Political Sociology

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

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a skeptical, evidence-driven liberal — social scientist and Democratic senator — whose work on family and poverty defined debates about the limits of government intervention

W.E.B. Du Bois

1868–1963

W.E.B. Du Bois was a civil rights pioneer and co-founder of the NAACP whose analysis of race, class, and democracy made him the most important African American political thinker of the 20th century

C. Wright Mills

C. Wright Mills was a radical American sociologist who mapped the interlocking military, corporate, and political elites and urged citizens to link private troubles to public power

Frank Salter

Frank Salter is an Australian ethologist whose theory of “ethnic genetic interests” gave ethnonationalist and identitarian currents a sociobiological vocabulary for ethnic self-preservation

James Q. Wilson

James Q. Wilson was a pragmatic, evidence-oriented postwar American conservative whose 'broken windows' theory reshaped policing and whose work anchored a data-driven, morally serious strand of the right

John Judis

John Judis is a social-democratic American journalist whose books on populism, nationalism, and shifting electoral coalitions reshaped how observers read the fault lines of U.S. politics

Eric Kaufmann

1970–

Eric Kaufmann is a self-described small-l liberal political scientist who argues that demographic change and ethnic-majority anxieties are reshaping Western politics and driving the populist right

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

Gaetano Mosca

1858–1941

Gaetano Mosca was an Italian liberal political scientist who founded elite theory, arguing that every society — democracy included — is ruled by an organized minority over a disorganized majority

Roberto Michels

1876–1936

Roberto Michels was a socialist-turned-fascist sociologist who formulated the iron law of oligarchy — the claim that every organization, even a democratic one, concentrates power in a small leadership class

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

Samuel Huntington

1927–2008

Samuel Huntington was a political scientist who consistently challenged his profession's prevailing consensus, arguing that civilizational conflict — not ideology or economics — would organize the post-Cold War world

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

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

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

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

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

Ralf Dahrendorf

Ralf Dahrendorf was a classical liberal sociologist who fused conflict theory with the defense of the open society, measuring social progress by the expansion of individual life chances

Wolfgang Streeck

Wolfgang Streeck is a German economic sociologist on the left who argues that democratic capitalism is unraveling under debt and market discipline, with the euro as its most rigid instrument

Ivan Krastev

Ivan Krastev is a Bulgarian political scientist, sympathetic to liberal and European values yet a candid critic of their complacencies, whose analyses of populism and democratic disillusionment shaped debates about Europe's crises

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

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