The Wilhelm Reich Museum is pleased to present a Zoom book launch with author Philip Bennett, who will be in conversation with Hannah Zeavin to mark the publication of his new book from Brill.
From Communism to Work Democracy is the first book devoted to Wilhelm Reich’s social and political thought and activities. It is an intellectual history, showing the evolution of Reich’s thought from a rather conventional 1920s-style communism, to a form of anarchism, to his unique concept of work democracy, all shaped by his understanding of Marxism. The book works with archival material not previously known or studied, and marks a huge leap in understanding Reich’s life, work, and overall intellectual trajectory.
Philip W. Bennett, Ph.D. (1972), is a former college professor who is now an independent scholar, active in the new field of Reich Studies. He has published numerous articles in peer reviewed journals on Reich’s political and social thought.
Hannah Zeavin is Associate Professor of the History of Science in the Department of History and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure & Mother Media (both with MIT Press). She is currently at work on All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance for Penguin Press, for which she received a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2024 Whiting Foundation Grant. She is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis and she cofounded The Psychosocial Foundation. Other work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, n+1, The Paris Review, Bookforum, and elsewhere.
