Which Philosopher Are You?

Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Montesquieu, Benjamin Franklin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Jeremy Bentham, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Henry David Thoreau, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Peter Kropotkin, Joaquim Nabuco, Rui Barbosa, Eduard Bernstein, Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Bertrand Russell, G. K. Chesterton, Antonio Gramsci, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, George Orwell, Ayn Rand, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Isaiah Berlin, Kwame Nkrumah, Albert Camus, Carlos Lacerda, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, John Rawls, William F. Buckley Jr., Murray Rothbard, Thomas Sowell, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Václav Havel, Robert Nozick and Roger Scruton. The pool is our thinkers and philosophers section, so it includes writers who also held office, such as Franklin, Havel and Cardoso.

Niccolò Machiavelli, Joseph de Maistre, Mary Wollstonecraft, José Martí, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky and José Sarney have profiles, but too few documented positions on the quiz's issues for a fair match. Che Guevara is never a result, because as commander of La Cabaña prison in 1959 he reviewed the appeals of revolutionary tribunals that sent people to execution. His page stays on the site with the full record. Our profiles start with Machiavelli, so ancient and medieval thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle and Confucius are not in the set.

Each statement moves you on one of 10 political axes. Your positions are compared with each thinker's profile on the same axes, and the closest is your match. Profiles come from the thinkers' own published works, not from later interpretations. The percentage shows closeness, not a probability.

No. The match compares your answers with where each of the thinkers stood on the same issues. It says nothing about character, personal conduct or everything they did in office. Every figure page sets out what admirers and critics say.

Your result is saved anonymously for statistics: the scores and the closest match, with no name or email. Individual answers are kept only if you tick the optional research box. The share link holds your scores, never your answers.

Twelve statements give a quick, rough match. The 12 Axes Political Test scores all 12 axes with up to 162 statements and matches you against ideologies, parties and every historical figure, philosophers included.