POLITICAL SCIENTISTS from France

Top 3

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary French Political Scientists of all time. This list of famous French Political Scientists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Étienne de La Boétie (1530 - 1563)

With an HPI of 67.48, Étienne de La Boétie is the most famous French Political Scientist.  His biography has been translated into 48 different languages on wikipedia.

Étienne or Estienne de La Boétie (French: [etjɛn də la bɔesi] , also [bwati] or [bɔeti]; Occitan: Esteve de La Boetiá; 1 November 1530 – 18 August 1563) was a French magistrate, classicist, writer, poet and political theorist, best remembered for his intense and intimate friendship with essayist Michel de Montaigne. His early political treatise Discourse on Voluntary Servitude was posthumously adopted by the Huguenot movement and is sometimes seen as an early influence on modern anti-statist, utopian and civil disobedience thought.

2. Maurice Duverger (1917 - 2014)

With an HPI of 61.48, Maurice Duverger is the 2nd most famous French Political Scientist.  His biography has been translated into 26 different languages.

Maurice Duverger (French pronunciation: [mɔʁis dyvɛʁʒe]; 5 June 1917 – 16 December 2014) was a French jurist, sociologist, political scientist and politician born in Angoulême, Charente. Starting his career as a jurist at the University of Bordeaux, Duverger became more and more involved in political science and in 1948 founded one of the first faculties for political science in Bordeaux, France. An emeritus professor of the Sorbonne and member of the FNSP, he has published many books and articles in newspapers, such as Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica, El País, and especially Le Monde. Duverger studied the evolution of political systems and the institutions that operate in diverse countries, showing a preference for empirical methods of investigation rather than philosophical reasoning. He devised a theory which became known as Duverger's law, which identifies a correlation between a first-past-the-post election system and the formation of a two-party system. While analysing the political system of France, he coined the term semi-presidential system. A staunch communist and Soviet Union admirer, he wrote following the February 1956 speech by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that Stalin had been no better and no worse than the majority of tyrants who preceded him, adding that the Russian Communist Party was a living organism whose cells were continuously rejuvenated, and that the fear of purges had had the effect of keeping the militants on edge, constantly reviving their zeal. From 1989 until 1994, he was a member of the Italian Communist Party, later the Democratic Party of the Left, in the European Parliament. In 1981, he was elected a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He died at the age of 97 on 16 December 2014.

3. Olivier Roy (b. 1949)

With an HPI of 48.51, Olivier Roy is the 3rd most famous French Political Scientist.  His biography has been translated into 16 different languages.

Olivier Roy (born 1949 in La Rochelle) is a French political scientist, professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He has published articles and books on secularisation and Islam including "Global Islam", and The Failure of Political Islam. He is known to have "a different view of radical Islam" than some other experts, seeing it as peripheral, Westernized and part of a radicalized and "virtual" rather than pious and "actual" Muslim community. More recently he has written on the Charlie Hebdo shooting, and the November 2015 Paris attacks.