20 Most Famous Political Scientists

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (painted portrait)-by Maurice Quentin de La Tour-Wikimedia Commons

20 Most Famous Political Scientists

Political science is a big and complex field that covers a variety of subjects and viewpoints. It is a social science that studies systems of power and governance as well as the analysis of political actions, political ideas, political behavior, and related constitutional provisions and legal frameworks. Political scientists have debated issues of power, authority, justice, and democracy since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers up to the present. While some have produced comprehensive theories and frameworks for comprehending politics, others have concentrated on particular problems or environments. Today’s political discussions and movements are still informed and motivated by their perceptions, critiques, and visions. This list examines 20 of the most well-known political scientists, whose theories and writings have influenced how we view politics, society, and the wider globe. 

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1. Aristotle

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer MET DP319026-by Rembrandt-Wikimedia Commons

Born in 384 BCE and passing away in 322 BCE, Aristotle was a famous ancient Greek philosopher. He was Alexander the Great’s instructor and studied philosophy in Athens under Plato. Aristotle made contributions to nearly every science and study that is currently recognized, including systematizing formal logic. His writings covered a wide range of subjects, including mathematics, metaphysics, biology, medicine, theater, ethics, and politics.

He is regarded as one of the greatest thinkers of all time and made significant contributions to many different areas. His political theory is one of his most important contributions to Western thought. The central tenet of Aristotle’s political philosophy is that the purpose of government is to promote eudaimonia, or ‘a good life,’ among its people, which entails promoting virtue. Virtues are learned character attributes that convey reason and merit admiration.

2. Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher who lived in the 17th century, is now considered one of only a small number of truly great political thinkers. His seminal book Leviathan is on par in importance with the political works of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls. Hobbes is renowned for his early and thorough elaboration of “social contract theory,” which justifies political ideas or agreements by referencing the agreement that would be reached between appropriately situated, rational, free, and equal people. He gained notoriety for his application of the social contract approach to come to the astounding conclusion that we should submit to the rule of absolute, unrestricted, and infinite sovereign power.

3. Niccolò Machiavelli

Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli-by Saints of Titus-Wikimedia Commons

The Renaissance-era Italian diplomat, writer, philosopher, and historian Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469, and died on June 21, 1527. Machiavelli undoubtedly made significant contributions to a wide range of critical debates in Western thinking, including political theory, history, historiography, Italian literature, the ethics of war, and diplomacy. But, Machiavelli never seems to have identified as a philosopher in fact, he frequently outright rejected philosophical study as irrelevant and his credentials do not imply that he easily fits into accepted frameworks of academic philosophy. His writings are infamous for being frustratingly illogical, contradictory, and occasionally self-contradictory. Instead of applying rigorous logical analysis, he instead draws on experience and examples. 

4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, author, and composer who lived from 28 June 1712 to 2 July 1778. Because of his contributions to political philosophy and moral psychology as well as his impact on succeeding thinkers, Rousseau continues to be a significant figure in the history of philosophy. Rousseau held a deeply pessimistic view of philosophy and philosophers, considering them to be the post-hoc justifiers of self-interest, apologists for various sorts of dictatorship, and contributors to the estrangement of the contemporary person from humanity’s innate instinct toward compassion. Finding a solution to maintain human freedom in a society where people are more and more reliant on one another to meet their wants is the central issue of Rousseau’s writings.

5. John Locke

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One of the most important political thinkers of the modern era was John Locke (1632–1704). He defended the idea that men are essentially free and equal in the Two Treatises of Government against the idea that God had predestined everyone to be subservient to a king. He claimed that people have fundamental rights that are independent of the laws of any specific community, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.

Men are naturally free and equal, according to Locke, who used this argument to support his theory of the social contract, which holds that people in the natural state conditionally cede some of their rights to the state in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberties, and property. Governments can be overthrown and replaced with new ones if they fail to uphold the people’s rights and advance the common good. Governments are established by the consent of the governed to serve those purposes.

Read also; Top 15 Facts about John Locke

6. Friedrich Nietzsche

The late 19th century was when Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) formed his philosophy. The main focus of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy is criticism; he criticizes morality for its adherence to implausible descriptive (metaphysical and empirical) claims about human agency as well as for the detrimental effects of its distinctive norms and values on the flourishing of the highest types of human beings. As Nietzsche’s implicit theory of the good, his positive ethical ideas are best understood as combining a kind of consequentialist perfectionism with a picture of human perfection comprising both formal and substantive features.

7. Karl Marx

Karl Marx 001-by John Jabez Edwin Mayal-Wikimedia Commons

Karl Heinrich Marx, a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, political economics critic, and socialist revolutionary, was born on May 5, 1818, and died on March 14, 1883. His two most well-known works are the four-volume Das Kapital(1867–1883) and the 1848 booklet The Communist Manifesto. Marx had a little bit of a political theory and a little bit less of a theory of governance. The simplest expression of his perspective of the state is the slogan “the capitalist state serves as the governing committee of the bourgeoisie.” He generally believed that the legal system and government represented class interests. Marx’s political and philosophical ideas had a significant impact on later historical periods in the fields of thinking, economy, and politics. His name has been applied to a social theory school, an adjective, and a noun.

8. Hannah Arendt 

One of the most significant political philosophers of the 20th century was Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). She is most known for two pieces that both inside and beyond the academic world had a significant impact. The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that was released in 1951. It sparked a lengthy discussion on the nature and historical roots of the totalitarian phenomena. The Human Condition, a groundbreaking philosophical study that examined the essential principles of the vita activa(labor, work, action), was the second and was released in 1958. Arendt published a lot of noteworthy pieces on subjects like the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition, and modernity in addition to these two significant publications. 

9. Max Weber

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German sociologist Max Weber wrote extensively on capitalism’s capacity to generate riches for society as well as authority, power, and rationalization in society. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1920) are his two best-known publications. In addition, Weber developed what he dubbed the Ideal Form of Bureaucracy, which allowed him to conduct the first-ever comprehensive scientific study of all facets of bureaucracy. He considered the perfect bureaucrat to be the best type to avoid any corruption. An administration that strictly adheres to protocol and enforces the laws is considered to be a bureaucracy in the terms of Max Weber. Consistently from employee to employee, the rules are written, obeyed, and enforced.

Read also; Top 10 surprising facts about Max Weber

10. John Rawls

John Rawls, an American political philosopher of the liberal tradition, was born in 1921 and died in 2002. His view of justice as fairness envisions a community of free individuals with an egalitarian economic structure, each possessing equal fundamental rights. His political liberalism theory investigates the proper use of political power in a democracy and conceives of a way to maintain civic unity in the face of the plurality of worldviews that democratic institutions permit. His works on the law of peoples lay out a liberal foreign strategy that seeks to establish a world order that is perpetually peaceful and tolerant.

11. Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault 1974 Brazil-by Unknown author-Wikimedia Commons

The writings of French philosopher Michel Foucault from the 20th century have a growing impact on political analysis. Its effect has mostly come from notions he created in certain historical studies that have been adopted as analytical tools. The two most notable of these are “governmentality” and “biopower.” In a broader sense, Foucault created a radical new theory of social power which takes the form of strategies that have their own objectives above those of the people who engage in them. In Foucault’s view, people are both products of and participants in games of power.

12. Samuel Huntington

The most significant contribution Samuel Huntington made to the study of politics was his 1968 book Political Order in Changing Societies. This book was most likely the final significant attempt to create a general theory of political growth, and its significance must be understood in light of the preeminent ideologies of the 1950s and early 1960s. This was the height of “modernization theory,” which was undoubtedly America’s most comprehensive and thorough attempt to develop an empirical theory of human social development. 

13. Robert Dahl

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Robert Alan Dahl was an American political theorist and Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He was born on December 17, 1915, and he passed away on February 5, 2014. He devised the pluralist theory of democracy, according to which political outcomes are implemented through rival, if unequal, interest groups, and he used the term “polyarchy” to describe the actual democratic system of government. Dahl, who is credited with developing behavioralist characterizations of political power and as the father of “empirical theory,” conducted a study on the nature of decision-making in real institutions, such as American cities. He is the most significant researcher involved with the pluralist theory of describing and comprehending local and governmental power structures.

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14. Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky, a political activist, scholar, and critic of the US and other governments’ foreign policies, was born on December 7, 1928. He is regarded as a major intellectual on the American left wing of politics and identifies as an anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist. The most notable contribution made by Chomsky to linguistics was the creation of transformational grammar. In some ways, his method for studying language and the mind, which suggests that the ability for creativity is a significant aspect of human nature, seems to support his political ideas.

15. Francis Fukuyama

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Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama, an American political scientist, political economist, and expert on international relations, was born on October 27, 1952. In his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Fukuyama makes the controversial claim that the spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism in the West and its way of life may represent the culmination of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and political struggle and serve as the last remaining form of human government. He changed his mind and admitted that culture and economics cannot be clearly divided in his 1995 book Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity. 

16. Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag, an American author, philosopher, and political activist was born on January 16, 1933, and she passed away on December 28, 2004. She is well known for her fictional works The Way We Live Now (1986), The Volcano Lover (1992), and In America(1999) as well as her analytical works Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1968), On Photography (1977), and Sickness as Metaphor (1978). Throughout the Vietnam War and the Sarajevo Siege, Sontag was engaged in writing, speaking, and visiting conflict zones. She published extensively on a variety of topics, including communist philosophy, AIDS and disease, culture and media, photography, and human rights. She has been referred to as “one of the most prominent critics of her generation” because of the controversy that her essays and speeches generated.

17. Edward Said

Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim in Sevilla, 2002-by Barenboim-Said Academy gGmbH-Wikimedia Commons

In his capacity as a public intellectual, Said was a contentious figure in the Palestinian National Council due to his open criticism of both Israel and the Arab world, in particular the political and cultural practices of Muslim regimes that went against the interests of their respective peoples. In order to guarantee the Palestinians living in Israel equal political and human rights, including the right to return to their country of origin, Said argued for the creation of a Palestinian state. The public intellectual’s role is to “sift, judge, criticize, and choose so that choice and agency return to the individual” man and woman, according to how he defined his oppositional relationship to the status quo.

18. Angela Davis

Political activist, academic, and writer Angela Yvonne Davis is well-known. In the 1960s, she rose to become the head of the Communist Party USA, and she was closely associated with the Black Panthers. She has pushed for the closure of prisons and the dismantling of the prison-industrial complex. She taught history of consciousness courses and served as the department’s director of feminist studies until retiring as Distinguished Professor Emerita from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

19. Robert Putnam

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American political scientist Robert David Putnam is best known for his contentious book Bowling Alone, in which he makes the case that the United States has experienced an unprecedented decline in civic, social, associational, and political life (social capital) since the 1960s, with grave adverse effects. He considered the degree of civic engagement, interpersonal trust, and participation potential that cities, states, or countries have as a public good.

20. Cornel West

American philosopher, political activist, social critic, actor, and public intellectual Cornel Ronald West was born on June 2, 1953. West, a Baptist minister’s grandson, is interested in how race, gender, and class function in American culture as well as how people act and respond to their “radical conditionedness.” His works Race Matters (1994) and Democracy Matters(2004) are among the most significant. West is an outspoken figure in American left-wing politics. 

The interest shown by people around the world in learning about other countries political systems has increased concurrently with the onset of globalization. As a result, political scientists gain value and significance since they offer the framework through which we can comprehend the world political economy.