Flora Tristan, the first European writer to connect socialism and feminism, has long been neglected as a systematic thinker. This paper reads her The Workers’ Union and other writings through the lens of a political economy of care. It argues that Tristan takes the need for care work in the family seriously, while also calling for institutional care for the young, sick, and elderly. While her gendered views from the early 19th century assume that much of this care work, especially in families, would be done by women, the systematic core of her arguments can be separated from these historical layers. Ultimately, Tristan provides a political economy perspective in which economic and political rights are closely interwoven, but in which unpaid care work, in the family and beyond, is always part of the picture. 

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Photo: St. Paul's from Ludgate Hill, plate 24 from Original Views of London as It Is Place (1842) by Thomas Shotter Boys via the Art Insitue of Chicago on Unsplash​ 

Authoritarian contexts - e.g. regimes, movements, and personalities - are ubiquitous throughout human history, and can be found across our world today. Analytic political philosophy, unlike its Continental counterpart, has tended to shy away from such contexts through idealising the conditions for theoretical research and delineating clearly the scopes for envisioned praxis and efficacy. Even where such contexts feature in analytic political theories, they are either portrayed as definitively and unequivocally defective, or as 'objects' with which democratic societies must engage. This talk posits that such methodological presumptions are fundamentally problematic: not only do they overlook the substantial richness, diversity, and agency of life in authoritarian contexts, they also fail to shed light on how political change - whether it be in the direction of greater political legitimacy or justice - can and should come about in authoritarian contexts. This talk draws upon Dr. Wong's two recently published works -- Reparative Justice in Authoritarian States (Routledge, 2025) and "Living the liberal life in illiberal contexts: the case for realist pluralist liberalism", Inquiry (2026).