Political Philosophy

Martha Nussbaum

1947–

Martha Nussbaum is an American political philosopher whose capabilities approach, work on emotions and law, and universalist feminism have made her among the most influential living theorists of justice

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

Robert Nozick

1938–2002

Robert Nozick was the libertarian philosopher whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) answered John Rawls and became the foundational text of contemporary libertarian political theory

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

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

Francis Fukuyama

1952–

Francis Fukuyama is the liberal political theorist behind the End of History thesis, a former neoconservative who broke over Iraq and now defends classical liberalism against critics on both left and right

John Rawls

1921–2002

John Rawls was the liberal egalitarian philosopher whose A Theory of Justice (1971) revived political philosophy and dominated late-20th-century debates about justice, equality, and democratic legitimacy

Jonathan Haidt

1963–

Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist and critic of academia's liberal monoculture whose moral foundations research explains why the left consistently underestimates what conservatives actually care about

Raymond Aron

1905–1983

Raymond Aron was a French liberal who watched Nazism rise in Berlin while Sartre theorized in Paris — then spent fifty years arguing that ideology was the opium of the intellectuals

Marcus Aurelius

121–180

Marcus Aurelius was Rome's Stoic philosopher-emperor, ruling the most powerful state in the world while writing a private journal on how to live well — the Meditations, among the most widely read texts in human history

Richard Rorty

1931–2007

Richard Rorty was a liberal pragmatist who dismantled the philosophical foundations of liberalism — and then argued, calmly, that liberalism didn't need them

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 More

1478–1535

Thomas More was a Christian humanist and Lord Chancellor of England who invented the word "utopia" and died rather than endorse Henry VIII's break with Rome, launching a tradition of radical social imagination

Walter Lippmann

1889–1974

Walter Lippmann was a liberal journalist and political theorist who explained why democracy's citizens could never know what they needed to know — and spent fifty years trying to figure out what to do about it

William Godwin

1756–1836

William Godwin was the first systematic philosophical anarchist — the rationalist who argued that government itself was the enemy of human perfection and founded the tradition Proudhon and Bakunin would inherit

Eric Voegelin

1901–1985

Eric Voegelin was an anti-totalitarian political philosopher who diagnosed Nazism and Communism as secular Gnosticisms — political religions trying to immanentize the eschaton and build heaven through politics

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

Irving Kristol

1920–2009

Irving Kristol was the godfather of neoconservatism — a veteran of City College's anti-Stalinist left who spent his career asking what liberalism gets wrong about human nature and the limits of good intentions

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

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

Roger Scruton

1944–2020

Roger Scruton was a conservative philosopher who defended the unfashionable — beauty, belonging, and the inherited past — as human necessities rather than prejudices

Russell Kirk

1918–1994

Russell Kirk was the traditionalist conservative who gave the postwar American right its intellectual soul, defending tradition, order, and the permanent things against modern ideological abstraction

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

Arthur Schopenhauer

1788–1860

Arthur Schopenhauer was a political quietist whose pessimistic philosophy of blind will challenged Enlightenment rationalism and shaped Nietzsche, Freud, and the counter-Enlightenment tradition

Bertrand Russell

1872–1970

Bertrand Russell was a philosopher and anti-war campaigner — imprisoned for opposing the First World War, though he reluctantly supported the Second as a lesser evil — who spent his last decades organizing against nuclear weapons

Karl Popper

1902–1994

Karl Popper was a liberal philosopher of science who turned falsifiability into a defense of the open society — arguing that democracies are superior not because they are just but because they can correct their mistakes

Mahatma Gandhi

1869–1948

Mahatma Gandhi was the Indian independence leader who transformed nonviolent resistance from a personal moral stance into a systematic political philosophy — and demonstrated that it could defeat an empire

Vladimir Lenin

1870–1924

Vladimir Lenin was the Bolshevik revolutionary who transformed Marxism from a philosophy of history into an operational manual for seizing state power — and then used it

Voltaire

1694–1778

Voltaire was the French Enlightenment's great polemicist against clerical and arbitrary power, turning religious tolerance and freedom of expression into urgent political demands rather than abstract principles

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

Michael Oakeshott

1901–1990

Michael Oakeshott was an English conservative philosopher whose skepticism of rationalist politics gave 20th-century conservatism its most sophisticated philosophical voice

Hannah Arendt

1906–1975

Hannah Arendt was a German-American political theorist who refused every ideological camp, rebuilding political thought from the lived experience of totalitarianism

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

Socrates

470–399 BCE

Socrates was the founding figure of Western philosophy, whose relentless questioning of Athenian politicians and poets — and his acceptance of an unjust death sentence — made him philosophy's first martyr

G.A. Cohen

G.A. Cohen was an analytical Marxist who defended Marx's theory of history with the rigor of analytic philosophy, then turned that same rigor on the moral foundations of equality

Michael Walzer

Michael Walzer is an American political philosopher and committed democratic socialist whose just war theory and pluralist 'spheres of justice' fused communitarian sensibility with the egalitarian left

Amy Gutmann

Amy Gutmann is a liberal-democratic political philosopher who made deliberative democracy — citizens reasoning together across moral disagreement — central to how democracies justify their decisions

Judith Shklar

Judith Shklar was a postwar liberal political theorist whose “liberalism of fear” grounded liberalism not in abstract rights but in avoiding cruelty and preventing the worst abuses of power

Confucius

551–479 BCE

Confucius was a Chinese philosopher who sought to restore social harmony through virtue, ritual propriety, and hierarchical relationships, shaping East Asian government for over two millennia

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

Walter Rauschenbusch

1861–1918

Walter Rauschenbusch was the Baptist founder of the Social Gospel, whose eleven years in Hell's Kitchen convinced him that poverty was structural rather than spiritual — and that the church was obliged to say so

Charles Sanders Peirce

1839–1914

The mathematician and logician who founded American pragmatism — arguing that the meaning of any concept lay in its practical consequences, and that inquiry was an inherently social and self-correcting process

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

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

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

Abraham Lincoln

1809–1865

Abraham Lincoln was the antislavery president whose arguments about consent, equality, and the meaning of the founding remain the deepest engagement with American democratic theory ever produced

Martin Luther

1483–1546

Martin Luther was the Augustinian monk whose protest against indulgences fractured Western Christendom and whose insistence on conscience over ecclesiastical authority set the terms of political debate for centuries

Martin Luther King Jr.

1929–1968

Martin Luther King Jr. was the minister and political philosopher who fused Gandhian nonviolence, Christian personalism, and American democratic ideals into the most morally serious political movement of the twentieth century