Browse the index
Filter by category and discipline, then by continent, country and century of birth. Countries not yet represented can be drafted at the research desk.
Category
Era
9 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.
Mary Wollstonecraft
1759 – 1797A Vindication of the Rights of Woman founded feminist political theory.
John Stuart Mill
1806 – 1873Principles of Political Economy and On Liberty joined markets to individual freedom.
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.