Alex Gourevitch

Associate Professor of Political Science

Areas of Interest: History of political and economic thought; theories of freedom; work and leisure; Marxism; rights theory; republicanism; and democratic theory.

Biography

Alex Gourevitch is an associate professor of political science at Brown University. He writes on contemporary and historical themes related to the connection between politics and economics. His core interests are in how to think about the relationship between freedom and social life. He first book, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century, showed how a certain way of thinking about freedom naturally led from the critique of slavery to the critique of wage-labor and to a defense of producer cooperatives. 

He is currently writing two books. One, on the political ethics of strikes, looks at what strikes are, why workers have a right to strike, and what is to be celebrated in strikes. The core idea is that strikes are one way workers resist the oppression that they face in capitalist societies. The other book, on shared-labor socialism, is a reconstruction of the argument for sharing labor in the context of a democratic-socialist society. The argument develops through a criticism of post-work arguments for universal basic income and automation.

Gourevitch has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Brown's Political Theory Project, and before coming to Brown he was a professor of political science at McMaster University.