Since then, famous polemicists have included satirist Jonathan Swift, Italian physicist and mathematician Galileo, French theologian Jean Calvin, French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher Voltaire, Russian author Leo Tolstoy, socialist philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, novelist George Orwell, playwright George Bernard Shaw, communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, linguist Noam Chomsky, social critics H.L.
In Ancient Greece, writing was characterised by what Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin called "strident adversariality" and "rationalistic aggressiveness", summed up by McClinton as polemic.
[14] Major political polemicists of the 18th century include Jonathan Swift, with pamphlets such as his A Modest Proposal, Alexander Hamilton, with pieces such as A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress and A Farmer Refuted, and Edmund Burke, with his attack on the Duke of Bedford.
According to McClinton, other prominent polemicists of the same century include such diverse figures as Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and Michael Moore.
[6] Conservative Jewish Austrian writer and journalist Karl Kraus (1890-1935) considers the topic of moral collapse in his polemic writings.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Mach write in a similar manner and style to Kraus; In 2007 Brian McClinton argued in Humani that anti-religious books such as Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion are part of the polemic tradition.