Ezra's Bookshelf

Citizen Marx

by Bruno Leipold · 440 pages · ~8 hrs

PhilosophyPolitics & Government

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Bruno Leipold provides a comprehensive analysis of Karl Marx's social and political thought, with particular attention to his underappreciated republicanism. While Marx is usually read as a critic of liberal democracy, Leipold shows that his thought drew heavily on the republican tradition's emphasis on freedom as non-domination. Marx's critique of capitalism was in significant part a critique of the domination that wage labor permits, and his vision of communism was a vision of a society in which no person depends on another's arbitrary will. Leipold, a political theorist, reads Marx's major works alongside lesser-known texts to reconstruct this republican dimension. He engages with contemporary debates in political philosophy about the nature of freedom and the conditions of its realization. The book is scholarly but accessible to readers interested in Marx or in political theory more broadly. For those who know Marx primarily through his economic analysis, Leipold offers a perspective that reveals new dimensions of the thought.

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