About

Alexander H Gourevitch is an associate professor of political science in the Department of Political Science at Brown University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 2010 and also holds an MPH from Columbia University and a BA from Harvard University. His research interests include the history of political and economic thought, strikes and injustice, theories of freedom, work and leisure, Marxism, rights theory, republicanism, and democratic theory. Gourevitch has held positions as an assistant professor at McMaster University, a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Brown University's Political Theory Project, and a College Fellow at Harvard University. His scholarly work explores various themes within political theory, including economic democracy, labor, republican liberty, and the political implications of work and social justice. Gourevitch has published numerous articles in reputable journals such as the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, and Political Theory, among others. He also writes political commentary for publications like Jacobin, Dissent, and Salon. His contributions to the field include analyses of the right to strike, liberty, labor repression, and the transformation of work, emphasizing the importance of economic democracy and the political significance of labor movements.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Philosophy
• Political economy
• Law and economics
• Epistemology
• Environmental ethics

Selected publications

• Themselves Must Strike the Blow

  Philosophical Topics · 2020 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  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 freedoms they are denied, but ought to enjoy, if they demand that freedom for themselves, through their own, collective activity. Strikes are an essential way of both winning and exercising those denied freedoms. They are therefore a path to, and partial realization of, the ideal of self-emancipation to which socialists are, or ought to be, committed.

  DOI

• Freedom Now

  Polity · 2020 · 16 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  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 reinventing the economy as the true site of freedom. To reclaim freedom as a value of the left, we have to begin with the daily experience of most people: the unfreedom of the workplace. The authoritarian organization of work is not just an offense against freedom; it also helps us understand how freedom requires emancipation both from the economy and within the economy, and why that emancipation requires mass struggle.

  DOI

• Solidarity and Civic Virtue

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 22 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  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 <italic>stabilize</italic> 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 thought about civic virtue as qualities that agents exercise to <italic>transform</italic> rather than stabilize a regime. And they argued that virtue developed out of the self-education and activity of citizens themselves, not state coercion. The real danger lies not in the defence of an illiberal state but of the kinds of demands that the oppressed make on each other to act virtuously. As such, labour republicans offer us a model for thinking about the role—and risks—of virtue in emancipatory politics.

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gregory Belenky

  Stony Brook University

  31 shared

• D. Donetsky

  Stony Brook University

  26 shared

• David Westerfeld

  Stony Brook University

  23 shared

• B. Laikhtman

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  15 shared

• L. Shterengas

  Stony Brook University

  14 shared

• Ramon U. Martinelli

  12 shared

• Leonid Glebov

  University of Central Florida

  7 shared

• Vadim Smirnov

  5 shared

Similar researchers at Brown University

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• Lai-Sheng Wangh-168
• Huajian Gaoh-156
• Christopher Schmidh-151
• Karen Furieh-148