The Plebeian International: Traditions of the Vanquished in Radical Republican Thought

What has been lost with the victory of the nation-state as the institutional framework of democratic politics? This dissertation turns to the Atlantic world between the 1830s and 1870s, when national sovereignty was not yet taken as the only source of democratic legitimacy, in order to recover anti-oligarchic visions of democracy on a transnational scale. Reading actors from dominated groups as political theorists who imagined popular power in opposition to elite rule, it shifts attention from a republican tradition in the Anglophone North Atlantic to plebeian republican currents linking France and Brazil. Against the idea of democracy as the expression of a unified national will, a neglected tradition of plebeian internationalism treated it as a form of institutionally mediated counter-power to constrain domination by the few and enable relations of freedom and equality among the many. Plebeian internationalists invoked the ancient Roman figure of the people as plebs, yet not out of a nostalgic desire to recreate a republic of the ancients; instead, the plebs offered radical republicans a language for anti-oligarchic counter-power, out of time and out of place in a nation-building nineteenth century: popular power exercised against domination rather than sovereignty exercised over territory.

Plebeian internationalists sought to build what they called a “universal republic,” which, though variously labeled “associationism,” “guarantism,” or “federalism,” they understood as a project already under way in social movements, not as an abstract cosmopolitan ideal. Yet in a less familiar gesture, their radical republicanism was also animated by a backward-looking perspective: appeals to an inherited “ancient constitution” of communal powers and customary rights, usurped by elites, nation-states, and property regimes alike. For plebeian internationalists, republican citizenship was a collective practice, consisting in the defense and reinvention of shared institutions, regenerated from below, both preceding and exceeding national borders. To speak of a “universal republic” was to imagine popular powers beyond national enclosures while drawing legitimacy from reclaimed inheritances rather than from a sovereign foundation.

The dissertation opens with Lorenz von Stein’s theory of the “social movement,” first devised while serving as a Prussian police agent, which domesticated the plebeian internationalist imagination of an emergent workers’ movement into an object of national administration. Subsequent chapters then trace plebeian internationalist visions as contributions to an anti-oligarchic democracy beyond the nation-state. They focus on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s federalism against usurpation, which denounced property and nation-states alike as the “theft” of collective powers while naturalizing patriarchal “privileges of sex,” a tension the chapter reconstructs through Proudhon’s dialogue with his feminist critics Jeanne Deroin and Joseph Déjacque; the Brazilian journalist Antônio Pedro de Figueiredo, the first Black writer in the Americas to call himself a “socialist,” who, in Recife during the 1840s, imagined an “integral association” of free and enslaved workers in a global struggle against “industrial and financial feudality”; the Brazilian abolitionist lawyer Luiz Gama, who presented maroon resistance as a “civic virtue” and whose arguments in the courtroom transformed the legal codes of the Brazilian Empire into mediations of plebeian counter-power; and Eugène Huzar’s account of “planetary aediles” (1857), which extended an ancient Roman institution to a planetary scale in proposing a democratic mechanism to constrain environmentally destructive elites.

By excavating a tradition of plebeian internationalism, this dissertation brings into view anti-usurpatory and transnational visions of democratic institution-building. Its unresolved tensions remain our own: how to build democratic power across borders, how to defend shared inheritances against oligarchic usurpation, and how to durably enact relations of freedom and equality in a fractured and unequal world.