A Wide Range of Authors of Diverse Ideas
The number of authors with substantial ideas is, of course, endless. Listed here are some of the more notable ones, emphasizing those who wrote in recent centuries up to our current time. Over time, a brief description of their lives and their contribution to the legacy of their ideas will be added. Likewise, we welcome suggestions of other authors, even though some limits will have to obtain. While a great deal can be learned from almost any serious scholar, even those antagonistic to our traditions, institutions and ideals, this list will focus on those who have made a distinct contribution to a better understanding of the importance of family and community, independent thinking and free markets, sensible, limited government and a wide range of voluntary and philanthropic activities. Works that foster respect for others and religious belief, a humility and gratitude to our inherited culture, and, overall a free, decent and benevolent society.
A
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
Douglass Adair
John Adams
John Quincy Adams
Konrad Adenauer
Armen Alchian
Fisher Ames
George Anastaplo
Benjamin Anderson
Martin Anderson
St. Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
Hadley Arkes
Raymond Aron
St. Augustine
B
Irving Babbitt
Hans Urs Balthasar
Edward Banfield
Harry Elmer Barnes
John Barron
Bruce Bartlett
Jacques Barzun
Frederic Bastiat
Peter Bauer
Gary Becker
Arnold Beichman
Bernard Iddings Bell
Hillaire Belloc
William Bennett
George C.S. Benson
Raoul Berger
Henri Bergson
Harold Berman
George Bernanos
Walter Berns
Arthur Bestor
Tom Bethel
Bradley Birzer
William Blackstone
Walter Block
Franz Boehm
Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk
Lord Bolingbroke
Louis Bonald
Robert Bork
Lemuel Boulware
L. Brent Bozell, Sr.
Adda Bozeman
Ray Bradbury
Mel Bradford
Eva Brann
Louis Bredvold
Cleanth Brooks
Orestes Brownson
Yale Brozen
James Buchanan
Patrick Buchanan
James Buckley
William Buckley, Jr
Louis Budenz
J. Budziszewski
Edmund Burke
Jacob Burkhardt
James Burnham
Arthur Burns
C
Taylor Caldwell
John C. Calhoun
Roy Campbell
Glenn Campbell
Fr. Francis Canavan
George W. Carey
Allan Carlson
Andrew Carnegie
John Chamberlain
William Henry Chamberlin
Whitakker Chambers
G.K. Chesterton
Roy A. Childs, Jr.
Winston Churchill
Cicero
Carl von Clausewitz
Harry Clor
Ronald Coase
David S. Collier
Robert Conquest
James Fenimore Cooper
Juan Donoso Cortes
Frederick Copleston
Richard Cornuelle
John Corrington
Ralph Adams Cram
George Crocker
Brian Crozier
Joseph Cropsey
Marquis de Custine
D
Henri Daniel-Rops
Jean Danielou
Martin D’Arcy
D.T. D’Armentano
John Davenport
Donald Davidson
Christopher Dawson
Donald Devine
Martin Diamond
Charles Dickens
John Dickinson
Gottfried Dietze
Aaron Director
Benjamin Disraeli
Rev. James Dobson
Lev Dobriansky
Heimato von Doderer
Justus Doenecke
Herman Dooyerweerd
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Milorad Drachkovitch
Peter Drucker
Allen Drury
E
John East
Max Eastman
Jonathan Edwards
Lee Edwards
Paul Eidelberg
Luigi Einaudi
Mircea Eliade
T.S. Eliot
William Y. Elliott
Joseph Epstein
Ludwig Erhard
Walter Eucken
M. Stanton Evans
F
Robert Faulkner
William Faulkner
Adam Ferguson
Guglielmo Ferrero
Frank Fetter
John Finnis
John Flynn
Samuel Francis
Milton Friedman
Bruce Frohnen
Robert Frost
Lon Fuller
G
Lewis Gann
Garet Garrett
Robert Gates
Friedrich Gentz
Robert George
Edward Gibbon
George Gilder
Basil Gildersleve
Robert Goldwin
Barry Goldwater
Johann Goethe
James Goldsmith
Caroline Gordon
Paul Gottfried
Alfred de Grazia
Alan Greenspan
Romano Guardini
H
Ernest van den Haag
Gottfried von Häberler
Otto von Habsburg
Jonathan Haidt
Alexander Hamilton
Ronald Hamowy
Learned Hand
Victor David Hansen
Anthony Harrigan
Frederick Hart
Jeffrey Hart
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Friedrich Hayek
Henry Hazlitt
Paul Heyne
Will Herberg
Marguerite Higgins
Dietrich von Hildebrand
Gertrude Himmelfarb
Eric Hoffer
Ross J.S. Hoffman
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Hans Herman Hoppe
Richard Hooker
Walter Hooper
Herbert Hoover
Thomas Howard
Wilhelm von Humboldt
David Hume
Samuel Huntington
William H. Hutt
Charles Hyneman
I
Fred Ikle
Washington Irving
C.P. Ives
J
Jane Jacobs
Harry Jaffa
Stanley Jaki
Henry James
Anthony de Jasay
Robert Jastrow
Philip Jenkins
John Jewkes
Paul Johnson
Samuel Johnson
Bertrand de Jouvenel
Friedrich Juenger
Ernst Juenger
K
Herman Kahn
Donald Kagan
Willmoore Kendall
Paul Kengor
Hugh Kenner
Soren Kierkegaard
James Jackson Kilpatrick
Roger Kimball
William R. Kintner
Jeane Kirkpatrick
Russell Kirk
Israel Kirzner
Frank Knight
Fritz Krämer
Peter Kreeft
Irving Kristol
Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Abraham Kuyper
L
Ludwig Lachmann
Suzanne LaFollette
Victor Lasky
Rose Wilder Lane
Ernest Lefever
Donald Lavoie
Gustave LeBon
Bruno Leoni
Ralph Lerner
C.S. Lewis
Leonard Liggio
Walter Lippmann
John Lukacs
Henri du Lubac
Arnold Lunn
Edward Luttwak
Andrew Lytle
Eugene Lyons
M
James McClellan
Forrest McDonald
Walter McDougall
Ralph McInerny
Alistair MacIntyre
Tibor Machan
Fritz Machlup
James Madison
Daniel Mahoney
Joseph de Maistre
Pierre Manent
Henry Manne
Clarence Manion
Harvey Mansfield
Gabriel Marcel
Jacques Maritain
George Marsden
John Marshall
Allan Meltzer
Herman Melville
H.L. Mencken
Carl Menger
Frank Meyer
John Milton
Kenneth Minogue
Ludwig von Mises
Thomas Molnar
Paul Elmore More
Oskar Morgenstern
Raymon Moley
Felix Morley
Gustave de Molinari
Montesquieu
Marion Montgomery
Gouverneur Morris
Alfred Mueller-Armack
Adam Heinrich Mueller
Malcolm Muggeridge
Robert Mundell
Charles Murray
John Courtney Murray
Robert Musil
N
John Henry Newman
Richard John Neuhaus
Reinhold Niebuhr
Gerhart Niemeyer
Robert Nisbet
William Niskanen
Albert J. Nock
Robert Novak
Michael Novak
Robert Nozick
G. Warren Nutter
O
Michael Oakeshott
Flannery O’Connor
Edmund Opitz
Jose Ortega y Gasset
George Orwell
Elinor Ostrom
Vincent Ostrom
Gerald O’Driscoll
P
George Panichas
Henry Paolucci
Fr. Stanley Parry
John Dos Passos
Charles Peirce
Stefan Pejovich
Jaroslav Pelikan
Walker Percy
Sylvester Petro
Howard Phillips
Max Picard
Michael Polanyi
John Polkinghorne
Karl Popper
Richard Posner
Stefan Possony
Ezra Pound
R
Paul Rahe
Ralph Raico
John Randolph
John Crowe Ransom
Henry Regnery
William Rehnquist
Charles Rice
William Rickenbacker
Paul Ricoeur
Philip Rieff
Mario Rizzo
Paul Craig Roberts
Ben Rogge
Herb Rommerstein
Wilhelm Röpke
H.R. Rookmaaker
Stanley Rosen
Murray Rothbard
David Nelson Rowe
Jacques Rueff
Alexander Ruestow
George Rutler
Rousas Rushdoony
Claes Ryn
S
Ellis Sandoz
Jean-Baptiste Say
Dorothy Sayers
Antonin Scalia
Francis A. Schaefer
Fr. James Schall
Willi Schlamm
Carl Schmitt
Helmut Schoeck
Robert Schuchman
Alfred Schuetz
Joseph Schumpeter
George Schuyler
Fred Schwarz
Walter Scott
Roger Scruton
Paul Seabury
Arthur Seldon
Amartya Sen
John Senior
Hans Sennholz
William Shakespeare
B.B. Shenoy
Bishop Fulton Sheen
Edward Shils
Paul Shorey
Bernard Siegan
S. Fred Singer
Julian Simon
Yves Simon
W. Cleon Skousen
Adam Smith
Vernon Smith
Joe Sobran
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Pitrim Sorokin
Hernando de Soto
Thomas Sowell
Louis Spadaro
Robert Speaght
Herbert Spencer
Oswald Spengler
Peter Stanlis
James FitzJames Stephen
George Stigler
Herbert Storing
Gerald Stourzh
Leo Strauss
Robert Strausz-Hupe
Richard von Strigl
Luigi Sturzo
William Graham Sumner
Walter Sullivan
Thomas Szasz
T
Robert Taft
Roger Taney
Charles Tansill
Allen Tate
John Taylor of Caroline
Edward Teller
Margaret Thatcher
Clarence Thomas
Cornelius Van Til
Alexis de Tocqueville
Ralph de Toledano
Stephen Tonsor
JRR Tolkien
Gordon Tullock
Mark Twain
Leopold Tyrmand
U
Evelyn Underhill
Freda Utley
V
Paul Valery
Sheldon Vanauken
Balint Vazsonyi
Peter Viereck
George Viksnins
Eliseo Vivas
Eric Voegelin
W
Fr. Edmund Walsh
A.A. Walters
Jude Wanniski
Richard Dixie Walker
Leon Walras
Robert Penn Warren
Wilcomb Washburn
Richard Weaver
Simone Weil
Eudora Welty
Edward George West
Nathaniel Weyl
Thomas Woods
Friedrich von Wieser
Aaron Wildavsky
Frederick Wilhelmsen
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Walter Williams
George Will
Ralph K. Winter
Rene de Visme Williamson
Francis Graham Wilson
James Q. Wilson
Owen Wister
Karl Wittvogel
P.G. Wodehouse
Tom Wolfe
Y
Leland Yeager