For nearly four centuries, a principal concern of political philosophers has been to justify the coordination of the activities of radically independent individuals by the state, a complex of institutions that monopolize the right to compel compliance by the use of threat of force. In what follows, I will challenge aspects of this project – the better to accommodate a way of thinking about society and politics that, following Marx's lead, envisions a social order, communism, constituted by people who have substantially overcome a need for state-compelled coordination. My aim is to defend a nonutopian but still Marxian version of this idea.

In an intellectual culture as prone to historicism as ours now is, it should be widely acknowledged that such major historical transformations as the expansion of (individualizing) market relations and the emergence of the nation-state have profoundly affected philosophical reflections on politics and society. Nevertheless, the extent to which prevailing understandings of the individual and the state depend upon transitory real-world phenomena is commonly overlooked. For many purposes, the coexistence of a widespread awareness of the historicity of these concepts with their ahistorical treatment in contemporary political theory has been benign. But in order to defend Marxian communism, it is especially important to bear in mind how marked political philosophy today is by the historical specificity of its fundamental concepts.