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Category
Disciplines in Economics, Business & Politics
Economists, political economists, entrepreneurs and statesmen whose theories, firms and constitutions organise money and power.
Era
Countries (85)
15 figures
Cicero
106 BCE – 43 BCERepublican theory and oratory that still frame constitutional argument.
Niccolò Machiavelli
1469 – 1527The Prince separated political analysis from moral instruction.
Thomas Hobbes
1588 – 1679Leviathan founded the modern theory of sovereignty and the social contract.
John Locke
1632 – 1704Consent, property and toleration — the template for liberal constitutions.
Montesquieu
1689 – 1755Separation of powers, copied into nearly every written constitution since.
Alexander Hamilton
1755 – 1804Designed American public credit, the national bank and industrial policy.
Mary Wollstonecraft
1759 – 1797A Vindication of the Rights of Woman founded feminist political theory.
Simón Bolívar
1783 – 1830Led six nations to independence and drafted their founding constitutions.
John Stuart Mill
1806 – 1873Principles of Political Economy and On Liberty joined markets to individual freedom.
Sun Yat-sen
1866 – 1925Three Principles of the People underwrote the republican transformation of China.
John Maynard Keynes
1883 – 1946Argued governments should spend in a slump — and every modern state now does.
Hannah Arendt
1906 – 1975The Origins of Totalitarianism remains the reference work on how republics fail.
Kwame Nkrumah
1909 – 1972Led Ghana to independence and theorised neo-colonial economic dependence.
Milton Friedman
1912 – 2006Monetarism, floating exchange rates and a generation of deregulation.
Lee Kuan Yew
1923 – 2015Turned a port city into a high-income state — the developmental-state exemplar and its critics.