Niklas Plaetzer is a Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Political Theory from Sciences Po Paris. His research brings together political theory and the history of political thought, with particular interests in democratic theory, republicanism, international order, and social movements.
His book project, The Plebeian International: Traditions of the Vanquished in Radical Republican Thought, reconstructs a transatlantic tradition of plebeian republicanism in the nineteenth century, with a focus on France and Brazil. It examines how radical republicans theorised institutions of democratic counter-power against oligarchy and connected movements for popular self-government across national and imperial borders.
Niklas's broader research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century political thought, the work of Hannah Arendt, sovereignty and its critics, and the political thought of the Black Atlantic. His work has appeared in Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, Contemporary Political Theory, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, and Historical Materialism, as well as in several edited volumes.
Selected Publications:
“Insurgent Legality: Luiz Gama’s Plebeian Republicanism between Law and Prefiguration.” Contemporary Political Theory 24, no. 3 (2025): 428–447.
“Refounding Denied: Hannah Arendt on Limited Principles and the Lost Promise of Reconstruction.” Political Theory 51, no. 6 (2023): 955–980.
“Eichmann in Plettenberg: Carl Schmitt Reads Hannah Arendt.” Modern Intellectual History 20, no. 1 (2023): 270–297.
“How to Make the Moment Last? On Rupture and Institutions in Massimiliano Tomba’s Insurgent Universality.” Historical Materialism 30, no. 4 (2022): 108–124.
“Decolonizing the ‘Universal Republic’: The Paris Commune and French Empire.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 49, nos. 3-4 (2021): 585–603.
Photo credit: Beth Rooney
