Constantin Pecqueur's Lost Republic A Marker for a Radically Republican Political Economy

Constantin Pecqueur, a 19th century socialist theorist, is undoubtedly one of the forgotten figures in the history of republicanism. Yet he imagined a radical republic, both politically and economically. Pecqueur was one of the economists who opposed to the liberal tradition and its conception of freedom, which he considered incompatible with the idea of the Republic. Pecqueur explained that social freedom involved equality of conditions. Republican state had to organize and translate this equality and this freedom into facts, and this necessarily involved an extension of the scope of rights. It is this unsuspected republic, attesting to a radically republican political economy that this article explores by the publications from the years 1840-1850 and some unpublished manuscripts.