Johan Rudolph Thorbecke (14 January 1798 – 4 June 1872) was a Dutch liberal statesman. As the leading figure in the Constitutional Reform of 1848, he is considered the founder of parliamentary democracy in the Netherlands, and the most important Dutch statesman of the 19th century.

Born in Zwolle in 1798 to a financially struggling Lutheran merchant family of German origin, Thorbecke attended a Latin school and studied law and humanities in Amsterdam and Leiden. After receiving his doctorate in 1820, he spent four years in Germany, where met contemporary philosophers and was introduced to the ideas of Romanticism and historism. After his return to the Netherlands, he became a professor, first at Ghent University and, after the Belgian Revolution, at Leiden University. In Leiden, Thorbecke's writings became increasingly political in nature, and he soon became a leading figure in the charge for constitutional reform. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1844, and made an unsuccessful attempt at constitutional reform as part of a group called the Negenmannen.

Amid the Revolutions of 1848, King William II appointed a constitutional reform commission headed by Thorbecke. In this capacity, he virtually single-handedly wrote a new Constitution of the Netherlands, which was adopted on 3 November of that year in slightly amended form. Among the changes introduced by the new Constitution were ministerial responsibility and direct elections to the House of Representatives, thus turning the Netherlands into a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system. During his first ministry (1849–1853), Thorbecke built upon the Constitution with several organic laws, including the Municipalities Act, which introduced local self-government. During his second ministry (1862–1866), he introduced the Hogere Burgerschool, which expanded secondary education to the middle class.

Thorbecke died in 1872, a year into his third ministry. His 1848 Constitution and his subsequent reforms had a lasting impact on Dutch politics and society. He has been commemorated with three statues, in Amsterdam, Zwolle and The Hague.

Johan Rudolph Thorbecke was born in Zwolle on 14 January 1798. He was descended from a Lutheran family originally from Osnabrück, of which one member had settled in Zwolle in the mid-17th century, where he worked as a postmaster and freight forwarder. His descendants continued to engage in trade and were members of the upper middle class. Thorbecke's father Frederik Willem was a tobacco manufacturer, while his mother Christine Regina was his father's cousin, born in Osnabrück. Frederik Willem's business suffered badly from the anti-British policies of the French occupiers, and his tobacco factory went bankrupt in 1803, after which he was unable to find another source of employment and would spend most of his time on the education of Johan Rudolph and his younger brother.

Johan Rudolph proved to be diligent and exemplary at a young age, showing intelligence and curiosity. Because of the sacrifices of his parents, who continued to struggle with financial problems, he was able to enjoy a decent education. He enjoyed primary education in his birthplace and in Amsterdam, where he lived until 1806, and attended a Latin school back in Zwolle, where he received a thorough education in Greek and Latin languages and antiquity and mathematics. Most of all he felt drawn to history, particularly to the works of Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren, professor of philosophy and history at the University of Göttingen. Thorbecke was named primus of his class and, in accordance with custom at the time, delivered a public Latin oration on Christiaan Gottlieb Heyne, the then-recently deceased professor of classical philology in Göttingen.

After graduating from the Latin school in the summer of 1814, Thorbecke continued his studies at the Athenaeum Illustre of Amsterdam, moving in with the Lutheran minister G.F. Sartorius, a friend of his father's. He attended lectures of Jean Henri van Swinden, and David Jacob van Lennep became his foremost mentor. When the philological faculty of Leiden University organised a competition on Cicero's De Oratore in 1817, Thorbecke submitted an entry entitled De principio philosophiae moralis secundum Cicernonem, and was awarded a gold medal on 8 February 1818. That same year, he enrolled at Leiden University, where he continued his studies and was awarded two more gold medals for treatises in academic competitions, one on Cicero's philosophy in 1818, and on the systems of the Greek philosophers in 1820. He received his doctorate on 19 June 1820 summis honoribus after defending his thesis entitled Disputatio historico-critica inauguralis de C. Asinio Pollione

Shortly after receiving his doctorate, Thorbecke was granted a state scholarship of 1,200 guilders for a journey to the foremost universities and libraries in Germany. The scholarship had been made possible by the efforts of Leiden professor Joan Melchior Kemper, who was a friend of education minister Anton Reinhard Falck, and was renewed the following year. Thorbecke started his journey in the fall of 1820, at the age of 22, and travelled through Germany for two years, visiting Göttingen, Marburg, Giessen, Heidelberg, Stuttgart, München, Erlangen, Jena, Dresden and Berlin. In Giessen, he was offered but declined a professorship, and met the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. In Erlangen, where he stayed in mid-1821, he befriended August von Platen-Hallermünde. In Berlin, he stayed with Henriette Solger, widow of the philosopher Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, who had died in 1819.