Some of us have been boning up on this topic for about 6 years already, while others are just tuning in now based on the horrors of recent events. It can be overwhelming to come in cold, so here — don’t go it alone! Take this:
Putin’s war against the west
President Biden “declassified” an intelligence analysis many of us had arrived at some time ago: Russian president Vladimir Putin is a cruel revanchist leader who will stop at nothing to claw out a larger legacy before he dies. His goal is nothing less than reconstituting the former Soviet Union and restoring the “glory” of the Russian empire of yesteryear. And for some reason he thinks the world community is going to let him get away with his delusional fever dreams of conquest — as if fever dreams of Mongol domination are still de rigueur.
Putin has hated democracy for a long time — since before the Berlin Wall fell where he was stationed in East Berlin as a young KGB agent, taking the news hard. Now, he has many fifth column confederates aiding and abetting him from within the United States — a number of them brazenly, and openly. It is getting harder and harder for those treasonous types to “hide out” in the folds of disinformation, misinformation, and plausible deniability. The play is being called — and everyone will need to decide if they’re for democracy or authoritarianism.
The Republican National Committee, in perhaps the most stunningly stupid self-own in the history of modern politics certainly in my lifetime, finally said the quietest part out loud: that in their official pronouncement, the events at the Capitol on January 6 constituted “legitimate political discourse.” Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were censured by the RNC in the statement as well, for their role on the January 6 Committee and their investigation into these “legitimate” events involving a murderous attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
Yale historian Joanne Freeman had this to say about the RNC statement:
The RNC statement about “legitimate political discourse” is a line in the sand.
Democracy vs. Authoritarianism is on the ballot in 2022
If there’s any upside to the dark situation we’re in, it’s these gifts Republicans keep on giving — further debasing themselves each time you think they can’t possibly stoop any morally lower — that we can use to our advantage to turn out our base in record numbers in these upcoming midterms. We did it in 2018, and there’s no reason to believe we can’t do it now. Trump’s support is waning, not growing — and the fractures within the GOP are widening, not tightening. Plus, we’ll have 8 million new 18-year-old eligible voters we can potentially reach — the vast majority of whom statistically speaking, are going to be progressive Democrats.
None of the other policy questions or culture wars will matter if we cannot solve the most fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: do we still believe in the ideals of the Constitution, the rule of law, and the vision of a self-governing people shared by the Founders? Or do we want to hand over the keys to the nation to the erstwhile billionaires, old money heirs, and trust fund playboys who want to drag us back to some perverted nostalgic fantasyland that’s part Leave It To Beaver, part wild west, and part Silence of the Lambs?
Meanwhile Bob has made The Authoritarians available free of charge here, and I absolutely encourage you to read it — it’s fascinating stuff and he’s an entertaining as well as informative writer. In this post I’ll do my best to summarize the main points of the book, because I know people are busy and not everyone has time to read a whole book much less scrape together hours to volunteer and do activist work.
Bob Altemeyer The Authoritarians
Dr. Altemeyer defines authoritarianism as “something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cook up between themselves.” Followers submit blindly to the leaders and give them too much free rein to do anti-democratic, brutal, and tyrannical things. Power corrupts absolutely, and power seems to corrupt authoritarians most of all.
He classifies the authoritarians into three primary groups:
Authoritarian followers — typically this group follows the established authorities in their society, including government officials, clergy and traditional religious leaders, business leaders, and self-appointed gurus of all stripes. They tend to have a “Daddy and Mommy know best” approach to the government, believing that authorities are above the law. Psychologically, authoritarian followers exhibit a high degree of submission to authorities they accept as legitimate, high levels of aggression in the name of those authorities (if so called upon), and a high degree of conventionalism and conformity. They tend to be bigots, with prejudices against many types of groups.
Authoritarian leaders — tend to be Social Dominators, who long to control people and affect others’ lives. They are overall highly prejudiced and bigoted, do not believe in the American value of equality, and feel justified in wielding great power over society with little qualification and even less self-reflection. They believe the world is divided into wolves and sheep, and they have no qualms fooling the sheep into opening the pasture gate so they can eat. “Might makes right” is their personal motto.
Double Highs — about 10% of any given sample score highly on both the social dominance test and the right-wing authoritarian scale, which is odd given the social dominator’s otherwise reluctance to be submissive. They exhibit extra prejudice and extra hostility — beyond either the social dominators or the RWAs. They tend to be the “religious” social dominators, who had a fundamentalist upbringing, or had a conversion experience as an adult (George W. Bush, e.g.) and now tend to believe in some form of Strict Father Morality.
More traits of authoritarian followers
They tend to feel more endangered in potentially threatening situations that most people do (think: Dick Cheney‘s descent into bunker mentality after 9/11)
More afraid than most people; they tend to have overactive amygdalas
Were raised by their parents to be afraid of others — both parents and children have told researchers so
More likely to issue threats than low authoritarians
Most orthodox — were raised fundamentalist and are highly repressed
Most hardline
Believe “whatever I want is right”
Paradoxically, want to “be normal” very badly — they tend to get tugged by the people around them
Authoritarian aggression
Authoritarians prefer not to have fair fights out in the open — they tend to aggress when they believe their hostility is welcomed by established authority, or supports established authority. They also often aggress when they have an obvious physical advantage over the target — making women, children, and others unable to defend themselves as ideal targets. These cowards have the gall to feel morally superior to the innocent victims they assault in an ongoing asymmetrical warfare between supremacists and marginalized groups.
To make matters worse, authoritarians do their dirty deeds in the shadows and scream bloody murder at anyone who dares try and expose their dark secrets to the light. Their theatrical and performative self-righteousness is just an act to avoid accountability and responsibility for what they do — even unto themselves.
Moreover, authoritarians are extra punitive against lawbreakers they don’t like (though exceedingly permissive for lawbreakers they *do* like, which is infuriatingly hypocritical), because they believe fervently in the value of punishment. Many advocate child corporal punishment — spanking and worse — for children as young as 1 year old. Authoritarian followers tended to report feelings of “secret pleasure” when hearing of the misfortunes of high school classmates who had misbehaved, believing they got what they deserved in life.
It would be accurate to think of authoritarians as “little volcanoes of hostility,” almost heat-seeking their way into authority-approved ways to erupt and release their pent-up anger. Many of them do not, and will not ever realize that their fundamentalist upbringing has sadly left their brains underdeveloped, and ill-equipped to navigate the modern world with its rapid changes, accelerating inequality, advancing climate change, and political instability.
Lethal Union
When a social dominator becomes an authoritarian leader, and leads his authoritarian followers down malevolent roads from informing to threatening to vigilanteism, researchers refer to this state of affairs as a “lethal union.” It’s a highly dangerous and volatile time for a democracy, one warranting caution and vigilance from concerned citizens.
Throughout history, these are the situations that tend to devolve further into aggression, political violence, civil war, genocide, and worse. We need to be very damn careful about who we elect as our leaders — we cannot allow our government to be captured by special interests and the narrow, quixotic delusions of old billionaires outshining daddy and staving off death.
More books about authoritarians
If you’ve already read Bob Altemeyer The Authoritarians, or you’re just looking for more resources on authoritarianism — here’s a list to get started:
President Biden and Vice President Harris commemorated the 1 year anniversary of the January 6 attack on our democracy with morning speeches and a day of remembrance inside the Capitol rotunda with Representatives and Senators giving a number of moving speeches in their respective chambers. The tone on TV news and blue check Twitter was somber and reflective. The President referred to the violent events of Jan 6, 2021 as a terrorist attack on our democracy, and said that the threat was not yet over — that the perpetrators of that event still hold a “dagger at the throat of America.”
Only two Republicans were present in chambers when the moment of silence was held for the nation’s traumatic experience one year ago — Representative Liz Cheney and her father, Dick Cheney, the former VP and evil villain of the George W. Bush years. That this man — a cartoonish devil from my formative years as a young activist — was, along with his steel-spined force of nature daughter, one half of the lone pair that remained of the pathetic tatters of the once great party of Lincoln.
What do you do if you’re in a 2-party system and one of the parties is just sitting on the sidelines, heckling (and worse!?)? How do you restore confidence in a system that so many people love to hate, to the point of obsession? Will we be able to re-establish a sense of fair play, as Biden called on us to do today in his speech?
The Big Lie is about rewriting history
We don’t need to spend a ton of time peering deeply into discerning motive with seditionists — we can instead understand that for all of them, serving the Big Lie serves a function for them in their lives. It binds them to their tribe, it signals a piece of their “identity,” and it signals loyalty within a tight hierarchy that rewards it — all while managing to serve their highest goal of all: to annoy and intimidate liberals. Like all bullies, their primary animating drive is a self-righteous conviction that “I am RIGHT!” at all times and about all things, and that disagreement is largely punishable by death or, in lieu of that, dark twisted fantasies of death passed off lamely and pathetically as “just joking, coworker!”
The filibuster is an archaic rule that was at first only there by accident, then whittled into a sharp blade of minority rule by Southern plantation owner and virulent white supremacist John C. Calhoun — a man credited with laying the groundwork for the Civil War.
The South Carolina plutocrat strategized on behalf of wealthy aristocratic ambitions in the 1820s and 30s. Dubbed the “Marx of the master class” by historian Richard Hofstadter, Calhoun consumed himself with an obsession over how to establish permanent rule by his 1% brethren. He was an early proponent of property over people — the original “just business” kind of cold calculating supremacist that would come to typify the darker southern shadow culture of America.
Calhoun came to the conclusion that the Founders had made a grave mistake when creating the nation, and had put in too much democracy and too little property protection. He had a conviction that collective governance ought to be rolled back, because it “exploited” the wealthy planter class such as himself. During his time in the Senate he engineered a number of clever devices for the minority to rule over the collective will of the public — dubbed a “set of constitutional gadgets” for restricting the operations of a democratic government by a top political scientist at the time.
Public choice theory and Charles Koch
Slaveholding Senator John C. Calhoun inspired a series of men in the future to take up the torch of minority rule and its apparatus. James McGill Buchanan combined ideas from F. A. Hayek with fascist strains of Calhoun’s ministrations in the Senate to pack a conservative economic punch with public choice theory.
A young Charles Koch was exposed to Buchanan’s re-interpretation of Calhoun’s re-intepretation of the founders’ intentions, and embarked on a lifelong mission to indoctrinate the world in the religion of hyper-libertarian Ayn Randian fiscal austerity.
New lie, same as the old lie. The old lie is that America was never intended to be a democracy — which is doublespeak nonsense. The old lie is that the Declaration of Independence was wrong — that all men are not created equal; that the entire reason we founded a new nation was somehow misguided. But “conservatives” have been fighting fervently for this original Big Lie since time immemorial.
So: Charles Koch is the new John C. Calhoun. He and his vast navel-gazing empire of “think tanks” and other organs of self-regurgitation have managed to brainwash enough people and operate enough bots to make it almost a coin toss whether the average citizen believes the nation was founded as a democratic republic or an authoritarian theocracy.
The filibuster is one of the strongest minority rule tools in their toolbox.
Corruption erodes trust, fairness, and ultimately, the rule of law. A fair playing field is necessary for a thriving democracy. Justice must come for the rich just as she comes for the poor. Including Trump corruption.
Research has shown that emotional repression causes authoritarianism (Altemeyer, Adorno, Stenner et al). Fundamentalist religious groups favor the most repression, culturally — ergo, fundamentalist groups are at the highest risk for nurturing authoritarian traits.
Emotional repression is the keystone of fundamentalist parenting. The strict application of “Biblical law” as cherry-picked by extremists is inherently contradictory & hypocritical, stunting emotional and psychological growth through corporal punishment and capricious applications of anger for sometimes opaque reasons.
When trusted caregivers apply physical violence to a developing mind, seeds of deep distrust and paranoia are planted. Children learn to “obey” by repressing negative parts of themselves so deeply they fall out of conscious awareness altogether & rule the personality “from below.”
Never being given the required emotional support to transcend the paradoxical human project of reconciling the positive & negative aspects inherent in all people, they become “arrested” at a moment of obsession with punishment as the only solution to every problem. They see the world in very black and white terms — the classic “you’re either with us or against us” zero-sum worldview in which everybody who doesn’t agree with you must be delegitimized and eradicated completely.
Mythology has it that “reckless Democratic spending” is to blame for the ballooning of the national debt — though the historical record shows otherwise.
In fact, the conservatives‘ beloved demi-god Ronald Reagan was the first President to skyrocket the debt, thanks to some bunk ideas from an old cocktail napkin that linger to this day — the Republican monetary theory in a nutshell is (I shit you not) that we should take all our pooled tax money and give it to… billionaires. Because, you know, they’re clearly the most qualified people to make decisions affecting the 99% poor people. Supposedly they’re the smartest folks to entrust with our money.
Trickle down, debt up
Except it’s not true, as year after year and study after study shows. Nor for all their finger-waggling at Democrats over the national debt has the GOP turned in a balanced budget since Nixon. Republicans are the most gigantic hypocrites on economics writ large, but particularly so for the national debt — with Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump all turning in record debt increases, primarily through tax cuts for the wealthy and the Gulf and Afghanistan wars.
Meanwhile, Bill Clinton balanced the budget, created a surplus, and reduced the debt during his 8 years in office, and Obama inherited the deepest recession since the 1929 Great Depression.
The financial crisis of 2008-09, itself caused by the reckless Republican zeal for deregulation — this time of financial derivatives — was a wholly GOP-owned debacle that the next president paid for politically. Nevertheless, President Obama had the debt again on a reduction path as a percentage of GDP — but then Donald “I bankrupted a series of casinos!” Trump oozed his way into the highest office in the land.
It’s weird how “reckless Democratic spending” always happens under Republican administrations!
During the Trump administration, Republicans patted themselves on the back for giving a $2.7 trillion tax cut to billionaires for no reason, while the economy was relatively hot already (after being rescued by Obama). Not only was no progress made on diminishing the debt, but the national debt actually increased (both nominally and as a percentage of GDP) under Trump’s first term even before the sudden arrival of a novel coronavirus caused it to leap into the stratosphere like a 21st century American tech oligarch.
Only when President Biden arrived on the scene and took the helm of fiscal and monetary policy did the national debt begin cooling off once again — all while dramatically and quickly scaling up covid-19 vaccine production and distribution and passing over $3 trillion in Keynesian legislation meant to get the dregs of the middle class reoriented to a place on the map vis-a-vis the 1% once again.
Republican national debt bullshit
I am hereby calling bullshit on Republicans’ crocodile tears over the national debt, which they suddenly remember only when a Democrat is in town and summarily ignore while their guy is in the hot seat burning through cash like it’s going out of style.
We need to have a better collective narrative for Democratic success on the economy. The Republicans are no longer the kings of the economic world — if they ever were. It feels more like smoke and mirrors each passing day, with climate change denial, the Inflationary Boogeyman, and other GOP Greatest Hits playing ad nauseum on the AM social media waves.
Here are at least a few things to remember about the national debt, that Republicans generally get wrong:
wars are very expensive
booms in social services are expensive too; but not as expensive as wars
there is not any perceivable truth in the old GOP party line that Democrats always overspend and Republicans are always thrifty
Reagan and both Bushes presided over two of the biggest spikes in public debt in recorded history, outside of FDR who had both the Great Depression and WWII to contend with
Clinton, Carter, Johnson, Kennedy, and Truman all decreased the debt
be wary of graphs that don’t “normalize” to GNP — it’s an attempt to “lie with statistics” by obfuscating the roles of inflation and the growth of the economy itself
there is more than one way to look at and evaluate the level of public debt
But you don’t have to take our word for it — just ask the Vice President of the Confederacy what his reasons were in the infamous Cornerstone Speech of 1861, just a few weeks before the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter:
“The new [Confederate] constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution . . . The prevailing ideas entertained by . . . most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. . . Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of . . . the equality of races. This was an error . . .
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner–stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”
— Alexander H. Stephens, March 21, 1861, reported in the Savannah Republican, emphasis in the original
More ways we know the Civil War was about slavery
The state secession declaration documents mention the words “slave”, “slavery“, and “slave-holding” over 150 times, along with a number of related words including abolition, abolitionist, race, African, white race, and negro among yet others.
The Constitution of the Confederate States of America is almost identical to the US Constitution; in most of the several places that had been modified, the subject of the change regarded slavery and the claimed rights of Southern white men to own black human beings as a captive labor force.
Contemporaneous speeches given by Southern leaders at the time leading up to the war and during the war uniformly named the question of slavery as the core animus for their fight.
The Confederates rejected the idea floated internally of enlisting Blacks to replace the much-drained manpower of the South even though the final year of the war — despite ample evidence of the capabilities of black fighting forces as evidenced by their use by the Union to rout Southern Armies in bloody battle after bloody battle.
The secessionists even hampered their own ability to get diplomatic recognition, by refusing to clarify any sort of end date for slavery or apologia for the moral failings of the peculiar institution to a Britain and France who saw the practice as barbaric by that time. In other words, they chose slavery over independence when push really literally came to shove.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates were almost entirely about slavery and the question of whether it should be extended further into new US territories of the West, halted, or ended altogether. Lincoln was on the side of halting slavery, and when he was elected President in 1860 the Southern states began seceding from the Union.
I’ll be continuing to work on this as information comes out of the various investigations and inquiries into the attempted coup to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, from the January 6 Committee to Merrick’s DOJ, the GA district attorney, NY district attorney, various civil suits, and probably more we don’t even know about yet. You can navigate the full mind map as it grows here:
Head onward into “Continue Reading” to see the same mind map through a geographic perspective:
Bootlicker Kevin McCarthy showboated his way through an evening of scorn and ridicule for his audience of one: Herr Trump. His sad evening comedy routine for the “just joking!” crowd was an act of political theater given no votes in his caucus were ever in danger of voting for the bill, thus no need to persuade them. McCarthy’s speech sparked jeers and heckles from the chamber itself as well as the wider outside world, as tweets poured forth from inside and out of the Capitol.
Fortunately, the GOP Leader failed to stop Biden’s Build Back Better plan while gifting the Democrats with a healthy dose of both comedy gold and some irresistable mid-term slogans:
Dem Mid-term slogan: "My opponent doesn't want your kids to go to preschool."
Or capital vs. labor, oligarchs vs. plebes, plutocrats vs. proles, rich vs. poor — however you want to narrate it, the property vs. people struggle continues on in new and old ways, each and ere day.
Here in America, the plutocrats have devised many clever methods of hiding the class struggle behind a race war smokescreen, that is both real and manufactured — instigated, exacerbated, agitated by the likes of schlubby wife abusers like Sloppy Steve Bannon, wrinkly old Palpatines like Rupert Murdoch, and shady kleptocrats like Trump and Putin.
The United States has nursed an underground Confederacy slow burning for centuries, for sociopathic demagogues to tap into and rekindle for cheap and dangerous political power. Like The Terminator, racist and supremacist troglodytes seem always to reconstitute themselves into strange and twisted new forms, from slavery to the Black Codes to sharecropping to convict leasing to Jim Crow to Jim Crow 2.0 — the psychopaths want their homeland.
Ds need to start framing this as an oligarch's game in which a global class war is repeatedly laundered and diverted into a provincial race war. https://t.co/9a0KikBuGo
The political left loves people, and our extremists for the most part destroy capital or property that insurance companies will pay to make shiny and new again — unlike the right wing extremists who bomb federal buildings, killing hundreds of people and costing taxpayers’ money to replace.
Meanwhile, the right wing claims to be the righteous party for its extreme fixation on life before birth, yet its regulation-allergic capitalists destroy people and the natural world more broadly, from factory farming to deforestation, the destruction of habitats, strip-mining and other toxic extraction practices, and on into climate change itself. Being in fact the chief architects of manmade atmospheric devastation, they have managed to make themselves invisible from the deed by simply (wink wink!) denying it exists.
WWJD?!
Certainly, not anything the Republican Party is up to. Jesus would be sad.
Freedom means the right to make choices. When you have a large population, that means many different kinds of people are making many kinds of different choices for different reasons. That means, mathematically speaking, a broad distribution graph of options chosen over time. Freedom produces diversity, as a direct consequence of its own laissez-faire philosophy.
The Founders knew this. James Madison was an intellectual of his day, and a polymathic student of the great ideas of his time. It is hard not to see the influence of exposure to Condorcet’s theory about decision-making in Madison’s later ideas about diffusing the flames of factions by essentially dousing them in the large numbers of people spreading out within the growing nation. He believed that ideas and interests that were actively opposing each other would be a good way to preserve enough vigor to sustain an active self-governing democracy.
Regardless of the origin, Madison clearly himself was advocating for the power of diversity to preserve the very republic. He believed that this diversity of views in fact provided the structure that would help prevent singular demagogues from rising up too far and destroying democracy forever in their quest for unlimited power. The founders shared this foresight — that giving Americans the freedom to live as they may would lead to a healthy democracy, through the promulgation of different ideas and knowledge as well as through vigorous debate.
You can’t have freedom without diversity
Many who cite Freedom as their patriotic raison d’être do not seem to tolerate well the exercise of freedom by others, particularly others they disagree with or do not like. But as the great Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer once said, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” She had the insight that if her civil rights could be taken away from her, then no one else’s rights would be safe in this nation either.
America has always struggled to live up to its founding ideals — but it seems like if we want to truly honor their memories, we would continue to take that vision at face value and continue to carry the light of the torch of equality, perhaps upwards to the crest of a hill from whence we may shine once again.
Elder wisdom, Thinkers, and Creators Since Antiquity
Some say there’s nothing new under the sun. Maybe we don’t need to go that far — but we should definitely appreciate the voluminous contributions of the ancient thinkers and great philosophers of antiquity, who figured out a dizzying array of complicated concepts long before the modern era.
We have much to learn from our ancestral teachers. Here’s a place to start — which shall grow over time as the knowledge is passed down yet again, age unto age. Things that stand the test of time are valuable, no matter what the currency of the day.
The Great Philosophers
Name
Known for
Born
Died
Where lived
Influenced
St. Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologiae
1225
1274
Italy
Anaxagoras
Early Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who moved forward ideas about the nature of existence
c. 500 BC
c. 428 BC
Greece, Persia
Diogenes, Plutarch
Hannah Arendt
A politically progressive Jewish philosopher, Arendt fled the Nazi regime for America, where she wrote the foundational text on the political psychology of authoritarianism, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951)
1906
1975
Germany, America
Aristotle
Student of Plato and founder of the Lyceum, he is widely known for his Socratic Method of questioning as a basis for philosophical discussion
384 BC
322 BC
Greece
The Enlightenment, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante
Marcus Aurelius
Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher who advocated for cultivating an ethos of impermanence and doing one's duty.
121
180
Roman Empire
Avicenna
Persian polymath, father of early medicine, and a key figure during the Islamic Golden Age
980
1037
Persia
Francis Bacon
declaring that human intellect and reason are means of discovering the truth: "Knowledge is power“
1561
1626
England
Roger Bacon
Most celebrated European scientist of the Middle Ages.
1220
1292
England
Pierre Bourdieu
The French sociologist's work focuses on how upper social classes preserve their social privileges through generations despite the persistent myth of social mobility in post-industrial liberal societies
1930
2002
France
Jeremy Bentham
father of Utilitarianism
1748
1832
England
Daniel Bernoulli
Swiss mathematician widely credited for pioneering the field of statistics
1700
1782
Switzerland
Jacob Bernoulli
1655
1705
Switzerland
Jean Boudin
French political philosopher known for his theory of sovereignty
1530
1596
France
Louis Braille
French educator and inventor of the Braille system of reading and writing for the blind
1809
1852
France
Brunelleschi
Italian architect, sculptor, and designer
1377
1446
Italy
Joseph Campbell
Literature professor most known for his work in world mythologies, and the widely observed narrative of the archetypal hero
1904
1987
White Plains, NY
George Lucas and Star Wars
Andrew Carnegie
Gilded Age tycoon who made a fortune leading the steel industry in the late 19th century, becoming one of the richest Americans in history
1835
1919
Scotland, America
Cicero
Roman statesman, orator, philosopher, scholar, lawyer, and skeptic who championed a return to republican government during the dictatorship of Julius Caesar.
106 BC
43 BC
Rome
John Locke, David Hume, Motesquieu, Edmund Burke
Marquis de Condorcet
French philosopher, mathematician, and early political scientist who played a key role in transforming European society from feudalism to modern secular democracy.
1743
1794
France
Thomas Jefferson
Confucius
Confucianism -- a system of ethics and morals to guide "right" behavior
551 BC
479 BC
China
Marie Curie
Chemist and physicist whose work on radioactivity earned her a Nobel Prize -- the first woman ever to win the award.
1867
1934
Poland, France
Leonardo da Vinci
The Italian polymath, painter, engineer, inventor, scientist et al was a giant of the Renaissance. He is often credited as being the greatest painter in th history of art.
1452
1519
Italy
Charles Darwin
English naturalist most famous for the knowledge of evolution
1809
1882
England
Democritus
basic theory of the atom: a fundamental building block unit of all things that itself is not divisible (although later we would discover even smaller particles, the atom is still essentially the most basic building block)
460 BC
371 BC
Greece
René Descartes
cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am
1596
1650
France
Alexis de Tocqueville
French diplomat, philosopher, historian, and aristocrat best known for his two volume Democracy in America (1835 & 1840), now considered one of the earliest works of sociology.
1805
1859
France
Diogenes
The most famous of the Cynics, a school of philosophy founded in Athens c. 400 BC, advocating the pursuit of happiness through avoiding the unnecessary temptations of material goods
412 BC
323 BC
Greece
Zeno
Emilé Durkheim
anomie — concept of lack of a shared moral order. Normlessness.
1858
1917
France
Albert Einstein
Known for his theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, Einstein is widely agreed to be one of the greatest physicist of all time.
1879
1955
Germany, America
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Writer, philosopher, poet, and abolitionist who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century and became a key figure in the American romantic movement
1803
1882
America
Henry David Thoreau
Empedocles
Greek philosopher best known for his cosmogonic theory of the four classical elements.
494 BC
434 BC
Greece
Epicurus
Greek philosopher and founder of the highly influential school of philosophy bearing his name, Epicureanism
341 BC
270 BC
Greece
John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx
Erasmus
A Dutch philosopher and Catholic theologian, Erasmus is acknowledged as one of the greatest minds of the northern Renaissance
1466
1536
Netherlands
Euclid
Greek mathematician and founder of geometry
c. 325 BC
c. 270 BC
Alexandria, Egypt
Michael Faraday
Hugely influential English scientist who made numerous contributions to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry
1791
1867
England
Enrico Fermi
Italian physicist who emigrated to America with his Jewish wife in 1938 and worked on the Manhattan Project, creating the world's first nuclear reactor and becoming dubbed the "architect of the atomic bomb."
1901
1954
Italy, America
Michel Foucault
Widely influential philosopher, literary critic, historian, and activist best known for his theories on the relationship between power and knowledge.
1926
1984
France
Sigmund Freud
Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis
1856
1939
Austria, UK
John Kenneth Galbraith
Concept of countervailing power — that collective worker power is needed to balance against growing corporatism in the economy
1908
2006
Canada, America
Galen
Greek physician, surgeon, and philosopher credited with developing the fields of anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, neurology, and logic
130
200
Greece, Rome
Galileo
The Italian polymath is considered the father of modern science, making groundbreaking contributions to the fields of modern physics, observational astronomy, and the scientific method itself.
1564
1642
Italy
Siddharta Gautama
The Buddha; achieving enlightenment under the Bodhi tree in India
563 BC
483 BC
India
Ghiberti
Sculptor most famous for his creation of the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistry
1378
1455
Italy
Johann Gutenberg
Invented the printing press, democratizing the dissemination of information for the first time.
1394
1468
Germany
Jürgen Habermas
German philosopher and member of the Frankfurt School, his work addresses public opinion and the public sphere through the lens of critical theory
1929
Germany
Friedrich Hegel
One of the most important figures in German idealism and a founding figure in Western philosophy
1770
1831
Germany
Martin Heidigger
German philosopher and member of the Nazi Party
1889
1976
Germany
Heraclitus
posited that change or flow is the most basic character of nature; that the world is characterized by opposites; and that God or "logos" is the essence of nature's constant flux and source of all things
535 BC
475 BC
Greece
Herodotus
first historian; first journalist; first foreign correspondent
480 BC
425 BC
Greece
Hippocrates
Greek physician who is considered the Father of Medicine and known for the Hippocratic oath still in use today
c. 460 BC
c. 370 BC
Greece
Thomas Hobbes
English philosopher and founder of modern political philosophy
1588
1679
England
Homer
Ancient Greek poet and author of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey
c. 750 BC
Greece
David Hume
Key Enlightenment philosopher who championed empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism
1711
1776
Scotland
William James
The father of American psychology
1842
1910
America
Thomas Jefferson
Founding Father and third president of the U.S., Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence
1743
1826
America
Carl Jung
Founder of analytical psychology
1875
1961
Switzerland
Immanuel Kant
A central Enlightenment thinker who made contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics among other fields.
1724
1804
Prussia
John Maynard Keynes
English economist whose ideas profoundly changed the field of macroeconomics and economic policy, now known as Keynesian economics
1883
1946
England
Søren Kierkegaard
Danish poet and polymath regarded as the first existentialist philosopher
1813
1855
Denmark
Thomas Kuhn
Philosopher of science known for his theory of scientific paradigms and paradigm shifts
1922
1996
America
Lao Tzu
the Dao de Ching and philosophy of Daoism
6th c. BC
6th c. BC
China
Lamark
A botanist, naturalist, and taxonomist, the French academic was an early proponent of the idea of evolution
1744
1829
France
Gottfried Liebniz
The German polymath is a key figure in the history of philosophy and mathematics both
1646
1716
Prussia
Vladimir Lenin
Fomented the Russian Revolution of 1917 that overthrew the tsarist regime
1870
1924
Russia
Joseph Stalin
Carolus Linnaeus
The father of modern taxonomy and inventor of binomial nomenclature for the modern system of naming organisms
1707
1778
Sweden
John Locke
philosophy of liberty and natural rights
1632
1704
England
Martin Luther
Kicked off the Protestant Reformation when he broke with the Catholic Church over the practice of indulgences
1483
1546
Germany
James Madison
Founding Father and fourth president of the U.S., Madison is known as the father of the Constitution and the author of the Bill of Rights, as well as a co-author of the Federalist Papers with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay
1751
1836
America
Karl Marx
His political theories were so revolutionary he lived in exile much of his life, with his works The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital exerting enormous influence on subsequent intellectual thought and world history
1818
1883
Germany, England
John Stuart Mill
A key thinker in the pantheon of classical liberalism, Mill contributed to political theory, political economy, and social theory among others
1806
1873
England
Mozi
An ethical philosophy advocating the caring for everyone equally
470 BC
391 BC
China
Legalism
Mohammad
Arab social and political leader who founded the religion of Islam
570
632
Mecca
Isaac Newton
One of the greatest scientists of all time, Newton discovered gravity and the laws of motion among much else
1642
1727
England
Friedrich Nietzsche
Key figure in modern intellectual history
1844
1900
Germany
Alfred Nobel
Inventor and philanthropist who gave his fortune to establish the Nobel Prize
1833
1896
Sweden
Georgia O'Keeffe
Painter known as the Mother of American modernism
1887
1986
America
Thomas Paine
Political theorist and revolutionary whose pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis helped persuade the colonists to declare independence from Great Britain
1737
1809
Britain; America
Parmenides
early Rationalist; believed our perceptions are an illusion shielding us from true reality, which is only discernable via human reason
515 BC
445 BC
Greece
Plato
Louis Pasteur
A French chemist and microbiologist who discovered vaccination and pasteurization, Pasteur is considered the father of bacteriology and the father of microbiology
1822
1895
France
Petrarch
Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters helped spark the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century
1304
1374
Italy
Philo of Alexandria
Philosopher and theologist who entwined Jewish exegesis and Stoic philosophy
c. 20 BC
c. 50 AD
Alexandria, Egypt
Plato
Platonic Forms
427 BC
347 BC
Greece
Aristotle
Pliny the Elder
Author, naturalist, and navy commander who wrote encyclopedic works on natural philosophy
23
79
Rome
Marco Polo
The first European to create a detailed history of his voyage to Asia via the Silk Road, including China, Japan, Persia, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam.
1254
1324
Italy
Neil Postman
The professor and cultural critic warned against the ill effects of tchnology and is best known for his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
1931
2003
America
Protagoras
Father of relativism; coined the phrase "man is the measure of all things"
490 BC
420 BC
Greece
Pythagoras
The Pythagorean theorem
570 BC
495 BC
Greece
Parmenides
François Rabelais
A writer, physician, Greek scholar, Renaissance thinker, Rabelais is infamous for his satirical and bawdy humor
1483
1553
France
John Rawls
Moral and political philosopher known for the thought experiment known as the "veil of ignorance," in which participants make decisions about the society they will live in without knowing a priori which class or social position they themselves would occupy.
1921
2002
American
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Political philosopher whose concept of the Social Contract inspired the French and American Revolutions, and underpins all modern liberal democracies
1712
1778
France
The Enlightenment, French Revolution
Jean-Paul Sartre
A key thinker in the philosophy of existentialism
1905
1980
France
Arthur Schopenhauer
The German philosopher was one of the first in the west to embrace Indian philosophy, including asceticism, self-denial, and the concept of worldly illusion. He influenced many other important thinkers and creators of the 19th and 20th centuries
1788
1860
Poland
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Richard Wagner, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler
Joseph Schumpeter
An Austrian emigree to the US, Schumpeter taught at Harvard and popularized the economic term "creative destruction"
1883
1950
Hungary, United States
Seneca
Rhetoric teacher and Stoic philosopher
55 BC
37 AD
Roman Empire
Adam Smith
This Scottish philosopher was a pioneer of political economy, and is widely regarded as the father of economics and the father of capitalism.
1723
1790
Scotland
David Hume
Socrates
Widely considered a founder of philosophy; the dialectic method, among much else
469 BC
399 BC
Greece
Plato
Spinoza
An early Enlightenment thinker inspired by Descartes to go on to lead the Dutch Golden Age
1632
1677
The Netherlands
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
The author, mathematical statistician, and former options trader has written several influential books on probability, uncertainty, and randomness.
1960
Lebanon, America
Thales
Posited water as being the basic material of the cosmos
624 BC
546 BC
Miletus, Greece
Theocritus
Creator of ancient Greek pastoral poetry
c. 300 BC
c. 260 BC
Greece
Thucydides
Athenian historian and general who wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War about the conflict between Sparta and Athens
460 BC
400 BC
Greece
Edward Tufte
Professor of computer science at Yale and a pioneer in the field of data visualization
1942
America
Virgil
Regarded as one of Rome's greatest poets, Virgil penned the Aeneid, the national epic of ancient Rome
70 BC
19 BC
Rome
Dante and the Divine Comedy
Vitruvius
Roman author, architect, and army engineer known for his significant contributions to architecture and design
c. 80 BC
c. 15 BC
Rome
The Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci
Voltaire
Key figure in the Enlightenment, Voltaire was famous for his criticism of the Catholic Church and advocacy of civil liberties including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the separation of church and state
1694
1778
France
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
James Watson
Credited with discovering the double helix structure of the DNA molecule
1928
America
Max Weber
German historian and political economist widely regarded as one of the most important theorists of modern Western society
1864
1920
Germany
Critical theory, the Frankfurt School
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Considered one of the greatest modern philosophers, Wittgenstein made significant contributions to the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind.
1889
1951
Austria, England
Zeno
Founder of the Stoic school of philosophy in 4th c. BCE Greece and Parmenides's most famous student.
Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is a broad measure of a nation’s economic output. It includes the value of all goods and services produced within a country’s geographic borders over a specified amount of time; often a year, for comparative annual GDP studies.
