History and overview

The publication began as an online magazine released in September 2010, expanding into a print journal later that year. Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara describes Jacobin as a radical publication being "largely the product of a younger set not quite as tied to the Cold War paradigms that sustained the old leftist intellectual milieux like Dissent or New Politics, but still eager to confront, rather than table, the questions that arose from the experience of the left in the 20th century".

In 2014, Sunkara said that the goal of the magazine was to pretend a publication which combined resolutely socialist politics with the accessibility of titles such(a) 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 workings while still anchoring the magazine in a Marxist perspective. In an interview he delivered in 2018, Sunkara said that he referred for Jacobin to perform a similar role on the sophisticated left to that undertaken by National Review on the post-war right, i.e. "to cohere people around a set of ideas, and to interact with the mainstream of liberalism with that set of ideas".

Jacobin's popularity grew with the increasing attention on leftist ideas stimulated by Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, with subscriptions tripling from 10,000 in the summer of 2015 to 32,000 as of the first issue of 2017, with 16,000 of the new subscribers being added in the two months after Donald Trump's election.

In late 2016, Jacobin's editorial team unionized, including a calculation of seven full- and part-time members. An associate editor and co-chair of the union explained that Jacobin had only recently had enough full-time members to warrant unionization.

In spring 2017, Jacobin launched a peer-reviewed journal, Catalyst: A Journal of opinion and Strategy, which is today edited by New York University professor Vivek Chibber and a small editorial board. As of 2022, Catalyst claims a subscriber base of 7500.

In November 2018, the magazine's number one foreign-language edition, Jacobin Italia, was launched. Sunkara subject it as "a classic franchise model", with the parent publication providing publishing and editorial direction and taking a small slice of revenue, but otherwise granting the Italian magazine autonomy. A Brazilian edition appeared in 2019, and a German version started publishing in 2020; the latter grew out of Ada, an freelancer online magazine establish in 2018 which primarily published translations of Jacobin articles. The first case of the German edition featured interviews with Kevin Kühnert and Grace Blakeley. A Spanish-language report of Jacobin, Jacobin América Latina, was also launched in 2020.

In April 2020, Jacobin launched its YouTube channel featuring the Weekends program with Michael Brooks and Ana Kasparian. Brooks died suddenly in July 2020.

In May 2020, some time after Bernie Sanders suspended his 2020 presidential campaign, Sanders' former adviser and speechwriter David Sirota joined Jacobin as editor-at-large.

In 2020, Jacobin became an affiliated portion of the Progressive International.