A political theorist is someone who engages in political theory. Niccolò Machiavelli, ca 1500, became the key figure in realistic political theory, crucial to political science Political Science is the systematic study of the allocation and transfer of power in decision making. ...

Notable historic political theorists

• Aristotle
• John Austin
• Frederic Bastiat
• Jeremy Bentham
• Jean Bodin
• Edmund Burke
• Frederick Engels
• Hugo Grotius
• Johann Gottfried von Herder
• Thomas Hobbes
• John Locke
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Niccolò Machiavelli
• Karl Marx
• John Stuart Mill
• John Milton
• Gustave de Molinari
• Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
• Thomas More
• Thomas Paine
• Plato
• Samuel Pufendorf
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• John of Salisbury
• Baruch Spinoza
• Lysander Spooner
• Alexis de Tocqueville

Aristotle (sculpture) Aristotle (Greek: Αριστοτέλης AristotelÄ“s) (384 BC – March 7, 322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher. ... John Austin (1790 - 1859) was a jurist, served in the army in Sicily and Malta, but, selling his commission, studied law, and was called to the Bar 1818. ... Frédéric Bastiat Claude Frédéric Bastiat (June 30, 1801–December 24, 1850) was a French classical liberal author and political economist. ... Jeremy Bentham (February 15, 1748 – June 6, 1832) was an English gentleman, jurist, philosopher, eccentric, and legal and social reformer. ... Jean Bodin (1530-1596) was a French jurist, member of the Parliament of Paris and professor of Law in Toulouse. ... Edmund Burke The Right Honourable Edmund Burke (January 12, 1729 – July 9, 1797) was an Anglo-Irish statesman, author, orator and political philosopher, who served for many years in the British House of Commons as a member of the Whig Party. ... Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820 - August 5, 1895) was a German Socialist philosopher and the co-founder of modern Communist theory with Karl Marx. ... Hugo Grotius Hugo Grotius (Huig de Groot, or Hugo de Groot; 10th April 1583 - 28th August 1645) worked as a jurist in the Dutch Republic and laid the foundations for international law, based on natural law. ... Johann Gottfried Herder Johann Gottfried von Herder (August 25, 1744 - December 18, 1803), German poet, critic, theologian, and philosopher, is best known for his concept of the Volk and is generally considered the father of ethnic nationalism. ... Thomas Hobbes: detail from a portrait by John Michael Wright (National Portrait Gallery, London) Thomas Hobbes (April 5, 1588 – December 4, 1679) was a noted English political philosopher, most famous for his book Leviathan (1651). ... John Locke John Locke (August 29, 1632–October 28, 1704) was a 17th-century philosopher concerned primarily with society and epistemology. ... G.W.F. Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. ... Detail of the portrait of Machiavelli, ca 1500, in the robes of a Florentine public official Niccolò Machiavelli (May 3, 1469 – June 21, 1527) was a Florentine statesman and political philosopher. ... Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883 London, UK) was an influential German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer of the International Workingmens Association, whose two books in particular, Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto (the latter with Friedrich Engels), laid the foundations... John Stuart Mill (May 20, 1806 – May 8, 1873), aka JS Mill, an English philosopher and political economist, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. ... John Milton John Milton (December 9, 1608 – November 8, 1674) was an English poet, most famous for his blank verse epic Paradise Lost. ... Gustave de Molinari (March 3, 1819 - January 28, 1912) was a Belgian-born economist associated with the French économistes, a group of laissez-faire liberals. ... Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (January 18, 1689 – February 10, 1755) was a French political thinker who lived during the Enlightenment and is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, taken for granted... Portrait of Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478–6 July 1535), posthumously known also as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, writer, and politician. ... Thomas Paine Thomas Paine (January 29, 1737–June 8, 1809), intellectual, scholar, and idealist, is widely recognized as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. ... PLATO, an apronym for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operation, was one of the first generalized Computer assisted instruction systems, originally built by the University of Illinois (U of I) and later taken over by Control Data (CDC), who provided the machines it ran on. ... Samuel Pufendorf (January 8, 1632 - October 26, 1694), was a German jurist. ... Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean Jacques Rousseau (June 28, 1712 – July 2, 1778) was a Franco-Swiss philosopher, writer, political theorist, and self-taught composer of The Age of Enlightenment. ... John of Salisbury (c. ... Baruch Spinoza Benedictus de Spinoza (November 24, 1632 – February 21, 1677), named Baruch Spinoza by his synagogue elders and known as Bento de Spinoza or Bento dEspiñoza in the community in which he grew up. ... Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 - May 14, 1887) was an American political philosopher, abolitionist, and legal theorist of the 19th century. ... For other uses, see Tocqueville (disambiguation) Alexis de Tocqueville Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (b. ...

Twentieth-century political theorists

• Gabriel Almond
• Hannah Arendt
• Ernest Barker
• Isaiah Berlin
• Stephen Bronner
• G. D. H. Cole
• William E. Connolly
• Noam Chomsky
• Robert Dahl
• John Dewey
• David Easton
• Richard E. Flathman
• Michel Foucault
• David Friedman
• Carl Friedrich
• Antonio Gramsci
• Jurgen Habermas
• Clive Hamilton
• Paul Hirst
• L. T. Hobhouse
• Jean Jaurès
• V. O. Key, Jr.
• Russell Kirk
• Harold J. Laski
• Harold D. Lasswell
• Vladimir Lenin
• Robert Paul Nozick
• Michael Oakeshott
• John Plamenatz
• G. Bingham Powell
• John Rawls
• Murray Rothbard
• Leo Strauss
• Charles Taylor (philosopher)
• Leon Trotsky
• Roberto Mangabeira Unger
• Eric Voegelin
• Graham Wallas
• Stephen L. Wasby
• Beatrice Webb
• Sidney Webb
• Sheldon Wolin

Hannah Arendt in her early adulthood Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 - December 4, 1975) was a German political theorist. ... Sir Isaiah Berlin Sir Isaiah Berlin (June 6, 1909 – November 5, 1997) was a political philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the 20th century. ... Stephen Eric Bronner (b. ... George Douglas Howard Cole (September 25, 1889 - January 14, 1959) was an English journalist and economist, closely associated with the development of Fabianism. ... William E. Connolly is an American political theorist. ... Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... Robert A. Dahl (b. ... John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, whose thought has been greatly influential in the United States and around the world. ... Richard E. Flathman is an American political theorist. ... Michel Foucault Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 – June 26, 1984) was a French philosopher and held a chair at the Collège de France, a chair to which he gave the title The History of Systems of Thought. His writings have had an enormous impact on other scholarly work: Foucault... David Friedman David D. Friedman (born 1945), is a libertarian writer who became a leading figure in Anarcho-capitalism with the publication of his book The Machinery of Freedom (1971). ... Antonio Gramsci Antonio Gramsci (January 23, 1891 – April 27, 1937) was an Italian writer and a politician, a leader and theorist of Socialism, Communism and anti-Fascism. ... Jürgen Habermas Jürgen Habermas (born June 18, 1929 in Düsseldorf, Germany) is a philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory. ... Growth Fetish is a book (ISBN 1741140781) about economics and politics by the Australian left-wing political theorist Clive Hamilton. ... Paul Hirst (1947-2003) was Professor of Social Theory at Birkbeck College, University of London. ... Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (September 8, 1864 - June 21, 1929) was a British liberal politician, one of the theorists of new liberalism. ... Jean Jaurès Jean Léon Jaurès (September 3, 1859 - July 31, 1914) was a French Socialist leader. ... Valdimer Orlando Key, Jr. ... Russell Kirk (1918-1994), was an American historian, moralist, social critic, and man of letters, best known as the father of modern conservatism. ... Harold Dwight Lasswell (February 13, 1902 — December 18, 1978) was a leading political scientist and communications theorist. ... Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Russian: Влади́мир Ильи́ч Ле́нин   listen?), original surname Ulyanov (Улья́нов) (April 22 (April 10 (O.S.)), 1870 – January 21, 1924), was a Russian revolutionary, the leader of the Bolshevik party, the first Premier of the Soviet Union, and the founder of the ideology of Leninism, later expanded into Marxism-Leninism by Joseph... Robert Nozick (November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher and Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. ... Michael Joseph Oakeshott (11 December 1901 - 19 December 1990) was an English philosopher with particular interests in political thought, the nature of history as a form of knowledge, the philosophies of education and religion, and aesthetics. ... John Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was a philosopher, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University and author of A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism, and The Law of Peoples. ... Murray Newton Rothbard Murray Newton Rothbard (March 2, 1926 - January 7, 1995) was an American economist and political theorist belonging to the Austrian School of Economics who helped define modern libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism. ... Leo Strauss Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973), was a Jewish German-American political philosopher who has been greatly influential in America. ... Charles Taylor (born November 5, 1931) is a Canadian philosopher known for his viewpoints on morality and modern western identity of individuals and groups. ... 1915 passport photo of Trotsky Leon Davidovich Trotsky (Russian: Лев Давидович Троцкий; also transliterated Leo, Lev, Trotskii, Trotski, Trotskij and Trotzky ) (October 26 (O.S.) = November 7 (N.S.), 1879 – August 21, 1940), born Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Лев Давидович Бронштейн), was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist intellectual. ... Roberto Unger is a Brazilian contemporary social theorist and law professor at Harvard Law School. ... Eric Voegelin (January 3, 1901 – January 19, 1985) was a political philosopher. ... Categories: Stub | 1858 births | 1943 deaths ... Categories: UK Labour Party politicians | British MPs | Peers | Secretaries of State for the Colonies (UK) | 1859 births | 1947 deaths | People stubs ...

See also

political science, political scientist, politics Niccolò Machiavelli, ca 1500, became the key figure in realistic political theory, crucial to political science Political science is an academic and research discipline that deals with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior. ... See also: Political Science Notable political scientists Kenneth Arrow - Nobel Memorial Prize winning economist who published influential paper on his widely cited Arrows Impossibility Theorem Robert Axelrod Duncan Black - Responsible for unearthing the work of many early political scientists, including Charles Dodgson Jean-Charles de Borda - 18th century mathematician... The Elections and Parties Series Democracy Liberal democracy History of democracy Referenda Representative democracy Representation Voting Voting systems Elections Elections by country Elections by calender Electoral systems Politics Politics by country Political campaigns Political science Political philosophy Related topics Political parties Parties by country Parties by name Parties by ideology...