Theocracy
God reigns through His ministers.
Political power is exercised by representatives of a faith, and civil law submits to religious law.
Thinkers · Agostinho de Hipona, João Calvino, Girolamo Savonarola
House of Tradition
The inherited order as a repository of wisdom.
Traditionalism
Order comes before us.
Society as an organic and sacred order, founded on religion, hierarchy and custom, against modernity.
Thinkers · Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
Religious conservatism
Faith shapes culture; culture shapes politics.
Religion should guide the moral and cultural life of society, without the clergy governing the state.
Thinkers · Russell Kirk, Gustavo Corção, Christopher Dawson
Legitimist monarchism
One king, one law, one faith.
Royal sovereignty of divine or traditional origin, unshared with assemblies, as the foundation of political unity.
Thinkers · Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Robert Filmer, Charles Maurras
Constitutional monarchism
The king reigns but does not rule.
A hereditary crown as a symbol of continuity and a moderating power above factions, under a constitution.
Thinkers · Walter Bagehot, Benjamin Constant, Joaquim Nabuco
Traditionalist monarchism
King, charters and altar.
A Catholic, decentralised monarchy that governs respecting the charters, corporations and concrete liberties of each region.
Thinkers · Juan Vázquez de Mella, Francisco Elías de Tejada
Neoreaction
Government as company, citizen as customer.
Radical scepticism towards democracy; proposes small, efficient, competing sovereignties governed like companies.
Thinkers · Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land
Burkean conservatism
Reform in order to conserve.
Scepticism towards rationalist projects; prudence, inherited institutions and gradual change as the guardians of liberty.
Thinkers · Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton
Liberal conservatism
Conserving liberty.
Defends the free market and civil liberties as part of the inheritance to be conserved, wary of both the revolutionary and the planner.
Thinkers · Alexis de Tocqueville, Raymond Aron, Roberto Campos
Agrarianism
The land forms character.
Rural life, small farming property and rooted communities as the moral and political foundation of the nation.
Thinkers · Thomas Jefferson, Wendell Berry, The Southern Agrarians
House of Order
Unity, sovereignty and strong authority.
National conservatism
The nation as inheritance and destiny.
National sovereignty, cultural and religious cohesion, and an active state defending national identity and economy.
Thinkers · Yoram Hazony, Charles de Gaulle
Bonapartism
The people acclaim, the chief decides.
A strong leader, legitimised by plebiscites, governs above parties and classes in the name of national unity.
Thinkers · Napoleão III, Carl Schmitt
National populism
The people against the elites.
The popular nation against cosmopolitan elites, with a welfare state for nationals, protectionism and charismatic leadership.
Thinkers · Juan Perón, Getúlio Vargas
National corporatism
Everything within the state, nothing outside it.
A historical family of the interwar years: the nation as organism, trade corporations under the state, a single party and total mobilisation.
Thinkers · Giovanni Gentile, Alfredo Rocco
Developmentalism
The state as engine of progress.
A planning state drives industrialisation, protects infant industry and directs credit to overcome backwardness.
Thinkers · Celso Furtado, Raúl Prebisch, Friedrich List
Technocracy
To govern is to solve problems.
Public decisions entrusted to experts and technical criteria, with efficiency as the measure of legitimacy.
Thinkers · Henri de Saint-Simon, Thorstein Veblen
Political meritocracy
Rule by the most able and virtuous.
Rulers should be selected for proven merit, education and virtue, rather than by popular election.
Thinkers · Confúcio, Platão, Daniel A. Bell
House of Community
Intermediate bodies, subsidiarity and the common good.
Distributism
Three acres and a cow.
Property widely distributed among families, guilds and small producers; subsidiarity against concentrated capital and state.
Thinkers · G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Leão XIII
Christian democracy
Person, family, common good.
Personalism and Christian social teaching applied to democracy: a social market economy and subsidiarity.
Thinkers · Jacques Maritain, Konrad Adenauer, Alceu Amoroso Lima
Christian corporatism
Capital and labour, one body.
Trade corporations unite employers and workers in each branch, overcoming class struggle through cooperation, under Christian social teaching.
Thinkers · Pio XI, René de La Tour du Pin, Albert de Mun
Communitarianism
The self is always situated.
Identity is formed by communities and traditions; politics should cultivate bonds, virtues and shared responsibilities.
Thinkers · Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor
Localism
Small is beautiful.
Small-scale, self-sufficient economies and governments close to the people, against centralisation and gigantism.
Thinkers · E. F. Schumacher, Leopold Kohr
Green politics
Think globally, act locally.
Sustainability, decentralisation and participatory democracy; the economy subordinated to ecological limits.
Thinkers · Arne Næss, André Gorz, Petra Kelly
Eco-socialism
No ecology without the end of capital.
The ecological crisis is a product of capitalism; only social ownership and democratic planning can respect the planet's limits.
Thinkers · Michael Löwy, Joel Kovel, John Bellamy Foster
Degrowth
Living better with less.
A planned reduction of production and consumption in rich countries, with a relocalised economy and conviviality.
Thinkers · Serge Latouche, Ivan Illich, Giorgos Kallis
Green conservatism
Conserving our common home.
The protection of nature as a duty of inheritance: love of place, of landscape and of generations to come.
Thinkers · Roger Scruton, Wendell Berry
House of Liberty
The individual, property and contract.
Anarcho-capitalism
Property, contract, nothing more.
Every function of the state can be provided by markets and voluntary associations; institutionalised coercion is illegitimate in principle.
Thinkers · Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, Gustave de Molinari
Agorism
Counter-economics, starting now.
Rather than reforming or seizing the state, hollow it out: parallel markets and voluntary networks that make it obsolete.
Thinkers · Samuel Edward Konkin III, J. Neil Schulman
Paleolibertarianism
Free markets, firm mores.
Combines radical libertarian economics with cultural conservatism and the defence of natural orders, communities and voluntary hierarchies.
Thinkers · Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Lew Rockwell, Murray Rothbard (late)
Polycentric law
Many courts, no sovereign.
Law and justice can be provided by competing agencies and courts, without a territorial monopoly on law.
Thinkers · Randy Barnett, Bruce Benson, Bruno Leoni
Mutualism
Reciprocity without masters.
Market anarchism: cooperatives, mutual credit and occupancy-and-use ownership, without the state and without concentrated capital.
Thinkers · Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Benjamin Tucker, Kevin Carson
Geoanarchism
The land is everyone's; the rest belongs to its maker.
A stateless society with private enterprise, but with land treated as a commons whose exclusive use pays into a community fund.
Thinkers · Fred Foldvary, Leo Tolstói
Minarchism
The state as night-watchman.
A state reduced to courts, police and defence, limited to protecting the natural rights of life, liberty and property.
Thinkers · Robert Nozick, Frédéric Bastiat, Herbert Spencer
Objectivism
Reason, egoism, capitalism.
Reason as the only guide, rational egoism as ethics and laissez-faire capitalism as the only moral system.
Thinkers · Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff
Consequentialist libertarianism
Liberty works.
Defends free markets and minimal government not on natural rights grounds, but because they produce more prosperity and well-being.
Thinkers · Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Jason Brennan
Fusionism
Liberty as means, virtue as end.
A synthesis of economic freedom and moral conservatism: limited government protects liberty so that virtue is chosen, not imposed.
Thinkers · Frank Meyer, William F. Buckley Jr.
Bleeding-heart libertarianism
Free markets, tender heart.
Free markets and broad civil liberties, with explicit concern for the poor — for instance through a simple basic income.
Thinkers · Matt Zwolinski, John Tomasi
Georgism
The land belongs to all; its fruit, to those who labour.
Free markets combined with a single tax on land value, land being treated as a common inheritance.
Thinkers · Henry George, Silvio Gesell
Classical liberalism
Limited government, equal law for all.
The rule of law, limited constitutional government, free trade and individual rights as the foundation of political order.
Thinkers · John Locke, Adam Smith, Benjamin Constant, F. A. Hayek
Ordoliberalism
A free market within an order.
The free market requires a strong legal framework: competition rules, anti-monopoly policy and monetary stability guaranteed by the state.
Thinkers · Walter Eucken, Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig Erhard
House of Equality
Emancipation, social ownership and distributive justice.
Social liberalism
Real freedom requires real conditions.
Individual rights and a market economy, with a state that guarantees opportunity, public services and moral neutrality.
Thinkers · John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, T. H. Green
Third Way
Neither maximal state nor unbridled market.
A renewal of the centre-left: accepts the globalised market, but invests in education, opportunity and active safety nets.
Thinkers · Anthony Giddens, Amartya Sen
Social democracy
A tamed market, full citizenship.
A mixed economy with a robust welfare state, collective bargaining and redistribution through democratic, gradual means.
Thinkers · Eduard Bernstein, Olof Palme, Anthony Crosland
Market socialism
Workers' firms, a market between them.
Socially or cooperatively owned firms compete in a market; profit belongs to those who work, not to shareholders.
Thinkers · David Schweickart, John Roemer, Oskar Lange
Democratic socialism
Democracy in the economy too.
Social ownership of the means of production, achieved and governed through democratic institutions.
Thinkers · Rosa Luxemburgo, Michael Harrington, Ralph Miliband
Guild socialism
The trade governs the trade.
National guilds of workers, organised by branch of activity, run production in partnership with public authority.
Thinkers · G. D. H. Cole, A. R. Orage, S. G. Hobson
Council communism
All power to the councils.
Anti-authoritarian Marxism: society is run by elected, recallable workers' councils, with no leading party and no bureaucratic state.
Thinkers · Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rühle, Paul Mattick
Marxism-Leninism
Vanguard, plan, revolution.
A vanguard party leads the dictatorship of the proletariat, the planned economy and the abolition of private property.
Thinkers · V. I. Lenin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
Trotskyism
Permanent revolution.
The revolution can only survive if it is international; a critique of the bureaucratisation of the workers' state and a defence of inner-party democracy.
Thinkers · Leon Trótski, Ernest Mandel
Maoism
The countryside surrounds the city.
Peasant revolution through protracted people's war, the mass line and continuous cultural revolution against the return of the bourgeoisie.
Thinkers · Mao Tsé-tung, Lin Biao
Anarcho-communism
From each according to their ability…
Abolition of the state and private property in favour of federated communes and distribution according to need.
Thinkers · Piotr Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Emma Goldman
Anarcho-syndicalism
The union is the seed of the future society.
Revolutionary unions seize and self-manage production, replacing state and capital with federations of workers.
Thinkers · Rudolf Rocker, Fernand Pelloutier, Buenaventura Durruti
Libertarian municipalism
The city as assembly.
Municipal assemblies of direct democracy, federated with one another, replace the nation-state and reorganise the economy on ecological lines.
Thinkers · Murray Bookchin, Janet Biehl
House of Method
Positions defined more by procedure than by content.
Panarchism
Everyone chooses their own government.
Governments as non-territorial associations freely chosen; the voluntary method matters more than the content.
Thinkers · Paul Émile de Puydt, Max Nettlau
Liberal archipelago
Many islands, one common sea.
Communities with very different values coexist under a common minimum: toleration, and freedom of association and exit.
Thinkers · Chandran Kukathas, Robert Nozick
Civic republicanism
To be free is to have no master.
Freedom as non-domination: mixed institutions, active citizenship, contestable laws and civic virtue.
Thinkers · Philip Pettit, Quentin Skinner, Nicolau Maquiavel
Direct democracy
The people decide, without intermediaries.
Laws and major decisions voted on directly by citizens, through referendums, popular initiatives and assemblies.
Thinkers · Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Cornelius Castoriadis
Sortition democracy
Anyone can govern.
Assemblies of citizens chosen by lot deliberate on the great questions, as in the Athenian courts.
Thinkers · David Van Reybrouck, Hélène Landemore, Aristóteles
Pragmatic centrism
Whatever works, without dogma.
Policies assessed case by case on the evidence; gradual, testable reforms instead of doctrinal programmes.
Thinkers · Karl Popper, Cass Sunstein
Political utilitarianism
The greatest happiness of the greatest number.
Institutions and laws judged solely by their contribution to aggregate well-being.
Thinkers · Jeremy Bentham, Henry Sidgwick, Peter Singer
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