Marx was a highly original and polymathic thinker, unhampered by disciplinary boundaries, whose intellectual influence has been enormous. Yet in the wake of the collapse of Marxism-Leninism in Eastern Europe the question arises as to how important his work really is for us now. An important dimension of this volume is to place Marx's writings in their historical context and to separate what he actually said from what others (in particular, Engels) interpreted him as saying. Informed by current debates and new perspectives, the volume provides a comprehensive coverage of all the major areas to which Marx made significant contributions.

Table of Contents

1.Reading Marx: Life and works

2.Critical reception: Marx then and now

3.Social and political theory: Class, state, revolution

4.Science: Realism, criticism, history

5.History: Critique and irony

6.Moral philosophy: The critique of capitalism and the problem of ideology

7.Political philosophy: Marx and radical democracy

8.Reproduction and the materialist conception of history: A feminist critique

9.Gender: Biology, nature, and capitalism

10.Aesthetics: Liberating the senses

11.Logic: Dialectic and contradiction

12.History of philosophy: The metaphysics of substance

13.Religion: Illusions and liberation

About the Author

Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol, UK. He is a graduate of Columbia University (BA) and Oxford University (BPhil, DPhil), and has held appointments at the University of Liverpool and the University of Bristol, the latter since 1980. His visiting professorships and sabbatical appointments include appointments at Virginia Commonwealth University; the Australian National University; Seikei University and Senshu University, Tokyo; Lingnan University, Hong Kong; the Claremont Colleges in California; and he teaches a summer school course in Discourse Analysis at the National University of Singapore. He is on the Executive Committees of the International Political Science Association, the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom, and the European Consortium of Political Science Associations. Dr Carver has published extensively on Marx, Engels and Marxism, and Sex, Gender and Sexuality. As a Marxist scholar he has published texts, translations, commentaries and numerous philosophical articles, book chapters and edited volumes. His latest publications are a two-volume study of the "German Ideology Manuscripts" for Palgrave Macmillan, New York (2014), and the Cambridge Companion to the Communist Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, New York, in press). In gender studies he is the author of numerous reference book articles; co-author of Judith Butler and Political Theory (Routledge, 2008); co-editor of Judith Butler's Precarious Politics (Routledge, 2008); and most recently author of 'Men and Masculinities in International Relations Research' for the Brown Journal of World Affairs (December 2014).