the publication began as an online magazine released in september 2010, but it expanded into a print journal later that year. "jacobin" has been described by its founder bhaskar sunkara as a radical publication, "largely the product of a younger generation not quite as tied to the cold war paradigms that sustained the old leftist intellectual milieus like "dissent" or "new politics"". sunkara has said that the aim of the magazine was to create a publication which combined resolutely socialist politics with the accessibility of titles such as "the nation" and "the new republic". he has also contrasted it to publications associated with small leftist groups, such as the international socialist organization's "socialist worker" and "international socialist review" which were oriented towards party members and other revolutionary socialists, seeking a broader audience than those works whilst still anchoring the magazine in a marxist perspective. in an interview he gave in 2018 sunkara said that he intended for "jacobin" to perform a similar role on the contemporary left to that undertaken by "national review" on the post-war right, "to cohere people around a set of ideas, and to interact with the mainstream of liberalism with that set of ideas".