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PORTSIDE CULTURE

REPUBLICANISM AND THE FORMATION OF KARL MARX’S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL
THOUGHT  
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Tim Christiaens
February 17, 2025
LSE Review of Books
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_ In this book, writes reviewer Christiaens, author Bruno Leipold
expertly surveys the writings of Karl Marx and tracks his intellectual
journey which vacillated between and combined republicanism and
socialism. _

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_Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social
and Political Thought_
Bruno Leipold
Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691205236

We treat words like “Marxism” and “communism” today as almost
synonymous, but in the 19th century, the socialist scene was composed
of multiple intellectuals vying to determine the course of progressive
politics. Socialism was in fact far from being the dominant
ideological opponent on the progressive spectrum to conservatism and
liberalism. Republicanism championed the cause of popular freedom on
mostly political, non-economic grounds. It favoured political reforms
to enfranchise popular self-government but was weary of using the
state to impose socio-economic equality on the population. Progressive
republicans mainly criticised the arbitrary use of power by
authoritarian state apparatuses and campaigned for the broadening of
political participation. Only in the 19th century did their focus
shift slightly from the political sphere to the factory, when some
republicans realised that, even if people would be liberated from
authoritarian kings and oppressive aristocracies, they would still
suffer from social dependency under the system of capitalist
wage-labour. The republicans strove for a return to a pre-bourgeois
economy of small-scale artisans, local farmers, and independent
business owners as a remedy against the ongoing proletarianisation of
workers under industrial capitalism.

Leipold meticulously documents Marx’s vacillating journey between
the philosophies of republicanism and socialism.

Long before Marx became the figurehead of socialist thought, his
intellectual development was deeply rooted in this republican
tradition. In _Citizen Marx, _political theorist and historian of
political thought Bruno Leipold_ _meticulously documents Marx’s
vacillating journey between the philosophies of republicanism and
socialism. While republicanism focused on political reforms to
constitutional systems, electoral laws, or civil rights, and promoted
a return to a middle-class economy of small business owners, socialism
fully embraced the economic and technological development of
capitalism toward concentration of power and proletarianisation. The
industrialisation of production was, for the socialist movement, a
blessing in disguise insofar as it massively increased the collective
production of wealth. Economies of scale augmented the overall wealth
available to society, but capitalist property laws denied workers the
benefits of this economic progress. The socialists subsequently
imagined different ways for the working class to claim ownership over
the enhanced means of production. However, most of these proposals
were surprisingly silent on politics, constitutional reform, or
revolution. Robert Owen
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thought capitalists could simply be convinced into founding
worker-managed cooperatives while Henri Saint-Simon
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believed politics could be reduced to a technocratic science that
would let experts administer the production and distribution of goods
without much democratic input.  

Classical history of political thought tends to present Marx’s
thought as a stand-alone, independent reflection on the political
tensions of industrial capitalism, as if Marx’s socialism emerged
out of an intellectual vacuum. But Leipold shows that Marx
continuously positioned himself vis-à-vis rival thinkers and
activists.

Leipold’s book documents Marx’s intellectual development between
these two philosophies to show how Marx articulated his own hybrid
version of republican socialism, which would soon become the dominant
intellectual tradition of progressive politics for one-hundred years.
Leipold superbly surveys Marx’s expansive oeuvre from his early
journalistic writings – and even his high-school essays – to his
major works in political economy and his commentaries on the Paris
Commune. He thereby distinguishes three phases in Marx’s thought.
While Marx started as a republican critic of the Prussian State and
Hegelian philosophy, around 1843 he broke publicly and privately with
republicanism and shifted towards socialism. Only much later, in his
commentaries
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on the failed republican experiments in France, would Marx
wholeheartedly return to his republican principles. But by now, these
principles would be so infused with socialist political economy that
it put Marx in direct confrontation with the main republican thinkers
of his day, like Giuseppe Mazzini
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While the latter dismissed the Paris Commune
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from the start as futile working-class egoism, Marx viewed the Commune
as a tragic prefiguration of a post-capitalist future that
convincingly combined working-class social emancipation with
republican institutions of democratic self-government. The road
forward, he believed, lay in a combination of the collectivisation of
the economic infrastructure and the establishment of a social republic
that would put the proletariat definitively in charge of this
infrastructure. 

The key lesson from Leipold’s work is how Marx created his hybrid
philosophy of republicanism and socialism through intense continued
debate with other critical thinkers of his time. Most of these authors
are currently forgotten, like the republican Hegelian Arnold Ruge
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the antipolitical socialist Karl Grün
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anti-communist republican Karl Heinzen.
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Classical history of political thought tends to present Marx’s
thought as a stand-alone, independent reflection on the political
tensions of industrial capitalism, as if Marx’s socialism emerged
out of an intellectual vacuum. But Leipold shows that Marx
continuously positioned himself vis-à-vis rival thinkers and
activists. Without the intellectual conflict between these competing
views, there simply would not have been a Marxian political
philosophy. If class struggle is the motor of history, then
intellectual struggle was the motor of Marx’s life. By excavating
the writings of these understudied rival thinkers – including the
witty details of how these individuals clashed with Marx’s
challenging personality – Leipold throws Marx’s thought in the
flames from which it drew its vigorous spark.  

Socialist political philosophy as a political practice should not
consistently reaffirm a coherent, static doctrine of theoretical
principles. Rather, it is a dynamic series of interventions in
concrete political situations

A new look at the chemical reaction of republican and socialist
elements that produced the combustion we nowadays call “Karl
Marx’s philosophy” is particularly interesting for today’s
left-wing political thought. On the one hand, an influential strand of
accelerationist Marxism
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has moved away from experiments in local anti-hierarchical social
movements and democratic self-government, which they dismissively
describe as “folk politics
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They champion technological innovation as leverage toward a
postcapitalist future where humanity can enjoy renewed free time as
the production process becomes increasingly automated. On the other
hand, new left-wing republicanisms have either uncoupled progressive
demands for popular self-government from economic working-class
emancipation (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
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and/or revived the ideal of property-owning democracy for independent
small-scale business owners (Elizabeth Anderson
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Even within the communist movement itself, calls for degrowth
communism (Kohei Saito
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dismiss Marx’s pleas for collectivising the industrial production
apparatus in favour of small-scale, self-reliant economies reminiscent
of republican agrarianism. 

While these debates between pro- or anti-growth, pro- or
anti-technology, pro- or anti-agrarian communes are currently ravaging
left-wing intellectual debate, Marx’s hybrid and flexible
positioning between republican self-government and socialist
large-scale collectivised production provides a helpful new
perspective. Socialist political philosophy as a political practice
should not consistently reaffirm a coherent, static doctrine of
theoretical principles. Rather, it is a dynamic series of
interventions in concrete political situations, where the
“correctness” of a position is determined through a theory’s
effectiveness in political and intellectual struggle. By showing the
malleability and relativity of Marx’s own thought throughout his
struggles with other progressive thinkers, Leipold teaches
progressives today the same lesson of identifying philosophical
thought as an exercise in political intervention.

_NOTE: This review gives the views of the author, not the position of
the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and
Political Science._

Dr. Tim Christiaens is assistant professor of philosophy and economic
ethics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He writes about
critical theory in relation to work and/or technology with, among
others, a book on platform work called _Digital Working Lives_ (Rowman
& Littlefield, 2022).

* Karl Marx
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* Republicanism
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* Left Politics
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* Socialist Political Theory
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