiated his role

Michael Sandel

1953–

Michael Sandel is an American communitarian philosopher whose critique of Rawlsian liberalism and widely read work on justice, markets, and merit make him one of the most influential living political thinkers

Michel Foucault

1926–1984

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher of the left who rejected Marxist orthodoxy, and whose analyses of power, discipline, and sexuality reshaped critical theory across ideological lines

Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz was an anti-totalitarian Polish poet whose The Captive Mind dissected how intellectuals rationalize their submission to ideology

Simone de Beauvoir

1908–1986

Simone de Beauvoir was the French existentialist philosopher whose The Second Sex (1949) founded modern feminist theory, grounding women's liberation in the freedom to become rather than be

Curtis Yarvin

1973–

Curtis Yarvin is the central writer of the neoreactionary movement, whose case against democracy and for CEO-style absolutist rule shaped the online far right and parts of the tech elite

Alasdair MacIntyre

1929–2025

Alasdair MacIntyre was the Aristotelian philosopher and communitarian critic of liberal modernity whose After Virtue (1981) launched the contemporary revival of virtue ethics

Fyodor Dostoevsky

1821–1881

Fyodor Dostoevsky was an Orthodox Christian conservative novelist — transformed by Siberian imprisonment from socialist radical — whose great novels prophesied where revolutionary nihilism would lead

Ayn Rand

1905–1982

Ayn Rand was the Russian-American novelist-philosopher of Objectivism — rational self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism — whose fiction shaped late 20th century American libertarian and conservative thought

Charles Taylor

1931–

Charles Taylor is a communitarian political philosopher whose accounts of modern identity, multiculturalism, and the secular age made him one of the most influential living political thinkers

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844–1900

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher hostile to democracy, socialism, and nationalism alike, whose attack on Christian morality reshaped the political imagination of the 20th century in ways he never intended

Henry David Thoreau

1817–1862

Henry David Thoreau was an American transcendentalist and abolitionist whose Civil Disobedience (1849) founded the modern doctrine of principled resistance and shaped every later tradition of nonviolent political action

Nick Land

Nick Land is a British philosopher of right accelerationism whose anti-egalitarian 'Dark Enlightenment' writings made him a touchstone of the online neoreactionary right

Oswald Spengler

1880–1936

Oswald Spengler was the German prophet of civilizational decline whose Decline of the West cast democracy as a passing phase destined to yield to Caesarism — a framework that shaped twentieth-century political pessimism

Simone Weil

1909–1943

Simone Weil was a radical philosopher and mystic whose politics ran from union organizing and factory labor to a Christian critique of uprooted industrial civilization — she died at thirty-four on the rations of occupied France

Thomas Carlyle

1795–1881

Thomas Carlyle was an anti-democratic Victorian prophet who attacked industrial capitalism and parliamentary government with equal ferocity, preaching hero-worship while his 'cash nexus' critique fed the socialist tradition

Christopher Lasch

1932–1994

Christopher Lasch was a social critic rooted in America’s productivist tradition who advanced a politics of limits, blaming consumerism, therapeutic culture, and elite secession for the collapse of civic life

George Orwell

1903–1950

George Orwell was an English socialist who understood totalitarianism from the inside out — his commitment to the cause inseparable from his contempt for the lies told in its name

Leo Strauss

1899–1973

Leo Strauss was a German-American political philosopher whose recovery of classical political philosophy and critique of modern relativism founded the Straussian school

Max Stirner

1806–1856

Max Stirner was a German egoist philosopher whose dissolution of every fixed idea into 'spooks' made him a wellspring for anarcho-individualism, Nietzsche, and radical libertarian thought

Max Weber

1864–1920

Max Weber was the German founding figure of modern political sociology, whose analyses of bureaucracy, authority, and the rise of capitalism shaped nearly every attempt to understand modern political life

Søren Kierkegaard

1813–1855

Søren Kierkegaard was the father of existentialism, whose attack on Hegelian system-building and the complacency of state Christianity reshaped 20th-century philosophy, theology, and political thought

Carl Schmitt

1888–1985

Carl Schmitt was an anti-liberal legal theorist and committed Nazi whose accounts of sovereignty, the state of exception, and the friend-enemy distinction still haunt debates over liberal democracy

Emma Goldman

1869–1940

Emma Goldman was a Russian-American anarchist whose fearless advocacy of labor rights, free speech, and birth control made her the most visible radical in early twentieth-century America

Daniel Bell

Daniel Bell was an American sociologist — a self-described socialist in economics, liberal in politics, and conservative in culture — who charted the "end of ideology" and the rise of post-industrial society

Eugene Genovese

Eugene Genovese was a Marxist historian of American slavery whose Gramscian reading of the Old South reshaped the field — before a late-life migration to conservatism, traditionalism, and Catholicism

Paul Gottfried

Paul Gottfried is a paleoconservative theorist whose diagnosis of the managerial state and therapeutic liberalism shaped a dissident strand of the American right

Julius Evola

Julius Evola was an Italian Traditionalist philosopher of the radical right whose anti-egalitarian vision of a spiritual aristocracy remains a touchstone for far-right and identitarian currents

Ryszard Legutko

Ryszard Legutko is a Polish conservative philosopher who argues that liberal democracy shares unsettling affinities with the communism he once resisted

Samuel Francis

Samuel Francis was a paleoconservative theorist who fused James Burnham's managerial-elite analysis with the populist politics of alienated Middle Americans

Ayatollah Khomeini

1902–1989

Ayatollah Khomeini was the Shia cleric and Islamic revolutionary who overthrew Iran's Shah in 1979 and built a durable theocratic republic on the doctrine of clerical rule

Leo Tolstoy

1828–1910

Leo Tolstoy was a Christian anarchist and pacifist — Russia's supreme novelist who renounced wealth and coercive authority and inspired Gandhi's nonviolent resistance

Clyde Wilson

Clyde Wilson is a paleoconservative historian whose editing of Calhoun's papers and defense of states' rights shaped the decentralist and neo-Confederate strands of the American right

Thorstein Veblen

1857–1929

Thorstein Veblen was a sardonic critic of American capitalism whose dissection of the leisure class introduced "conspicuous consumption" into the common language and cast business as parasitic on productive industry

James Burnham

1905–1987

James Burnham was an ex-Trotskyist turned anti-Communist conservative who predicted the managerial revolution, shaped Orwell's vision of totalitarianism, and warned the West it lacked the will to survive

José Ortega y Gasset

1883–1955

José Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish liberal philosopher whose Revolt of the Masses diagnosed civilization's gravest internal threat — the mass man who demands without contributing and mistakes comfort for achievement

Albert Camus

1913–1960

Albert Camus was a French-Algerian moralist of reform over revolution who refused every ideological excuse for murder, at the cost of his standing with the Parisian left that had made him famous

Rosa Luxemburg

1871–1919

Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary Marxist — the most brilliant theorist of her generation, and the one most willing to tell the left hard truths about power, democracy, and revolutionary violence