by Jochen Schmon
Bruno Leipold is a fellow in political theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and beginning in May 2025 he will be an Assistant Professor in Political Theory at Durham University. He is a political theorist and historian of political thought with a focus on the work of Karl Marx, the republican political tradition, and theories of popular democracy. Jochen Schmon spoke to Leipold about his forthcoming book, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton University Press).
Jochen Schmon: Much contemporary scholarship on Marx rests on the claim of an “epistemological break” that would divide Marx’s writings into a “young” humanist-philosophical period and a “mature” science of a historical-materialist critique of political economy performed in Das Kapital. Instead of this, your new book provides a characterization of the intellectual development of Marx divided by “political breaks.” You insist that we go beyond Marx’s personal philosophical and scientific reading experiences, instead trying to understand the systematic shifts in Marx’s thinking via his engagement with the discourse of republicanism. Throughout the 19th century, as you emphasize, republicanism spread across Europe and the Americas, becoming the dominant articulation of popular politics. How would you characterize the central theoretical specificities of Republican political thought? How does this Roman political tradition differ from and add to the traditions of German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism that have been accepted since Lenin as the “Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”?
Bruno Leipold: One thing that was very important to me in the book was to reconstruct the meaning of “republicanism” at the time of Marx. In the literature, republicanism is often presented as a tradition that flourished in ancient Athens and Rome, was revived in the Renaissance, and then died out after the American Revolution. That story makes for a convenient narrative but is simply false. Republicanism was a living political ideology and movement in nineteenth-century Europe. Thousands upon thousands of political activists and thinkers explicitly thought of themselves as republicans and were understood as such by their conservative opponents and liberal competitors. Deeply committed to popular sovereignty, these republicans fought to establish democratic republics in place of the absolutist and constitutionalist monarchies that dominated the continent. Whereas earlier accounts of the republican tradition often counterpose “democracy” and “republicanism” (a historical trope that is itself overdone), nineteenth-century republicanism was, in many ways, the political ideology of democracy. Indeed, that is what most obviously distinguishes republicans from liberals in the period—the latter were hostile to majority rule and tried to limit popular engagement in politics through property qualifications on suffrage.
Furthermore, republicans committed themselves to democracy beyond the political sphere. Their conception of freedom as the absence of arbitrary power underpinned both their critique of monarchy and their opposition to the domination of capitalist employers. They developed what might be thought of as a non-socialist anti-capitalism. It tried to stem the proletarianization of artisan workers through social measures that would reassert their independence. That vision of political economy was immensely popular amongst workers—it is easy to forget that outside of England artisans, not proletarians, made up a large percentage of the European working class for much of the nineteenth century. Consequently, republicanism served as the radical popular ideology of the left for much of the period, and it took a long time for socialism to replace it. Socialism did so in part by offering a more persuasive political economy. It responded to the reality of large-scale capitalist production. At the same time, socialism also integrated much of that earlier radical republican legacy. I see Marx as part of that historical process.
Lenin’s tripartite account of Marx’s influences, memorable though it is, completely misses those European republican elements. Interestingly, that tripartite image goes all the way back to Moses Hess’s 1841 Die europäische Triarchie, which Marx and Engels used in their early writings to describe the influences on socialism’s emergence. But Marx and Engels referred to “French politics” rather than “French socialism,” a formulation that does a somewhat better job of capturing the republican legacy.
JS: You delineate two political breaks in Marx’s work. As he became increasingly involved in the communist movement, Marx shifted from a left-Hegelian embrace of a “Democratic Republic” to a radical rejection of a “Bourgeois Republic.” Later, after observing what he called the authentically “proletarian” political institutions of the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx came to endorse a “Social Republic.” How do you characterize the political and philosophical context from which the young Marx emerged as, in your words, a genuinely “republican critic” of both monarchic and liberal politics?
BL: Marx’s carried out his earliest political writings as a journalist for the Rheinische Zeitung, a paper that had just been set up in Cologne in 1842. The existing literature tends to either present these articles as simply liberal or as Marx’s attempt to radicalize the paper. The truth is more interesting. Privately, Marx was a committed republican who, like many in the wider left Hegelian movement—including his later collaborator, Arnold Ruge—had abandoned the belief that it would suffice to turn absolutist Prussia into a liberal constitutionalist regime. But we also know that when Marx took over as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, he was acutely aware of how tightly Prussia limited the room for maneuver for oppositional politics. Prior to publication, the Prussian state required all newspapers to submit copies to a government censor for approval. Artless displays of radicalism could easily lead to the whole paper being shut down. Marx therefore had to play a delicate game, testing the censors’ limits without provoking the government into further suppression. That meant that Marx actually opposed the ultra-radicalism of some left Hegelians, like Edgar Bauer, who insisted on openly calling for a republic. Marx’s own articles display a much more subtle critique of various aspects of arbitrary power in Prussia, from government censors to feudal legislators and forest wardens. At the same time, Marx also attempted to build a coalition between republicans and liberals, centering issues consonant with both frameworks, such as the freedom of the press, representative assemblies, and the rule of law. But it is equally clear, I argue, that Marx goes beyond the arguments typical of German Vormärz liberals by providing a much more democratic theoretical basis for these institutions and grounding them in a republican conception of freedom, namely, as the people’s subjection only to laws that they controlled.
Marx’s careful balancing act of private republicanism and public liberalism was ultimately not enough to stave off the reactionary Prussian authorities, who ordered the closure of the Rheinische Zeitung in early 1843. One official concluded that Marx held “ultra-democratic convictions” in “complete contradiction with the principle of the Prussian state.” In his 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx had the space to write a more expansive account of his republican political views. To an extent that commentators have not properly appreciated, this text attempted to comprehensively critique the liberal goal of constitutional monarchy (in the specific form defended by Hegel). Marx rejected this model for still subjecting the people to arbitrary power and nearly wholly excluding them from sovereignty and political participation. He sketched an alternative democratic regime in which the people carried out their own public administration and tightly controlled their representatives. Against some interpreters like Shlomo Avineri, who view Marx’s Critique as the moment of his conversion to communism, I stress how much Marx’s criticisms overlap with other German republicans, such as Ruge or Johann Georg Wirth. I also set out how, around the time he penned that text, Marx explicitly and publicly criticized socialists and communists for their lack of interest in politics—a criticism commonly leveled by contemporary republicans.
Finally, I want to complicate the notion of “breaks.” It has occupied discussions of Marx’s thought at least as far back as Althusser’s famous intervention in For Marx (1969). “Breaks” suggests a sharp rejection of all that comes before it, whereas I see many continuities. Marx’s conversion to communism (which I would date to 1844 in Paris) incorporated his earlier republican critiques into a new, synthesized form of republican communism committed to democratic politics. Similarly, Marx’s early republican critique of socialists and communists also hammered them for their detailed planning, and his anti-utopianism thus precedes his communism. So, while it is important to understand Marx’s ideological and political transition from republicanism to communism, we should give equal weight to continuities amidst this change.
JS: Marx’s most famous political writing, The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 with Friedrich Engels, represents a decisive moment in Marx’s intellectual transition. However, scholars in the liberal canon, like Hannah Arendt or Isaiah Berlin, read Marx’s discussion of a “bourgeois republic,” as simply equating republicanism with bourgeois ideology. Can you explain the complex adoption and rejection of republican ideas in Marx’s earliest expressions of his communist convictions?
BL: We have to contextualize Marx’s writing in socialists’ widespread anti-political and anti-democratic views in the 1840s, as Marx encountered them. Owenists in Britain, Saint-Simonians and Fourierists in France, and True Socialists in Germany treated skeptically or outright rejected the republican demand for revolution and a democratic republic. Robert Owen, for example, vocally opposed the working-class Chartist demand for universal male suffrage, convinced that socialism could be spread through peaceful experimental communities, provoking sharp rebukes from republican Chartists like Bronterre O’Brien. Even Engels, who had made his own transition from republicanism to socialism, endorsed these widespread anti-political views in his early writings. He explicitly argued that democracy was an outdated goal, going so far as to make the humorously naïve prediction that the administration of socialism could be run by experts selected via an essay competition.
It was only together, from 1845 to 1848, that Marx and Engels developed a conception of communism resolutely committed to a democratic republic with universal male suffrage and civil rights. As much as Marx and Engels emphasized the limits of emancipation offered by a “bourgeois republic,” they viewed the institutions of such a republic as critical to the achievement of socialism. They fought doggedly to displace the anti-political strains of socialism in organizations like the Communist League. The publishing of the pro-democratic Communist Manifesto by the League showed the success of their efforts. During the 1848 Revolutions, Marx and Engels’ cautioned against immediately demanding communist rule, calling instead for the strategic alliance of communists with republicans to establish a German republic first.
This is the republican element in Marx’s thought. But I am just as keen to stress that Marx was also reacting to republicanism. A currently fashionable tendency interprets everyone as a republican. Marx was a communist: he rejected the republican response to capitalism. He considered their vision of independent artisans and peasants who owned their own tools and land anachronistic insofar as large-scale, capitalist industry was irreversibly destroying its economic preconditions. Thus, while the Manifesto aligns with republicans’ political goals, it simultaneously rejects their social defense of universalized small-scale property ownership as a completely impractical response to capitalism. Trying to hold on to that world, Marx and Engels claimed, failed to appreciate the material forces driving historical change.
At the same time, I am also keen to stress that though Marx rejected the republican social program, his own social critique was deeply imbued by republican language. Throughout his economic writings, from the 1844 Paris manuscripts to Capital, Marx condemns the arbitrary power that individual capitalists’ exercise over their employees. He is explicit that such domination makes workers unfree. He also expands that analysis into a more comprehensive and structural critique of how the capitalist class, underpinned by the even more impersonal domination of the market, dominates workers.
Through these varied manifestations, my book demonstrates Marx’s ambivalent but meaningful relationship to republicanism.
JS: Even if, contrary to the canonical readings of Marx, you make clear that he vehemently dismissed the “antipolitical” tendencies of his socialist contemporaries, you add that Marx still believed early on that socialist power could be achieved through bourgeois, republican institutions. Not until the Paris Commune would Marx begin to consider that a socialist state might require novel political institutions. How did Marx characterize this—to borrow your terms—“radical democratic experiment,” as you write, for which he praised the communards in The Civil War in France?
BL: Marx’s political incorporation of republicanism in the years before 1848 was indeed significant. But, compared to his early radical republicanism, it is clear that his views underwent a significant metamorphosis. Where the young Marx comprehensively outlined the structure of an ideal democratic regime, his defense and critique of a bourgeois republic later on took much of its constitutional architecture for granted.
The 1871 Paris Commune shook that complacency. In a rare display of humility, Marx admitted that the Commune showed that he had been wrong in the Manifesto: socialism required a much more extensive political transformation. The Civil War in France describes the type of state democratization so demanded. Assembly representatives would receive workmen’s wages, vote under binding instructions, and face the people’s right to recall them. The state’s repressive and administrative apparatus would require transformation, too. Marx argues for the replacement of the standing army by a civic militia and for the direct election or legislative control of public servants. Not only does this represent a return to Marx’s early political concerns, but it also reflects common republican demands at the time, the lineage of which can be traced to the French Revolution.
JS: I want to talk more about your conception of democracy vis-à-vis republicanism. Not only contemporary radical theorists of democracy such as Cornelius Castoriadis or Jacques Rancière have claimed an irreducible opposition between republicanism and democratic politics. In fact, as you acknowledge, the entire canon of republican thought, from Polybius and Cicero to Machiavelli, Rousseau or Madison, understands this dichotomy as foundational. The republican “mixed regime” was always conceived as a means to prevent democratic rule by the direct and equal participation of the citizenry in government. Republicanism would circumscribe democracy as “one element” in the state system—that is, as tribunes with a legislative veto right or electoral representation—among the other elements. The republic’s “aristocratic” senate and the “monarchic” consuls or presidents’ temporary emergency powers should check the excesses of what Madison called a “pure democracy.” Following this traditional understanding in a critical way, in his Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State (1843), an oft-neglected text that your book takes pains to recover, Marx writes that the republic was only “the abstract political form of democracy,” for it is not the entire “demos” but only “a part” of the citizenry that “determines the character of the whole” in a republican state. You do not interpret Marx’s theory of democracy as an antagonistic stance towards republicanism, whether in his early writings or his late appraisal of the Paris Commune. Can you elaborate on this?
BL: You are right to highlight that it’s an entirely standard trope to present “republicanism” or the “republic” in opposition to “democracy.” My refusal to repeat this trope in my book emerges directly from my contextualization of republicanism in the nineteenth century. In text after text from that time, republicans and their opponents effectively treated “democracy” and “republic” as synonyms. “Republicans” were just as likely to identify and be addressed as “democrats” (or “radicals”). Nineteenth-century republicans rarely expressed the idea of a “republic” as a mixed regime combining democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. If anything, the mixed constitution was defended by nineteenth-century liberals.
In other words, attempting to oppose republicanism to democracy simply makes no sense when analyzing that era. This is one important reason why it matters to carry out careful contextual reconstruction rather than approach Marx with a preformed definition of “republicanism” drawn from recent political theories—an approach that I admit marked my first engagement with the topic.
Now, it is true that, outside the nineteenth century, the opposition of republicanism to democracy holds some legitimacy. Certainly, there is Madison’s famous distinction between an ancient direct democracy and a modern representative republic (Federalist No. 10, 1787). But I think we have become a little too beholden to this distinction; indeed, it is today frequently instrumentalized by American conservatives. I have a suspicion, though only a suspicion, that Madison might have been pushing against Anti-Federalist attempts to refashion the notion of a “republic” in a more democratic image. In any case, I find Montesquieu’s distinction between a democratic republic and an aristocratic republic, depending on whether the whole or part of the people rules, a more helpful one. I think it captures the way that popular and elitist elements within republicanism have historically contested the term’s meaning, whether that is plebeians versus patricians in Rome or the popolo versus grandi in Florence. The more popular, democratic side of republicanism tends to get much less attention, as Annelien de Dijn has nicely shown. That might be because these elements have always been more likely to appeal to poorer citizens with less access to the means of ideological production and perhaps even lacking literacy. The surviving historical record—and intellectual history itself—is thus likely to be biased towards aristocratic republicanism.
Returning to the nineteenth century, I also compare Marx’s views with “republicanism” rather than “democracy” because the former better captures my interest in an ideology and its associated political formation or movement. “Democratism” never caught on as a description, though Ruge unsuccessfully employs the term at one point. The ideology and political movement of republicanism or republicans is, of course, centered on democracy (that is what I meant earlier by calling republicanism the “political ideology of democracy”). And I do discuss at length what Marx thought about “democracy” as a regime and set of institutions. The crux of the matter is that I really wanted to bring to the fore that republicanism exists as an actual political force in Marx’s time with which he had to interact, whether as an ally against conservatives, liberals, and anti-political socialists or as something to ultimately displace.
JS: In chapter 6, your reading of Capital emphasizes how Marx’s theorization of capitalist domination cannot be reduced, in the fashion of much scholarship, to operating exclusively in either a “direct” or “indirect” mode. On the contrary, Marx’s theory of capitalism enables us to think through both poles together. His descriptions of “abstract” and “concrete” forms of domination express workers’ domination by both concrete, individual capitalists as well as an abstract economic system that coerces even capitalists to ceaselessly intensify their exploitation of labor. You state that “central to this account were republican ideas of dependency, servitude, and unfreedom.” Can you explicate how only a republican discourse would have allowed Marx to theorize capitalist modes of production in such a way and how he would have thus “also expanded and transformed those republican ideas”?
BL: I like your way of contrasting the concrete domination by capitalists and the more abstract domination of the economic system. It seems so clear to me that Marx always theorized both, as well as the connections between them. And I think that republican ideas and language were not only central to his account but can (I hope) provide us with a helpful normative and conceptual account of the unfreedom of capitalism. My thinking here is enormously indebted to Alex Gourevitch and William Clare Roberts, who have done so much to show how the republican idea of domination applies in the economic realm.
In my chapter on Capital, I set out what might be thought of as different levels of domination. First, there is the personal domination in the factory by capitalists and their supervisors over the worker. Again and again, Marx likens this relationship to the arbitrary power enjoyed by an absolute monarch over his subject. This is particularly evident in Marx’s many detailed reports for the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA, or “First International”) in the 1860s on the despotic conditions faced by workers across Europe. These reports are a neglected goldmine. What strikes me is how similar some of his complaints here are to his early political journalism. He objects, for instance, to how, when it comes to fining workers, the capitalist embodies accuser and judge in one person without offering the worker any means to contest that judgment. This is the same argument Marx had made about the power of Prussian government censors exercised over journalists. So, you see a kind of transference of the complaint about arbitrary power from the political to the social.
Second, I try to show how Marx thought a more structural form of domination underpinned this personal domination. In a favored phrase, Marx says that while slaves or serfs belong to a particular master, workers belong to the whole capitalist class. What he means is that, because workers do not own their means of production, they must find a capitalist master to employ them even if they have the formal “freedom” to choose the particular capitalist for whom they work. What Marx does quite nicely, I think, is show how this structural necessity explains and reproduces personal domination in the workplace. Economic structures require workers to submit themselves to a capitalist’s domination, and as workers’ structural dependence on the capitalist class grows, so does their domination in the workplace. We can think here of Marx’s idea of the reserve army of the unemployed, whose expansion decreases the working class’s power to effectively bargain and strike.
Third, I emphasize that this personal and structural domination is not simply because capitalists have a sadistic desire for power over others (though many certainly do) but because domination has an explanatory link to exploitation. I think that Marx gives us an account of exploitation based on how capitalists use their domination to extract surplus labor from workers, whether through the brute extension of the working day or the more subtle appropriation of productivity gains. I hope my discussion of these processes shows that domination provides a more accurate account of Marx’s theory of exploitation than some attempts to reduce it to a question of justice and the distribution of resources.
Finally, all of these aspects of capitalist domination are underpinned by the most impersonal form of domination that Marx identifies: the market. Marx thought that capitalism subordinates everyone—including capitalists—to the market imperative to continuously accumulate. “Good” capitalists who do not want to dominate or exploit their workers will be driven from the market by their competitor’s cheaper goods. All of us are thus subjected to an abstract, impersonal power that we do not control. This impersonal domination, of course, requires people to uphold and reproduce it, but Marx stresses that it cannot be understood if we only focus on arbitrary individual wills (as important as that is to understanding workplace domination). As you intimate, this expands and transforms some accounts of republican freedom that would restrict the concept’s application to identifiable agents only. But that is not how Marx understands domination, and I think that restricting it in this way would destroy our ability to assess what makes capitalist domination distinctive.
JS: You emphasize the centrality of the notion of “wage slavery” for Marx’s theory of capitalist domination. Many scholars, specifically in Black Studies, have leveled powerful criticisms against this comparison of wage labor with slavery, depicting it as indicative of a broader problem with Marx’s thought. Thinkers such as Cedric Robinson or Denise Ferreira da Silva have argued that Marx diminishes, if not obfuscates, the pivotal role of the transatlantic system of slavery in creating capitalist modernity. How does your book interpret Marx’s comparative and conceptual usage of slavery for theorizing capitalism?
BL: I would not want to reject the important criticisms of Marx’s blind spots. I think Marx could have said more about slavery’s interaction with capitalism. One can easily imagine that if he had emigrated to America, as so many of his contemporary German 1848 exiles did, he might have written a quite different account.
The “wage slavery” metaphor or analogy has a complicated history. Southern slaveholders sometimes used it nefariously to justify their chattel slavery. They tried to claim that they cared for their slaves, while northern factory owners would let their workers go and watch them starve at the first sign of crisis. But we even find something like this argument amongst some early European radicals and socialists. They did not endorse slavery, but they did talk about “wage slavery” in order to make an often-racialized claim that the conditions for white workers in Europe were worse than those faced by black slaves in the Americas. Even the young Engels claimed that wage slaves faced more intense supervision inside the factory than American slaves did in the field.
Against this context, it is important to recognize that Marx does not use “wage slavery” in this way. While he notes that slaves have an advantage in being provided with their subsistence by their master, he never—to my knowledge—says that wage slavery is worse than chattel slavery. He is very clear in Capital that the most brutal form of domination is that experienced by the American slaves, who are likewise exposed to the intensified exploitation brought about by the competitive pressures of global capitalism. Marx’s use of “wage slavery” serves to highlight the unfreedom of supposedly “free” workers, not to deny the even greater unfreedom of slaves.
Of course, there is the question of whether it is appropriate to use this language of slavery at all, but I think we need to bear in mind that the condition of English workers in 1824 is not that of 2024. When you have no welfare state, no unemployment insurance, and trade unions are banned, then the domination faced by workers is of such a magnitude that a comparison with slavery seems apt. When those countervailing conditions exist, talk of wage slavery can easily seem like an exaggeration. In a brilliant recent paper, Tom O’Shea has made the helpful suggestion that we should reserve the term “wage slavery” for cases of waged labor that expose workers to a level of arbitrary power so great as to threaten their very means of existence. When an employer’s arbitrary power does not reach that level, we can (and should) still talk of economic domination but not wage slavery. That seems like a sensible way to apply the analogy.
JS: Your book makes a strong contribution to a larger, extremely promising revival of studies on Marx in contemporary political theory and philosophy, as well as intellectual history. What brought you to this topic, and what do you think is the academic and political relevance of Marx today?
BL: I think I was first drawn to the topic of Marx and republicanism for the somewhat prosaic reason that many people had claimed some kind of connection, but no one had actually looked at it properly—the famous “research gap.” More interesting, perhaps, is why I was drawn back to the topic, again and again, for a decade or so of research. One reason was that I kept discovering new aspects of republicanism’s relevance to Marx’s writings, and I wanted to do the story justice. That partly explains why it has, unfortunately, become a much longer book than I ever anticipated.
A further motivating reason was a hope (and it might just be a hope) that the resulting picture of Marx is an appealing one for some of our contemporary struggles. I do not think the history of political thought can or should be expected to give us straightforward lessons for the present, but it can reveal how we have become bewitched (to use Skinner’s appealing language) by our present assumptions. In showing us that alternative paths existed behind us, it can challenge us to set out on a new path today.
There are many aspects of Marx that might, in this sense, hold relevance for us. In the book, I highlight two potentialities. The first is the promise of Marx’s critique of capitalism in terms of freedom and domination. This seems to me not just normatively apt but also rhetorically powerful. We have become accustomed to talking in terms of equality or community when opposing capitalist oppression, but the language of freedom—once so central to socialism—has been largely lost. Republican freedom provides a starting point from which to articulate a comprehensive challenge to domination today.
The other potentiality is Marx’s insight, gained through the Paris Commune, that radical social transformation requires radical democratic political institutions. While there have always been socialists who held to that commitment, they were drowned out in the twentieth century by various authoritarian perversions, obviously, but also the technocratic view that one need only be elected to power to turn the ship of state towards socialism. As we think about how to challenge social domination today, I think that Marx’s older view, namely that the state needs to be fundamentally democratized, might be worth reconsidering.
JS: You have been appointed as an assistant professor at Durham University, starting in May 2025. What do you hope to work on after publishing this impressive first monograph?
BL: When I finished this book, I promised myself that I would never let myself write another one, since I found writing it so painful! But after a few months of recovery, I found the irresistible itch to dive into a new project returning. Currently, I’m thinking about writing a history of popular government. I was very influenced by the late Bernard Manin’s Principles of Representative Government (1995), which narrates the rise of the regime that today we call democracy but was—as Manin powerfully shows— founded in opposition to it. I would like to tell the story of that democratic opposition, starting from the English, American, and French Revolutions and going right up to the German Revolution in the twentieth century. My hope is that this history could allow us to better identify the democratic limits of the regimes we live in today and the alternatives that existed in the past.
In line with that new interest, I have just applied for a large ERC grant with Udit Bhatia, Pierre-Étienne Vandamme, and Yanina Welp to study popular government from a global perspective. Our hope is that by combining our specialisms, we might be able to overcome some of the Western parochialism in the study of democracy (including my own).
As part of my turn towards democratic theory, I also have a couple of papers looking at the promise and limits of sortition. One of them, which is under review, proposes the idea of Constituency Juries, who are randomly selected from an elected representative’s constituency and tasked with holding them accountable. I argue that they provide a more promising way to address some of representative government’s failings—particularly its oligarchic tendencies—than other sortition proposals. That idea emerged out of my work on Marx, as I thought through his criticism of representative institutions. In a way, it is a response to the suggestion I raised above that social transformation requires radical democratic institutions. It is perhaps also an example of how practicing the history of political thought can inspire new interventions in contemporary political theory.
Jochen Schmon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at the New School for Social Research and dissertation fellow at the Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence. He studies the conceptual history of slavery and the discursive resonances of abolitionist politics in the emerging feminist, republican, anarchist, and communist imaginaries of the 19th century.
Edited by Zac Endter
Featured Image: La Terre Promise by Rougeron Vignerot (1891). Line engraving. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
