Early History

Most scholars would agree that 4th-century BC Greek philosopher Aristotle was the earliest forerunner of the political scientist. His study of types of regimes in his Politics has remained a major influence on the discipline. Over the centuries, other classics of the field were written by Greek philosopher Plato, Roman statesman Cicero, Italian statesman Niccolo Machiavelli, British philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, French writer Jean Jacques Rousseau, and German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx. Almost all of these authors dealt with the possibility that a society could provide the conditions for a good life for all its people.