Most overrated and underrated political philosophers?

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

I'm not well-read enough on paid thinkers to opine here.

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 .

Mr. Grant's Wikipedia page did not really spell out much of what you meant by "'paternalistic' conservatism", but my scorching hot take (based on Wikipedia skimming and my own assumptions) is that populist conservatism is what happens when you divorce paternalistic conservatism from its original class basis and/or bring the masses into politics and/or try to plant non-liberal conservatism in an overtly liberal soil. You get "muh fiscally maybe centrist and socially more conservative" but with vastly different flavors and results.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Moreover, his influence on states all over the world has been largely counterproductive: constitutions jammed fill with checks and balances and heavily separated powers are no less unlikely to be led by tyrants than states without; the idea that all branches of government jealously guard their own privileges against the other leading to a neat equilibrium is one that is not seen in reality.

I'd actually be interested in seeing this put to the test. Of course, the central pitfall of such a research design would be to take constitutions at face-value; we would not only have to control for socioeconomic realities, but also the actual "correlation of forces" as of the constitution's ratification.