Interview: Bruno Leipold

Bruno Leipold is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the author of Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (2024).

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What was the republicanism that Marx came into contact with and how did this republicanism or these republicanisms, if they were different, change or shape his views?

[.cdw-name]Bruno Leipold[.cdw-name]

The republicanism that I’m particularly focused on in the book is the republicanism that existed as a political movement and an ideology at Marx’s time. Republicanism is often thought of as something going back to ancient Greece orancient Rome. I’m interested in it as it existed as an alternative or, sometimes, an ally to socialism in the nineteenth century.

That means it was a political movement that was essentially fighting for democracy, popular sovereignty, in a historical context of much greater authoritarianism in Europe. Today, we have socialists, liberals and conservatives across the political spectrum, but in the nineteenth century, the republicans were the left’s main political ideology. And that’s only slowly replaced across the nineteenth century by socialism.

Marx came onto the scene as a republican. When he began his public career as a political journalist, that’s how he identified.  Then, over time, he transitioned to communism. How did republicanism shape his beliefs? The most fundamental thing I would say is that the thing that Marx always believes in across his entire life, from when he's a republican to when he transitions to communism and for the next 50 to 60 years after that, is the centrality of a democratic republic for human emancipation. He, of course, believes that it's not sufficient for human emancipation. You need to go beyond that to communism, of course, but he's absolutely committed to that being an essential element in the struggle for that. That is something that he takes over from republicans and he carries over from his own prior republicanism. There are a lot of communists who didn’t believe that, and I think that’s why it’s really important to understand the republican aspects.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

The next question follows that quite nicely. What are the differences and similarities that Marxism or Marx's thought, I suppose, more than Marxism, had with republicanism and with other forms of nineteenth-century socialism.

[.cdw-name]Bruno Leipold[.cdw-name]

The central thing is that Marx agrees with republicans about the importance of a democratic republic. But he’s not simply a republican. He is a communist, or at least, I would argue, a republican communist, but he is a communist and that means he believes in the abolition of capitalist private property.

Whereas that is not what most republicans believe. They are, especially the most radical of them, anti-capitalist as well. They share a criticism that Marx and other communists make, of that capitalist wage labour makes you unfree and dependent on your employer. What republicans argue is that the response to that should be that everyone should become their own independent self-employer. Essentially that you have an economy of peasants and artisans and then that way no one has to work for someone else, and every person is their own boss. No one is subject to the arbitrary power of a master in that way. That is a different political economy to what Marx defends, and Marx and Engels defend. They argue that the republican political economy is a dying one that is being irreversibly destroyed by the efficiencies of capitalism.

That’s one of the reasons that leads them to their different response to capitalism. They say, well, we also believe in freedom as non-domination, freedom as the absence of arbitrary powers, but we believe that that can only be achieved in a socialist economy and a socialised economy rather than one where you try to universalise private property ownership, which is the republican response.

When it comes to other nineteenth-century socialist variants — and this is something I’m really keen to stress in the book — it’s easy to think that democracy is connected to socialism, but that was not at all something that could be taken for granted when Marx and Engels found communism in the 1840s. The vast majority of early socialists are anti-political and even anti-democratic. They explicitly reject, in their writings and in their activism, the republican arguments for a democratic republic, for universal suffrage, popular sovereignty and so on, and argue that these should not be engaged in. They in their own ways. various, sometimes authoritarian, sometimes technocratic, sometimes not very well-worked out ideas of non-politics that socialism might have. That’s present in the small cooperative ventures of Owenites and Fourierists, where you go out to the countryside and where small-scale experiments are supposed to peacefully spread socialism, rather than by engaging in political struggle. So, the contrast is between Marxist republican communism, anti-communist republicanism and anti-political socialism.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

So, it's a secret third thing?

[.cdw-name]Bruno Leipold[.cdw-name]

It's a secret third thing, but not secret anymore, because I've got it out there now.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

How many republicans are there? What’s the strength of this movement? If you’re walking about in the 1830s or 1840s, will you see republicans out and about?

[.cdw-name]Bruno Leipold[.cdw-name]

That is a really good question and not an easy one to answer. I think it depends entirely which European country you are, whether that's let's say Germany, France or England.

In England, I would call the Chartists republican, and some of them are willing to use that label as well. Some of them are more hesitant because it’s anti-monarchical, but I think as a description of their ideology, it fits. Chartism is a massive movement: tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people. They’re pushing for the people to have popular sovereignty, so in that sense, it’s a huge republican movement. In France, after 1830, it’s relatively legal to be a republican, while in the German states you can’t just be an out-and-out republican. There is extreme government censorship in Prussia where Marx is writing. So, it’s harder to say if you’re on the street meeting people, whether they are republicans, because they’re not allowed to say.

It's hard to estimate these things because when people are as excluded from the political system as they are in all these states, then there is no vote count you could use to estimate their numbers. But at various points, they are mass movements. There are also secret societies. In France prior to 1830, and even afterwards, you get small splinter cells of republican groupings that are also trying to overthrow the state through republican insurgency, which has its own influence on later socialist currents.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

The next question is about contemporary republicanism. I wonder if you could talk about radical republicanism in the context of popular sovereignty, particularly as contemporary radical republicanism tends to take the workplace as central, but popular sovereignty or self-rule could also (and historically and presently have been) applied to questions of imperialism and national liberation and democracy within and between countries.

[.cdw-name]Bruno Leipold[.cdw-name]

What do I think republicanism is more generally? At the very thinnest, it arises from a belief that citizens should rule themselves. And various movements have come from that. In contemporary political theory, literature and academic discussions, it is still an academic discourse, without much pick-up on the left. There’s little bit more discussions around socialist republicanism more than I thought that there would be, which I'm pleased. But I think, on the whole, it’s still been very much an academic retrieval that's had limited political impact so far. And in that academic retrieval the big figures in the first wave like Pettit and so forth, were giving a criticism of liberalism. But I think in a lot of ways also reproduced a lot of liberalism in it, particularly in its political aspects, recommendations of what democracy should look like and so forth, and in its rather limited social critique.

That's why people like Alex Gourevitch were so important, in their contributions, now over ten years ago, that pushed the point that if we care about this idea of self-rule and its connection to freedom as non-domination, then we have to care that we don't have free states, and we also need free societies. I think that that was absolutely central.

What I don’t want us to lose sight of is the fact that republicanism exists in the nineteenth century. There’s an academic presumption that republicanism stops after the American and French revolutions, that after that there is nothing of interest or nothing at all. And I think that’s not the case at all. Republicanism is both a political and a social ideology, and that means that it believes in popular sovereignty in the political realm. Popular sovereignty has to exist then in the social realm as well, whether you want to cash that out in terms of popular sovereignty or freedom.

I think that these things go very naturally together for nineteenth-century republicans. They don’t see republicanism as divided in this way — this is just part of the set of concepts they have. If you were to enumerate everything they believed, if we did a Michael Freeden style of ideology analysis, which is for me, the most influential way to understand ideologies, you would have to have popular sovereignty in there, and democracy, but also liberty, equality and fraternity, and, most importantly, the way they all hang together. For republicans, liberty is very closely tied to popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty in turn gives you the moral justification or legitimacy for power, and popular sovereignty is also what upholds your liberty as non-domination. These things are connected, rather than free hanging commitments.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

I’ve been thinking about popular sovereignty in relation to the dynamics of imperialism in the core. So, you can have a situation where the majority is opposed to some aspect of foreign policy, but it doesn’t make any sort of difference, whereas on other issues, polling is the special object which must be responded to. Take an arms embargo on Israel, for instance — 57 per cent of people in Britain support one, but it’s something which the Government is not going to do. So, there’s a revelation of the impossibility of self-rule in countries which claim to believe in it (at least for themselves, they don’t bother with the pretence when they’re imposing rule elsewhere). This isn’t typically framed in republican language, but it seems like both this unmasking of the undemocratic face of imperialism or the limits it necessarily places on what passes for democracy in the Global North, and, questions of national liberation themselves, could be thought in republican terms.

[.cdw-name]Bruno Leipold[.cdw-name]

I would say that that's a really nice way to get to the issue is because Palestine is a good example of that disconnect between popular feeling and elite opinion and the inability to do anything constitutionally about that disconnect. There are no constitutional mechanisms to force the government to do something, despite the fact that, as you say, the majority of the British population opposes what the British government is doing. I mean, Iraq would be a similar case. I think that is a nice link to republicanism because republicans in the nineteenth-century are committed to democracy, which can seem quite boring. But I think they actually had a much thicker sense of what democracy might entail and what popular sovereignty might entail. Of course, popular sovereignty itself is an ideal that can have different interpretations. For most republicans of the nineteenth-century, they really believe in what you might call active popular sovereignty, which is a phrase I get from Stuart White’s work on Rousseau.

There’s one interpretation of popular sovereignty that’s really like a founding moment, let’s say. The people have the power to set up the constitution, or that popular sovereignty only exists at the point of elections. Nearly all the republicans I looked at believe in something much more active than that — the people have to have continual ongoing power over their representatives. They’re influenced by a reading of Rousseau, of course, the famous quote about the English people are only free when they elect their representatives and then they are enslaved for the next five to seven years or however long. They believe something like that, and they believe that here has to be political institutions that realise popular sovereignty continuously, whether that is having the right to recall your representatives, to be give them binding instructions, to have primary assemblies where you could meet with your other constituents and instruct the representatives.

In a way one could say that maybe republicanism wins because we now have democracy. But actually, I think much more is the case that we had a bit of a bait and switch, that there was a much more extensive version of what democracy might look like, and we ended up with the thinnest version of it. And with a thicker version, I think it's true, it'd be harder to do something like, you know, I don't think we should think that everything would suddenly be rosy and shiny with a more democratic system. But things like Gaza, things like Iraq might be a lot harder to do in the kind of political system that nineteenth-century republicans had hoped for.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

One of the most famous experiments in thicker popular sovereignty was the Paris Commune (1871), which was short-lived and violently put down. What was that? What effects did it have on Marx? Is it the culmination of republicanism? A magical republican moment? And how does it fit, too, in later Marxism?

I’m thinking of the wonderful story of Lenin, when he finds out that his revolution, the Russian Revolution has lasted longer than the Paris Commune, and he goes out and dances in the snow. I’ve always thought that I had the chance to set a public holiday, in some sort of communist micro-state, and I’m not sure how that would happen, but let’s assume it has, if I’m in a position of holiday-setting, as some sort of governor, that it would be a holiday.

Anyway, is the Commune a sort of lodestar, in which freedom, politics, democracy, and more all come together, for its participants, observers and those who inherit the memory of it?

[.cdw-name]Bruno Leipold[.cdw-name]

Let me start with the question of whether it’s the high point of republicanism, because I think that is important. Many twentieth-century socialist figures and movements claim the Commune as their own. For them this is the first step of the proletariat onto the world stage. Modern historical research has really emphasised the extent to which its participants and its leaders were actually republicans. If you look at the composition of the actual leadership of the Paris Commune, nearly half of the Commune Council are more accurately thought of as republicans. So, it is very much dominated, to some extent, by this older radical tradition as well as there being a newer kind of socialist language taking part in it. It’s a debate between republicans, it must be said. The communards are republicans, but a lot of the supporters of the regime that goes to crush them are also republicans, moderate republicans.

So, it’s a debate within republicanism as much as it is between republicanism and other ideologies, because, in one sense, it’s a difference about how one understands republicanism. Is republicanism realised in the populace, in really active popular sovereignty that the Paris Commune would, had it been successful, have realised with much greater control over representatives and the people administering itself?

It’s this extraordinary moment where the entire municipal administration of Paris flees and decamps to Versailles, and they have to come up with their own administration themselves. And Marx, of course, celebrates this. It was a working-class uprising, and I think it deserves to be called working class. Maybe not the modern, let's say industrial proletarian working class, but it is a working class. Mostly artisans, who take control of the city of Paris for close to three months, where the administration and the national government flee the city, meaning they get to rule it themselves. It is inspirational for all kinds of people, for Marx and for others. It’s inspirational partly because it is so brutally crushed in the so-called Bloody Week, when around twenty thousand Parisians were slaughtered as the Versailles government makes its way back into Paris. It’s probably the bloodiest civil unrest in the nineteenth century.

For Marx, it’s very important. Marx’s commitment to the democratic republic and to politics is lifelong. But at a certain point, particularly in the lead up to 1848, the commitment is a bit thin in terms of just how extensive he thinks democracy needs to be. He really doesn't have much to say beyond it being kind of universal suffrage and equal civic rights. He thinks those are essential things, central institutions. But he doesn't have much of a thick sense of what democracy might require. That really changes with the Paris Commune. He then gives us a much deeper account, and I think a more extensive one. The state machinery that has been inherited is not nearly democratic enough, workers need their own state machinery, if they are to emancipate themselves. The instrument of their enslavement cannot be the instrument of their emancipation — they need their own government and state.

Marx is inspired by what he sees in the Paris Commune. He also reads into it a lot that doesn’t happen or only partially happens. He takes it as an inspiring example and runs with it. Representatives, he argues, should be paid the same as the people, bringing them closer to the people, giving the people real control and popular sovereignty. So instead of deciding every three or six years which representative of the bourgeoisie is going to misrepresent the people in parliament, the people will now rule themselves. That's what it means in terms of representation. And then in terms of administration, he's inspired by this example of a self-administration.

He thinks it becomes incredibly important that public administration, which, in bourgeois states, is handed over to a professional civil service that are elite and hierarchical in various ways, should be elected by the people themselves or appointed by the legislature. And in that way, I think it's an ideal of the people ruling and administering which takes some inspiration from ancient Athens in that. And that provides a much more democratic idea of what kind of republic would be necessary for bringing about socialism.

Marx says we need a truly democratic republic for socialism. He calls it a social republic, and that is an important shift in his thoughts. He recognises that when he writes a new preface to the Communist Manifesto a year or two after this. He says that one of the things that the Manifesto didn’t emphasise or didn’t get is the necessity of really democratically transforming the state.The Paris Commune has a huge effect on Marx’s thoughts. It’s really important as part of the story of republicanism’s influence on Marx.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

One of the most famous experiments in thicker popular sovereignty was the Paris Commune (1871), which was short-lived and violently put down. What was that? What effects did it have on Marx? Is it the culmination of republicanism? A magical republican moment? And how does it fit, too, in later Marxism? I’m thinking of the wonderful story of Lenin, when he finds out that his revolution, the Russian Revolution has lasted longer than the Paris Commune, and he goes out and dances in the snow. I’ve always thought that I had the chance to set a public holiday, in some sort of communist micro-state, and I’m not sure how that would happen, but let’s assume it has, if I’m in a position of holiday-setting, that would be a holiday. Anyway, is the Commune a sort of lodestar, in which freedom, politics, democracy, and more all come together, for its participants, observers and those who inherit it?

[.cdw-name]Bruno Leipold[.cdw-name]

Let me start with the question of whether it’s the high point of republicanism, because I think that is important. Many twentieth-century socialist figures and movements claim the Commune as their own. For them this is the first step of the proletariat onto the world stage. Modern historical research has really emphasised the extent to which its participants and its leaders were actually republicans. If you look at the composition of the actual leadership of the Paris Commune, nearly half of the Commune Council are more accurately thought of as republicans. So, it is very much dominated, to some extent, by this older radical tradition as well as there being a newer kind of socialist language taking part in it. It’s a debate between republicans, it must be said. The communards are republicans, but a lot of the supporters of the regime that goes to crush them are also republicans, moderate republicans.

So, it’s a debate within republicanism as much as it is between republicanism and other ideologies, because, in one sense, it’s a difference about how one understands republicanism. Is republicanism realised in the populace, in really active popular sovereignty that the Paris Commune would, had it been successful, have realised with much greater control over representatives and the people administering itself?

It’s this extraordinary moment where the entire municipal administration of Paris flees and decamps to Versailles, and they have to come up with their own administration themselves. And Marx, of course, celebrates this. It was a working-class uprising, and I think it deserves to be called working class. Maybe not the modern, let's say industrial proletarian working class, but it is a working class. Mostly artisans, who take control of the city of Paris for close to three months, where the administration and the national government flee the city, meaning they get to rule it themselves. It is inspirational for all kinds of people, for Marx and for others. It’s inspirational partly because it is so brutally crushed in the so-called Bloody Week, when around twenty thousand Parisians were slaughtered as the Versailles government makes its way back into Paris. It’s probably the bloodiest civil unrest in the nineteenth century.

For Marx, it’s very important. Marx’s commitment to the democratic republic and to politics is lifelong. But at a certain point, particularly in the lead up to 1848, the commitment is a bit thin in terms of just how extensive he thinks democracy needs to be. He really doesn't have much to say beyond it being kind of universal suffrage and equal civic rights. He thinks those are essential things, central institutions. But he doesn't have much of a thick sense of what democracy might require. That really changes with the Paris Commune. He then gives us a much deeper account, and I think a more extensive one. The state machinery that has been inherited is not nearly democratic enough, workers need their own state machinery, if they are to emancipate themselves. The instrument of their enslavement cannot be the instrument of their emancipation — they need their own government and state.

Marx is inspired by what he sees in the Paris Commune. He also reads into it a lot that doesn’t happen or only partially happens. He takes it as an inspiring example and runs with it. Representatives, he argues, should be paid the same as the people, bringing them closer to the people, giving the people real control and popular sovereignty. So instead of deciding every three or six years which representative of the bourgeoisie is going to misrepresent the people in parliament, the people will now rule themselves. That's what it means in terms of representation. And then in terms of administration, he's inspired by this example of a self-administration.

He thinks it becomes incredibly important that public administration, which, in bourgeois states, is handed over to a professional civil service that are elite and hierarchical in various ways, should be elected by the people themselves or appointed by the legislature. And in that way, I think it's an ideal of the people ruling and administering which takes some inspiration from ancient Athens in that. And that provides a much more democratic idea of what kind of republic would be necessary for bringing about socialism.

Marx says we need a truly democratic republic for socialism. He calls it a social republic, and that is an important shift in his thoughts. He recognises that when he writes a new preface to the Communist Manifesto a year or two after this. He says that one of the things that the Manifesto didn’t emphasise or didn’t get is the necessity of really democratically transforming the state.The Paris Commune has a huge effect on Marx’s thoughts. It’s really important as part of the story of republicanism’s influence on Marx.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What is Marx's account of freedom? Does this differ from republicans'? And if so, why and how?

[.cdw-name]Bruno Leipold[.cdw-name]

Marx has a multifaceted idea of what freedom entails. It has a relationship to alienation, to self-realisation, to self-mastery, to collective control over our society. But it also has a republican element. This is what I'm trying to get across in the book is that there’s no doubt that all of these elements are part of Marx's conception of freedom. But I think we've really neglected the extent to which Marx is also just straightforwardly concerned with the way in which arbitrary power, domination, makes people unfree. That’s one component of Marx's overall conception of freedom. In his earliest writings, his earliest journalism, he's very clear that the kind of arbitrary power that is exercised by the Prussian regime, by its officials, its feudal legislatures, its government censors, all of these are instances of a kind of arbitrary power that deny freedom to the people subjected to it.

And then importantly, when he becomes a communist, that view of freedom doesn't disappear. It is transferred and extended into the social realm. So, Marx, from his very earliest to his later writings, repeatedly condemns the arbitrary power that the capitalist exercises over workers in the workplace. He gives legions of practical examples of that, including the arbitrary power to impose fines on workers. If you're a little bit late to work, you get deductions from your wages, if the capitalist is not happy with your work, all of these things, basically that the capitalist essentially is jury and prosecutor and judge all in one person. And he thinks this is outrageous.

When he gets very involved in the International Working Men's Association in the 1860s, which is this working-class union of workers’ groups across Europe, he gets these reports from across Europe of how workers are really being treated. He gets real-life cases of what it means in, let's say, the mines, in the textile mills of examples of despotic power — of being fined, of being denied housing, being denied holidays, all based on this arbitrary power. Marx uses explicitly republican language when he is talking about these practices. At one point in Capital, he says that you have the arbitrary absolute monarch in the political sphere, you also have an arbitrary monarch inside your factory as well. He's very happy to make that kind of comparison, that there is a king in the factory in a capitalist system, and that this is also a very clear case of unfreedom on Marx's account, and I think it's a republican one.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

There’s a commonly made claim that the left needs to use the language of freedom. One of the problems with this might be the extent to which freedom can mean many and very different things. Does filling out an account of freedom with this republican freedom or republican-inflected freedom from Marx help better gain and control that contested terrain? If that’s something we should be doing.

[.cdw-name]Bruno Leipold[.cdw-name]

I think that the left should reclaim the territory of freedom. It’s so clear if you look at nineteenth-century writings, that conservatives are not defenders of freedom in the nineteenth century. Freedom is a worrying ideal. And the left, in these early socialist writings, in Marxist writings freedom, is a left-wing ideal, and one that we want. And that has been lost partly through the replacement of what freedom means. When you replace that freedom with this really limited sense of what political theorists call freedom as non-interference — you’re only unfree when someone interferes with you. That's a view of freedom that can lead you very easily to defend all kinds of dominating relationships. Whether that is the employer and employee, whether that is a wife and a husband, all of these things where there's formal consent right to these relationships, but that are actually consent to domination.

And I think freedom as non-domination, the republican account of freedom, shows you why in some ways the formal level is really beside the point when you actually want to assess the actual power relationships. Marx is certainly helpful for that — he argues that at the entrance of the factory, it might say freedom, but once you get into the hidden abode of production behind it, you have this deep unfreedom that the worker is in fact subjected to. That is one really key argument of Capital.

What does that mean for the left and politics today? I won't say that I have a clear idea what it really means, let’s say rhetorically and strategically, because of course anything like this would need to be done naturally and believably and organically. Obviously, you shouldn't give a speech that talks about freedom as non-domination because that sounds weird.

But I think what it can do is that it captures real complaints that already exist in so far as if you look at what workers say, whether that is Deliveroo drivers or others in the gig economy or service workers, or nurses and so forth.

They're talking about why aspects of their work suck, why on a daily basis, they might be demeaned by their bosses who ask crazy things, why Amazon warehouse workers hate their supervisors. These are daily experiences. They are sometimes, but not always, couched in the language of freedom. They could be a claim about freedom. But I think there is a hesitancy about doing so because we've lost that language partly. Freedom is not just about have you consented to this contract, but whether you are an unfree person. Do you have the status of a free person? I think that's the republican point — making sure that each person has the standing to make free choices.  One thing that inhibits that is whether someone has arbitrary control over you. I think that this idea already exists in people's lived experience of domination. And I think that what it can do, if we combine that in a kind of republican language around freedom and domination, is give that a certain structure to it and show what the connections are between these things: that there is arbitrary power is experienced by people in all kinds of different aspects in their social lives, in their political lives, and that there is a kind of underlying objection that we have on the left to that that I think can be articulated with that idea of freedom.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

At work, people have this as part of their everyday experience of reality — people are forced into relations that involve domination or require a kind of civility from them that they don't like, or, perhaps more rarely, the other way round, of not wanting to participate in them.

I mean, I don't feel that sorry for the bossers-about, but the fact that these relations are compulsory and coerced, the fact that they clearly relate quite strongly to subjectivity and to standing — which is I think a useful word for thinking about all this — is pertinent.

[.cdw-name]Bruno Leipold[.cdw-name]

The two big things that I hope my book comes out of is an appreciation of the importance of politics and freedom to the left. And those would be the resources I hope my book provides.

Of course, you could do that without writing a book about Marx and there are forms of political theorising that do that. I find that hard to do personally. And I also find it sometimes less convincing. Marx has a certain status on the left and deservedly so. I don’t believe in a Marx as authority argument. I don't think just because Marx had these republican beliefs, that's enough. But I think it’s a good way into the question. Why do I think this? This is not an easy question. Why do I think these reinterpretations matter? I think it can be hard to find these resources that I hope to provide without having done the historical archaeology to give it the kind of depth and coherence that I hope the history provides. That’s why those reinterpretations matter to me.

Particularly with Marx, it matters because, of course, he is so massively misunderstood, maybe more so than most of the big canonical figures.  I don't pretend that my book can really change that, that much. But I think that there is also a lazy academic writing about Marx as well that fits him neatly into certain boxes, including that he is part of the anti-political movement of the nineteenth century, and I think that reflects the fact that people do not know much about the nineteenth century and the dynamics of anti-political socialism.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

It's obvious, but presenting the ideas in the context of works shows them as responsive to that context, but also to show that there can be a kind of limiting effect of just presenting the ideas as non-contextual, freestanding propositional content. Of course, this is Marx’s method too — ideas are part of or proper to or emerge within a particular moment, and in that sense are “responsive” to them. And you can’t really understand these ideas without these various ways of contextualising them.

[.cdw-name]Bruno Leipold[.cdw-name]

I agree that they are responses to particular moments. That doesn't mean, of course, that they should be consigned to those moments. Certainly, that's one reason why I'm really attracted to that kind of contextual historical method because I think it’s a way to re-politicise Marx, which might be surprising.

But I think that is actually what a good historical contextualisation can do — to show why, sometimes, even with bits of Capital, it's not always clear why Marx is doing something. And then if you understand these paragraphs that you're reading are a response to someone, let's say that Marx doesn't even name, that his audience would have been familiar with at the time. Then you can start to see why the text is arguing against, and that for me, that's what makes them more political rather than less. There are, of course, versions of contextualism that really depoliticise and consign things to the past. Some big biographies of Marx have done that, but that’s not the way that I see the value of the historical contextualism.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Perhaps what’s needed is the combination of contextualism and a radical conception of the past or history, which can produce a contextualism that doesn’t dissolve into context but that makes both the ideas and the context more alive as a result of that contextualism

Do we find ourselves in a moment of Marx revival?

[.cdw-name]Bruno Leipold[.cdw-name]

Just by the sheer number of publications and books, it's clear that there is a revival of interest. And I think that there is of course, a bigger political story to be told about why that is happening in academia. It's no longer crazy to be talking about and interested in Marx and socialism in a way that it was, 15 years ago, the way that you'd be laughed out of the seminar room to be still thinking about and interested in this. The political context has changed that, post-2008. For me, republicanism was a way to talk about Marx. In academia, people need to find a hook that gets the liberals that dominate most of the disciplines to take our ideas seriously. Republicanism also gives us an interesting version of Marx and Marxism, so it wasn’t only something instrumental or strategic.

As for a verdict, I think it's a bit too early to say. It’s hard to discern many broader trends.

One thing there is not as much of in recent Marx writing is historical or contextual work. I’d like to see more of that, including on republicanism and a republican Marx. Although, I am slightly already concerned that people misunderstand what I mean by a republican Marx. I am not trying to make Marx into a republican or suddenly say that he's just part of the republican canon in some straightforward way. There are important differences. Marx is a communist. But we can understand his communism better by understanding it in its relationship to republicanism.  

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

You need some sort of caveat on the cover — Citizen Marx with a question mark in brackets. But they don’t let you have that sort of thing for a book title.

[.cdw-name]Bruno Leipold[.cdw-name]

Maybe Citizen Marx biases it one direction for people, because the book is really telling the dual story of the way in which Marx is influenced by republicanism, but also how he reacts to republicanism. The “citizen” thing is also a socialist thing. It is how socialists referred to each other in the nineteenth century before they called each other “comrade”. It’s something that goes back to, of course, the republican Revolution in France. So, “Citizen” doesn’t try to claim Marx for republicanism, but to show how much socialism and Marx’s socialism is also part of the republican story in a way that has been misunderstood.

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