Louis Mosar

Bruno Leipold's Citizen Marx will likely become a canonical text, both within the field of republican political theory and historiography and within Marx scholarship. In this review article, I contextualize Leipold's book within the development of the contemporary (neo)republican research program. I show how contemporary republicanism was born out of the effort of authors within intellectual history who sought, through the concept of “political languages,” to challenge the Cold War narrative of freedom as either noninterference or self-mastery. This effort was later taken up by Phillip Pettit who explicitly aimed to create an alternative contemporary political philosophy to liberalism. I argue that the work of Alex Gourevitch is the beginning of what I call the “radical turn” within republicanism. Gourevitch, William Clare Roberts, and Bruno Leipold after him sought to both challenge the dominant historiographical account of republicanism and to shift the focus from the political to the economic plane. Next, I formulate one major (sympathetic) critique of Leipold's book. I argue that Leipold insufficiently engages with the literature on commercial republicanism and that this leads Leipold to too hastily decouple the normative and non-normative elements of Marx's critique of capitalism. I end by pointing out what the larger societal relevance of the work is: reclaiming freedom as the basis of critiquing capitalism, shifting the economic discussion from mere distributive questions to relational questions, and the importance of thinking about political institutions for socialist society.