Empire and Democracy: Political Antinomies in the Thought of Karl Marx is a paper under-work, presented at APSA 2025. In it, following the recent turn to Marxist thought in democratic theory, I that Karl Marx’s theory of democracy is most robustly and actionably defined as the antinomy to ‘empire,’ a pervasive mode of domination. In this, I trace the development of Marx's critique of empire from his early, Left-Hegelian works, through his journalistic writings on India, to his reflections on the Paris Commune. In doing this excavation, I shed-light on the positive content of Marxian democracy and contribute to filling in a lacuna in recent work on Marx and democratic theory—his writings on contemporary imperialism.
