Albert Otto Hirschman

Maverick economist, Albert Otto Hirschman, was a world traveller: born in Berlin, educated in Paris, London and Trieste (where he obtained his Ph.D.), fought in the French Army in 1940, emigrated to the United States in 1941, stayed two years at Berkeley, joined the US Army, joined the Federal Reserve in Washington in 1946, lived

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Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci was born in Ales, Italy, on the island of Sardinia, a relatively remote region of Italy that was mostly ignored by the Italian government in favor of the industrialized north (the problem of Sardinia had previously become part of the political activity of Giuseppe Mazzini in Turin’s senate). He was the fourth of

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Benito Mussolini

Mussolini was born in Predappio, near Forli, in Romagna, on July 29, 1883. His father, Alessandro, was a blacksmith, and his mother, Rosa, was a schoolteacher. Like his father, Benito became a fervent socialist. He qualified as an elementary schoolmaster in 1901. In 1902 he emigrated to Switzerland. Unable to find a permanent job there

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

Montesquieu was one of the great political philosophers of the Enlightenment. Insatiably curious and mordantly funny, he constructed a naturalistic account of the various forms of government, and of the causes that made them what they were and that advanced or constrained their development. He used this account to explain how governments might be preserved

Che Guevara (Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna)

Ernesto Guevara was born in Argentina on June 14, 1928. He became an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary and Cuban guerrilla leader. “Che” is an Argentine expression for calling someone’s attention, and in some other parts of Latin America, a slang for someone from Argentina. In 1951, Ernesto set off from his home town of Córdoba on

David Easton

American political scientist. Major works of David Easton – A Framework for Political Analysis, Prentice-Hall, 1965 – A Systems Analysis of Political Life, Wiley, 1965; re-issued University of Chicago Press, 1979 – Varieties of Political Theory,(ed.), Prentic-Hall, 1966 – Children in the Political System, (with J. Dennis), McGraw-Hill, 1969; re-issued, University of Chicago Press, 1980

Eduard Bernstein

Eduard Bernstein was born in Berlin, Germany on 6th January, 1850. The son of Jewish parents, his father was a railroad engineer. Bernstein worked as a bank clerk and in 1872 he joined the Social Democrat Party (SDP). In the 1877 General Election in Germany the SDP won 12 seats. This worried Otto von Bismarck,

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Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels, the eldest son of a successful German industrialist, was born in Barmen on 28th November 1820. As a young man his father sent him to England to help manage his cotton-factory in Manchester. Engels was shocked by the poverty in the city and began writing an account that was published as Condition of

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Ideas – To identify the categories inherent in our own subjective thinking is at the same time to identify objective reality’s fundamental character or meaning. – ‘The idea’, ‘reason’, or ‘God’ = the full actualization of which is spirit – is reality’s fundamental character. – The stages both of nature and of human activity are

George Douglas Howard Cole

Born in Cambridge, George Douglas Howard Cole would become one of the leading figures in the Fabian Society, serving as chairman from 1939 to 1946 and 1948 to 1950 and as president from 1952 to 1959. Closely connected to the Guild Socialist Movement, Cole helped found the National Guilds League in 1915. For a period

James Burnham

James Burnham was a popular political theorist, activist and intellectual, known for his work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, which heavily influenced George Orwell’s “1984”. Burnham was a leading American Trotskyist in the 1930s, forming the American Worker’s Party, which was a communist and anti-Stalinist party. He left the party in 1940, distancing himself

Jeremy Bentham

Ideas – Human beings are motivated solely by the desire to gain pleasure and avoid pain. – The morality of our actions is determined by their utility. – Happiness is identical with pleasure, unhappiness with pain. – Pleasure alone is intrinsically good (good in itself) and pain alone is intrinsically bad. – We have a

John W. Burton

John W. Burton was born on March 2, 1915 in Melbourne, Australia. He was educated at Newington College, Sydney, the University of Sydney, and the London School of Economics. Burton’s early career was marked with academic as well as diplomatic success. He was part of the Australian delegation sent to San Francisco after World War

Joseph Schumpeter

A product of the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Joseph A. Schumpeter exemplified that heritage. Although a student of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser, Schumpeter was never really a footsoldier of the Austrian School. After a quick doctorate at Vienna, Schumpeter roamed about as something of a footloose lawyer until he rejoined

Joseph V. Stalin (Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili)

Joseph Stalin was the second leader of the Soviet Union. His real name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, and he was also known as Koba (a Georgian folk hero) to his closest sphere. The name “Stalin” (derived from combining Russian stal, “steel” with “Lenin”) originally was a conspirative nickname; however, it stuck to him and he

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Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein)

Leon Trotsky was born on October 26, 1879, son of a hard-working, thrifty, and well-to-do jewish farmer, in the southern part of Ukraine. The family valued education highly, and when Leon Trotsky was about nine years old they let him move to the city of Odessa, to stay with his ‘uncle’ and to go to

Louis-Auguste Blanqui

Louis-Auguste Blanqui, French revolutionary socialist and leader of many uprisings against the 19th century regime in France, was born at Puget-Théniers. He studied both law and medicine, but found his real vocation in politics, and quickly became a champion of the most advanced opinions. He took an active part in the July Revolution of 1830,

Mancur Olson

Mancur Olson is recognized as one of a handful of scholars responsible for changing the field of economics to ensure that politics became an integral part of economic thinking and policy formation. His work emphasized that a country’s economic policies and the quality of its legal institutions primarily determine its economic performance. Two books by

Mao Zedong

One of the most prominent Communist theoreticians, Mao’s ideas on revolutionary struggle and guerrilla warfare were extremely influential, especially among Third World revolutionaries. Of Hunanese peasant stock, Mao was trained in Chinese classics and later received a modern education. As a young man he observed oppressive social conditions, becoming one of the original members of

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Michael Bakunin (Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin)

Michael Bakunin was born on May 18, 1814 in the Russian province of Tvar, one hundred and fifty miles northwest of Moscow. He received his primary and secondary education in Italy. At the tender age of fifteen, Bakunin was sent to artillery school in St. Petersburg. Bakunin was expected to pursue a military career and