List of political theorists
A political theorist is someone who engages in constructing or evaluating political theory, including political philosophy. Theorists may be academics or independent scholars.
Ancient
Medieval
- al-Farabi[1]
- Dante Alighieri[1]
- Averroes[1]
- Thomas Aquinas[1]
- Ibn Khaldun[1]
- John of Salisbury[1]
- Maimonides[1]
- Muhammad
- William of Ockham[1]
Renaissance and early modern
- Jeremy Bentham
- Edmund Burke
- Benjamin Franklin
- Hugo Grotius
- Johann Gottfried von Herder
- Thomas Hobbes[2]
- Immanuel Kant[3]
- John Locke[4]
- Niccolò Machiavelli[5]
- James Madison
- John Milton
- Thomas More
- Montesquieu
- Samuel von Pufendorf
- Adam Smith
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau[6]
Late modern
- Muhammad Asad
- Hayk Asatryan
- Mikhail Bakunin
- Frédéric Bastiat
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Juan Donoso Cortés
- Émile Durkheim[7]
- Friedrich Engels
- Julius Evola
- René Guénon
- William Godwin
- Emma Goldman
- Friedrich Hayek
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel[8]
- Theodor Herzl
- Peter Kropotkin
- Muhammad Iqbal
- Rose Wilder Lane
- Gustave Le Bon
- Vladimir Lenin
- György Lukács
- Rosa Luxemburg
- Joseph de Maistre
- Herbert Marcuse
- Charles Maurras
- Karl Marx[9]
- John Stuart Mill
- Adam Müller
- Thomas Paine
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
- Vinayak Damodar Savarkar
- Joseph Schumpeter
- Oswald Spengler
- Lysander Spooner
- Max Stirner
- Leo Strauss
- Leon Trotsky
- Alexis de Tocqueville[10]
- Max Weber[11]
- Mary Wollstonecraft
Born in 20th century
- Theodor Adorno
- Tariq Ali
- Louis Althusser
- Gabriel Almond
- Hannah Arendt
- Raymond Aron
- Kenneth Arrow
- Isaiah Berlin
- Murray Bookchin
- Wendy Brown
- James Burnham
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Noam Chomsky
- Dobrica Ćosić
- Robert Dahl
- Raya Dunayevskaya
- Ronald Dworkin
- David Easton
- Frantz Fanon
- Nancy Fraser
- Michael Freeden
- Betty Friedan
- David D. Friedman
- Erich Fromm
- Francis Fukuyama
- Muammar Gaddafi
- Antonio Gramsci
- Che Guevara
- Amy Gutmann
- Jürgen Habermas
- Ho Chi Minh
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe
- C. L. R. James
- Ruhollah Khomeini
- Russell Kirk
- Leszek Kołakowski
- Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
- Will Kymlicka
- Ernesto Laclau
- Ali Latifiyan
- Alasdair MacIntyre
- Harvey Mansfield
- Chantal Mouffe
- Antonio Negri
- Robert Nozick
- Martha Nussbaum
- Michael Oakeshott
- Karl Popper
- Robert D. Putnam
- Sayyid Qutb
- Ayn Rand
- John Rawls
- Michael Walzer
- Murray Rothbard
- Wilhelm Röpke
- Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar
- James C. Scott
- Carl Schmitt
- Roger Scruton
- Charles Taylor
- Eric Voegelin
- Simone Weil
- John Zerzan
- Howard Zinn
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h Nederman, Cary; Mulieri, Alessandro (Fall 2025). Zalta, Edward N.; Nodelman, Uri (eds.). "Medieval Political Philosophy". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 22 January 2026.
- ^ Slomp, Gabriella (2011). "Hobbes, Thomas". In Badie, Bertrand; Berg-Schlosser, Dirk; Morlino, Leonardo (eds.). International Encyclopedia of Political Science. Vol. 4. Thousand Oaks: Sage. p. 1098–1100.
- ^ Brandt, Reinhard (2011). "Kant, Immanuel". In Badie, Bertrand; Berg-Schlosser, Dirk; Morlino, Leonardo (eds.). International Encyclopedia of Political Science. Vol. 5. Thousand Oaks: Sage. p. 1399–1401.
- ^ Casalini, Brunella (2011). "Locke, John". In Badie, Bertrand; Berg-Schlosser, Dirk; Morlino, Leonardo (eds.). International Encyclopedia of Political Science. Vol. 5. Thousand Oaks: Sage. p. 1470–1473.
- ^ Barthas, Jérémie (2011). "Machiavelli, Niccolò". In Badie, Bertrand; Berg-Schlosser, Dirk; Morlino, Leonardo (eds.). International Encyclopedia of Political Science. Vol. 5. Thousand Oaks: Sage. p. 1479–1481.
- ^ Leterre, Thierry (2011). "Rousseau, Jean-Jacques". In Badie, Bertrand; Berg-Schlosser, Dirk; Morlino, Leonardo (eds.). International Encyclopedia of Political Science. Vol. 7. Thousand Oaks: Sage. p. 2332–2335.
- ^ Poggi, Gianfranco (2011). "Durkheim, Émile". In Badie, Bertrand; Berg-Schlosser, Dirk; Morlino, Leonardo (eds.). International Encyclopedia of Political Science. Vol. 3. Thousand Oaks: Sage. p. 696–699.
- ^ Tyler, Colin (2011). "Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich". In Badie, Bertrand; Berg-Schlosser, Dirk; Morlino, Leonardo (eds.). International Encyclopedia of Political Science. Vol. 4. Thousand Oaks: Sage. p. 1066–1069.
- ^ Guo, Dingping (2011). "Marx, Karl". In Badie, Bertrand; Berg-Schlosser, Dirk; Morlino, Leonardo (eds.). International Encyclopedia of Political Science. Vol. 5. Thousand Oaks: Sage. p. 1492–1495.
- ^ Jaume, Lucien (2011). "Tocqueville, Alexis de". In Badie, Bertrand; Berg-Schlosser, Dirk; Morlino, Leonardo (eds.). International Encyclopedia of Political Science. Vol. 8. Thousand Oaks: Sage. p. 2621–2624.
- ^ Kaelber, Lutz (2011). "Weber, Max". In Badie, Bertrand; Berg-Schlosser, Dirk; Morlino, Leonardo (eds.). International Encyclopedia of Political Science. Vol. 8. Thousand Oaks: Sage. p. 2736–2739.