No Social Revolution Without Sexual Revolution

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591719829061
• Date: 01 December 2019
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

829061PTXXXX10.1177/0090591719829061Political TheoryDuong
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Political Theory
2019, Vol. 47(6) 809 –835
No Social Revolution
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Revolution
Kevin Duong1
Abstract
Recent studies have revealed how workers’ movements adapted republicanism
into a language of anticapitalism in the nineteenth century. Much less attention
has been paid, however, to the role feminists played in this process. This
essay addresses this oversight by introducing the voices of the utopian
socialists under July Monarchy France. These socialists insisted that there
could be no social revolution without sexual revolution. Although they are
often positioned outside of the republican tradition, this essay argues that the
utopian socialists are better understood as rendering the legacy of classical
and French republicanism compatible with nascent workers’ movements in
the 1830s. By foregrounding the feminist Flora Tristan, this essay shows how
utopian socialists weaponized republican tropes to address the social question,
thereby expanding what a republican critique of capitalism could look like.
Keywords
Socialism, feminism, republicanism, Flora Tristan, France
In the summer of 1843, Flora Tristan published L’Union ouvrière (The
Workers’ Union).1 Originally rejected by Parisian publishers, Tristan later
released the book with the help of direct subscriptions from sympathetic
workers: poets, artisans, painters, laundresses, masons, water carriers, and
1Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA
Corresponding Author:
Kevin Duong, Bard College, P.O. Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504, USA.
Email: kduong@bard.edu

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Political Theory 47(6)
playwrights, as well as intellectuals like Victor Considerant (who contributed
10 francs) and George Sand (40 francs). The Workers’ Union quickly went
through several editions. Each time, workers sponsored its reprint. Inside its
pages, Tristan called for proletarians of both sexes to unite and create for
themselves institutions for their social improvement. Inside, too, lay Tristan’s
critique of industrial society. The Workers’ Union analogized the condition of
wageworkers to those of women and denounced the situation of both as slav-
ery. It claimed that both groups could emancipate themselves through union-
ization. With a union, the promise of 1789 could be fulfilled for pariahs all
over—those men and women who, condemned by family and factory, found
themselves trapped in unfree dependence. In short, The Workers’ Union
stands as one of the first statements of socialist feminism in France and a
prominent example of a republican critique of capitalism in the first half of
the nineteenth century.
Political theorists have recently come to appreciate republicanism’s adap-
tation into a vocabulary of anticapitalism during the nineteenth century.2
Ever since the work of J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, it was pre-
sumed that liberalism eclipsed classical republicanism as the preeminent
vocabulary of modern political freedom.3 Republican values like mixed con-
stitutionalism and civic virtue were judged unviable in an age of large com-
mercial societies. But scholars have come to understand that republican
thought persisted into the nineteenth century and beyond, inspiring popular
labor movements like the Knights of Labor and canonical theorists like Karl
Marx.4 They have also traced a more complex, symbiotic relationship
between republicanism and liberalism, recasting the relationship between
the two as an evolving succession rather than a paradigm break.5 Far from
disappearing in the modern age, republicanism transformed in myriad, con-
flicting ways in response to the social question and the forms of social inter-
dependence distinctive to capitalism.
Given political theory’s ongoing reappraisal of republicanism, it is strik-
ing that theorists have neglected the historical role of feminists like Tristan in
adapting republican tropes for anticapitalist criticism. To be sure, contempo-
rary critics have explored feminist uses of republican thought, even if the
occasion for joining the two after the Cold War has been to critique liberal-
ism, not capitalism.6 Yet the neglect of feminist voices from republican cri-
tiques of capitalism is particularly conspicuous, because such early republican
critiques were inseparable from the emergence of organized feminism. This
was especially true in France.7 Until 1848, leading socialist thinkers believed
that the social question could not be resolved without women’s liberation. If
there was going to be a social revolution, it would have to pass through a
sexual revolution.

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Duong
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This essay revisits these early feminist-socialist voices from July
Monarchy France to describe how they used republican tropes to articulate
social revolution as sexual revolution. One reason for this operation is
straightforwardly historical: despite efforts to enlarge the purview of political
theory’s canon, our aperture of nineteenth-century social criticism remains
defined by liberalism. Utopian socialism has never received dedicated treat-
ment in the pages of this journal, and Tristan remains virtually unknown
among historians of political thought. Yet as scholars plumb the past and
present for critical perspectives on capitalism, they ought to do so in dialogue
with the whole range of voices raised during and after the nineteenth century.
Silvia Federici has observed that preserving the history of anticapitalist
thought “is crucial if we are to find an alternative to capitalism,” because
“this possibility will depend on our capacity to hear the voices of those who
have walked similar paths.”8 This is especially true of feminists forgotten.
Tristan in particular, however, also has contemporary value. An engaged
intellectual rather than a philosopher, she did not theorize concepts in a sys-
tematic way. But her polemics point to at least two new ways of weaponizing
republicanism as a political language—that is, as a collection of rhetorical
tropes and images deployed in the figuration of injustice and the emplotment
of its overcoming. First, she reveals its internationalist possibilities. Critics
have objected, rightly, that republican liberty has been historically insepara-
ble from nationalism.9 Philip Pettit’s famous “eyeball test”—that to be free
requires we be able to “look each other in the eye without fear or deference
that a power of interference might inspire”—usually involves a bounded
community of individuals capable of tracking one another’s interests as
equals.10 Tristan’s The Workers’ Union, however, is both a republican critique
of capitalism and arguably the first text of labor internationalism in modern
European political thought.11 The Workers’ Union demands that workers of
both sexes organize across boundaries of trade and nation. This is not, as for
the American Knights of Labor, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s federalism or the
traditional artisan compagnonnage, a matter of creating associations in vari-
ous national contexts. Instead, it involves adapting the classical republican
trope of fraternité to demand a single international body of both proletarian
men and women.
Second, Tristan’s thought models a new way of turning republican critiques
of dependency against the family. Contemporary critics have already used
republican thought to reveal patterns of domination in institutions of everyday
life like wage labor, the workplace, and the marriage contract.12 Tristan shares
these concerns, but she finds the family to be troubling for reasons that are
distinct. The normative organization of the family internally dominates
women, to be sure. But just as importantly, it structurally reproduces the

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domination of all working men and women by the bourgeoisie. That is because
the sexual division of labor at its foundation prevents proletarian men and
women from seeing their linked fates. Without grasping their linked fates,
working men and women cannot unionize across sexual difference. They are
therefore blocked from generating the shared power necessary to overcome
their collective dependency on the bourgeoisie. By expanding the object of
critique from the marriage contract to the family as a social institution, Tristan
shows us how to attend, not only to domination of women by men within the
marriage contract but also to the wider role of the patriarchal family in repro-
ducing working-class disunity and disempowerment.
Introducing Tristan into our portrait of republican critiques of capitalism
in the nineteenth century therefore alters that portrait: it reveals international-
ist possibilities rooted in social solidarity across sexual difference. Episodes
of cooperation between feminism and socialism have often appeared to be
exceptions rather than a rule. For its part, republicanism has been cast as an
“uneasy ally” to feminism and a substitute for socialism, especially after
1989.13 Yet studying Tristan and her generation invites us to inhabit a moment
in the history of the left when the trajectories of socialism, feminism, and
republicanism were not yet pried apart. Tristan and her generation believed,
as a matter of common sense, that socialism and feminism shared a joint
pursuit of political freedom as collective...