Ideology Atlas

Read what traditions prioritize and where they disagree. No assessment is required.

• Classical Liberalism — Protects individual liberty through secure property, voluntary exchange, and constitutional limits on government. Public power must justify its interference with private choices.
• Social Liberalism — Treats civil liberties and practical opportunities as complementary. Public education, social insurance, and regulated markets can help people exercise freedoms that formal rights alone leave out of reach.
• Neoliberalism — Makes competition and market coordination central to economic policy, often favoring market opening, private provision, and rules that sustain exchange. The label covers several different historical projects.
• Libertarianism — Gives strong priority to individual rights, private property, and voluntary association. This property-centered model limits compulsory redistribution and confines government to a narrow range of protective functions.
• Left-Libertarianism — Combines strong personal freedom with equal claims to natural resources or opposition to state-supported economic privilege. It separates self-ownership from an unrestricted right to appropriate the external world.
• Social Democracy — Uses democratic government, collective bargaining, and universal services to reduce insecurity and inequality while retaining a predominantly privately owned market economy.
• Democratic Socialism — Seeks democratic control of economic power through social or worker ownership, extending democratic decision-making into the organization of production. It requires political pluralism rather than party monopoly.
• Marxism — Analyzes capitalism through class relations, exploitation, and control of production. It asks how collective ownership and changes in economic power could replace capitalist social relations.
• Marxism–Leninism — Assigns a revolutionary party a leading role in a centralized transition to socialism, combining party-state authority with extensive public control of production.
• Anarchism — Challenges claims that coercive political hierarchy is necessary or legitimate. It explores voluntary association, federations, and other ways to coordinate social life without a sovereign state.
• Anarcho-Syndicalism — Makes worker unions and direct action the means of replacing capitalist and state authority with federated, self-managed workplaces.
• Conservatism — Treats inherited institutions and practices as accumulated experience. It favors prudent reform that preserves useful relationships rather than rebuilding society from a comprehensive abstract design.
• Liberal Conservatism — Combines constitutional liberties and private enterprise with gradual reform and institutional continuity. It generally seeks to revise an existing order rather than replace its foundations.
• Social Conservatism — Gives established family, religious, and communal norms a legitimate role in public policy, including education and family law.
• Traditionalism — Assigns authority to inherited customs and obligations across generations. Political change should respect social knowledge that may not be captured by explicit rules or individual preferences.
• Communitarianism — Argues that identities and obligations develop within relationships and shared practices. Political decisions should consider common goods as well as the choices of separate individuals.
• Civic Nationalism — Defines national membership through citizenship and shared political institutions rather than common ancestry. It links national solidarity with self-government and equal civic standing.
• Cultural Nationalism — Connects political self-government with preserving a shared language, history, or cultural inheritance. Institutions may support cultural transmission as a public objective.
• Cosmopolitanism — Extends equal moral concern beyond national membership. It asks what people owe strangers abroad and what international institutions, migration rules, or economic arrangements those duties require.
• Republicanism — Understands freedom as protection from arbitrary power. Law, contestable authority, and civic institutions should prevent dependence on another person’s unchecked will.
• Distributism — Favors widely dispersed productive property, small enterprises, and household independence. It opposes concentrated ownership by either large capital or the state.
• Christian Democracy — Connects democratic politics with human dignity, solidarity, and decisions made at the lowest effective level. Private property carries social obligations rather than an unlimited entitlement.
• Green Politics — Makes ecological limits and responsibilities to future generations part of political decisions. It often favors prevention of environmental harm and wider participation in decisions affecting shared ecosystems.
• Eco-Socialism — Links ecological damage to capitalist production and accumulation. It seeks democratic social control of investment and production within environmental limits.
• Progressivism — Treats institutions as revisable responses to public problems. It supports deliberate reform of rules that sustain exclusion, unequal opportunity, or concentrated power.
• Feminist Political Theory — Examines how gender shapes law, work, care, family relations, and political participation. It challenges arrangements that make supposedly private power invisible to public institutions.
• Technocracy — Gives technical experts a substantial role in public decisions, treating complex policy as a problem of informed coordination and competent administration.
• Georgism — Distinguishes wealth people produce from the rental value of land. Taxing land value can fund public purposes while leaving stronger incentives for labor, enterprise, and improvement.
• Market Socialism — Combines social or worker ownership with market exchange. Prices can coordinate production without giving private capital owners final control over enterprises.
• Mutualism — Proposes reciprocal exchange among independent producers and associations while opposing monopolistic privilege and coercive hierarchy. It emphasizes possession, cooperation, and decentralized arrangements.
• Political Realism — Starts from conflict, power, security, and political constraints rather than treating government as the direct application of an ideal moral theory.
• Liberal Egalitarianism — Combines equal basic liberties with institutions that limit the effects of social disadvantage. Education, distribution, and political rules should support fair terms of cooperation.
• Classical Republicanism — Connects civic freedom with a self-governing political community, public service, and institutions that resist corruption and dependence.
• Civic Humanism — Emphasizes active citizenship and the cultivation of abilities needed for public judgment. Education and civic participation help sustain a free political community.
• Deliberative Democracy — Judges democratic decisions partly by the quality of public reasoning behind them. Citizens and representatives should exchange reasons, hear objections, and revise proposals under fair conditions.
• Participatory Democracy — Seeks more direct citizen involvement in decisions between elections, through institutions such as local assemblies, participatory budgeting, and workplace or community governance.
• Radical Democracy — Treats democratic struggle as continuing challenges to exclusion and concentrated power rather than a completed institutional settlement. It extends democratic contestation into more areas of social life.
• Multiculturalism — Argues that formally identical treatment can leave cultural minorities disadvantaged. Recognition, accommodation, or differentiated rights may be needed for equal participation.
• Federalism — Divides public authority between different territorial levels instead of locating all final decisions in one centralized government. Constitutional rules allocate shared and separate responsibilities.
• Liberal Nationalism — Seeks to reconcile national self-government and cultural attachment with individual rights, democratic equality, and obligations to outsiders.
• Anti-Colonial Thought — Challenges colonial domination and claims to govern another people. It examines the political, economic, and cultural conditions needed for self-rule after empire.
• Pan-Africanism — Links the emancipation of African peoples and diasporas to solidarity across borders. Proposals range from cultural cooperation to continental political and economic institutions.
• Confucian Political Thought — Connects good government with ethical cultivation, exemplary leadership, and responsibilities within social relationships. Ritual and education help form conduct rather than relying only on penalties.
• Mohism — Evaluates political conduct through public benefit and concern that is not confined to kin or status. It criticizes aggressive warfare and wasteful expenditure.
• Daoist Political Thought — Questions coercive intervention and rigid social standards. Texts associated with Laozi and Zhuangzi explore restraint, nonaction, and the limits of imposed political designs.
• Gandhian Thought — Connects self-rule with nonviolent resistance, ethical discipline, and local forms of cooperation. Political methods should reflect the social relations they seek to create.
• Ambedkarite Thought — Treats the destruction of caste hierarchy and equal civic standing as conditions of democracy. Constitutional protections must be supported by social relations of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
• African Communitarian Thought — Examines personhood and moral obligation through social relationships, mutual responsibility, and community life. The term covers distinct African philosophical proposals rather than one continental doctrine.
• Liberation Theology — Interprets religious commitments through the circumstances of oppressed people and the transformation of unjust social structures. Faith informs action against material and political domination.
• Syndicalism — Treats organized labor as a central source of economic and political power. Unions and collective action can transfer control of production toward workers.
• Guild Socialism — Proposes democratic control of industries through worker guilds while seeking forms of public accountability beyond private capitalist ownership.
• Fabian Socialism — Seeks socialist change through research, public administration, and gradual democratic reform rather than an immediate revolutionary break. Public provision and institutional redesign are practical instruments of change.
• Libertarian Socialism — Combines opposition to capitalist domination with opposition to concentrated state power. It favors worker self-management and decentralized, democratically coordinated social ownership.
• Anarcho-Communism — Combines rejection of state authority with communal access to resources and voluntary cooperation. Distribution should meet needs rather than depend on ownership or wage contracts.
• Council Communism — Makes workers’ councils, rather than a ruling party or parliamentary elite, the institutions of socialist self-government and control of production.
• Democratic Confederalism — Proposes networks of local democratic assemblies linked through confederation, emphasizing decentralized participation, gender equality, and ecological concerns.
• Ecofeminism — Investigates connections between gendered domination and the treatment of the nonhuman world. It asks how care, economic organization, and ecological responsibility should change together.
• Social Ecology — Connects ecological problems with hierarchical social arrangements. It proposes democratic and decentralized institutions as part of changing human relationships with the natural world.
• Ordoliberalism — Argues that a competitive market order requires a strong legal framework against monopoly and arbitrary economic power. Government should establish and enforce rules rather than continually direct market outcomes.
• Paternalistic Conservatism — Links institutional continuity and social hierarchy with duties of protection by those holding wealth or authority. Welfare and regulation can be justified as obligations of stewardship.
• Agrarianism — Gives farming, land stewardship, and relatively independent rural communities a central place in political and economic life. It often challenges concentrated industrial power and urban dependence.
• Libertarian Municipalism — Seeks to shift political power toward democratic local assemblies and confederated municipalities. Public participation, rather than local administration alone, is the point of decentralization.
• Secular Humanism — Bases public justification on human experience, inquiry, and welfare without requiring religious authority. It supports equal dignity and freedom of belief within a shared political order.
• Christian Anarchism — Uses Christian commitments to conscience, nonviolence, and service to question coercive state authority. Voluntary community is an alternative to domination by law or force.
• Fascism — Subordinates pluralist politics and individual rights to an imagined national renewal under an authoritarian leader. It treats opposition as an enemy to be suppressed and legitimizes coercion in the name of national unity.
• Nazism — Combines dictatorship and expansionist nationalism with antisemitism and a fabricated racial hierarchy. Nazi institutions removed rights by ancestry and carried out systematic persecution and genocide.
• Neo-Fascism — Adapts fascist visions of a regenerated nation to conditions after 1945. Some currents reproduce older organizations and imagery; others change their language or work through smaller cultural and political networks.
• Neo-Nazism — Revives Nazi racial antisemitism and supremacist political aims after 1945. Organizations may differ, but glorification of Nazi rule and exclusion of targeted groups are defining continuities.
• White Nationalism — Defines political belonging around a supposed white racial identity and seeks to preserve or establish white dominance, separation, or exclusive political power. The claimed racial threat is a political narrative, not a fact of unequal human worth.
• Stalinism — Centers a highly centralized party-state, rapid industrialization, compulsory collectivization, and the political authority associated with Stalin’s rule. Its historical institutions used extensive repression against perceived opponents.
• Maoism — Reworks Marxist revolutionary politics around peasant mobilization, party leadership, and continuing class struggle after a revolution. Different later movements interpret Mao’s ideas and the role of revolutionary organization differently.
• Trotskyism — Connects socialist transformation with international revolution and argues that democratic and socialist tasks can develop into one continuing process. It criticizes the Stalinist doctrine of building socialism within one country.
• Salafi-Jihadism — A violent religious-political ideology that claims armed struggle is necessary to establish its particular conception of Islamic rule. It makes exclusionary claims about legitimate authority and targets opponents through a militant interpretation rejected by many Muslims.
• Anarcho-Capitalism — Proposes replacing the state with privately supplied law, protection, and other services organized through property rights and contract. Its account of voluntary exchange extends to functions usually treated as public authority.
• Anarcho-Primitivism — Locates domination in industrial civilization, domestication, and specialized production rather than only in the state or capitalism. It questions whether complex technological systems can be made compatible with a life free of domination.
• Neoreaction / Dark Enlightenment — Rejects liberal democracy and egalitarian political legitimacy, often proposing concentrated sovereign authority modeled on monarchy or corporate control. Technology and market institutions can coexist with its defense of hierarchy.
• Techno-Optimism — Treats technological innovation, energy abundance, and market competition as central means of improving material life. The influential 2023 manifesto argues against policies and attitudes it sees as restraining technological progress.
• Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) — Advocates accelerating technological and economic development, emphasizing competitive experimentation and the growth of intelligence and energy use. Early statements oppose centralized attempts to control complex technological-economic systems.
• Network-State Movement — Proposes that an online community develop shared commitments, collective organization, and distributed physical territory before seeking political recognition. It treats digital coordination and the ability to form new communities as tools of institutional change.
• Postliberalism — Questions whether liberal individualism and market-centered institutions can sustain common goods, social obligations, and durable communities. Contemporary proposals seek political institutions that shape economic and cultural life toward a substantive account of the good.
• National Conservatism — Prioritizes national independence, inherited institutions, and cultural continuity, while allowing government to support domestic economic and social objectives. Its organized statement rejects race-based political theories and presents the nation as the main setting for public obligation.
• Degrowth — Seeks a planned reduction of resource and energy throughput in affluent economies while protecting well-being and reducing inequality. It challenges GDP growth as the overriding public objective and emphasizes sufficiency and redistribution.
• Transhumanism — Explores using science and technology to expand human capabilities and address aging, suffering, and biological limits. Its institutional declarations also recognize major risks and support deliberation about how technological change should be governed.
• Effective Altruism — Uses evidence and explicit comparison to decide how limited resources can help others more effectively. Participants work on different causes and disagree about priorities, methods, and the role of uncertainty.
• Longtermism — Gives substantial importance to how present decisions affect the long-run future. Strong versions argue that improving that future should dominate choices in many important decision contexts, rather than being only one consideration among others.
• Deep Ecology — Challenges the assumption that nonhuman nature matters only because it serves human purposes. It connects the value of living systems with changes in human consumption, social priorities, and ways of relating to the natural world.
• Platform Cooperativism — Proposes digital platforms owned and governed by the workers or other stakeholders who depend on them. Democratic control extends to platform rules, algorithms, data, and how the benefits of the enterprise are shared.
• Christian Nationalism (United States) — Links a particular conception of American national identity and public authority to Christianity. Researchers examine beliefs about government, law, and national belonging rather than treating ordinary Christian faith as evidence of this political position.
• Left Populism — Frames politics as a conflict between ordinary people and an entrenched elite, combining that opposition with demands for economic equality or redistribution. It claims public institutions should express the people’s collective will.
• Right Populism — Combines a people-versus-elite political story with right-oriented national or cultural priorities. It often presents established institutions as obstacles to restoring control to a supposedly neglected national public.
• Violent Extremist Accelerationism — Within some white-supremacist currents, treats social breakdown as a route to a racially exclusive political order and promotes violence to hasten that collapse. It rejects coexistence and democratic change in favor of destabilization.
• AI Precaution and Pause Advocacy — Argues that the development of highly capable AI should be constrained, slowed, or paused when serious risks cannot be adequately evaluated or controlled. Advocates emphasize independent assessment and governance before irreversible deployment.
• Act Consequentialism — Assesses each available action by its expected consequences. What makes an action right depends on which outcome is best according to the theory’s account of value.
• Rule Consequentialism — Justifies moral rules by the consequences of their general acceptance. Stable constraints on action can be defended because a society using those rules is expected to fare better.
• Deontological Ethics — Treats duties, rights, or constraints as reasons that can limit the pursuit of better aggregate outcomes. Some ways of treating people may remain impermissible even when beneficial overall.
• Contractualism — Asks which principles people can justify to one another, especially whether a principle could be reasonably rejected by someone it affects. Individual claims matter in the justification of shared rules.
• Virtue Ethics — Centers moral character, practical wisdom, and the activities that constitute a flourishing life. Good judgment develops through practices and relationships, not only through applying rules to isolated acts.
• Ethics of Care — Focuses on dependency, attentiveness, and responsibilities within relationships. Moral judgment should notice who needs care, how needs are interpreted, and how care is actually provided.
• Moral Particularism — Questions whether sound moral judgment depends on fixed principles that work the same way in every case. The relevance and force of a reason may change with the situation.
• Natural Law Ethics — Connects moral requirements with practical reason, basic human goods, and the conditions of human flourishing. Its arguments seek standards that are not simply products of local choice.