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. Here the most notable political theorists are categorized by their -ism or school of thought, with a remaining category ("Other") for those theorists who do not fit into any of the major traditions.

Anarchist

 * Mikhail Bakunin
 * Murray Bookchin
 * Noam Chomsky
 * William Godwin
 * Emma Goldman
 * Peter Kropotkin
 * Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
 * James C. Scott
 * John Zerzan
 * Howard Zinn

Classical liberal

 * Raymond Aron
 * Frédéric Bastiat
 * Isaiah Berlin
 * Benjamin Franklin
 * Francis Fukuyama
 * Hugo Grotius
 * Friedrich Hayek
 * Immanuel Kant
 * John Locke
 * James Madison
 * John Milton
 * Montesquieu
 * Karl Popper
 * Samuel von Pufendorf
 * Joseph Schumpeter
 * Adam Smith
 * Alexis de Tocqueville

Conservative

 * Edmund Burke
 * James Burnham
 * Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 * Juan Donoso Cortés
 * Julius Evola
 * Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
 * Johann Gottfried von Herder
 * Russell Kirk
 * Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
 * Gustave Le Bon
 * Joseph de Maistre
 * Harvey Mansfield
 * Charles Maurras
 * Adam Müller
 * Michael Oakeshott
 * Wilhelm Röpke
 * Carl Schmitt
 * Roger Scruton
 * Oswald Spengler
 * Leo Strauss
 * Eric Voegelin

Feminist

 * Wendy Brown
 * Raya Dunayevskaya
 * Nancy Fraser
 * Betty Friedan
 * Chantal Mouffe
 * Martha Nussbaum
 * Mary Wollstonecraft

Libertarian

 * David D. Friedman
 * Hans-Hermann Hoppe
 * Rose Wilder Lane
 * Robert Nozick
 * Ayn Rand
 * Murray Rothbard
 * Lysander Spooner
 * Max Stirner

Marxist

 * Theodor Adorno
 * Tariq Ali
 * Louis Althusser
 * Cornelius Castoriadis
 * Friedrich Engels
 * Frantz Fanon
 * Antonio Gramsci
 * Che Guevara
 * Ho Chi Minh
 * C.L.R. James
 * Kim Il Sung
 * Ernesto Laclau
 * Vladimir Lenin
 * György Lukács
 * Rosa Luxemburg
 * Herbert Marcuse
 * Karl Marx
 * Antonio Negri
 * Leon Trotsky

Religious

 * Muhammad Asad
 * Muammar Gaddafi
 * René Guénon
 * Muhammad Iqbal
 * Alasdair MacIntyre
 * Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar
 * Vinayak Damodar Savarkar
 * Charles Taylor
 * Simone Weil

Social liberal

 * Kenneth Arrow
 * Jeremy Bentham
 * Robert Dahl
 * Amy Gutmann
 * Will Kymlicka
 * John Stuart Mill
 * John Rawls
 * Michael Walzer

Other

 * Gabriel Almond
 * Hannah Arendt
 * Aristotle
 * Chanakya
 * Cicero
 * Confucius
 * Dobrica Ćosić
 * Ronald Dworkin
 * David Easton
 * Erich Fromm
 * Jürgen Habermas
 * Theodor Herzl
 * Thomas Hobbes
 * Leszek Kołakowski
 * Ali Latifiyan
 * Niccolò Machiavelli
 * Mencius
 * Thomas More
 * Thomas Paine
 * Plato
 * Robert D. Putnam
 * Jean-Jacques Rousseau