Thinkers
53 political and philosophical thinkers with multiple works in the PoliReads canon. Each page gathers their books, key ideas, and the reading paths their works anchor.
Looking for a specific work? Browse the full canon →
Adam Smith
2 books in the canon
Scottish moral philosopher and the founding figure of modern political economy (1723–1790). Smith held the chair of mor…
Amartya Sen
3 books in the canon
Indian economist and philosopher (b. 1933), Nobel laureate in economics. Development as Freedom (1999) gathers his infl…
Anne Applebaum
2 books in the canon
American-Polish journalist and historian (b. 1964), a staff writer at The Atlantic and a Pulitzer Prize–winning histori…
Antonio Gramsci
2 books in the canon
Italian Marxist theorist and politician (1891–1937), founder of the Italian Communist Party, who spent the last eleven…
Aristotle
2 books in the canon
Greek philosopher (384–322 BCE), student of Plato and tutor of Alexander the Great. Where Plato sought ideal forms, Ari…
bell hooks
2 books in the canon
American author, feminist, and cultural critic (1952–2021), born Gloria Jean Watkins; she wrote under the lowercased pe…
C. S. Lewis
2 books in the canon
British scholar of medieval literature and Christian apologist (1898–1963), longtime Oxford and Cambridge professor. Th…
C. Wright Mills
2 books in the canon
American sociologist (1916–1962), professor at Columbia University and a fierce critic of mainstream social science. A…
Carl Schmitt
2 books in the canon
German jurist and political theorist (1888–1985), the most provocative and controversial constitutional thinker of the…
Charles Taylor
3 books in the canon
Canadian philosopher (b. 1931), one of the most influential living thinkers on religion, identity, and modernity. A Sec…
Cicero
2 books in the canon
Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher (106–43 BC), the supreme stylist of Latin prose and a defender of the Roman Re…
David Graeber
2 books in the canon
American anthropologist and anarchist activist (1961–2020), professor at the London School of Economics and a prominent…
Francis Fukuyama
4 books in the canon
American political scientist and political economist (b. 1952), now at Stanford. A student of Allan Bloom and Samuel Hu…
Frantz Fanon
2 books in the canon
Martiniquais psychiatrist and political philosopher (1925–1961) who joined the Algerian liberation movement and worked…
Frederick Douglass
2 books in the canon
American abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman (c. 1818–1895) who escaped slavery in Maryland and became the most…
Friedrich Hayek
4 books in the canon
Austrian-British economist and social theorist (1899–1992), Nobel laureate in Economics (1974). Hayek is the 20th centu…
G. A. Cohen
2 books in the canon
Canadian-born political philosopher (1941–2009), Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford and a foun…
George Orwell
2 books in the canon
English novelist, essayist, and journalist (1903–1950), born Eric Arthur Blair. A democratic socialist who fought in th…
Hannah Arendt
3 books in the canon
German-American political theorist (1906–1975) who fled Nazi Germany in 1933. A student of Heidegger and Jaspers, Arend…
Immanuel Kant
2 books in the canon
German philosopher (1724–1804), the central thinker of the Enlightenment. Perpetual Peace (1795) sketches the condition…
Isaiah Berlin
2 books in the canon
Latvian-British philosopher and historian of ideas (1909–1997), for decades the most prominent public intellectual at O…
James Burnham
2 books in the canon
American political theorist and writer (1905–1987) who moved from Trotskyism to the founding of the post-war American c…
James C. Scott
2 books in the canon
American political scientist and anthropologist (b. 1936), Sterling Professor at Yale and a self-described 'crude Marxi…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
2 books in the canon
Genevan philosopher and writer (1712–1778) whose ideas about natural goodness, the corrupting effects of society, and p…
John Locke
2 books in the canon
English philosopher (1632–1704) who wrote the Second Treatise during the Exclusion Crisis but published it after the Gl…
John Rawls
2 books in the canon
American political philosopher (1921–2002), professor at Harvard. A Theory of Justice (1971) revived analytical politic…
John Stuart Mill
3 books in the canon
English philosopher and political economist (1806–1873), the preeminent liberal theorist of the 19th century. Mill's wo…
Judith Shklar
2 books in the canon
Latvian-born American political theorist (1928–1992), a refugee from both Nazism and Soviet communism who became the fi…
Jürgen Habermas
2 books in the canon
German philosopher and social theorist (b. 1929), the leading figure of the second generation of the Frankfurt School.…
Karl Marx
3 books in the canon
German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary (1818–1883), the most influential critic of capitalism in the modern e…
Ludwig von Mises
2 books in the canon
Austrian-American economist (1881–1973), a central figure of the Austrian School and a uncompromising defender of class…
Mark Lilla
2 books in the canon
American historian of ideas (b. 1956), professor of humanities at Columbia University and a longtime essayist on politi…
Max Weber
3 books in the canon
German sociologist, jurist, and political economist (1864–1920), a founding figure of modern social science. Weber's co…
Michael Walzer
2 books in the canon
American political philosopher (b. 1935), long-term professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Walzer…
Michel Foucault
3 books in the canon
French philosopher and historian of ideas (1926–1984), among the most cited thinkers in the humanities. Foucault's work…
Mohandas K. Gandhi
2 books in the canon
Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political ethicist (1869–1948), known as Mahatma. Gandhi developed satyag…
Naomi Klein
2 books in the canon
Canadian author and activist (b. 1970) who became a defining voice of the anti-globalisation left with No Logo (1999) a…
Niccolò Machiavelli
2 books in the canon
Florentine diplomat and political thinker (1469–1527) who served the Florentine Republic for fourteen years before bein…
Patrick J. Deneen
2 books in the canon
American political theorist (b. 1964), professor at the University of Notre Dame. A communitarian critic of both left a…
Peter Kropotkin
2 books in the canon
Russian geographer and anarchist theorist (1842–1921), born Prince Kropotkin, who renounced his aristocratic title afte…
Plato
2 books in the canon
Athenian philosopher (c. 428–348 BCE), student of Socrates and founder of the Academy. Plato treats politics as insepar…
Roger Scruton
2 books in the canon
English philosopher (1944–2020), the leading conservative thinker of his generation in Britain. The Meaning of Conserva…
Silvia Federici
2 books in the canon
Italian-American scholar and activist (b. 1942), a co-founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign in the…
Simone Weil
2 books in the canon
French philosopher and mystic (1909–1943), a brilliant and ascetic thinker who moved from Marxist activism to a singula…
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
2 books in the canon
Steven Levitsky (b. 1968) and Daniel Ziblatt (b. 1972) are professors of government at Harvard and specialists in compa…
Steven Pinker
2 books in the canon
Canadian-American cognitive psychologist and linguist (b. 1954), Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psycho…
Thomas Aquinas
2 books in the canon
Italian Dominican friar and theologian (1225–1274), the central figure of scholasticism and of the natural-law traditio…
Thomas Paine
2 books in the canon
English-American political pamphleteer and activist (1737–1809) whose Common Sense (1776) made the case for American in…
Thomas Piketty
2 books in the canon
French economist (b. 1971), professor at the Paris School of Economics and the EHESS, who became one of the most influe…
Thomas Sowell
4 books in the canon
American economist and social theorist (b. 1930), senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a prolific author across…
Timothy Snyder
2 books in the canon
American historian (b. 1969), professor at Yale and a leading scholar of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust.…
Yascha Mounk
2 books in the canon
German-American political scientist (b. 1982), professor at Johns Hopkins and founder of the journal Persuasion. A prom…
Yoram Hazony
2 books in the canon
Israeli-American political theorist and Bible scholar (b. 1964), president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and a ce…