In recent years, interest in Karl Marx has centered on his critique of capital, of economic exploitation, and of market mechanisms. Few recent discussions of Marx have taken up his vision of a postcapitalist order, and of the political processes by which societies might move in that direction. Concomitant with the decline of working-class movements and the political parties connected to them, as well as the collapse of statist communism in the former Soviet bloc, theoretical interest in the Marxian concept of socialism has experienced a precipitous decline. That intellectual space has been filled at one level by liberal discourses of democracy and civil society, and further to the left, by anarchism, sometimes tied theoretically to strains of poststructuralism.

The respected French political philosopher Miguel Abensour's 1997 book, now translated along with his newer prefaces from 2004 and 2008, operates within this space, offering a post-1989 interpretation of Marx that speaks to our century's suspicion of authoritarian politics and its appreciation for grassroots democracy. Concentrating on the political sphere, it presents Marx as a theorist of “insurgent democracy” who is more relevant than ever in a period when the most important forms of totalitarian communism have been overcome and their presumed successor, liberal democracy, has come under renewed criticism as well.

Absensour's book takes as its textual point of departure a little-known study by Marx, the 1843 “Critique of Hegel's ‘Philosophy of Right,’” a book-length manuscript that preceded the more famous “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” of 1844. Neither was published until the 1920s. Where the 1844 Manuscripts dealt with themes like alienated labor, communism, humanism, private property, and capitalist domination, the 1843 Critique developed a radically democratic critique of bureaucracy and of Hegel's version of constitutional monarchy. Despite its publication in English some four decades ago by Joseph O'Malley, the 1843 Critique has received relatively little discussion in the English-speaking world. It has fared somewhat better in France, where well-known intellectuals like Jean Hyppolite and Michael Löwy have taken it up as a core Marxian text, while Maximilien Rubel gave it a prominent place in his Oeuvres of Marx for the prestigious Pléiade series. Cotranslator Max Blechman's effective introductory essay contextualizes these issues, and more.

Abensour does not furnish either an introduction to or an exegesis of the 1843 “Critique of Hegel's ‘Philosophy of Right’” itself, plunging directly into a broader debate about democracy, the state, and revolution. Much of his take on Marx and democracy revolves around a single, somewhat enigmatic sentence he cites from the 1843 Critique: “The modern French have conceived it thus: In true democracy [wahren Demokratie] the political state disappears” (p. 2). To Abensour, the phrase “democratic state,” employed a decade earlier by Tocqueville and ever since, is an oxymoron. The state, he argues, is the enemy of modern or “insurgent” democracy, which since 1789 has struggled on “two fronts”: “As in the French Revolution, with the popular societies and les Enragés, it rises against the state of the Old Regime and at the same time against the new state in statu nascendi, the one which brings to power new ‘nobles’ hoping to dominate the people in their turn” (p. xxxv). In this way, Abensour identifies himself with libertarian revolutionary traditions, both anti-Jacobin and anti-Leninist. He is also suspicious of modern liberal democracy's constitutional state under the rule of law, initially “conceived in order to tie the hands of [state] power,” but resulting in the penetration of the state into the whole of society (p. 97). (The otherwise superb translation is opaque at this point, rendering Abensour's “état de droit”/“Rechtstaat” as “state of right,” rather than “constitutional state” or “rule of law.”)

The reference to the “popular societies” of the 1790s is crucial, for here Abensour—who is coeditor of a collection of the writings of the Jacobin leader Saint-Just—also demarcates himself from anarchism and its rejection of politics. Insurgent democracy, as he presents it, involves the development and sustenance of popular institutions—neighborhood associations, class-based groupings, and so on—while at the same time contesting the institutionalized and truncated form of democracy of the modern liberal state. Thus, far from aiming toward a utopia beyond politics, insurgent democracy fights to retain political debate, difference, and pluralism, even in a postrevolutionary society. In this sense, Abensour opposes the utopian notions of a society free of factional conflict that can be found in both liberal and socialist notions of revolution. He is probably closer to Rosa Luxemburg's early criticism from the left of Lenin and Trotsky's postrevolutionary dictatorship: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently” (Rosa Luxemburg Reader, eds. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson [2004], 305). Of course, the Bolsheviks were to ban factions, as had the Jacobins before them.

Absensour's espousal of a sort of permanent democratic revolution, going against both the old system and the newly constituted state that replaces it, is what brings him into the sphere of Machiavelli. He reads the Italian philosopher as an upholder of civic humanism in the manner of Pocock, while stressing Machiavelli's “originary division expressed best by the opposition of desires: the desire of the great to command and oppress the people, and that of the people to be neither commanded nor oppressed—the desire for liberty” (p. 74).

Abensour regards Marx's 1859 Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, which described his 1843 Hegel critique as having shown that “political forms … originate in the material conditions of life” as something of a step backward, involving a “decentering of the political” (p. 10), where themes from 1843 were “forgotten or repressed” (p. 11). The 1859 Preface, best known for its statement that “social existence … determines consciousness” (p. 10), has long been a favorite of those attempting to portray Marx as an economic reductionist.

The themes of insurgent democracy are recovered in the “Civil War in France,” Marx's pamphlet on the Paris Commune of 1871. Abensour argues that this text, which also focuses on the political dimension, evidenced “an anti-statist matrix that persists in the form of a latent dimension in Marx's oeuvre, always susceptible to rise again and produce new fruit” (p. 88).

This points to a problem in Absensour's interpretation of Marx, who wrote that the Commune represented “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor” (Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan [2000], 589). In paraphrasing it, Abensour bends this phrase slightly, substituting “social” for “economic.” In this way, he elides a major difference between the Marx of 1843, who had yet to develop a real critique of capital, and the Marx of 1871. To the later Marx, even the Commune's radically insurgent democracy, one that in his eyes had famously smashed the state, constituted a necessary but insufficient step if it could not move on to free the working class from the rule of capital.

Abensour also ties his interpretation of Marx to contemporary debates in democratic theory, especially the discussions of democracy and of anarchy in the work of Claude Lefort and Reiner Schürmann, as well as earlier writings by Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas.

Overall, this book makes a most significant contribution. It offers a fresh and generally persuasive interpretation of Marx, while also addressing some contemporary issues within democratic theory.