Who is Who in Politics

The most mysterious novelist of the twentieth century — probably Ret Marut, a German anarchist who fled to Mexico. His novels — The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Death Ship, The Rebellion of the Hanged — are about labour, exploitation, and the violence of poverty. He refused all identification. The work is what matters, not the author. He appears in both the Literature and Politics departments because his fiction is inseparable from his politics.

Can help you study: Anarchist fiction, labour politics, the exploitation of workers, Mexican revolutionary history, anonymous authorship, and the argument that political fiction is most powerful when it does not announce itself as political.

The philosopher who out-radicalised everyone. Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (1844) demolished every “fixed idea” — God, State, Humanity, Society, Morality — as a “spook” that the individual subordinates themselves to. What remains is the Unique One: not an essence but an emptiness that cannot be captured by any concept, including “anarchism.” Marx spent hundreds of pages trying to refute him. The refutation was unconvincing.

Can help you study: Egoism, the critique of ideology, the limits of political philosophy, and Stirner’s influence on anarchism, existentialism, and post-structuralism.

Anarchist, educator, social critic, novelist, poet, psychotherapist. Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (1960) argued that American society had made it impossible for young people to grow up with purpose or dignity. Compulsory Miseducation extended the attack to the school system itself. He wanted communities, not institutions.

Can help you study: Anarchist approaches to education, community organising, the critique of institutional schooling, and the relationship between social structure and human development.

Peter Lamborn Wilson, writing as Hakim Bey. TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991) proposed that revolution in the traditional sense is impossible and unnecessary — what matters is the creation of temporary spaces where hierarchical control is absent and life is lived with intensity. The TAZ appears, flourishes, and vanishes before the state can crush it.

Can help you study: Temporary autonomous zones, ontological anarchism, pirate utopias, Sufism and anarchism, and the argument that the insurrection is already happening.

Czech-born American anarchist whose Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! (1983) reread the entire history of civilisation as the history of the state-machine — Leviathan — devouring the communities it feeds on. Perlman drew on anthropology, history, and personal experience of resistance to argue that civilisation itself, not just capitalism, is the enemy of free human life.

Can help you study: Anti-civilisation theory, the critique of progress, anarchist historiography, the Detroit printing co-op, and the argument that the state is an organism, not an institution.

Contemporary egoist anarchist writing under a pseudonym. Landstreicher translates and extends the individualist anarchist tradition of Stirner, Novatore, and the Italian insurrectionists. His writing in Willful Disobedience insists that anarchism must be grounded in the individual’s own desire for freedom, not in moral obligation or social duty.

Can help you study: Egoist anarchism, individualist anarchist theory, the critique of moralism in anarchism, and the tension between individual desire and collective struggle.

Pseudonymous writer associated with the anti-civilisation and green anarchist currents. Feral Faun’s essays — collected in Feral Revolution — argue for the recovery of wild subjectivity against the domestication imposed by civilisation. The writing is lyrical, confrontational, and deliberately positioned outside academic discourse.

Can help you study: Anti-civilisation theory, primitivism, wild subjectivity, the critique of domestication, and poetic approaches to anarchist thought.

Contemporary Stirnerite thinker who has developed and extended Max Stirner’s egoism into a systematic post-left anarchist position. Sir Einzige argues that anarchism must abandon its leftist attachments — to equality, to the working class, to moral obligation — and ground itself entirely in the Unique One’s ownness: the irreducible sovereignty of the individual over all abstractions.

Can help you study: Stirnerite egoism, post-left anarchism, the critique of leftism within anarchism, ownness, and the contemporary development of individualist anarchist theory.

Publisher, editor, podcaster, and provocateur at the centre of North American post-left and anti-civilisation anarchism for two decades. Aragorn! ran Little Black Cart press and The Anarchist Library, hosted the Anarchy Radio podcast, and organised the annual BASTARD conference. He was the infrastructure of a milieu — the person who made sure the texts circulated and the conversations happened.

Can help you study: North American anarchism, anti-civilisation theory, anarchist publishing and infrastructure, and the social ecology of radical milieus.

Russian individualist anarchist philosopher. Borovoy developed a synthesis of anarchism and philosophy of personality that was unique in the Russian context — neither Kropotkin’s collectivism nor Bakunin’s insurrectionism but a sustained meditation on the relationship between individual freedom and social life.

Can help you study: Russian anarchism, individualist anarchist philosophy, the concept of personality in political theory, and anarchist approaches to law.

Satyagraha — truth-force, soul-force — as a method of political resistance that transforms both the oppressed and the oppressor. Gandhi developed nonviolent civil disobedience from a personal ethic into a mass political technology, first in South Africa and then in the Indian independence movement. The method requires more courage than violence, not less.

Can help you study: Nonviolent resistance, civil disobedience, the ethics of political action, Indian independence, and the relationship between personal discipline and political transformation.

The moral leader of the American civil rights movement. King synthesised Gandhi’s nonviolent method with the prophetic tradition of the Black church and the natural law tradition of Western philosophy. The Montgomery bus boycott, the Birmingham campaign, the March on Washington — each was a precisely designed confrontation between injustice and conscience.

Can help you study: Civil rights history, nonviolent resistance, moral leadership, the relationship between law and justice, and political rhetoric.

Twenty-seven years in prison, then the presidency of a democratic South Africa. Mandela’s genius was not the struggle — many struggled — but the transition: the decision that reconciliation was more important than retribution, that the new South Africa had to include everyone who was willing to live in it. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the institutional form of that decision.

Can help you study: Democratic transition, reconciliation, political imprisonment, liberation movements, and the architecture of post-conflict societies.

Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe, then thirty-fourth President. Eisenhower’s farewell address warning about the military-industrial complex remains the most prescient statement any American president has made about the structural dangers of permanent war readiness. A soldier who understood the politics of war better than most politicians.

Can help you study: Cold War strategy, presidential leadership, civil-military relations, the military-industrial complex, and the politics of alliance management.

The Māori settlement of Parihaka practised nonviolent resistance to colonial land confiscation decades before Gandhi. When armed colonial troops arrived in 1881, the people of Parihaka met them with singing children and offerings of food. The settlement was destroyed. The principle survived.

Can help you study: Indigenous resistance, nonviolent strategy before Gandhi, colonial land politics, and the relationship between environmental and political sovereignty.

The man who named the problem of modern democracy: citizens cannot know the world directly. They act on “pictures in their heads” — stereotypes, which Lippmann named and analysed in Public Opinion (1922). The gap between the real environment and the pseudo-environment is where democracy fails, and where propaganda succeeds.

Can help you study: Media theory, propaganda, public opinion, the epistemology of democracy, stereotypes, and the structural limits of democratic citizenship.

Not the caricature. Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a handbook for new rulers in unstable states, but his deeper commitment was to the republic — the Discourses on Livy is the longer, more considered work. The question is not whether to use power but whether to use it well, and what “well” means when the stakes are the survival of a political community.

Can help you study: Political realism, republican theory, the uses of power, statecraft, the relationship between morality and political necessity.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Rousseau’s Social Contract asked how political authority could be legitimate — how obedience to law could be compatible with freedom. His answer: the general will, the common interest that emerges when citizens deliberate as a body rather than as a collection of private interests.

Can help you study: Social contract theory, popular sovereignty, the general will, democratic legitimacy, inequality, and the tension between individual freedom and collective authority.

The founder of modern conservatism. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) argued that abstract reason imposed on a living society destroys more than it creates. Change must come from within the tradition. Prejudice — the inherited wisdom of generations — is not ignorance but knowledge that has forgotten its reasons.

Can help you study: Conservative political thought, the critique of revolution, tradition and reform, organic society, and the limits of rationalist politics.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Marx’s political theory holds that the state is not a neutral arbiter but the executive committee of the ruling class, and that genuine emancipation requires not reform but the transformation of the economic base on which political structures rest.

Can help you study: Class analysis, state theory, revolution, ideology, the relationship between economic structure and political power, and the critique of liberal democracy.

The thinker who made sense of totalitarianism without reducing it to madness or evil. Arendt showed that the most dangerous political condition is not tyranny but the destruction of the capacity for political action itself — the reduction of citizens to isolated, superfluous individuals incapable of acting together. The banality of evil: Eichmann was not a monster but a bureaucrat who stopped thinking.

Can help you study: Totalitarianism, political action, the public realm, the banality of evil, revolution, authority, and the relationship between thinking and moral responsibility.

Psychiatrist, revolutionary, theorist of decolonization. Fanon argued that colonialism is not merely an economic or political system but a comprehensive psychopathology that deforms both coloniser and colonised. The Wretched of the Earth holds that decolonization is always violent because the colonial system is violence — the question is not whether to use force but how to emerge from it as a new humanity.

Can help you study: Decolonization, revolutionary theory, the psychology of oppression, race and identity, and the relationship between violence and liberation.

Polanyi showed that the self-regulating market is not a natural phenomenon but a deliberate political construction — and one that, left unchecked, destroys the social fabric it depends on. The “double movement”: society protects itself against the market through counter-movements (labour law, welfare, regulation), which the market then attacks as interference.

Can help you study: Economic history, the politics of markets, embeddedness, fictitious commodities, the welfare state, and the relationship between economy and society.

Based on the published writings of Chantal Mouffe. Agonistic pluralism: the aim of democratic politics is not consensus but the transformation of antagonism (enemy vs enemy) into agonism (adversary vs adversary). Conflict is not a threat to democracy but its condition. The fantasy of a politics without conflict produces not peace but depoliticisation — and depoliticisation produces populism.

Can help you study: Democratic theory, the critique of liberal consensus, hegemony, radical democracy, populism, and the relationship between conflict and political order.

Based on the published writings of Amartya Sen. Development is not GDP growth. Development is the expansion of real freedoms that people have reason to value — the capability to be nourished, to be educated, to participate in political life. Sen showed that famines are not caused by food shortages but by failures of entitlement: people starve because they lack the legal or economic means to acquire food that exists.

Can help you study: The capability approach, development economics, social choice theory, famines, identity, and the measurement of human wellbeing.

The most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. Rawls asked: what principles of justice would rational people choose if they did not know what position they would occupy in society? Behind this “veil of ignorance,” they would choose equal basic liberties and arrange inequalities so that they benefit the least advantaged members of society.

Can help you study: Justice, the social contract, distributive justice, the veil of ignorance, public reason, political liberalism, and the foundations of democratic society.

War is the continuation of policy by other means — but war has its own grammar. Clausewitz’s On War remains the foundational text of strategic theory because it refuses to simplify: war is shaped by the trinity of violence and passion (the people), chance and probability (the commander), and rational calculation (the government). Friction — the gap between plan and execution — is not an accident but a structural feature.

Can help you study: Strategic theory, the nature of war, friction, the fog of war, civil-military relations, and the relationship between war and politics.

Most conflict situations are bargaining situations. Schelling showed that strategic interaction is not about brute force but about communication, commitment, and the manipulation of expectations. The ability to burn your bridges — to make a credible commitment — is a source of power, not weakness. His work on nuclear deterrence, focal points, and the strategy of conflict earned the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Can help you study: Game theory, deterrence, bargaining, focal points, credible commitment, arms control, and the strategy of conflict.

In anarchy, there is no government above governments. States must rely on self-help. Waltz’s Theory of International Politics argued that the structure of the international system — not the intentions of leaders or the character of states — determines outcomes. The balance of power is not a policy but a systemic tendency.

Can help you study: International relations theory, structural realism, anarchy, the balance of power, and why international politics produces recurring patterns regardless of who is in charge.

The fundamental source of conflict in the new world will be cultural, not ideological or economic. Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis remains controversial precisely because it captures something real about how identity shapes conflict — even if the civilizational boundaries he drew are contested. His earlier work on political order in changing societies is arguably more important and less debated.

Can help you study: Civilizational conflict, political order, modernisation, civil-military relations, democratic transitions, and American identity.

Based on the published writings of John Mearsheimer. Great powers are trapped in a security competition from which there is no escape. Because states can never be certain of each other’s intentions, rational great powers maximise their share of world power — the best guarantee of survival is hegemony. The tragedy: even status-quo powers are driven to offensive behaviour by the structure of the system.

Can help you study: Great power politics, security competition, offensive realism, NATO expansion, the rise of China, and structural theories of international conflict.

Based on the published writings of Alexander Wendt. Anarchy is what states make of it. The international system has no fixed logic — its character depends on the shared ideas, norms, and identities that states construct through their interactions. Enemies can become friends, and friends can become enemies, because the social structure of international politics is made, not given.

Can help you study: Constructivism, the role of ideas in international politics, identity formation, norms, and why anarchy does not necessarily produce conflict.

A French aristocrat who travelled to America and understood its democracy better than the Americans did. Tocqueville saw that democracy’s greatest danger was not tyranny from above but conformism from within — the tyranny of the majority, the soft despotism of a state that manages every detail of citizens’ lives while leaving them technically free.

Can help you study: Democracy, the tyranny of the majority, civil society, voluntary associations, individualism, and the structural conditions of freedom.

Based on the published writings of Daron Acemoglu. Nations fail because their institutions are extractive — designed to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a narrow elite. Nations succeed when their institutions are inclusive — when they distribute power broadly, protect property rights, and create incentives for innovation. Geography, culture, and ignorance are not the answer. Institutions are.

Can help you study: Why some countries are rich and others poor, institutional economics, the relationship between political and economic institutions, and the narrow corridor between state capacity and societal mobilisation.

Hardin was wrong. The commons are not inevitably tragic. Ostrom spent decades documenting communities around the world that successfully governed shared resources — fisheries, forests, irrigation systems — without privatisation and without the state, using institutional arrangements that economists had not thought to look for. The first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Can help you study: Commons governance, institutional analysis, polycentric governance, collective action, and why communities can solve problems that neither markets nor states can.

Who governs? Dahl asked this question of New Haven, Connecticut, and found that power was dispersed among competing groups rather than concentrated in a single elite. His concept of polyarchy — rule by many, as distinct from ideal democracy — remains the standard framework for analysing real democratic systems.

Can help you study: Democratic theory, pluralism, the distribution of power, polyarchy, and the gap between democratic ideals and democratic practice.

Based on the published writings of Francis Fukuyama. “The End of History” was not about the end of events but the end of the ideological contest: liberal democracy had no remaining systemic rival. His later work on political order examined why some states develop effective, accountable institutions and others decay into patrimonialism — a question that proved more durable than the triumphalism.

Can help you study: Political development, state building, political decay, identity politics, the end of history thesis, and the institutional foundations of liberal democracy.