Plato

The Athenian who turned the spoken argument into written philosophy, and who built nearly all of it around one question: who should rule, and why. Across the dialogues he writes Socrates as a man asking questions in the street, but the questions do not stay in the street. They become the foundation of political thought in the West. To read Plato is to find that the oldest objections to democracy were also the sharpest, and that answering them is still part of the work.