Political traditions

Caste is the primary structure of Indian inequality, and dismantling it requires constitutional guarantees and state action rather than reform of hearts.

B. R. Ambedkar · Jyotirao Phule · Periyar E. V. Ramasamy

All coercive hierarchy — the state above all — should be dismantled and replaced by voluntary, federated self-organisation.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon · Mikhail Bakunin · Peter Kropotkin

Abolish both the state and private ownership of productive property, replacing them with federated worker and community control.

Peter Kropotkin · Emma Goldman · Noam Chomsky

Order, stability and effective government take priority over political competition, civil liberties and checks on executive power.

Thomas Hobbes · Carl Schmitt · Juan Linz

A social market economy grounded in Catholic social teaching: private ownership, strong welfare, and family and church as institutions the state should support rather than replace.

Jacques Maritain · Wilhelm Röpke · Pope Leo XIII

The nation is a community of citizens bound by shared political commitments, open to anyone who takes them on — not by ancestry.

Ernest Renan · Jürgen Habermas · Maurizio Viroli

Society is an inheritance held in trust across generations, and obligation runs in both directions between those with power and those without.

Edmund Burke · Joseph de Maistre · Michael Oakeshott

Freedom means the absence of coercion; the state should secure property and contract, and otherwise leave people alone.

Adam Smith · John Locke · Friedrich Hayek

A classless, stateless society reached through revolution — and, in its twentieth-century state form, a single-party government directing the whole economy.

Karl Marx · Friedrich Engels · Vladimir Lenin

Established institutions carry knowledge that no individual reformer possesses, so change should be gradual and the burden of proof falls on the reformer.

Edmund Burke · Michael Oakeshott · Roger Scruton

Society organised into recognised bodies — labour, business, agriculture — that bargain with each other under the state rather than competing as individuals or classes.

Émile Durkheim · Philippe Schmitter · Othmar Spann

Socialism achieved through democratic means: public or collective ownership of major economic sectors, with elections and civil liberties intact.

Rosa Luxemburg · Karl Kautsky · G. D. H. Cole

A competent bureaucracy directs private industry towards export competitiveness — market prices, state targets, and political competition postponed.

Chalmers Johnson · Alice Amsden · Robert Wade

A totalitarian ideology of national rebirth through a single party and leader, the elimination of opposition, and the subordination of the individual to the nation.

Giovanni Gentile · Carl Schmitt

Sex-based hierarchy is a political structure rather than a natural fact, and law and public policy should be used to dismantle it.

Mary Wollstonecraft · Simone de Beauvoir · Betty Friedan

Ecological limits are the binding constraint on everything else, and economic and political institutions should be rebuilt around them.

Rachel Carson · E. F. Schumacher · Vandana Shiva

Indian nationhood defined by attachment to India as a holy land, making Hindu civilisation the basis of national identity rather than the constitution alone.

V. D. Savarkar · M. S. Golwalkar · Deendayal Upadhyaya

Elections are real and are won, but courts, press and civil society are brought under control between them — majority rule without the constraints liberalism attaches to it.

Fareed Zakaria · Steven Levitsky · Daniel Ziblatt

Islam supplies not only personal ethics but the basis of law and government, and the state should be organised accordingly.

Sayyid Qutb · Hassan al-Banna · Abul A’la Maududi

Government exists to protect individual rights, and its power must be limited, accountable and justified to those it governs.

John Locke · John Stuart Mill · Immanuel Kant

People own themselves and what they earn; the state should do almost nothing beyond preventing force and fraud.

Robert Nozick · Murray Rothbard · Ludwig von Mises

A disciplined vanguard party takes state power on behalf of the working class, abolishes private ownership, and rules without competing parties.

Vladimir Lenin · Leon Trotsky · Joseph Stalin

The nation is the primary political community, and a government’s first duty is to its own people, culture and sovereignty.

Johann Gottfried Herder · Giuseppe Mazzini · Ernest Gellner

Markets do not arise on their own — the state must build and defend them, then submit its own services to competition.

Friedrich Hayek · Milton Friedman · James M. Buchanan

Africans and the African diaspora share a common political destiny, and continental unity is the condition of genuine independence rather than a sentiment about it.

W. E. B. Du Bois · Kwame Nkrumah · Frantz Fanon

Politics is a conflict between ordinary people and a self-serving elite, and the people’s will should not be obstructed by institutions.

Ernesto Laclau · Chantal Mouffe · Cas Mudde

Inherited social arrangements should be judged by their results, and deliberately reformed where they leave some groups worse off.

John Dewey · Jane Addams · B. R. Ambedkar

Religious teaching is a legitimate and necessary source of public morality, and law should reflect rather than exclude it.

Thomas Aquinas · Abraham Kuyper · Jacques Maritain

Freedom means not being subject to anyone’s arbitrary power — which requires active citizens and dispersed authority, not merely being left alone.

Niccolò Machiavelli · James Harrington · Hannah Arendt

Keep the market economy, but tax it substantially and use the proceeds for universal public services and strong worker protections.

Eduard Bernstein · John Maynard Keynes · Gøsta Esping-Andersen

Freedom needs material foundations, so the state should secure education, health and security of income — while leaving private life alone.

John Stuart Mill · L. T. Hobhouse · John Maynard Keynes

The means of production should be owned collectively rather than privately, so that economic decisions serve need rather than profit.

Karl Marx · Friedrich Engels · Robert Owen

Accept the market settlement, then use its proceeds for public investment and opportunity — neither the old left nor the new right.

Anthony Giddens · Amartya Sen · Robert Reich

Not merely obedience but belief: the state claims the whole of life — work, family, thought — and permits no private sphere at all.

Hannah Arendt · Carl Friedrich · Zbigniew Brzezinski