Political Philosophy
The catalogue includes 17 thinkers in Political Philosophy.
How these pages are made
Each school page lists the thinkers in our catalogue who belong to this tradition (primary school or recorded affiliation). Dates, works and bios come from the same catalogue as the app. We do not write original essays about the school.
Thinkers in this tradition
- Václav Havel1936 – 2011
Czech playwright, dissident, and statesman (1936–2011). His 1978 essay *The Power of the Powerless* became the manifesto of Eastern Europe's anti-totalitarian opposition, arguing that even small acts of "living in…
- Leszek Kołakowski1927 – 2009
Polish philosopher and historian of ideas (1927–2009). A young revisionist Marxist purged from the Polish Communist Party in 1966 for ideological deviation, he emigrated to Oxford, where his three-volume *Main Currents…
- Andrei Sakharov1921 – 1989
Soviet nuclear physicist turned human-rights activist (1921–1989). The principal designer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, he became the most prominent dissident scientist of the USSR, calling for nuclear disarmament,…
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon1809 – 1865
French mutualist philosopher and the first thinker to call himself an anarchist (1809–1865). His 1840 treatise *What Is Property?* opens with the most famous answer in political philosophy — "Property is theft!" — by…
- Mikhail Bakunin1814 – 1876
Russian revolutionary anarchist (1814–1876). The principal nineteenth-century theorist of collectivist anarchism, he held that the state — including the "dictatorship of the proletariat" Marx envisioned — would always…
- Raymond Aron1905 – 1983
French sociologist, journalist, and political philosopher (1905–1983). The principal liberal counterweight to Sartre's Marxism in postwar France, his *The Opium of the Intellectuals* (1955) dissected the willingness of…
- Luisa Murarob. 1940
Italian feminist philosopher (b. 1940). Co-founder of the Milan Diotima community (1983), she developed an "affidamento" thought of female genealogies and the "symbolic order of the mother" as the relational matrix from…
- Giorgio Agambenb. 1942
Italian philosopher of biopolitics and political theology (b. 1942). Trained on Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, his nine-volume *Homo Sacer* project (1995–2014) redrew the entire map of Western sovereignty: at the…
- Cornelius Castoriadis1922 – 1997
Greek-French philosopher, economist and psychoanalyst (1922–1997). Co-founder with Claude Lefort of the heterodox Marxist group *Socialisme ou Barbarie* (1948–1965), he broke with both Soviet bureaucratic socialism and…
- Alain Badioub. 1937
French philosopher and Maoist militant (b. 1937). The most uncompromising contemporary defender of the universal in continental thought, his *Being and Event* (1988) and *Logics of Worlds* (2006) use Cantorian set…
- Max Horkheimer1895 – 1973
German philosopher and sociologist (1895–1973), the founding director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt and architect of the project that became known as Critical Theory. His 1937 essay *Traditional and…
- Herbert Marcuse1898 – 1979
German-American philosopher of the Frankfurt School (1898–1979). The most political of the original Frankfurt theorists, his *One-Dimensional Man* (1964) argued that advanced industrial society had absorbed all genuine…
- Carla Lonzi1931 – 1982
Italian art critic and radical feminist (1931–1982). After a decade as one of Italy's most respected art critics — her interviews with Cy Twombly, Pino Pascali and others were collected in *Autoritratto* (1969) — she…
- Herbert Spencer1820 – 1903
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was an English philosopher who coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' and built one of the Victorian era's grand intellectual systems. A self-taught former railway engineer, he set out…
- John Rawls1921 – 2002
John Rawls (1921–2002) was an American political philosopher whose A Theory of Justice (1971) revived political philosophy as a systematic discipline. He proposed choosing society's basic principles from behind a 'veil…
- Max Stirner1806 – 1856
Max Stirner (1806–1856) was a German philosopher, born Johann Kaspar Schmidt, whose The Ego and Its Own (1844) mounted a radical attack on every abstraction placed above the individual. He dismissed God, the state,…
- Robert Nozick1938 – 2002
Robert Nozick (1938–2002) was an American philosopher whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) became the classic philosophical defense of libertarianism. Answering his Harvard colleague John Rawls, he argued that only a…