My thanks go to Raffaele Laudani for his generous and penetrating review of The Plebeian Experience. Before responding to his criticisms, I would first like to offer some elements of context regarding the genesis of my book.

First published in Paris in 2007, The Plebeian Experience staked a claim for radical politics in the midst of the “return of political philosophy” that occurred in fin de siècle France. This “return” took a paradoxical form: Its most influential scholars considered democracy as an “inescapable horizon,” yet they were dismissive of the politics of the Many. In short, they reduced democracy to institutions, procedures, and “majority rule,” rather than also considering it as “the capacity to do things” collectively (J. Ober 2007). This left little room for any scholarship that rehabilitated, either theoretically or historically, a substantive conception of democracy based on the political capacity of the Many and allowed for a politics of the “extra-ordinary” to become an integral part of our political heritage. (For an alternative intellectual history of the French “return to politics,” see Martin Breaugh et al., eds., Thinking Radical Democracy: The Return to Politics in Post-war France, 2015.)

As Laudani aptly frames it, my work undertakes a “historical genealogy of global radical politics.” As such, it resonates with the work of other scholars, notably with that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude. If there seems to be “echoes” of their work in my own, our perspectives diverge, however, in many key respects. For example, my work insists on a non-class-based analysis of radical politics: The plebeian experience involves “anybody and everybody,” and it is respectful of the idea of plurality, as understood by Hannah Arendt. As well, my work categorically rejects the idea that the Many need “leaders” or “vanguards” in order to organize their entry into political agency. In fact, I consider the presence of such elites to be one of the greatest threats to the political freedom generated by a plebeian experience.

Laudani invites me to make the conceptual move from Machiavelli—too concerned with the “institutional composition of the natural conflictuality of society”—to La Boétie and his “idea of politics as movement.” While I am intrigued by this suggestion, I wonder what would be lost by such a move. After all, the second part of my book deals with the “forms of political organization” of the plebeian experience and shows that the radical politics of the Many cannot be reduced to the simple liquefaction of existing institutions, but that it also created radically democratic political organizations open to plurality and thriving on conflict—in stark contrast to the central institutions of liberal democracy. Would plebeian politics as pure movement not reinforce the bromide that we have nothing to learn from radical politics because of its instability and transience?

Finally, Laudani considers that the “real limit” of my work is that its “geographic borders” are limited to Europe. As it is often the case, the selection of historical case studies was based primarily on my training as a scholar of European political thought and history. This said, the concept of “plebeian experience” was created with a deliberate aim to understand a type of politics that goes beyond the historical scope of my work. One of the main objectives of the book is to offer a new heuristic device to analyze, and thus better understand, radical politics. As Laudani himself states in his review, my framework accurately describes W. E. B Du Bois’s “black abolitionism,” and I am pleased that other scholars have begun to use my work to analyze non-European radical politics, such as contemporary uprisings in Latin America (see Ricardo Peñafiel et al., eds., L’interpellation plébéienne en Amérique latine, 2012). Indeed, my hope is that Laudani’s final critique will be read as an invitation to scholars to deepen our understanding of radical democratic politics through the prism of the plebeian experience.