Alex Gourevitch
Biographic Data
| ID | 112770 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alex Gourevitch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alex |
| FAMILY NAME | Gourevitch |
| SIGNATURE | GOUREVITCH A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brown University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 214 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Strikes, civil rights, and radical disobedience: From King to Debs and back
Solidarity and Civic Virtue: Labour Republicanism and the Politics of Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century America
This chapter argues that debates around republicanism and civic virtue are structured around two unwarranted assumptions. First, neo-republicans and their critics assume that civic virtues are qualities that stabilize a free state. Second, they assume that the cultivation of virtue primarily requires coercive inculcation. I contest both assumptions through historical reconstruction of nineteenth-century ‘labour republicanism’. Labour republicans …
Themselves Must Strike the Blow: The Socialist Argument for Strikes and Self-Emancipation
Socialists know that they ought to defend strikes, but why? The best argument is that strikes are acts of self-emancipation. The ideal of self-emancipation lies at the heart of socialist political theory. It is up to workers to emancipate themselves, not just because it takes class power to overthrow capitalism, but because there is an intrinsic connection between class struggle and socialist freedom. Workers can only possess and exercise the fre…
Freedom Now
Left-wing politics is resurgent. Self-proclaimed socialists are unexpectedly popular. Proposals like universal health care are a commonplace of Democratic campaigns. But there is not yet a clear, unifying idea behind this political shift. We propose that that idea is freedom. While the left once understood freedom as emancipation from the economy, the right spent the twentieth century neutralizing and appropriating the idea of freedom by reinvent…
The Right to Strike: A Radical View
Workers face a common dilemma when exercising their right to strike. For the worst-off workers to go on strike with some reasonable chance of success, they must use coercive strike tactics like mass pickets and sit-downs. These tactics violate some basic liberties, such as contract, association, and private property, and the laws that protect those liberties. Which has priority, the right to strike or the basic liberties strikers might violate? T…
The Limits of a Basic Income: Means and Ends of Workplace Democracy
A democratic economy matters for different reasons, depending on why we are concerned about authoritarian workplaces. Authoritarian work conditions violate overlap but distinct values, related to democratic government, meaningful work, non-domination, exploitation, and the quality of leisure time. To the degree that democratizing work is supposed to advance these values, a basic income is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for eliminati…
Quitting Work but Not the Job: Liberty and the Right to Strike
The right to strike is everywhere recognized but appears unjustifiable. Strikers refuse to work but they claim a right to the job. This sounds like illiberal privilege, or at least it cannot be a coercively enforceable claim. I argue, however, that the right to strike is justified as a way of resisting intertwined forms of structural and personal domination associated with the modern labor market. Workers are structurally dominated insofar as bei…
Police Work: The Centrality of Labor Repression in American Political History
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century
This book reconstructs how a group of nineteenth-century labor reformers appropriated and radicalized the republican tradition. These 'labor republicans' derived their definition of freedom from a long tradition of political theory dating back to the classical republics. In this tradition, to be free is to be independent of anyone else's will - to be dependent is to be a slave. Borrowing these ideas, labor republicans argued that wage laborers we…
Liberty and its economies
The revival of classical liberal thought has reignited a debate about economic freedom and social justice. Classical liberals claim to defend expansive economic freedom, while their critics wish to restrict this freedom for other values. However, there are two problems with the role ‘economic freedom’ plays in this debate: inconsistency in the use of the concept and indeterminacy with respect to its definition. Inconsistency in the use of the con…
Welcome to the Dark Side: A Classical-Liberal Argument for Economic Democracy
John Tomasi's Free Market Fairness claims to provide a principled defense of classical-liberal institutions. Respect for the development of our moral powers or “self-authorship,” according to Tomasi, requires that we make certain economic liberties basic, including freedom of contract and the right to accumulate property. Yet Tomasi's principles and his institutions are at odds. Tomasi has provided ethical grounds for defending not classical-libe…
Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work
In the nineteenth century a group of “labor republicans” argued that the system of wage-labor should be replaced by a system of cooperative production. This system of cooperative production would realize republican liberty in economic, not just political, life. Today, neo-republicans argue that the republican theory of liberty only requires a universal basic income. A non-dominated ability to exit is sufficient to guarantee free labor. This essay…
William Manning and the Political Theory of the Dependent Classes
This article reappraises the political ideas of William Manning, and through him the trajectory of early modern republicanism. Manning, an early American farmer writing in the 1780s and 1790s, developed the republican distinction between “the idle Few” and “the laboring Many” into a novel “political theory of the dependent classes.” On this theory, it is the dependent, laboring classes who share an interest in social equality. Because of this int…
Labor and Republican Liberty
Environmentalism-Long Live the Politics of Fear
It is safe to say that the politics of fear, that doomed project of national rejuvenation through fear and emergency, is in the past. But past in what sense? The answer depends on the response to another question: what are the alternatives offered by the Left that could provide an equally overarching and commanding framework to replace the war on terror? Environmentalism is one of the few movements on the left that presents itself in the same tot…
Are Human Rights Liberal
This paper provides a liberal critique of paternalistic tendencies in the contemporary human rights concept. In contrast to familiar arguments that the paternalism of human rights comes from a false universalism, concealing a culturally specific normativity or gender inequality, I critique what I take to be the way contemporary human rights thinking reconceives of the rights-bearer. First, the theory reconceives of the rights-bearing subject not …
Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work
In the nineteenth century a group of “labor republicans” argued that the system of wage-labor should be replaced by a system of cooperative production. This system of cooperative production would realize republican liberty in economic, not just political, life. Today, neo-republicans argue that the republican theory of liberty only requires a universal basic income. A non-dominated ability to exit is sufficient to guarantee free labor. This essay…
From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century
This book reconstructs how a group of nineteenth-century labor reformers appropriated and radicalized the republican tradition. These 'labor republicans' derived their definition of freedom from a long tradition of political theory dating back to the classical republics. In this tradition, to be free is to be independent of anyone else's will - to be dependent is to be a slave. Borrowing these ideas, labor republicans argued that wage laborers we…
The Right to Strike: A Radical View
Workers face a common dilemma when exercising their right to strike. For the worst-off workers to go on strike with some reasonable chance of success, they must use coercive strike tactics like mass pickets and sit-downs. These tactics violate some basic liberties, such as contract, association, and private property, and the laws that protect those liberties. Which has priority, the right to strike or the basic liberties strikers might violate? T…
Labor and Republican Liberty
Quitting Work but Not the Job: Liberty and the Right to Strike
The right to strike is everywhere recognized but appears unjustifiable. Strikers refuse to work but they claim a right to the job. This sounds like illiberal privilege, or at least it cannot be a coercively enforceable claim. I argue, however, that the right to strike is justified as a way of resisting intertwined forms of structural and personal domination associated with the modern labor market. Workers are structurally dominated insofar as bei…
Freedom Now
Left-wing politics is resurgent. Self-proclaimed socialists are unexpectedly popular. Proposals like universal health care are a commonplace of Democratic campaigns. But there is not yet a clear, unifying idea behind this political shift. We propose that that idea is freedom. While the left once understood freedom as emancipation from the economy, the right spent the twentieth century neutralizing and appropriating the idea of freedom by reinvent…
Police Work: The Centrality of Labor Repression in American Political History
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Liberty and its economies
The revival of classical liberal thought has reignited a debate about economic freedom and social justice. Classical liberals claim to defend expansive economic freedom, while their critics wish to restrict this freedom for other values. However, there are two problems with the role ‘economic freedom’ plays in this debate: inconsistency in the use of the concept and indeterminacy with respect to its definition. Inconsistency in the use of the con…
Environmentalism-Long Live the Politics of Fear
It is safe to say that the politics of fear, that doomed project of national rejuvenation through fear and emergency, is in the past. But past in what sense? The answer depends on the response to another question: what are the alternatives offered by the Left that could provide an equally overarching and commanding framework to replace the war on terror? Environmentalism is one of the few movements on the left that presents itself in the same tot…
Welcome to the Dark Side: A Classical-Liberal Argument for Economic Democracy
John Tomasi's Free Market Fairness claims to provide a principled defense of classical-liberal institutions. Respect for the development of our moral powers or “self-authorship,” according to Tomasi, requires that we make certain economic liberties basic, including freedom of contract and the right to accumulate property. Yet Tomasi's principles and his institutions are at odds. Tomasi has provided ethical grounds for defending not classical-libe…
Are Human Rights Liberal
This paper provides a liberal critique of paternalistic tendencies in the contemporary human rights concept. In contrast to familiar arguments that the paternalism of human rights comes from a false universalism, concealing a culturally specific normativity or gender inequality, I critique what I take to be the way contemporary human rights thinking reconceives of the rights-bearer. First, the theory reconceives of the rights-bearing subject not …
Strikes, civil rights, and radical disobedience: From King to Debs and back
William Manning and the Political Theory of the Dependent Classes
This article reappraises the political ideas of William Manning, and through him the trajectory of early modern republicanism. Manning, an early American farmer writing in the 1780s and 1790s, developed the republican distinction between “the idle Few” and “the laboring Many” into a novel “political theory of the dependent classes.” On this theory, it is the dependent, laboring classes who share an interest in social equality. Because of this int…
Are Human Rights Liberal
This paper provides a liberal critique of paternalistic tendencies in the contemporary human rights concept. In contrast to familiar arguments that the paternalism of human rights comes from a false universalism, concealing a culturally specific normativity or gender inequality, I critique what I take to be the way contemporary human rights thinking reconceives of the rights-bearer. First, the theory reconceives of the rights-bearing subject not …
Environmentalism-Long Live the Politics of Fear
It is safe to say that the politics of fear, that doomed project of national rejuvenation through fear and emergency, is in the past. But past in what sense? The answer depends on the response to another question: what are the alternatives offered by the Left that could provide an equally overarching and commanding framework to replace the war on terror? Environmentalism is one of the few movements on the left that presents itself in the same tot…
Labor and Republican Liberty
William Manning and the Political Theory of the Dependent Classes
This article reappraises the political ideas of William Manning, and through him the trajectory of early modern republicanism. Manning, an early American farmer writing in the 1780s and 1790s, developed the republican distinction between “the idle Few” and “the laboring Many” into a novel “political theory of the dependent classes.” On this theory, it is the dependent, laboring classes who share an interest in social equality. Because of this int…
Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work
In the nineteenth century a group of “labor republicans” argued that the system of wage-labor should be replaced by a system of cooperative production. This system of cooperative production would realize republican liberty in economic, not just political, life. Today, neo-republicans argue that the republican theory of liberty only requires a universal basic income. A non-dominated ability to exit is sufficient to guarantee free labor. This essay…
From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century
This book reconstructs how a group of nineteenth-century labor reformers appropriated and radicalized the republican tradition. These 'labor republicans' derived their definition of freedom from a long tradition of political theory dating back to the classical republics. In this tradition, to be free is to be independent of anyone else's will - to be dependent is to be a slave. Borrowing these ideas, labor republicans argued that wage laborers we…
Liberty and its economies
The revival of classical liberal thought has reignited a debate about economic freedom and social justice. Classical liberals claim to defend expansive economic freedom, while their critics wish to restrict this freedom for other values. However, there are two problems with the role ‘economic freedom’ plays in this debate: inconsistency in the use of the concept and indeterminacy with respect to its definition. Inconsistency in the use of the con…
Welcome to the Dark Side: A Classical-Liberal Argument for Economic Democracy
John Tomasi's Free Market Fairness claims to provide a principled defense of classical-liberal institutions. Respect for the development of our moral powers or “self-authorship,” according to Tomasi, requires that we make certain economic liberties basic, including freedom of contract and the right to accumulate property. Yet Tomasi's principles and his institutions are at odds. Tomasi has provided ethical grounds for defending not classical-libe…
Police Work: The Centrality of Labor Repression in American Political History
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The Limits of a Basic Income: Means and Ends of Workplace Democracy
A democratic economy matters for different reasons, depending on why we are concerned about authoritarian workplaces. Authoritarian work conditions violate overlap but distinct values, related to democratic government, meaningful work, non-domination, exploitation, and the quality of leisure time. To the degree that democratizing work is supposed to advance these values, a basic income is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for eliminati…
Quitting Work but Not the Job: Liberty and the Right to Strike
The right to strike is everywhere recognized but appears unjustifiable. Strikers refuse to work but they claim a right to the job. This sounds like illiberal privilege, or at least it cannot be a coercively enforceable claim. I argue, however, that the right to strike is justified as a way of resisting intertwined forms of structural and personal domination associated with the modern labor market. Workers are structurally dominated insofar as bei…
The Right to Strike: A Radical View
Workers face a common dilemma when exercising their right to strike. For the worst-off workers to go on strike with some reasonable chance of success, they must use coercive strike tactics like mass pickets and sit-downs. These tactics violate some basic liberties, such as contract, association, and private property, and the laws that protect those liberties. Which has priority, the right to strike or the basic liberties strikers might violate? T…
Solidarity and Civic Virtue: Labour Republicanism and the Politics of Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century America
This chapter argues that debates around republicanism and civic virtue are structured around two unwarranted assumptions. First, neo-republicans and their critics assume that civic virtues are qualities that stabilize a free state. Second, they assume that the cultivation of virtue primarily requires coercive inculcation. I contest both assumptions through historical reconstruction of nineteenth-century ‘labour republicanism’. Labour republicans …
Themselves Must Strike the Blow: The Socialist Argument for Strikes and Self-Emancipation
Socialists know that they ought to defend strikes, but why? The best argument is that strikes are acts of self-emancipation. The ideal of self-emancipation lies at the heart of socialist political theory. It is up to workers to emancipate themselves, not just because it takes class power to overthrow capitalism, but because there is an intrinsic connection between class struggle and socialist freedom. Workers can only possess and exercise the fre…
Freedom Now
Left-wing politics is resurgent. Self-proclaimed socialists are unexpectedly popular. Proposals like universal health care are a commonplace of Democratic campaigns. But there is not yet a clear, unifying idea behind this political shift. We propose that that idea is freedom. While the left once understood freedom as emancipation from the economy, the right spent the twentieth century neutralizing and appropriating the idea of freedom by reinvent…
Strikes, civil rights, and radical disobedience: From King to Debs and back
Law (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Politics (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (11 works) · Law and economics (9 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (8 works) · Democracy (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (5 works)