Raking Imperial Muck

Abstract

Abstract Not only does the chapter provide an overview of the relationship between writing about wealth or money and tyranny; it surveys mid-century thinking on what the advent of capitalism did to reshape the understanding of tyranny. Across the 1850s, many writers and thinkers began increasingly to notice the unfreedoms associated with capitalism, often using enslaved persons as figures for the working class. This chapter looks at this affiliation from another direction, focusing on the ways that capitalism generalizes forms of tyranny. Two authors anchor the chapter: Margaret Fuller and Karl Marx. Both were correspondents for the New-York Daily Tribune, and both wrote powerfully in the newspaper’s pages about the threat, new but old, that tyranny posed to persons. At the same time, the chapter continues to work within the frame of the long age of Napoleon by stressing the villainous role that Napoleon III played for Marx and, to a lesser extent, Fuller. In the Second Empire, Marx identified a new form of socialism—imperial socialism—a precursor to fascism.