In a recent interview, historian Quentin Skinner had the following to say about Karl Marx and the republican theory of liberty. The republican or “neo-Roman” theory says that we are unfree when we are subject to another person’s will:

I am very struck by the extent to which Marx deploys, in his own way, a neo-Roman political vocabulary. He talks about wage slaves, and he talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat. He insists that, if you are free only to sell your labour, then you are not free at all. He stigmatises capitalism as a form of servitude. These are all recognizably neo-Roman moral commitments.

Skinner also says that “this is a question which would bear a great deal more investigation than it has received.”