A new idea is haunting the political world: republicanism. It does not feature much in the propaganda of political parties, even those that call themselves republican, but it has begun to play a role in political theory. Republicanism boasts a long pedigree, harking back to Aristotle’s notion of public participation in the polis, and to Machiavelli’s and Montesquieu’s writings on the rule of law, as well as to the activist patriotic citizenship associated with the American and French revolutions. In the 1970s, the republican notion of vigorous participation in public life (or ‘civil society’) provided inspiration to opponents of tyranny in the crumbling Soviet empire. Since then, it has emerged as a substantial alternative to the dreary dogmas that stretch across the conventional political spectrum, from state-inspired collectivism to market-based individualism. 

Bruno Leipold is an evangelist for republicanism, and in his informative and enjoyable new book he examines the political opinions of Karl Marx and their place in the rather neglected field of 19th-century republicanism. Marx became entangled with republican ideas, according to Leipold, when he was a young liberal grappling with the political legacy of Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel in the early 1840s. Marx was impressed by Hegel’s majestic narrative of social progress, in which the inchoate idiocies of primitive society lead to centuries of strife which give way, ultimately, to a harmonious social order where public affairs are administered by professional civil servants and national unity is guaranteed by a constitutional monarchy. The young Marx maintained, however, that sovereignty should be vested in ‘the people’ rather than some royal personage. This goes to show, in Leipold’s view, that he placed himself firmly in the republican tradition.

In 1847, Marx cast in his lot with the London-based Bund der Kommunisten, and when he moved to London two years later he got involved with various other political movements, including Chartism and the International Workingmen’s Association (known as the International). In some of the most illuminating passages in this