Plebeian internationalism

This chapter examines how social movements of the mid-19th century developed projects of radical republicanism across and against the borders of nation–states. Plebeian internationalists extended republican ideas of freedom, equality, fraternity and civic virtue to working-class institution-building, refiguring their meaning in distinctly emancipatory and transnational registers. Recovering this hidden tradition not only draws attention to connections between republican and socialist thought; it also reveals the contingency of the nation–state as the dominant form of democratic politics. Plebeian internationalism points to alternatives which, though defeated in their own time, might once again speak to social movements in the present.