List of political philosophers
This is a list of notable political philosophers, including some who may be better known for their work in other areas of philosophy. The entries are in order by year of birth to show rough direction of influences and of development of political thought.
Ancient (born before 550 CE)
- Hammurabi
- Confucius
- Socrates
- Mozi
- Xenophon
- Plato
- Diogenes of Sinope
- Aeschines
- Aristotle
- Mencius
- Chanakya
- Xun Zi
- Thiruvalluvar
- Han Feizi
- Cicero
- Pliny the Younger
- Saint Augustine
Medieval (born between 550 CE and 1450 CE)
- Muhammad al-Shaybani
- Al-Farabi
- Al-Ghazali
- Averroes
- Al-Mawardi
- Maimonides
- St. Thomas Aquinas
- Ibn Taymiyyah
- Marsilius of Padua
- William of Ockham
- Ibn Khaldun
- Christine de Pizan
Renaissance and early modern (born between 1450 CE and 1750 CE)
- Niccolò Machiavelli
- Martin Luther
- Thomas Muntzer
- John Calvin
- Francisco Suárez
- Jean Bodin
- Richard Hooker
- Farkas Kovacsóczy
- Francis Bacon
- Hugo Grotius
- Thomas Hobbes
- Gerrard Winstanley
- James Harrington
- John Locke
- Baruch Spinoza
- Montesquieu
- François-Marie Arouet
- Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab
- Benjamin Franklin
- David Hume
- Frederick the Great
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Immanuel Kant
- William Blackstone
- Adam Smith
- Edmund Burke
- Thomas Paine
- Thomas Jefferson
- Jeremy Bentham
Late modern (born between 1750 CE and 1900 CE)
- James Madison
- William Godwin
- Mary Wollstonecraft
- Henri de Saint-Simon
- Thomas Robert Malthus
- Benjamin Constant
- Georg W. F. Hegel
- David Ricardo
- Charles Fourier
- James Mill
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Thomas Carlyle
- Auguste Comte
- Josiah Warren
- Rifa' al-Tahtawi
- Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
- Alexis de Tocqueville
- Max Stirner
- John Stuart Mill
- Simion Bărnuțiu
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
- Søren Kierkegaard
- Mikhail Bakunin
- Henry David Thoreau
- Karl Marx
- Sir Syed Ahmad Khan
- Gustave de Molinari
- Friedrich Engels
- Herbert Spencer
- Joseph Déjacque
- Thomas Hill Green
- William Graham Sumner
- Peter Kropotkin
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Georges Sorel
- Eduard Bernstein
- Benjamin Tucker
- Thorstein Bunde Veblen
- John Dewey
- Max Weber
- Sun Yat-sen
- Benedetto Croce
- Mohandas Karam Chand Gandhi
- Emma Goldman
- Rosa Luxemburg
- Bertrand Russell
- Rudolf Rocker
- Giovanni Gentile
- Muhammad Iqbal
- Pantaleo Carabellese
- Martin Buber
- Otto Bauer
- Jacques Maritain
- Georg Lukács
- Sergio Panunzio
- Karl Polányi
- Carl Schmitt
- Keshav Baliram Hedgewar
- Martin Heidegger
- B. R. Ambedkar
- Antonio Gramsci
- Walter Benjamin
- Herman Dooyeweerd
- Max Horkheimer
- Wilhelm Reich
- Herbert Marcuse
- Leo Strauss
- Alfred Sohn-Rethel
- Friedrich Hayek
- Julius Evola
- Erich Fromm
- Muhammad Asad
Born in 20th century
- Michael Oakeshott
- Karl Popper
- Yves Simon
- Theodor Adorno
- Ayn Rand
- Raymond Aron
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Hannah Arendt
- Sayyid Qutb
- Simone Weil
- Isaiah Berlin
- Norberto Bobbio
- Albert Camus
- Roland Barthes
- Fazlur Rahman Malik
- Louis Althusser
- Harry V. Jaffa
- Murray Bookchin
- John Rawls
- Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Sheldon S. Wolin
- Frantz Fanon
- Gilles Deleuze
- Murray Rothbard
- Michel Foucault
- Judith Shklar
- Noam Chomsky
- Jean Baudrillard
- Jürgen Habermas
- Bernard Williams
- Félix Guattari
- Ronald Dworkin
- Charles Taylor
- Guy Debord
- Harvey C. Mansfield
- Antonio Negri
- Fredric Jameson
- Wendell Berry
- Michael Walzer
- Thomas Nagel
- William E. Connolly
- Robert Nozick
- Douglas W. Rae
- Takis Fotopoulos
- Jacques Rancière
- Joxe Azurmendi
- Gerald Cohen
- Étienne Balibar
- Thomas L. Pangle
- Lorenzo Peña
- Giacomo Marramao
- James Tully
- Slavoj Žižek
- Roberto Mangabeira Unger
- Samuel Edward Konkin III
- Judith Butler
- Lorraine S. Pangle
- Rae Helen Langton