John Montfort Dunn FBA (born 9 September 1940) is emeritus professor of political theory at King's College, Cambridge, and visiting professor in the Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Chiba University.

[2] Dunn's work focuses on applying a historical perspective to modern political theory.

Together with his contemporary, the historian Quentin Skinner, and their mentor/colleague J. G. A. Pocock, he offered methodological prescriptions in the late 1960s which aimed at correcting the historical insensitivity of political science by reconstructing what past political thinkers intended to do in writing.

Much of his subsequent work – reflective essays, edited collections, and several books – has tackled substantive issues in political theory, although his historical sense continues to inform a certain skepticism about the degree to which politics is ultimately amenable to reason.

He is the author of The Cunning of Unreason (2001), a work that discusses how the limits of human knowledge and rationality prevent democratic republicanism from achieving all that it promises.