Karl Marx (1818--1883)
Last update: 08 Dec 2024 01:15First version: 17 September 2019
I am frankly astonished, in retrospect, that it has taken me this long to realize I need a notebook about Marx...
I have written before that Marx was one of the great thinkers of western civilization, and I was completely sincere in doing so. All of us who come after him are influenced by him and the richer for it. I also happen to think he was wrong about a hell of a lot of very important stuff. In this he resembled most of the other great thinkers. One of the ways he differs from most of the other great thinkers is that very few of them have so many active contemporary partisans.
To the extent that I have any worthwhile things to say about Marx's most important intellectual contributions, they are contained in the notebook on historical materialism and my blog post on Capital I.
See also: Economics; Marxism; Socialism
- Recommended, primary (obviously presumptuous):
- KM and Friedrich Engels
- The Communist Manifesto
- The German Ideology, Part I
- KM
- Capital, vol. I
- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
- Recommended, secondary, big picture:
- Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage
- G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense [I do not think the defense succeeds, for reasons explored elsewhere]
- Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx
- Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism
- Recommended, secondary, close-ups:
- Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. 1 [Marx being one of those currents...]
- Mike Beggs, "Zombie Marx", Jacobin 14 July 2011
- Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend
- Ernest Mandel, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx: 1843 to Capital
- Stanley Moore, Marx Versus Markets
- William Clare Roberts, Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital [My notes. Some self-exposition by Roberts.]
- To read:
- Shlomo Avineri, Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx
- Mike Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx's Lost Theory
- Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
- Daniel Little, The Scientific Marx
- John McMurtry, Structure of Marx's World-View
- Tom Rockmore, Marx's Dream: From Capitalism to Communism
- R. P. Wolff, Mr. Moneybags Must Be So Lucky
