Thinkers Timeline

Simón Bolívar was a military leader and political thinker who led much of South America to independence from Spain. In Latin America he is known as 'El Libertador', the Liberator. He was born on 24 July 1783 in Caracas, in what is now Venezuela. His family was part of the wealthy Creole class: people of Spanish descent born in the Americas. His parents died when he was young, and he was raised by uncles and a close teacher, Simón Rodríguez, who shaped his ideas deeply. As a young man, Bolívar travelled in Europe. He saw Napoleon crowned emperor in Paris in 1804. He watched the French Revolution's promises turn into Napoleon's empire. He also read widely: Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and other Enlightenment thinkers. These experiences shaped his sense of what politics could and could not achieve. Bolívar returned to South America determined to free it from Spanish rule. Between 1810 and 1825, he led long military campaigns across huge distances. He crossed the Andes mountains with his army in conditions that killed many of his soldiers. He won key battles at Boyacá (1819), Carabobo (1821), and Ayacucho (1824, commanded by his general Sucre). By the end of these wars, Spain had lost its mainland American colonies. Six modern countries were born from this struggle: Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia (named after him), and Panama. Bolívar hoped to unite these new nations into one great republic. He called it Gran Colombia. But the project failed. Regional rivalries, personal ambitions, and the size of the territory tore it apart. Bolívar died of tuberculosis on 17 December 1830, aged 47, on his way into exile. He died disappointed, saying famously that he had 'ploughed the sea'.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), usually known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician widely regarded as the author of the first published algorithm intended to be run on a machine. She was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke, a mathematically inclined aristocrat who separated from Byron a month after Ada's birth. Annabella worried that her daughter might inherit her father's volatility and insisted that Ada be given a rigorous education in mathematics and science — unusual for a girl of her class at the time. Ada studied with tutors including the mathematician Augustus De Morgan and the scientist Mary Somerville. In 1833, at seventeen, she met Charles Babbage, the mathematician designing mechanical calculating machines. She became his close intellectual collaborator over the next two decades. In 1843 she translated an article on Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine from French, adding her own extensive notes that more than tripled the length of the original. These notes, published under her initials AAL, contain the first detailed algorithm designed for machine execution and a remarkable philosophical discussion of what such a machine could and could not do. She married William King, later Earl of Lovelace, and had three children. She died of uterine cancer at thirty-six, having published only the one major work but having thought further into the future of computing than almost anyone of her century.

Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett was an English political activist and writer. She led the largest peaceful campaign for British women's right to vote for over twenty years. She was born on 11 June 1847 in Aldeburgh, a small town on the coast of Suffolk, England. Her father, Newson Garrett, was a successful businessman and political radical. He believed strongly in education for his daughters, which was unusual at the time. The Garrett family produced several remarkable women. Millicent's older sister Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became Britain's first qualified woman doctor. Their cousin Rhoda Garrett was a pioneer interior designer. Millicent herself married Henry Fawcett in 1867, when she was 19. He was a politician, professor of political economy at Cambridge, and blind from a shooting accident. They were intellectual partners. Their daughter Philippa later became one of the first women to score top marks in mathematics at Cambridge. Millicent's interest in women's right to vote (called 'suffrage') began very early. She attended her first suffrage meeting at age 19 in 1866, after hearing the philosopher John Stuart Mill speak on women's equality. She became active in campaigns at once. When her husband died in 1884, Millicent was 38. She turned her grief into political work. In 1897 she became leader of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), Britain's largest peaceful suffrage organisation. She led it for 22 years. In 1918, when British women over 30 finally won the vote, she was 71. In 1928, full equal voting rights for women were achieved. She died the next year, on 5 August 1929, aged 82.

Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933) was an American political philosopher and management thinker whose ideas about authority, conflict, and organisation anticipated much of the later twentieth century's humanistic approach to management. She was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, to a family of modest means. Her father, a Civil War veteran, died when she was young; her mother became an invalid, and Follett took on significant family responsibilities while still a student. She studied at the Annex — which later became Radcliffe College — at Cambridge University, and in Paris, focusing on history, political economy, and philosophy. Her first major book, The Speaker of the House of Representatives, appeared in 1896 and remains a standard work on the history of that institution. She worked for decades in community organising, founding evening recreation centres and other services in Boston's poorer neighbourhoods and serving on various committees on industrial and social questions. Her experience in community work brought her into contact with real problems of coordinating people with different interests toward common ends, and she drew on this experience to develop her later writings on management and organisation. The New State (1918) and Creative Experience (1924) argued for a democracy based on the integrating of differences rather than on majority rule. In the late 1920s she was invited to lecture to business audiences in the United States and England, and these lectures — posthumously collected as Dynamic Administration — made her reputation as a management thinker. She died in Boston in 1933. Her work was largely forgotten during the mid-twentieth century but has been rediscovered since the 1970s as the fields she influenced caught up with her.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian revolutionary and political theorist. He led the October Revolution of 1917 and founded the Soviet Union, the world's first communist state. His real name was Vladimir Ulyanov. He took the name Lenin around 1901. He was born on 22 April 1870 in Simbirsk, a town on the Volga river. His family was educated and middle class. His father was a school inspector who had risen into the Russian nobility. Two family events shaped him. In 1886 his father died. The next year, his older brother Alexander was hanged for taking part in a plot to kill Tsar Alexander III. Lenin was seventeen. He kept his brother's revolutionary commitment but rejected terrorism as a method. He turned to Marxism, a theory developed by Karl Marx, who argued that workers would eventually overthrow capitalism. Lenin trained as a lawyer but spent most of his life as a full-time revolutionary. He was arrested in 1895 and exiled to Siberia. In 1900 he moved to Western Europe, where he lived for most of the next seventeen years. He edited newspapers and wrote major books. In 1902 he published What Is to Be Done?, arguing for a small, disciplined revolutionary party. In April 1917, after the Tsar fell, he returned to Russia. His Bolshevik party seized power in the October Revolution. He led the new Soviet state through civil war, famine, and foreign intervention. A series of strokes from 1922 left him unable to work. He died on 21 January 1924, aged 53. His body is still on display in Red Square in Moscow.

Mao Zedong was a Chinese revolutionary and political leader. He founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and ruled it until his death in 1976. He was born on 26 December 1893 in Shaoshan, a village in Hunan province. His father was a rural grain dealer who had become relatively well-off. Mao did farm work as a boy, left an arranged marriage, and moved to the provincial capital Changsha to study. China at the time was in crisis. The old imperial system collapsed in 1911. Foreign powers had humiliated the country. Warlords controlled many regions. Millions lived in extreme poverty. Young Mao read widely and met revolutionary ideas. While working at Peking University library in 1918, he was introduced to Marxism. In 1921, he was one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party. A civil war followed between the Communists and the Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-shek. In 1934-35 Mao led the Long March, an 8,000-kilometre retreat that saved the Communist Party from destruction. By the end of World War II, his forces had grown strong. He defeated the Nationalists in 1949. On 1 October 1949 he stood atop Tiananmen Gate in Beijing and proclaimed the People's Republic of China. He ruled for twenty-seven years. He launched huge campaigns: land reform, the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Some brought great changes. Others brought disaster. He met US President Nixon in 1972, ending China's isolation from the West. He died in Beijing on 9 September 1976, aged 82.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German-American political philosopher. She was born into a Jewish family in Hanover, Germany, and studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 she fled Germany, was briefly interned in France, and eventually reached the United States in 1941, where she spent the rest of her life. Her experience as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany shaped all of her thinking: she wanted to understand how the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, had been possible, and what they revealed about the fragility of political freedom and human dignity. Her most important books are The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). She was a professor at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research in New York. She died in 1975, mid-sentence at her typewriter, working on her final book.

Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) was the first president of independent Ghana and one of the most important political thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century. He was born in the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then called under British colonial rule. He studied in the United States at Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania, where he was deeply influenced by Pan-African thought and by the political philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. He returned to Africa and led the campaign for Ghanaian independence, which was achieved in 1957, making Ghana the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence from colonial rule. His famous declaration that the independence of Ghana was meaningless unless it was linked to the total liberation of Africa set the tone for his political vision. He led Ghana until 1966, when he was overthrown in a military coup while on a visit to Hanoi. He spent his remaining years in Guinea, continuing to write and think until his death in 1972. His books, including Consciencism and Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, remain important texts in African political thought.

John Rawls (1921-2002) was an American political philosopher, widely regarded as the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and studied at Princeton University. He served in the Pacific during the Second World War, an experience that shook his earlier religious faith and deepened his concern with questions of justice: he witnessed the bombing of Hiroshima from close range and refused a commission that would have required him to participate in such actions again. He spent most of his academic career at Harvard University, where he taught from 1962 until his retirement. His major work, A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, transformed academic political philosophy and became one of the most discussed books of the century. In it he developed a systematic theory of justice grounded in the idea of a social contract among free and equal citizens choosing principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance. His later work, Political Liberalism (1993) and The Law of Peoples (1999), developed and revised his ideas in response to criticism. He died in 2002.

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was a political activist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and writer from Martinique, a French Caribbean island. He worked as a doctor in Algeria during the Algerian war for independence from France. He wrote about the psychological damage that colonialism causes — not just to bodies and communities, but to the minds and sense of identity of colonised people. He died of leukaemia at the age of 36, but his ideas have shaped political thought, education, and psychology across the world.

Patrice Émery Lumumba was a Congolese political leader and the first Prime Minister of the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was born in 1925 in Onalua, a village in the Kasai region. He came from the Tetela people. He was educated at mission schools and worked as a postal clerk and then as a beer salesman in Stanleyville (now Kisangani) and Léopoldville (now Kinshasa). During the 1950s, he became active in politics. He wrote articles, gave speeches, and helped found trade unions and cultural groups. In 1958, he helped create the Mouvement National Congolais, a party that wanted independence from Belgium for the whole country, not for one region only. He attended the All-African Peoples' Conference in Accra, Ghana, and met leaders like Kwame Nkrumah. Belgium agreed to give Congo independence on 30 June 1960. Lumumba became Prime Minister. He was 35 years old. His independence day speech, delivered in the presence of the Belgian King, shocked the world with its honesty about colonial violence. Within weeks, the new country fell into crisis. Parts of the country tried to break away. Belgian troops returned. Lumumba asked the United Nations and then the Soviet Union for help. Western powers, afraid of losing Congo's minerals, worked against him. He was removed from office, arrested, and handed over to his enemies. He was killed on 17 January 1961, aged 35.

Sir Albert Maori Kiki was a Papua New Guinean pathologist, trade unionist, politician, and writer. He was a co-founder of the Pangu Pati (Pangu Party), Papua New Guinea's first major political party, and served as the country's first Deputy Prime Minister from 1975 to 1977. His autobiography, Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime (1968), was the first major book to come out of Papua New Guinea written by an indigenous author and remains a foundational text of Pacific literature. He was born on 21 September 1931 in Orokolo Village, Gulf Province, in what was then the Territory of Papua under Australian administration. He was raised in his Elema people's traditional culture and in the Protestant faith of the London Missionary Society. He later wrote that he had completed his first traditional initiation in the eravo (men's ceremonial house) before the colonial administration's pressure caused such structures to be destroyed; by the time he was old enough for the second initiation, the eravo no longer existed. He was selected by Dr John Gunther, the Australian Director of Health, as one of a small group of promising students to study medicine at the Suva Medical School in Fiji. He failed his medical exams and was redirected into a pathology technician course. He returned to PNG and worked as a laboratory technician at Ela Beach Native Hospital. He became Papua New Guinea's first indigenous pathology technician. In 1958 he married Elizabeth Arivu Miro, a Roman Catholic, in one of the first 'mixed' Protestant-Catholic marriages in the Territory. He helped found the first trade union in Papua New Guinea, then in 1967 was a co-founder of the Pangu Pati. He became its national secretary. After the 1972 elections he entered the House of Assembly. He served as Minister for Lands and Environment under Michael Somare. When PNG became independent on 16 September 1975, he became its first Deputy Prime Minister. He held the role until 10 August 1977, when he was succeeded by Julius Chan. He was knighted as Sir Albert. He died in Port Moresby on 13 March 1993, aged 61.

Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) was an American political economist. She was born in Los Angeles and grew up during the Great Depression, a period of severe economic hardship in the United States. She studied political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and spent most of her career at Indiana University, where she co-founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. In 2009 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics. She received it for her work on how communities manage shared resources: things like forests, fisheries, water systems, and grazing land that many people depend on and that can be damaged if anyone takes too much. The standard economic view was that shared resources would always be destroyed by overuse, the so-called tragedy of the commons. Ostrom showed, through decades of careful fieldwork and research across many countries, that this was wrong. Communities around the world had developed their own rules and institutions for managing shared resources sustainably, without privatisation and without government control. She died in 2012, still working.

Wangari Muta Maathai was a Kenyan environmental activist, scientist, and politician. In 2004 she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She was born on 1 April 1940 in Nyeri, a rural area in central Kenya, into a Kikuyu farming family. As a child she gathered water from springs protected by tree roots. Her grandmother told her that a large fig tree near the family home was sacred and should never be cut down. These early experiences shaped her later love of trees. In 1960 she was selected for the Kennedy Airlift, a programme that brought East African students to study in the United States. She earned a biology degree at Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas in 1964 and a master's degree at the University of Pittsburgh in 1966. She returned to Kenya, completed a doctorate at the University of Nairobi in 1971, and became the first woman in East or Central Africa to earn a PhD. In 1977 she founded the Green Belt Movement, an organisation that paid rural women to plant trees. The movement grew quickly and eventually planted over 50 million trees. Through it, Maathai connected the protection of the environment to women's economic rights and to democratic politics. The Kenyan government under President Daniel arap Moi opposed her. She was harassed, beaten, and jailed several times. She kept going. After Moi lost power in 2002, she was elected to parliament with 98 percent of the vote and served as Assistant Minister for Environment. The Nobel Peace Prize came in 2004. She died of ovarian cancer on 25 September 2011, aged 71.

Steve Biko (1946-1977) was a South African activist and philosopher. He was born in King William's Town in the Eastern Cape, and grew up under the apartheid system, which separated South Africans by race and gave white South Africans almost all political, economic, and social power. He studied medicine at the University of Natal, one of the few universities that allowed Black students at that time, though they were kept in a separate section. There he became politically active and helped found the South African Students Organisation in 1968. He left the white-led liberal student movement because he believed that Black liberation could not be led by white people, even sympathetic ones: Black people had to lead and define their own liberation. He developed the philosophy of Black Consciousness, which argued that before political liberation could succeed, Black South Africans had to overcome the psychological damage of apartheid: the internalised sense of inferiority that the system had deliberately produced. He was banned, arrested, and tortured by the South African security police. He died in police custody in September 1977, aged thirty years old. His death caused international outrage and strengthened opposition to the apartheid regime.

Judith Heumann was an American disability rights activist. She is often called 'the mother of the disability rights movement'. She was born on 18 December 1947 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents, Werner and Ilse Heumann, were German Jewish immigrants. Many of their relatives had been killed in the Holocaust. The family later moved to Brooklyn, New York. When Judy was 18 months old, she got polio. This was during a large outbreak of the disease in the United States. A machine helped her breathe for three months. When she recovered, she could not walk. She used a wheelchair for the rest of her life. At age five, the principal of her local school refused to let her attend. He called her a 'fire hazard'. Her mother fought this. Eventually Judy got an education, partly in special classes and partly in a public high school. She went to Long Island University, where she began organising other disabled students. In her twenties, she applied to become a teacher in New York City. The Board of Education passed her written and oral exams but failed her medical exam because she used a wheelchair. In 1970, she sued them. The judge, Constance Baker Motley (the first Black woman federal judge), made it clear the Board would lose. They settled. Heumann became the first wheelchair user to teach in the state of New York. She taught for three years. She became one of the main leaders of the American disability rights movement. In April 1977, she led a 26-day sit-in at a federal building in San Francisco. The sit-in forced the US government to implement Section 504, the first major US disability civil rights law. She later worked for both the Clinton and Obama administrations. She wrote her memoir Being Heumann in 2020. She died on 4 March 2023 in Washington D.C., aged 75. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) both owe much to her work.