Left-leaning political theory and philosophy is undergoing what might be called a “neo-republican turn.” At the center of this turn is what many regard as the defining ideal of republicanism: a conception of freedom as non-domination, or independence from the possibility of arbitrary interference. Over the past few decades, this republican conception of freedom has received its most influential expression in the work of Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner; more recently, it has become a touchstone for many critics of capitalist markets, workplace hierarchy, and economic exploitation.
Among recent such critics, some have sought to claim Marx himself as part of the republican tradition, or at least as working in its wake. Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx offers the most thoroughly researched and compelling version of this argument to date. Through detailed engagement not only with Marx’s corpus—including many neglected and non-canonical texts—but also with the writings of his republican contemporaries, Leipold shows that Marx’s critique of capitalism and his positive institutional proposals cannot be fully understood apart from the nineteenth-century republican context in which they took shape.
To be sure, this is not quite the same as claiming that Marx is a thoroughgoing republican, and Leipold is careful to draw that distinction. His aim is to show how republicanism shaped Marx’s thought both positively, where Marx took up and developed republican ideas, and negatively, where he developed his positions in opposition to them (8). Among the positive influences, Leipold includes Marx’s conception of freedom as independence from arbitrary power (61, 92, 126, 310, 316–17); his emphasis on political struggle (13, 191, 215–16); his expansive view of democracy as requiring ongoing citizen participation (102, 108–9, 121, 126); his celebration of small-scale producers like artisans and yeoman farmers (318, 320); and his early belief in the intrinsic value of political participation (400–01). Among the negative influences, Leipold emphasizes Marx’s rejection of the republican elevation of the independent producer as revolutionary agent (11, 136, 275, 278–79), and his insistence that private property be abolished, not merely redistributed or universalized (6–7, 14, 253, 287–88, 293–98).
In addition to this core argument, Leipold develops two further lines of inquiry. The first traces Marx’s engagement with republican ideas across three periods: his early republicanism (1842–44); his partial break with it during the turn to communism (1844–52); and his later return to certain republican commitments after the Paris Commune. The second, developed primarily in chapter 6, shows how the republican critique of arbitrary power informs Marx’s analysis of capitalism in Capital.
Citizen Marx is a rich and illuminating account of the political and intellectual debates in which Marx’s thought took shape. It brings fresh clarity to many well-known themes in Marx’s work while also surfacing overlooked elements, such as his views on repurposing liberal state institutions for socialist ends (242–49, 358–59) and his brief “flirtation” with anti-politics (163–73). I learned a great deal from the book and recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in Marx’s thought. That said, in what follows, I raise two concerns about Leipold’s argument.
My first concern centers on Leipold’s argument that Marx endorses a republican conception of freedom as non-domination in his account of the worker’s subjection to the capitalist. On Leipold’s interpretation, domination emerges first in the worker’s dependence on the capitalist’s arbitrary will within the workplace (305). But as Leipold stresses, this immediate domination is “underpinned” by a deeper, “structural” form of domination rooted in the worker’s class position (312). Since the worker lacks access to the means of production, she must contract with an employer or face starvation. Structural domination, then, consists in the forced choice between “working for a master” and an unacceptable alternative (312–17).
While I agree that this account captures a key dimension of Marx’s analysis of the worker’s unfreedom, I am less convinced that the republican conception of domination fully fits the case. If the worker’s structural position is one of domination, it must stem from arbitrary power—but whose? Presumably, that of the capitalist class as a whole (314–15). Yet Leipold neither defines arbitrariness nor explains how capitalist class power qualifies as arbitrary. One might infer from his discussions of democracy and the rule of law (9, 31–32, 34, 66, 149) that he takes arbitrariness to mean power exercised without democratic input from those affected. But this is still compatible with a range of interpretations of “arbitrariness” under which the worker’s structural unfreedom would not count as the result of arbitrary power.
Consider, for instance, Pettit’s neo-republican account, which defines arbitrary power as power exercised at the discretion of the powerful, without any obligation to track the interests of those affected. On this view, it is unclear how the worker’s condition, in which he is forced to choose between employment or starvation, results from arbitrary power. A market-clearing wage offer may be exploitative, but it is not imposed unilaterally, and the labor market, however flawed, does compel employers to respond at least minimally to workers’ interests. In this respect, the republican framework may not fully capture the kind of structural unfreedom Marx identifies.
My second concern is whether freedom as non-domination is truly the central strand in Marx’s conception of freedom, and whether some of the examples Leipold cites are better understood through a different conception. While Leipold mentions in a footnote that republican freedom is not the only kind of freedom Marx endorses (183, n. 259), his argument suggests that it plays the leading role. Yet this may overstate its significance in Marx’s thought. After all, Marx is often associated with a positive conception of freedom on which freedom is realized through activities like democratic participation or productive labor, rather than a negative conception on which freedom is identified as the mere absence of constraint.
Indeed, some of the examples Leipold offers in support of Marx’s republicanism in fact point to a positive, non-republican, conception of freedom. For instance, he cites Marx’s emphasis on the intrinsic value of political participation as evidence of a “republican consideration” (400). Yet such passages are more naturally read through a positive conception, in which freedom is realized through the activity of politics itself. Similarly, Leipold frames Marx’s account of alienated labor in the 1844 Manuscripts in terms of a negative conception of freedom—the aspiration to “work free from the domination of a master” (183). But Marx’s account of unalienated labor goes further: labor is not merely free from domination, but free as “conscious, purposeful activity” that realizes the worker’s nature or “species-being.” Its value lies not just in the absence of constraint, but in its character as self-realizing and intrinsically fulfilling. Here, non-domination functions not as the core of Marx’s account of freedom, but as a background condition for a positive conception grounded in productive labor.
This is not to deny the importance of the republican strand in Marx’s thought, which Leipold brings into sharp focus. The question is whether it should be treated as central to Marx’s conception of freedom or as one element within a more complex account oriented toward a different ideal. A fuller exploration of how different conceptions of freedom inform Marx’s thought would deepen Leipold’s already rich contribution and clarify the stakes of reading Marx through a republican lens.
