The atlas / People
The people behind the ideas.
Meet the leaders, thinkers, and activists who shaped political life. Explore their perspectives—and the ideas, places, and people closest to them.
449 profiles
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- Religion
Sigmund Freud
Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis and developed concepts such as the unconscious, repression, and the Oedipus complex. In The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents, he critically examined religion, culture, and conflicts between individual desire and social life.
- Politics
Simón Bolívar
A South American military leader, Bolívar was the great liberator who led the independence of several countries of Spanish America, dreaming of uniting the continent under strong, centralized republics.
- Philosophy
Slavoj Žižek
A Slovenian philosopher, Žižek unites Marxism, psychoanalysis, and cultural criticism to analyze ideology and contemporary capitalism, becoming one of the most popular and provocative left-wing thinkers of our time.
- Philosophy
Socrates
Athenian philosopher, Socrates created the dialectical method of questioning to examine beliefs and pursue virtue, distrusted mass politics and the rhetoric of demagogues, and was executed for corrupting the youth.
- Activism
Steve Bannon
An American political strategist, Bannon articulated right-wing national populism, pitting globalist elites against an economic, cultural, and sovereigntist nationalism that influenced populist campaigns around the world.
- Politics
Sun Yat-sen
A Chinese statesman, Sun Yat-sen led the revolution that overthrew the empire and founded the Republic of China, formulating the Three Principles of the People, uniting nationalism, democracy, and the people's welfare.
- Politics
Tarcísio de Freitas
A military engineer and Bolsonaro's infrastructure minister, Tarcísio has governed São Paulo since 2023 with concessions, privatisations and a technocratic managerial pitch, reelected in October 2026.
- Activism
Ted Kaczynski
A former mathematics professor who withdrew to a remote cabin in Montana and carried out a nationwide bombing campaign for nearly two decades against scientists and executives, Kaczynski argued in his manifesto 'Industrial Society and Its Future' that industrial technology destroys human freedom and must be reversed through deliberate collapse.
- Political theory
Theodor Herzl
An Austro-Hungarian journalist, Herzl was the founder of modern political Zionism, advocating the creation of a Jewish national state as a response to antisemitism, becoming a central figure in Israel's history.
- Politics
Theodore Roosevelt
A US president, Theodore Roosevelt led the Progressive Era, fighting monopolies, regulating the market, and creating policies of environmental conservation and protection for consumers and workers.
- Religion
Thomas Aquinas
A Dominican friar and the foremost systematizer of medieval scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas fused Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology in the Summa Theologica, arguing for natural law as the basis of moral and political order, the authority of the Church and the Christian monarch, and hierarchy as the earthly reflection of divine order.
- Intellectual life
Thomas Edison
American inventor and businessman with over a thousand patents, he created the phonograph, the commercial light bulb and the first industrial research lab. He backed direct current against Tesla and was a deist freethinker critical of organized religion.
- Philosophy
Thomas Hobbes
An English philosopher, Hobbes founded a contractualist theory of the sovereign state, defending strong central authority to contain civil war, guarantee security, and subordinate religious and factional conflicts to public peace.
- Politics
Thomas Jefferson
Author of the Declaration of Independence and third US president, Jefferson championed an agrarian republic of small landowners, limited and decentralized government, religious freedom, and distrust of banks, armies, and cities.
- Religion
Thomas Müntzer
Radical Reformation preacher who broke with Luther and led peasants and miners in the German Peasants' War of 1525. He preached an apocalyptic theocracy of the elect, with goods in common and the overthrow of godless princes; he was beheaded after Frankenhausen.
- Political theory
Thomas Paine
A pamphleteer of the American and French revolutions, Paine defended the rights of man, the republic, and radical social reforms in popular language, spreading democratic ideals among the masses of his time.
- Politics
Thomas Sankara
A revolutionary from Burkina Faso, Sankara led a Marxist, pan-Africanist government that promoted self-sufficiency, women's rights, and radical social reforms, becoming an anti-imperialist icon of Africa.
- Activism
Tiradentes
Ensign and dentist who led the Minas Conspiracy against colonial taxation and Portuguese rule. Inspired by American independence, the plot envisioned a republic with a university and local manufacturing; he was hanged in 1792.
- Politics
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk
A Czech statesman and philosopher, Masaryk was the founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, defending humanist democracy, minority rights, and ethical values as the basis of national political life.
- Politics
Tony Blair
British prime minister from 1997 to 2007, Blair took New Labour to the Third Way, with markets, investment in education and tough sentencing, backed the invasion of Iraq and now champions digital ID and AI in government.
- Intellectual life
Victor Gao
Former Deng Xiaoping interpreter and vice president of the CCG think tank, Victor Gao defends one-party rule, unifying Taiwan by any means, Hong Kong's security law and the claim that NATO caused the war in Ukraine.
- Politics
Viktor Orbán
Hungary's prime minister from 2010 to 2026, Orbán built so-called illiberal democracy, combining nationalism, Christian conservatism, sovereignty vis-à-vis the EU and control over media and courts; defeated in 2026, he leads Fidesz in opposition.
- Business
Vitalik Buterin
Creator of Ethereum, Buterin formulated d/acc — defensive, decentralized technological acceleration —, funds public goods through quadratic funding, champions cryptography and privacy, condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and criticizes both the state and corporate monopolies.
- Politics
Vladimir Lenin
Leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution and founder of the Soviet Union, Lenin theorized the vanguard party, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and imperialism as the final stage of capitalism, shaping 20th-century communism.
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