Most overrated and underrated political philosophers?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'll start.

Overrated: People like John Locke and Robert Nozick are too-easy/MRDA answers for a maroon avatar (plus I don't think the quality of their thought is that bad, I just disagree with their conclusions), so instead I'll mention Theodor W. Adorno, who has some good insights but whose crass misogyny and bizarrely doctrinaire elitism have gotten a free pass in capital-L Leftist (or "Left"-as-an-adjective) circles for way too long.

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 .

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

- Camus. I read The Stranger but found myself pining for the prose of Ayn Rand the entire time. If you want to write fiction that has philosophical themes, at least make that philosophy interesting.

Ugh, The Stranger is the absolute worst way to get a fair read on Camus. The Plague or bust.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I can't believe I forgot about Foucault when I was doing the OP for this thread. He did have some good insights, but the fact that the Most Cited Scholar In The Humanities is someone who wanted to legalize pedophilia and supported the Ayatollah Khomeini is an embarrassment.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

"Overrated" are those philosophers, who are lectured in the pseudoscience of "politology" because they have written explicitely on politics.
"Underrated" are those philosophers, who are ignored by "politologists" because they have not written explicitely on the political implications of their systems.

Dude, don't you like Nicolás Gómez Dávila?  He was many things, but "somebody who didn't write explicitly on politics" was not one of them.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I can't believe I forgot about Foucault when I was doing the OP for this thread. He did have some good insights, but the fact that the Most Cited Scholar In The Humanities is someone who wanted to legalize pedophilia and supported the Ayatollah Khomeini is an embarrassment.

Well sure, but should academics have not cited Foucault on power or what have you because he wrote a positive article about the Islamic Revolution? This kind of charge is like saying Kant is a discredited philosopher because he was a biological racist (and people have argued this).

Far more problematic about Foucault is that the actual history he wrote is basically crap.

Foucault is cited on issues related to Islam and (extensively) to human sexuality as well. The problem is treating him as some sort of GOAT political philosopher/political historian--thus, "overrated"--not the fact that he's cited at all. If Kant were cited so extensively and oftentimes so uncritically that people actually were treating him as some sort of authority on race, then yes, I'd say that that constituted Kant being overrated.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

That's hilarious given that Foucault was a proto-neoliberal himself.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I made the mistake of reading about Foucault & his views on the age of consent....

Yeeees... you see, I was not exaggerating when I mentioned 'extremely distasteful politics and moral attitudes'.

The worst and most disillusioning part of it is when you realize how fashionable and widespread these viewpoints were in the immediately-post-1968 French chattering classes. Françoise Dolto signed that disgusting petition.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I made the mistake of reading about Foucault & his views on the age of consent....

Yeeees... you see, I was not exaggerating when I mentioned 'extremely distasteful politics and moral attitudes'.

I actually don't understand the objection.

Foucault's arguments (as they were oversimplified on Wiki...) on how 19th century criminal law was based on a 19th century medical science that transformed every sexual activity that wasn't vaginal coitus into a "disease" is well known. Commonplace, really.

It's not that Foucault's historical argument was incorrect (although considering that a lot of these nineteenth-century legal reformers were first-wave feminists it does smack a little of "these ball-busting bitches hate to see a chad thrive, maaaan!"), it's that his policy conclusion was morally abhorrent.

Overrated: Montesquieu. The separation of powers he extolled in practice amounted to the rights of minor aristocrats to rule petty fiefdoms and entrenched powers to run rampant and unchecked. In general (obviously not always, don't @ me with counterexamples), common people have far more to fear from local despots rather than supposed all-powerful tyrants who, for all their flaws, have to at least govern taking everybody into account. It's no wonder that he found his origins in the Parlements of the ancien regime, the aristocratic institutions who consistently blew up all royal attempts to get the house in order by claiming this itself was tyranny, an obstinacy that would completely blow up in their faces in the Revolution. 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.

Yeah, I'm all in favor of the primacy of local governance and avoiding concentrations of power in one individual or institution(s) as much as possible, but in practice, Montesquieu's philosophy has led to redundant bureaucracies, completely unnecessary gridlock, and glorified palace intrigue as every schemer and operator who wants to be in or close to power competes to get as much as possible.

To use one of my favorite examples: the pre-MBS Saudi Arabia, where the interests of tens of thousands (!!!) of inbred royals, a rigid clerical establishment, some important merchant and tribal leaders, and many comically bloated and overlapping state ministries/fiefdoms were mediated by the King and his brothers (the current monarch being the primary mediator/enforcer, FWIW). Real paragon of republican virtue there! /s

I think a lot of the think-maeking pseudophilosophy of American right-liberalism in general has its roots in Montesquieu. The whole "muh don't legislate morality" thing too, when of course in reality all legislating is inherently a moral act that expresses moral preferences.