Politics

Aristotle Born in Stagira, in Macedonia, around 384 BCE, the son of Nicomachus — physician to the Macedonian court — Aristotle entered Plato’s Academy at the age of seventeen, where he remained for some twenty years, until his master’s death. He later tutored Alexander the Great and, in 335 BCE, founded the Lyceum in Athens, a school whose members became known as Peripatetics (from their habit of discussing while walking). With Alexander’s death and the wave of anti-Macedonian feeling, he left Athens in 323 BCE — so that the city, according to ancient tradition, “might not sin twice against philosophy” — and died the following year in Chalcis. The body of texts we have inherited from him is the largest and most systematic of antiquity, spanning logic, physics, biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics. ...

Enrique Dussel Born in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1934, Enrique Dussel had a cosmopolitan formation — he studied in Argentina, Spain, France, and Germany, and also researched the history of the Church in Latin America. After a bomb attack on his home, he went into exile in Mexico in 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen and lived until his death, in 2023. He is the leading name of Latin American Liberation Philosophy and a central reference of decolonial thought. ...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Born in Geneva in 1712 and motherless from birth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was largely self-taught and led a wandering life before rising to prominence in Paris, where he kept company with the Encyclopedists — from whom he would later break dramatically. Recognition came in 1750, when he won the Dijon Academy’s competition with a discourse that already announced his most provocative thesis: that the arts and sciences, far from improving humanity, corrupt morals. Persecuted after the publication of Emile, condemned and forced into exile, he ended his life tormented, in 1778, leaving behind the Confessions. He is the great critic of the Enlightenment from within the Enlightenment itself. ...

John Locke John Locke was born in Wrington, England, in 1632, was educated at Oxford, and practiced medicine before becoming secretary and physician to the Earl of Shaftesbury, which brought him into the orbit of high English politics. Caught up in the struggles between Parliament and the absolutist Stuart crown, he went into exile in Holland during the reign of James II and returned only in 1689, with the Glorious Revolution, which enshrined the parliamentary order he would help to justify philosophically. He is regarded as the father of classical liberalism and one of the greatest influences on empiricism and modern political thought. ...

Machiavelli Born in Florence in 1469, Niccolò Machiavelli lived through the height and the crisis of the Italian Renaissance republics. For fourteen years he served as secretary of the Second Chancery of the Florentine Republic, on diplomatic missions that brought him before kings, popes, and the formidable Cesare Borgia — a direct experience of power that would mark all his thought. When the Medici returned in 1512, he was dismissed, imprisoned, and tortured on suspicion of conspiracy. It was then, in rural exile, that he wrote The Prince (1513). He is regarded as the founder of modern political science. ...

Marcus Aurelius Marcus Aurelius Antoninus ruled Rome from 161 to 180 CE and is remembered as the last of the “Five Good Emperors” and as the most celebrated example of the ancient ideal of the philosopher-king. Adopted into the line of succession by Antoninus Pius, he received a careful education and turned early to Stoicism, above all through reading Epictetus, to whom he had been introduced by his teacher Junius Rusticus. His reign, far from peaceful, was beset by wars on the Danube frontier, by revolts, and by the devastating Antonine Plague — circumstances in which his philosophy proved less a doctrine than a discipline of inner survival. ...

Plato Student of Socrates and the most influential philosopher of antiquity, Plato was born into an aristocratic Athenian family around 428 BCE. His master’s execution in 399 BCE marked him deeply and turned him away from the political career his lineage had reserved for him. After years of travel — which tradition links to contact with the Pythagoreans of southern Italy and to his failed attempts to educate the tyrants of Syracuse — he founded the Academy around 387 BCE, the first institution of higher learning in the West, which would endure for more than nine centuries. His work has reached us almost intact, almost entirely in the form of dialogues, with Socrates as the central character. ...

Thomas Hobbes Born in England in 1588 — according to tradition prematurely, amid the panic over the threatened Spanish Armada, which led him to say that “fear and I were born twins” — Thomas Hobbes studied at Oxford and became tutor to the noble Cavendish family. In his travels through Europe, he engaged with the new science of Galileo and with the great philosophers of the continent. A witness to the bloody English Civil War, he went into exile in Paris for over a decade; it was there that he matured the political theory published in Leviathan (1651). He is the founder of modern state theory. ...