Karl Marx explains politics through class relations, material production, and conflict inherent within particular historical forms of society: capitalism creates enormous productive power but also class domination and exploitation, in his analysis; the state is closely linked to underlying class structure, and revolutionary transformation is expected to eventually end capitalist class relations. Lenin adapts this Marxist framework to revolutionary organization, the analysis of imperialism, and the specific problem of seizing power in a less industrialized setting than classical Marxism originally anticipated; he argues for a disciplined vanguard party and for genuinely dismantling the existing bourgeois state apparatus, rather than merely taking it over intact. Mao Zedong further adapts Marxist-Leninist revolution to a predominantly agrarian society, giving the peasantry (rather than an urban industrial working class) the central revolutionary role, through protracted people’s war, the “mass line,” and an ongoing theory of contradiction — comparing Mao against Lenin on their differing social base and revolutionary method is the most efficient way to learn both together.
Antonio Gramsci explains why ruling groups can maintain power through consent, not only through coercive force: hegemony means leadership achieved through ideas, culture, and the institutions of civil society, and he distinguishes a direct “war of manoeuvre” from a slower “war of position” fought through cultural and institutional influence, assigning intellectuals an important role in either building or challenging this hegemony. Karl Popper defends the “open society” and criticizes political systems claiming to know supposedly inevitable laws of history; his attack on historicism connects closely to fallibilism — since humans can always be wrong, political arrangements should permit ongoing criticism and peaceful reform rather than claiming final, unchallengeable knowledge. Pierre Bourdieu explains how power operates through social fields and genuinely unequal forms of capital, not merely through money or formal office — developing economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital together with habitus (the durable dispositions shaped by a person’s social experience) to explain how inequality reproduces itself through education, culture, and institutions over time.
John Rawls asks what principles of justice free and equal people would actually choose if they did not know their own position in society in advance; his “original position” and “veil of ignorance” thought experiment supports equal basic liberties for everyone, plus social and economic inequalities permitted only under demanding fairness conditions, including his difference principle (inequalities must specifically benefit the least advantaged members of society to be justified). Francis Fukuyama became known for the “end of history” thesis: after the Cold War, liberal democracy held a powerful claim to be the final ideological form of modern political order — importantly, this is a claim about ideological competition ending, not that literal historical events would stop happening; his later work shifts attention toward state capacity, rule of law, accountability, and institutional development more broadly.
Michel Foucault studies how power operates through knowledge, institutions, discipline, and everyday practices, not only through the sovereign state as classical theory tended to assume — his concepts of power/knowledge, discourse, discipline, surveillance, normalization, and governmentality treat power as genuinely productive (it shapes categories, behaviour, and identities) as well as repressive. Jacques Derrida develops deconstruction, a method of reading that exposes unstable oppositions, hidden assumptions, and exclusions embedded within texts and concepts; its political relevance appears in questions of law, justice, identity, and otherness — deconstruction is emphatically not simply “destroying a text” or claiming nothing has meaning, a common misreading worth explicitly avoiding.
Søren Kierkegaard centres philosophy on the individual, choice, responsibility, and lived existence, rather than on abstract systems; although not a systematic political theorist himself, his emphasis on individuality, authenticity, and suspicion of “the crowd” influenced later existentialist and political thought. Jean-Paul Sartre argues that human beings are radically responsible for their own choices, because existence is not fixed by any predetermined human essence; freedom, responsibility, “bad faith” (self-deceiving denial of one’s own freedom), and political engagement are central themes, and his later political involvement brought existentialism into direct conversation with Marxism, colonialism, and liberation movements. René Descartes is primarily a philosopher of knowledge rather than politics, but his method of methodic doubt (seeking a genuinely secure starting point for knowledge) and his separation of thinking mind from extended matter shaped modern rationalism and the intellectual background against which later political thought about reason and subjectivity developed — he should not be forced into a detailed political doctrine he never actually systematized.
Modern Critical and 20th-Century Thought key takeaways: Marx, Lenin, and Mao form one connected lineage, each adapting the previous thinker’s theory to a different social and historical context. Gramsci and Foucault both broaden the analysis of power beyond direct coercion, toward culture and knowledge respectively. Popper and Rawls both develop institutional principles for handling fallibility and disagreement fairly, from different starting points. Fukuyama’s thesis is routinely misread as a literal claim about events ending, and should always be stated as a claim about ideological competition. Derrida, Kierkegaard, and Sartre connect to politics more indirectly than the other thinkers here, through method (deconstruction), individual existence, and radical freedom respectively — their political relevance is real but should not be overstated into a systematic political doctrine none of them actually wrote.