Dan Swain was born in the UK and studied at the University of Cambridge (2004-7) and University of Essex (2009-14), where he received a PhD in Philosophy. He joined the Czech University of Life Sciences as assistant professor in 2015. Since 2019 he has also held a part-time position as a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

At the Faculty of Economics and Management, he teaches the undergraduate courses Science, Philosophy and Society and Fundamentals of Political Science in English, and is available to supervise Bachelor and Diploma Theses on topics close to his interests, including the ethics of the market, environmental ethics, equality and discrimination, and social and political movements.

His research focuses on social and political philosophy. He has written widely on Marx and Marxism, including two books, None So Fit to Break the Chains: Marx’s Ethics of Self-Emancipation (2019) and Alienation: An Introduction to Marx’s Theory (2012), and a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx (2019). More recently, he has worked on concepts of solidarity, social cohesion and the theory and practice of social movements, including as part of a three-year project funded by the Czech Science Agency entitled ‘Towards a New Ontology of Social Cohesion’. As part of this project, he co-edited Unchaining Solidarities: On Mutual Aid and Anarchism with Catherine Malabou (2021) with Petr Urban, Catherine Malabou and Petr Kouba, and also developed work on the concept of prefigurative politics and how it is used in the theory and practice of social movements. His work has been published in journals including Political Studies, Contradictions and Krisis. 

List of Publications

2022, ‘Inequality, Fragmentation and Belonging: John Berger on Migrant Labour’, in Carpenter, Ritchie and Mojab, Marxism and Migration, Palgrave.

2021, Unchaining Solidarity: On Mutual Aid and Anarchism with Catherine Malabou, with Petr Kouba, Catherine Malabou and Petr Urban, Rowman and Littlefield.

2021, ‘Prefigurative Biology: Mutual Aid, Social Reproduction and Plasticity’, in Swain, Urban, Malabou and Kouba, Unchaining Solidarity: On Mutual Aid and Anarchism with Catherine Malabou, Rowman and Littlefield.

2019, ‘Not not but not yet: Present and Future in Prefigurative Politics’, Political Studies, 67(1), 47–62. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0032321717741233

2019, ‘None so fit to Break the Chains’ – Marx’s Ethics of Self-Emancipation, Brill.

2019, ‘Alienation, or why capitalism is bad for us’, in Prew, Rotta, Smith and Vidal eds. Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, Oxford University Press.

2018, ‘Working Poor’ in ‘Marx from the Margins: A Collective Project, from A to Z’, in Krisis. Journal for Contemporary Philosophy.

2018, ‘Marx, Pashukanis and the Form of Justice’, Kontradikce/Contradictions 2, 13-31. doi: 10.46957/con.2018.2.2

2012, Alienation: An Introduction to Marx's Theory, Bookmarks.