---
title: "History of political thought"
chunk: 7/8
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_political_thought"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:00:11.308994+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

An Irish member of the British parliament, Edmund Burke is credited with the creation of conservative thought. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is the most popular of his writings where he denounced the French Revolution, although he supported the American Revolution.
An exponent of liberal conservatism, French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville is known for his works Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution.
A German political theorist of the Conservative Revolution movement, Carl Schmitt developed the concepts of the friend/enemy distinction, the state of exception, and political theology. Though his most influential books were written in the 1920s, he continued to write prolifically until his death (in academic quasi-exile) in 1985. He heavily influenced 20th-century political philosophy.
Leo Strauss famously rejected modernity, mostly on the grounds of what he perceived to be modern political philosophy's excessive self-sufficiency of reason and flawed philosophical grounds for moral and political normativity. He argued instead that we should return to pre-modern thinkers for answers to contemporary issues. His philosophy was influential on the formation of neoconservatism, and a number of his students later were members of the Bush administration.

=== Intersectionality ===

Colonialism and racism were important issues that arose during the 1950s and 1960s. The rise of feminism, LGBT social movements and the end of colonial rule and of the political exclusion of such minorities as African Americans and sexual minorities in the developed world has led to feminist, postcolonial, and multicultural thought becoming significant. This led to a challenge to the social contract by philosophers Charles W. Mills in his book The Racial Contract and Carole Pateman in her book The Sexual Contract that the social contract excluded persons of colour and women respectively. Michel Foucault critiqued the modern conception of power on the basis of the prison complex and other prohibitive institutions, such as those that designate sexuality, madness and knowledge as the roots of their infrastructure—a critique that demonstrated that subjection is the power formation of subjects in any linguistic forum and that revolution cannot just be thought as the reversal of power between classes.

=== Marxism ===

Karl Marx's critique of capitalism—developed with Friedrich Engels—was, alongside liberalism and fascism, one of the defining ideological movements of the twentieth century. The Industrial Revolution produced a parallel revolution in political thought. Urbanization and capitalism greatly reshaped society. During this same period, the socialist movement began to form. In the mid-19th century, Marxism was developed, and socialism in general gained increasing popular support, mostly from the urban working class. Without breaking entirely from the past, Marx established principles that would be used by future revolutionaries of the 20th century, namely Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro. Though Hegel's philosophy of history is similar to Immanuel Kant's, and Karl Marx's theory of revolution towards the common good is partly based on Kant's view of history—Marx declared that he was turning Hegel's dialectic, which was "standing on its head", "the right side up again". Unlike Marx who believed in historical materialism, Hegel believed in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The Russian Revolution of 1917—and similar, albeit less successful, revolutions in many other European countries—brought communism, in particular the political theory of Leninism but also on a smaller level Luxemburgism, on the world stage. Antonio Gramsci instigated the concept of hegemony, arguing that the state and the ruling class use culture and ideology to gain the consent of the classes they rule over.
Contemporaneously with the rise of analytic ethics in Anglo-American thought, several new lines of philosophy directed at the critique of existing societies arose between the 1950s and 1980s. Most of these took elements of Marxist economic analysis but combined them with a more cultural or ideological emphasis. One of the founders of Western Marxism, György Lukács developed the theory of class consciousness and introduced the concept of reification in History and Class Consciousness. Out of the Frankfurt School, thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas combined Marxian and Freudian perspectives. Called the father of the New Left, Marcuse introduced the concept of repressive desublimation, in which social control can operate not only by direct control but also by manipulation of desire. Habermas pioneered such concepts as the public sphere, communicative action, and deliberative democracy. Along somewhat different lines, a number of other continental thinkers—still largely influenced by Marxism—put new emphases on structuralism and on a "return to Hegel". Within the (post-) structuralist line (though mostly not taking that label) are thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Claude Lefort, and Jean Baudrillard. The Situationists were more influenced by Hegel; Guy Debord, in particular, moved a Marxist analysis of commodity fetishism to the realm of consumption, and looked at the relation between consumerism and dominant ideology formation.

=== Objectivism ===

Ayn Rand was the founder of Objectivism and a prime mover of the libertarian movement in mid-twentieth-century America. Advocating a complete, laissez-faire capitalism, Rand held that the proper role of government was exclusively the protection of individual rights without economic interference. The government was to be separated from economics the same way and for the same reasons it was separated from religion. Any governmental action not directed at the defense of individual rights would constitute the initiation of force (or threat of force), and therefore a violation not only of rights but also of the legitimate function of government.

=== Republicanism ===