Fellowship / Fellows

Alex Gourevitch

  • 2016–2017
  • Social Sciences
  • William Bentinck-Smith Fellow
  • Brown University
Headshot of Alex Gourevitch
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Alex Gourevitch, from the political science department at Brown University, works on the relationship between economic and political theory. His first book, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2014), shows how the critique of slavery in the name of freedom developed into a critique of wage-labor.

His current project combines work from social theory, history, and political philosophy to develop a defense of the right to strike. He plans to argue that the right to strike is a right to resist oppression, which workers assert in response to the exploitation they experience in the modern economy. This way of thinking about the right to strike has implications not only for labor law and the use of force by private actors, but also on how solidarity and violence form core themes in the artistic representation of labor struggles.

Gourevitch received his PhD from Columbia University, was a College Fellow in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University’s Political Theory Project, and taught at McMaster University before moving to Brown. His most recently published paper “Quitting Work but Not the Job: Liberty and the Right to Strike” won the 2015 Best Paper Award from the Foundations of Political Thought section of the American Political Science Association. Gourevitch won the 2013 Montreal Political Theory Manuscript Workshop Award for what became From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth.

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

01 / 09

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