Short answers, pulled from the story.
Plato was the first political philosopher to write a systematic treatise on the nature of the state. He lived in Athens during the 4th century BCE and authored The Republic to explore what makes a government just.
Political philosophy became inextricably bound to the study of God during the medieval period. Augustine of Hippo wrote in the 5th century CE arguing that the state was a necessary evil, and Thomas Aquinas synthesized this with Christian doctrine in the 13th century.
Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince in the early 16th century to argue that the ends justify the means. He suggested that rulers must be willing to use cruelty and deception to maintain the state, shifting focus from moral idealism to actual behavior.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued in the mid-1800s that the history of all hitherto existing society was the history of class struggles. They posited that economic forces and class conflicts were the primary drivers of history rather than individual rights.
Hannah Arendt described totalitarian regimes in the mid-20th century as a new form of evil that could not be understood through traditional political categories. She highlighted how regimes like Nazi Germany and Soviet Stalinism mobilized populations through simplistic ideologies and used terror as an end in itself.
Political philosophy expanded to include non-Western traditions like Ubuntu during the 20th and 21st centuries. African political philosophy asserts that legitimate power should be guided by the communal good, compassion, and mutual respect.