Political Economy

Dean Baker

Dean Baker is a progressive American economist who argues market rules are deliberately written to favor the wealthy, and who famously warned of the U.S. housing bubble

Martin Feldstein

Martin Feldstein was a fiscally conservative Harvard economist who chaired Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers yet publicly warned that the era's deficits endangered the economy

Paul Collier

Paul Collier is a communitarian centrist development economist who reframed debates on the world's poorest countries, migration, and the social obligations binding national communities

C.K. Prahalad

C.K. Prahalad was a market-oriented management theorist who reframed the world's poor as entrepreneurial consumers, making markets central to debates over poverty and development

Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker was a pluralist social thinker, conservative in temperament yet reformist in aim, who sought a middle path between unregulated capitalism and state planning through decentralized, self-governing institutions

Indira Gandhi

1917–1984

Indira Gandhi was India's third Prime Minister, a Congress populist whose bank nationalizations and 'Abolish Poverty' campaign mobilized the poor — and whose Emergency rule remains India's closest brush with dictatorship

Daniel Kahneman

Nobel-winning psychologist whose work on cognitive bias reshaped how policymakers think about human rationality and choice.

David Ricardo

1772–1823

David Ricardo was a British economist whose theory of comparative advantage became the intellectual bedrock for free trade and classical political economy.

Elinor Ostrom

1933–2012

Elinor Ostrom was a political economist who showed that communities can govern shared resources themselves, defying the dogma that only states or markets can prevent ruin.

Friedrich List

1789–1846

Friedrich List was a German economist who argued that developing nations must protect their infant industries to build the productive power a united nation requires.

Hyman Minsky

1919–1996

Hyman Minsky was an American economist whose financial instability hypothesis argued that capitalist finance breeds its own crises, becoming the touchstone for post-2008 economic thought.

Joseph Schumpeter

1883–1950

Joseph Schumpeter was an Austrian-American economist who cast capitalism as a storm of "creative destruction" driven by entrepreneurs, and doubted democracy could survive its own success.

Karl Polanyi

1886–1964

Karl Polanyi was a Hungarian economic historian who argued that the self-regulating market is a utopian fiction that must be socially disciplined lest it destroy the fabric it depends on.

Ronald Coase

1910–2013

Ronald Coase was a British economist whose work on transaction costs and property rights reframed how markets, firms, and law-driven bargaining allocate resources.

Thomas Malthus

1766–1834

Thomas Malthus was a British economist and cleric whose warning that population growth outruns food supply gave political thought its enduring language of scarcity and limits.

Ludwig Erhard

1897–1977

Ludwig Erhard was the German economics minister and chancellor who built the postwar 'social market economy,' pairing free markets with a stable framework of competition and social cohesion.

William Jennings Bryan

1860–1925

William Jennings Bryan was a three-time presidential candidate whose "Cross of Gold" oratory fused agrarian populism with evangelical moralism into a lasting American voice.

Alexander Hamilton

1755–1804

Alexander Hamilton was the founding generation's foremost defender of strong national government, co-author of the Federalist Papers and architect of the early American financial system

Herbert Spencer

1820–1903

Herbert Spencer was a Victorian classical liberal who applied evolution to society before Darwin published — arguing that civilization advanced through competition and that state interference retarded human progress

John Kenneth Galbraith

1908–2006

John Kenneth Galbraith was the Keynesian liberal economist who explained why America was privately rich and publicly poor, and whose elegant prose made his heresies the common sense of the postwar liberal establishment

Henry George

1839–1897

Henry George was the American economist and reformer behind the Single Tax movement, whose bestselling Progress and Poverty argued that taxing land values could capture the unearned wealth of social progress

Henri de Saint-Simon

1760–1825

The count who fought at Yorktown, lost a fortune, and argued that industrial society should be governed by producers and scientists rather than by lawyers and nobles.

Walter Bagehot

1826–1877

Editor of the Economist, who described the English constitution as it actually worked rather than as it was drawn, and told central banks how to stop a panic.

Richard Cobden

1804–1865

The calico printer who led the Anti-Corn Law League, and argued that free trade would make war obsolete by binding nations in mutual interest.

Milton Friedman

1912–2006

Milton Friedman was a classical liberal economist and Nobel laureate whose monetarism and popular case for free markets made him the most politically influential economist of the second half of the 20th century

Branko Horvat

Branko Horvat was a Yugoslav market socialist who sought to give worker self-management rigorous theoretical grounding, arguing that a market economy could be organized around labor rather than capital

Jaroslav Vanek

Jaroslav Vanek was a Czech-born theorist of economic democracy whose rigorous case for worker self-management positioned labor-run firms as an alternative to both capitalism and state socialism

John Roemer

John Roemer is an analytical Marxist economist who designed feasible models of market socialism and recast equality as equal opportunity rather than equal outcome

Oskar Lange

Oskar Lange was a Polish market socialist whose trial-and-error model of planning answered liberal critics by arguing that a socialist economy could allocate resources rationally

David Schweickart

David Schweickart is an American market socialist philosopher who reimagined socialism as democratic worker self-management, arguing a market economy without capitalism is both feasible and just

Franklin D. Roosevelt

1882–1945

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the architect of the New Deal — the president whose dramatic expansion of federal power created the modern American welfare state, and who led the nation through depression and world war

Jawaharlal Nehru

1889–1964

Jawaharlal Nehru was independent India's first Prime Minister, a democratic socialist and secularist who yoked parliamentary democracy to state economic planning and Cold War non-alignment

Deng Xiaoping

1904–1997

Deng Xiaoping was the architect of China's market reforms, pairing economic liberalization with unbending one-party rule in the century's largest political-economic experiment.

Henry Clay

1777–1852

Henry Clay was an American statesman whose talent for brokering sectional compromise and his blueprint for national economic development shaped a generation of Union politics.

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot

1727–1781

Controller-General who tried to reform France out of its crisis and was dismissed in twenty months, and who wrote the first clear statement of history as indefinite progress.

David Graeber

1961–2020

David Graeber was an anarchist anthropologist whose histories of debt, work, and bureaucracy gave the Occupy generation a vocabulary for challenging capitalism from below.

François Quesnay

1694–1774

Court physician who founded the Physiocrats, drew the first model of an economy as a circular flow, and gave laissez-faire its program.

Adam Müller

1779–1829

The Romantic economist who attacked Adam Smith in the name of the state as a living whole, and gave German conservatism its case against the market.

John Maynard Keynes

1883–1946

John Maynard Keynes was the liberal economist whose General Theory (1936) revolutionized economics and whose mixed-economy philosophy underpinned mid-20th-century Western liberal democracy

Peter Kropotkin

1842–1921

Peter Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist communist whose Mutual Aid and The Conquest of Bread built the most systematic positive case for a cooperative society organized without the state

E.F. Schumacher

1911–1977

E.F. Schumacher was a German-British economist whose Small Is Beautiful argued that economies should be built around human scale, decentralized production, and appropriate technology.

James M. Buchanan

1919–2013

James M. Buchanan was an American economist who founded public choice theory, applying the tools of economics to political behavior and arguing politics should be studied without romance.

Michael Harrington

1928–1989

Michael Harrington was a democratic socialist writer who made poverty visible to postwar America with The Other America — and spent the rest of his life arguing that the response had been far too timid

Vilfredo Pareto

1848–1923

Vilfredo Pareto was an elite theorist who argued that minorities always rule, ideologies merely rationalize, and the circulation of elites between lions and foxes drives political history

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

Eduard Bernstein

1850–1932

Eduard Bernstein was the revisionist founder of democratic socialism, arguing that Marx's predictions had failed the evidence — and that this was good news for socialists, not bad

E.P. Thompson

1924–1993

E.P. Thompson was a democratic socialist historian who rescued the English working class from the 'enormous condescension of posterity' and forged a humanist New Left after breaking with Communism

G.K. Chesterton

1874–1936

G.K. Chesterton was a Catholic distributist who, with Hilaire Belloc, argued that the problem with capitalism was not that too many people owned property but that too few did

Georges Sorel

1847–1922

Georges Sorel was the French theorist of revolutionary syndicalism who argued that the energizing myth of the general strike — not parliamentary gradualism — was what the labor movement needed

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

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

1809–1865

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a mutualist and the first major thinker to call himself an anarchist — a self-educated printer who answered “What is Property?” with three words that became a slogan: property is theft

Frédéric Bastiat

1801–1850

Frédéric Bastiat was a French classical liberal economist whose witty pamphlets against protectionism and state intervention became foundational texts of the libertarian tradition

Karl Marx

1818–1883

Karl Marx was the German philosopher and economist whose critique of capitalism reshaped the political imagination of the modern world

James Mill

1773–1836

James Mill was a Scottish utilitarian philosopher who organized Bentham's ideas into the Philosophical Radicals movement and designed the formidable education of his son John Stuart Mill

Friedrich Engels

1820–1895

Friedrich Engels was a revolutionary communist and Marx's co-author, whose financial support, editing, and independent works made Marxism possible as a systematic political philosophy