Events
CUHK LAW CCTL Transnational Legal History Group Book Talk – ‘Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought’ by Dr. Bruno Leipold (Online)
2 Apr 2025
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Online (Zoom)
Dr. Bruno Leipold is a political theorist and historian of political thought with a focus on the work of Karl Marx and the republican political tradition. He has previously been a fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg, the European University Institute in Florence, the Justitia Amplificata Centre for Advanced Studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt, the Free University of Berlin and the London School of Economics and Political Science. He will be an Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science from September 2025.
In Citizen Marx, Dr. Bruno Leipold argues that, contrary to certain interpretive commonplaces, Karl Marx’s thinking was deeply informed by republicanism. Marx’s relation to republicanism changed over the course of his life, but its complex influence on his thought cannot be reduced to wholesale adoption or rejection. Challenging common depictions of Marx that downplay or ignore his commitment to politics, democracy, and freedom, Leipold shows that Marx viewed democratic political institutions as crucial to overcoming the social unfreedom and domination of capitalism. One of Marx’s principal political values, Leipold contends, was a republican conception of freedom, according to which one is unfree when subjected to arbitrary power.
Language: English
