Bolivar – Venezuelan-born Simón Bolívar liberated much of South America from Spanish rule in the 19th century and became one of Latin America’s greatest heroes. Born to a privileged family, he was orphaned as a child and raised by tutors, among them Simon Rodriguez, who emphasized the Enlightenment and, especially, works by Jean Jacques Rousseau. Bolívar travelled to Europe (1799-1802 and 1804), where he witnessed the coronation of Napoleon and gradually became drawn to the idea of revolution. He joined the Venezuelan revolution in 1810 and gained military victories and independence (1813), but in the civil war that followed his forces were defeated by a royalist army (1815). After exile in Jamaica, he returned to lead rebel forces based in Orinoco. In 1819 he defeated the Spanish and established the republic of Greater Colombia, a federation that included present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Ecuador. Further victories in Peru, at Junin and Ayacucho (1824) spelled the end of Spanish rule and Bolívar was the most powerful man on the continent. His vision of a united South America was never realized; various separatist movements and resentment toward his dictatorial methods prevented political stability and Bolívar resigned as president of Greater Colombia in 1830, just months before dying from tuberculosis.

Pancho Villa - A hero to some and a villain to others, Pancho Villa was a brutal modern-day version of Robin Hood. Born a peasant, Doroteo Arango got on the wrong side of the law early; according to legend he shot to death a wealthy hacienda owner who had made advances on his sister. Arango fled into the mountains and then joined a gang led by Francisco “Pancho” Villa; when that Villa was killed, Arango took over his name and his gang. In 1910 the new Villa and his men joined the revolt against Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz. (Among Villa’s fellow revolutionaries was another Mexican folk hero, Emiliano Zapata.) The revolution succeeded, but a few years later shifting alliances made Villa an outlaw again. Over the next decade he criss-crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, robbing and rustling cattle to survive, with armies from both sides unable to capture him. (One famous U.S. expedition was led by “Black Jack” Pershing and included future General George S. Patton.) Villa’s sympathy for peasants and his early battles against the corrupt Diaz regime made him popular with Mexico’s poor, and his exploits were heavily publicized in the U.S. and around the world. In 1920 Villa accepted a deal with a new Mexican government, laying down his arms in exchange for thousands of acres of land in Durango. He was assassinated three years later, though his killers were never captured.

John Locke - a 17th-century English philosopher whose ideas formed the foundation of liberal democracy and greatly influenced both the American and French revolutions. His contributions to philosophy include the theory of knowledge known as empiricism, which addressed the limits of what we can understand about the nature of reality. Locke held that our understanding of reality ultimately derives from what we have experienced through the senses. The political implications of his theories included the notions that all people are born equal and that education can free people from the subjugation of tyranny. Locke also believed that government had a moral obligation to guarantee that individuals always retained sovereignty over their own rights, including ownership of property that resulted from their own labor. Politically active, Locke was personal physician and advisor to Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, a leader in the parliamentary opposition to King Charles II. In 1681 Shaftesbury was accused of conspiring to overthrow Charles and was tried for treason. Although acquitted, he fled to the Netherlands and Locke followed. Locke stayed in exile until 1689, during which time he wrote his masterpiece, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and actively plotted to put William of Orange on the English throne. Locke returned to England after King James II fled and William was crowned William III (in the turn of events known as the Glorious Revolution). Over the next several years he published his most important works, including A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Two Treatises on Government (1690) and Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693).

Thomas Hobbes - an English philosopher who wrote the 1651 book, Leviathan, a political treatise that described the natural life of mankind as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Hobbes was educated at Oxford and worked as a tutor to the son of William Cavendish, later the Earl of Devonshire. His connections to the royal family gave him opportunities to travel and pursue his studies, but they also put him in the middle of the English Civil War. In 1640 political turmoil forced him to leave England for France, where he continued to associate with scholars and scientists of Europe, including Galileo and René Descartes. In his philosophical works, Hobbes wrote that matter and motion are the only valid subjects for philosophy. In Leviathan, he argued that man’s natural state is anti-social, and that moral rules are created to avoid chaos. Hobbes’s notion that social authority can come from the people — and not necessarily a monarch — rankled his royal associates, but helped him reconcile with Oliver Cromwell and the English revolutionaries, and he returned to England shortly after Leviathan was published. After the Restoration of 1660, Hobbes was favored by King Charles II, who granted him a pension, but urged him to clear future publications with the throne. Hobbes’s “nasty, brutish and short” line is still used often when students and politicians discuss human nature and the proper role of government.

Oliver Cromwell - Lord Protector of England for much of the 1650s, ruling in place of the country’s traditional monarchy. In the 1640s a civil war broke out between supporters of King Charles I (the Royalists) and of Parliament (the so-called Roundheads). Cromwell was a Roundhead military leader in a long series of civil war battles, which ended with Charles I imprisoned and finally beheaded in 1649. By 1653, Parliamentary squabbling led Cromwell to take control as head of state, in essence overseeing a military dictatorship. He eventually gained the king-like title of Lord Protector of the Realm, and presided over a troubled era of internal unrest and costly foreign wars. (Opinions vary on whether Cromwell was a well-meaning hero or a not-so-heroic type who set himself up as a near-king.) Cromwell died of natural causes in 1658 and was succeeded by his son, Richard Cromwell. Richard was forced from power less than a year later, and Charles II took the throne, returning the short-lived commonwealth to a monarchy.

Thomas Jefferson - the third president of the United States and one of the key drafters of the Declaration of Independence. Biographer James Parton said Thomas Jefferson could “calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin.” He served two full terms as president (1801-09) and also served as U.S. vice president, Secretary of State, minister to France, congressman, and governor of Virginia. He also founded the University of Virginia and served as president of the American Philosophical Society. For all that, Jefferson is best remembered as a champion of human rights and the lead draftsman of the Declaration of Independence. High points of his presidency included the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon Bonaparte and the exploration of the west at Jefferson’s behest by Lewis and Clark. Thomas Jefferson was the third person to be president of the United States, following George Washington and John Adams; he was succeeded by James Madison.

Prince Klemens von Metternich - the chief minister of the Austrian Empire and the leading conservative statesman in European politics from 1815 to 1848. He was the principal architect of the "Concert of Europe," the alliance of great powers that sought to maintain the the pillars of the old regime--monarchy, aristocracy, church, and privilege--against the forces of liberalism and nationalism. As minister of a German-led multi-national empire, Metternich had reason to fear nationalism as much as liberalism (which in any case tended to go hand in hand in the first half of the nineteenth century). Nationalists within the Austrian Empire threatened to establish small autonomous nation-states, thus ripping apart the empire, while German nationalists sought to unite the decentralized German states, thus jeopardizing Austria's status as the major power (along with Prussia) in German affairs. Austrian politician and statesman and perhaps the most important diplomat of his era. He was a major figure in the negotiations leading to the Congress and Treaty of Vienna and is considered both a paradigm of foreign policy management and a major figure on the development of diplomacy. He took part in European Congresses at Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), Troppau (1820), Laibach (1821), and Verona (1822). Metternich was a conservative, who favored traditional, even autocratic, institutions over what he saw as their radical alternatives, such as democratic systems, if the establishment of the latter meant, as they often did, the violent overthrow of the former. However, he was an enthusiastic supporter of what was called the Concert of Europe. Metternich wanted stability, not revolution. Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia began to meet to try to resolve impending crises peacefully. What has been described as a predecessor of the League of Nations evolved, although the Concert never had a formal mechanism. It lasted from 1814 until 1898. The concept of maintaining a balance of power informed the deliberations of the Concert. Metternich influenced Henry Kissinger in the twentieth century. Metternich's concept of the balance of power thus influenced Cold War policy as the two super-powers tried to match each other's capability, even to the extent of ensuring their mutual destruction if nuclear war had occurred.

Napoleon - is the most charismatic general in French history, famed for his military successes and (at the same time) for not quite conquering Europe. Starting as a second lieutenant in the French artillery, he rose quickly through the ranks until he staged a 1799 coup that made him First Consul of France. (In 1804 he went further, proclaiming himself emperor.) He led his armies to victory after victory, and by 1807 France ruled territory that stretched from Portugal to Italy and north to the river Elbe. But Napoleon’s attempts to conquer the rest of Europe failed; a defeat in Moscow in 1812 nearly destroyed his empire, and in 1814 he was deposed and exiled to the island of Elba. The next year he returned to Paris and again seized power, but this success was short-lived: the French army’s 1815 loss to the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo finished Napoleon for good. He was sent into exile on the island of St. Helena, where he died in 1821. His body was returned to Paris in 1840, and his tomb there remains a popular attraction.

Louis XIV - King Louis XVI of France was the unfortunate monarch executed during the 1789 French Revolution. He succeeded his grandfather, Louis XV, in 1774 and inherited a looming financial crisis just as democratic government was growing in popular and intellectual appeal. He’s been portrayed in the history books as a wishy-washy king who satisfied neither royalists nor reformers — and who was too influenced by his extravagant Austrian wife, Marie Antoinette. Louis served more than a dozen years as absolute monarch, but his inability to control events led to the 1789 revolution, during which he and his family were forcibly removed from their palace at Versailles and taken closer to Paris to live at the Tuileries Palace. Political compromises failed and the king and his family were caught trying to flee Paris in June of 1791. Returned to Tuileries, they were held under house arrest while the revolution worked itself out. The monarchy was abolished by the new government in 1792, and Louis was brought to trial for crimes against the people. Condemned to death, he was guillotined.

Bismark - William I became Prussia’s king in 1861 and a year later appointed Bismarck as his chief minister. Though technically deferring to William, in reality Bismarck was in charge, manipulating the king with his intellect and the occasional tantrum while using royal decrees to circumvent the power of elected officials. In 1864 Bismarck began the series of wars that would establish Prussian power in Europe. He attacked Denmark to gain the German-speaking territories of Schleswig-Holstein and two years later provoked Emperor Franz-Josef I into starting the Austro-Prussian War (1866), which ended in a swift defeat for the aging Austrian empire. At the time, Bismarck wisely declined to levy a war indemnity against the Austrians. Bismarck was less circumspect in his conduct of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). Seeing the opportunity to unify Germany’s loose confederations against an outside enemy, Bismarck stirred political tensions between France and Prussia, famously editing a telegram from William I to make both countries feel insulted by the other. The French declared war, but the Prussians and their German allies won handily. Prussia levied an indemnity, annexed the French border provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and crowned William emperor of a unified Germany (the Second Reich) in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles—a tremendous insult to the French. For much of the 1870s Bismarck pursued a Kulturkampf (cultural struggle) against Catholics, who made up 36 percent of Germany’s population, by placing parochial schools under state control and expelling the Jesuits. In 1878 Bismarck relented, allying with the Catholics against the growing socialist threat. In the 1880s Bismarck set aside his conservative impulses to counter the socialists by creating Europe’s first modern welfare state, establishing national healthcare (1883), accident insurance (1884) and old age pensions (1889). Bismarck also hosted the 1885 Berlin Conference that ended the “Scramble for Africa,” dividing the continent between the European powers and establishing German colonies in Cameroon, Togoland and East and Southwest Africa.

Black Jacobin - THE HAITIAN Revolution was the first and only successful slave revolution in human history. The slaves’ struggle produced heroic leaders, especially Toussaint L’Ouverture. He and his revolutionary army of self-emancipated slaves defeated the three great empires of the eighteenth century—Spain, England, and France—and finally won independence after a decade of struggle in 1804.While historians have written tomes on the eighteenth century’s other great revolutions—the American, and French—the Haitian Revolution has been buried under calumny or simply suppressed. Why? Our rulers of course minimize the role of revolution in history, even the ones that brought them to power, for fear of highlighting the fact that fundamental change comes from social revolution. But they hold a particular animus toward the Haitian Revolution. In its time it directly threatened the slave empires in the new world. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it offered hope of insurrection for independence to the colonies subject to the European empires. It has always been a challenge to liberals and their counsel of piecemeal reform and gradualism, which rarely if ever delivers change, and instead promises a counter-model of class struggle and revolution. Even on the left, the Haitian Revolution does not get the recognition it merits. For example, most left-wing histories of the French Revolution, often marred by a Stalinist French nationalism, fail to understand the centrality of the Haitian colony and slavery in the development of French capitalism and the consequent strength of the bourgeoisie to overthrow the absolutist monarchy.

Karl Marx - studied law and philosophy, and was initially influenced by the works of G. W. F. Hegel. Marx rejected the idealism of Hegel and developed a more materialistic theory of history as science, ultimately predicting that the triumph of the working class was inevitable. With his collaborator Friedrich Engels, Marx published the Communist Manifesto in 1848. Exiled from Europe, Marx lived in London, England and earned money through contributions to various newspapers, including the New York Tribune. Marx devoted the last decades of his life to working on Das Kapital, and was active in early communist organizations. His work greatly influenced modern socialism, and he is considered one of the founders of economic history and sociology. Marx’s theories were put into action in Russia by revolutionary V.I. Lenin.

FuKuzawa - was a Japanese author, writer, teacher, entrepreneur and political theorist whose ideas about government and social institutions made a lasting impression on a rapidly changing Japan during the period known as the Meiji Era. It is said that heaven does not create one man above or below another man. Any existing distinction between the wise and the stupid, between the rich and the poor, comes down to a matter of education.