Most overrated and underrated political philosophers?

[Brother Jonathan]

Overrated: I think Marx, more than anyone else. He is important, of course, but in academia at least he is treated with an almost sickening amount of reverence. Same goes for Foucault, who again is important but way too overrated by scholars of political philosophy.

Underrated: He's been ranked as overrated, but I think Burke usually gets the rough end of the stick when it comes to discussions of political philosophy. Generally, I have found he is at best treated as an unserious simpleton, and at worst a manipulative opportunist. He was shades of both, from time to time, but it doesn't warrant the hostility towards him outside of the conservative intellectual tradition. He's unarguably been as influential as Foucault in actual politics, but gets much less academic study. I think lack of serious academic discussion of conservatism is a growing problem. 

Underrated: George P. Grant seems mostly forgotten today outside lefty Catholic/Anglican circles, which is a real shame because his arguments for "paternalistic" conservatism are some of the best defenses of that particular political tradition out there, and are often far more compelling than defenses of trendier conservative currents like three-legged-stool fusionism or muh right-wing #populism .

I, personally, am fascinated by George P. Grant and am quite the fan. It's a shame he has largely been neglected, but his brand of Toryism actually had an immense influence on me. In the same vein, John Farthing is interesting, though I wouldn't say he is underrated like Grant is. "Red Toryism" in general is somewhat forgotten now, regrettably. 

[Brother Jonathan]

Foucault was a lunatic with extremely distasteful politics and moral attitudes, but his strange, addled brain did produce on occasion some very important insights that, most probably, would not have occurred to anyone else. Where a lot of academics go wrong is to try to use him as a substitute for the fallen Marx; as a man who created and propagated a total system of thought that can be usefully applied to any possible scholarly problem.

Just out of curiosity, how does applying Foucaultvian thought to any scholarly problem work?

At best, impenetrable word-salads. At worst... an example of that disturbing phenomenon when 'Theory' is placed into an intellectual ecosystem it does not belong in and functions like an invasive species.

The single worst grade I've ever gotten on an academic paper was also the only time I've ever cited Foucault. It was so uncharacteristically bad and so incomprehensible, even to me after I'd written it!, that my professor gave me a mulligan and told me I had a week to rewrite it from top to bottom. The rewritten version was Foucault-less and got an A-.

If memory serves, the paper was meant to prove that there should be gay rights in Japan or something, a subject that my professor, correctly, had faith that I was more than capable of discussing without recourse to The History of Sexuality or whatever it was I made the mistake of citing. In my defense, I was nineteen years old at the time.

I once went to a seminar on Foucault's "dispositif" at Berkeley. It might be the only lecture I've ever come close to falling asleep in.

My favorite example of Foucauldian thought run amok was when I had to listen to a lecture about how neoliberalism encourages state violence against people who deviate from heteronormative sexual activity. Maybe there is something to that, I mean I don't think so but it has academic value, but that being said why it came up in a medieval history class I couldn't tell you.

[Brother Jonathan]

In no small part because he thought it would help create a more open society. The lecture was explicitly about fusing Marxist and Foucauldian thought on neoliberalism though, so that might explain the hostility towards neoliberalism that isn't directly from Foucault.

On the subject of underrated political philosophers, I think Machiavelli is also not given his due. He's frequently discussed, but the depth and importance of his work is never really fully appreciated. He was, after all, a republican who was cited by the Founders from time to time and had a great influence of Thomas Hobbes. Most people would just tell you he was a scheming evil mastermind, but he was a serious thinker who deserves more mainstream study when it comes to discussions of republicanism.