List of political theorists
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A political theorist is someone who engages in constructing or evaluating political theory, including political philosophy. Theorists may be academics or independent scholars.
Notable historic political theorists
- Aristotle
- John Austin
- Simion Bărnuțiu
- Frederic Bastiat
- Jeremy Bentham
- Jean Bodin
- Edmund Burke
- Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui
- John C. Calhoun
- Chanakya
- Cicero
- Friedrich Engels
- Benjamin Franklin
- Hugo Grotius
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Johann Gottfried von Herder
- Thomas Hobbes
- Immanuel Kant
- John Locke
- Niccolò Machiavelli
- James Madison
- Karl Marx
- John Stuart Mill
- John Milton
- Gustave de Molinari
- Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
- Thomas More
- Thomas Paine
- Plato
- Samuel von Pufendorf
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- John of Salisbury
- Lysander Spooner
- Alexis de Tocqueville
- Ryōhei Uchida
Notable twentieth century's political theorists
- Bruce Ackerman
- Theodor Adorno
- Giorgio Agamben
- Tariq Ali
- Gabriel Almond
- Louis Althusser
- Hannah Arendt
- Raymond Aron
- Muhammad Asad
- Benjamin Barber
- Ernest Barker
- Robert N. Bellah
- Seyla Benhabib
- Walter Benjamin
- Isaiah Berlin
- Hans T. Blokland
- Allan Bloom
- Norberto Bobbio
- Eileen Hunt Botting
- Eoin Ó Broin
- Stephen Bronner
- Wendy Brown
- James Burnham
- Margaret Canovan
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Lorella Cedroni
- Noam Chomsky
- Tony Cliff
- G. D. H. Cole
- William E. Connolly
- Drucilla Cornell
- Dobrica Ćosić (1921–2014), Yugoslav and Serbian
- Joseph Cropsey
- Robert Dahl
- John Dewey
- Raya Dunayevskaya
- John Dunn
- Ronald Dworkin
- David Easton
- Susan Fainstein
- Frantz Fanon
- Richard E. Flathman
- Michel Foucault
- Nancy Fraser
- David D. Friedman
- Carl Friedrich
- Erich Fromm
- Muammar Gaddafi
- William Galston
- Emma Goldman
- Antonio Gramsci
- Antonia Grunenberg
- Che Guevara
- Alma Guillermoprieto
- Amy Gutmann
- Jürgen Habermas
- Clive Hamilton
- Michael Hardt
- Louis Hartz
- Friedrich Hayek
- David Held
- Paul Hirst
- Ho Chi Minh
- L. T. Hobhouse
- John Holloway
- Bonnie Honig
- Allama Iqbal
- C.L.R. James
- Jean Jaurès
- Leo Jogiches
- V. O. Key, Jr.
- Kim Il-Sung
- Russell Kirk
- Leszek Kołakowski
- Chandran Kukathas
- Will Kymlicka
- Ernesto Laclau
- Rose Wilder Lane
- Harold J. Laski
- Harold D. Lasswell
- Henri Lefebvre
- Claude Lefort
- Vladimir Lenin
- Theodore J. Lowi
- György Lukács
- Steven Lukes
- Rosa Luxemburg
- Dwight Macdonald
- Tibor Machan
- Alasdair MacIntyre
- C. B. Macpherson
- Harvey Mansfield
- Herbert Marcuse
- David Miller
- Chantal Mouffe
- Antonio Negri
- Saul Newman
- Anne Norton
- Martha Nussbaum
- Robert Nozick
- Michael Oakeshott
- Susan Moller Okin
- Thomas Pangle
- Carole Pateman
- Lorenzo Peña
- Hanna Fenichel Pitkin
- John Plamenatz
- J.G.A. Pocock
- Robert D. Putnam
- Ayn Rand
- John Rawls
- Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar
- Joseph Raz
- Murray Rothbard
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Mario Savio
- Carl Schmitt
- Joseph Schumpeter
- Judith N. Shklar
- James C. Scott
- Leo Strauss
- Charles Taylor
- Leon Trotsky
- Roberto Mangabeira Unger
- Eric Voegelin
- Jouke de Vries
- Graham Wallas
- Michael Walzer
- Beatrice Webb
- Sidney Webb
- Simone Weil
- Sheldon Wolin
- Iris Marion Young
- Raúl Zibechi
- Howard Zinn
- Kenneth Arrow