I was struck by what may seem a minor point in the interesting exchange between David Harvey and William Roberts in Jacobin this spring. Toward the end of his review of Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital, Harvey encourages Roberts to “open up the question of Jacobin republicanism” and elaborate on “the relations between Marx and August Blanqui.” Roberts rather hastily dismisses Harvey’s objection, happily conceding that “it is certainly right that Auguste Blanqui and his followers play no role in my account of . . . Capital.”

Like Harvey, I found Roberts’s focus on Capital’s political dimension welcome and illuminating. Roberts, for example, clarifies what’s at stake in Marx’s polemics with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his relation to Robert Owen. Even if we set the question of Marx’s interactions with the broad French revolutionary tradition to one side, however, Roberts’s disparaging take on Blanqui raises a few issues that might be worth addressing — if only to give Blanqui himself a chance to contribute to the discussion.

In one sense, I know that these issues are peripheral for both Harvey and Roberts, whose concern is with Marx rather than Blanqui. But for more than a century now, disdain for the French insurgent has become something of an automatic reflex across a very wide spectrum of political opinion, not least among expert readers of Marx, and this entrenched consensus not only limits our appreciation of Blanqui but distorts our understanding of Marx as well, and of revolutionary politics in general.