Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Marx’s Social and Political Thought

Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx is a bracing and convincingly argued reconstruction of Karl Marx’s political thought through the lens of the republican tradition. Rather than rehearse the familiar opposition between ‘liberal rights’ and ‘socialist equality’, Leipold situates Marx inside a longer genealogy of anti-domination politics, contending that republican freedom – as non-subjection to arbitrary power – was not merely incidental but constitutive of Marx’s intellectual development from the 1840s through Capital. He thus invites readers to reassess Marx not as an anti-political economic determinist but as a theorist for whom democratic institutions and civic self-rule are crucial means for overcoming capitalist unfreedom.

Leipold’s central thesis is straightforward and, in retrospect, disarmingly plausible: Marx’s mature critique of capitalism is best read as a republican argument that wage-labor places the worker under the arbitrary power of capital, just as monarchical or oligarchic rule places citizens under arbitrary political power. The novelty here is neither to reduce Marx to a ‘republican’ nor to deny the specificity of his critique of exploitation; rather, it is to show that Marx’s normative standard for unfreedom is continuous with the neo-Roman idea that to be free is not simply to be unmolested (the liberal ‘non-interference’ ideal) but to live without subjection to alien will. Leipold’s framing aligns Marx with a strand that runs from Machiavelli and the English Commonwealthmen to nineteenth-century radical republicanism; but he also documents how Marx pushes beyond classical civicism by locating domination in social relations of production.

Methodologically, the book is at its strongest when it reconstructs the micro-genealogy of Marx’s concepts through close readings of canonical texts and neglected journalism. It is often overlooked that Marx began his career as a staunch republican journalist ‘committed to overcoming the arbitrary power of despotic regimes through a democratic republic in which the people held active popular sovereignty through public administration by citizens and the control of representatives through binding mandates’ (8). The first article Marx published was a defense of the freedom of the press – and while his thinking eventually transitioned to communism, a form of communism that incorporated ‘much of his prior republicanism’ (11), it was a commitment from which he never wavered. What led Marx to embrace a ‘republican communism’ (13) was the realization that a free state, or political freedom, did not guarantee a free society; or, to put it somewhat different, political democracy without economic democracy left man in shackles.

Leipold’s reading of Marx’s theory of the state is among the book’s most illuminating contributions. He challenges the widespread assumption that Marx regarded political institutions as transient epiphenomena destined to ‘wither away.’ Instead, Leipold insists that Marx’s mature writings – particularly his analysis of the Paris Commune – reflect a persistent concern with institutional design. The Commune’s mechanisms of accountability, collective decision-making and recallability of representatives express, for Marx, a concretely republican vision of democracy, freed from the mediation of a separate bureaucratic state. This interpretation places Marx closer to modern neo-republicans such as Philip Pettit or Quentin Skinner than to deterministic materialists. For Leipold, the abolition of the state does not mean the end of politics but its reinvention: the establishment of a political order in which collective power is no longer alienated from those who exercise it. Republicanism, under Marx’s hand, thus becomes a theory of radical democracy.

While Citizen Marx succeeds in offering a compelling reinterpretation, certain limitations remain. Several reviewers, including Søren Mau in Spectre Journal, have noted that Leipold’s focus on republicanism comes at the expense of a deeper analysis of Marx’s critique of political economy. The relation between domination and exploitation – between the normative and the structural – is never fully theorized. Without engaging Marx’s value theory or the dynamics of capital accumulation, Leipold risks presenting a moralized Marx whose critique of capitalism appears as a plea for justice rather than as a systemic analysis of production.

These are not fatal objections; Leipold does not deny value theory’s centrality. But the concern invites a question about explanatory priority: if republican non-domination supplies the normative standard for unfreedom, does Marx’s explanatory account of exploitation (rooted in labor-value, competition and accumulation) risk being reinterpreted as merely ancillary? Leipold mostly avoids this trap by arguing that domination and exploitation are mutually illuminating: domination names the form of unfreedom; exploitation supplies the mechanism. Even so, an explicit meta-theoretical chapter clarifying this division of labor would strengthen the book’s bridge to political economy.

The book also enters a crowded conversation about Marx’s relation to democracy. Against the stereotype of an anti-political Marx who disdained rights and procedure, Leipold amasses evidence that Marx defended parliamentary struggle, universal suffrage and workers’ associations not only instrumentally but as constitutive checks on arbitrary rule. In this respect, the project converges with recent work that recovers Marx’s ‘political’ commitments without collapsing them into liberalism. What distinguishes Citizen Marx is its systematicity: it is not content to show that Marx ‘also cared about politics’; it reconstructs a coherent republican vocabulary – arbitrariness, non-domination, civic self-rule – within which his mature socialism is legible. Popular summaries and event descriptions make this point crisply, but Leipold’s contribution is to embed it in sustained exegetical work across early and late Marx.

A related strength is the book’s historiographical discipline. Leipold resists easy genealogies in which ‘republican Marx’ is simply opposed to ‘liberal Marx’ Rather, he tracks how republican concerns mutate as Marx encounters the social question. For instance, one finds in the 1840s a civic idiom of citizenship and corruption; after Capital, arbitrariness is relocated to the despotic power of the labor process and the subordination produced by market dependence. This dual movement – politics into economy, economy into politics – supports a conclusion shared by recent reviewers in both scholarly and public venues: Marx’s republicanism is not an add-on; it is the normative grammar that makes sense of his critique of capital’s rule.

One may also ask what follows for contemporary socialist strategy. Here Leipold is suggestive rather than prescriptive, but the implications are clear. If domination is the central vice and non-domination the central virtue, then democratic institutional design is not dispensable: workplace governance, public ownership with recallable mandates and constitutional constraints on private concentrations of power become central to any transition beyond capitalism. That orientation pushes against romantic anti-statism while refusing technocratic statism; the aim is to minimize arbitrariness – whether of market or bureaucracy – through civic control. Leipold’s public talks and interviews repeatedly emphasize this double refusal, and the reception across venues – LSE, Jacobin, Spectre and academic podcasts – suggests the book arrives at a moment when left strategy is again re-thinking its relation to the state, parties and civic power.

There are, however, some places where the argument might be pushed further. First, the republican tradition has its own ambivalences – its historical complicity with exclusionary citizenship, civic militarism and property-owning virtue. Leipold acknowledges these tensions implicitly by underscoring Marx’s universalist turn, but the review literature notes that a more frontal treatment of republicanism’s limits (and how Marx revises them) would help inoculate the project against a too-rosy portrait of civic freedom. Second, the book’s treatment of empire and racial domination – central sites of modern arbitrariness – could be more integrally woven into the republican frame. To the extent Marx’s journalism on Ireland or India is addressed, it provides a powerful test case for a global, non-Eurocentric republicanism; here one wishes for additional chapters. (To be fair, at 440 pages, the book already covers enviable ground.)

A final question concerns synthesis. What exactly is gained by naming Marx’s position ‘republican’, rather than ‘democratic socialist’ or ‘radical democratic communist’? The gain – and Leipold persuades on this point – is conceptual clarity about freedom. Republicanism centers the asymmetry of power (who can act arbitrarily over whom?), whereas liberalism centers interference and some socialist idioms center distribution. Citizen Marx argues that Marx’s own emphasis falls on domination: exploitation matters because it institutionalizes arbitrary power over workers’ lives; alienation matters because it reflects a polity in which collective self-rule has been privatized. In that sense, ‘republican communism’ names the book’s deepest insight: that socialist transformation must be architected as the minimization of arbitrariness across social life. Reviewers sympathetic and critical converge here, even when urging the author to integrate more economic theory or neglected texts; their convergence, in fact, testifies to the book’s generative power.

Citizen Marx stands as a major contribution to both Marx studies and republican political theory. It reinvigorates a dialogue between two traditions often treated as incompatible – Marxism and republicanism – and shows how the former can be read as the radical fulfillment of the latter. In doing so, Leipold provides a conceptual bridge between historical materialism and contemporary theories of freedom, democracy and power. The implications of this argument extend beyond intellectual history. By framing capitalism as a system of domination rather than merely of exploitation, Leipold aligns Marx’s critique with current political debates about structural dependence, inequality and democratic control. In an age of corporate power and algorithmic governance, the republican Marx becomes strikingly relevant: the theorist of freedom not as choice or consumption, but as collective self-determination.

By recentering republican non-domination in Marx, Leipold neither domesticates Marx into civic virtue ethics nor abstracts him into a purely moral philosopher. He clarifies how Marx’s diagnosis of capital’s ‘despotism’ is not a metaphor but a political claim about arbitrary social power embedded in production – and why, therefore, democracy without socialism is structurally thin, just as socialism without democracy is normatively self-defeating. As a work of intellectual history, the book is judicious and well-sourced; as a contribution to contemporary political theory, it is bracing. If one measure of success is whether a book changes how we gloss familiar texts, Leipold’s achievement is considerable: after Citizen Marx, it is harder to read Marx’s account of ‘the despotism of capital’ as merely figurative; it reads, more exactly, as a republican indictment and a socialist program for ending arbitrary power.