Marx

"Yes, this is a very different kind of book. It’s from the Routledge Philosophers series. It has a textbook format. It’s an introduction to the work of Karl Marx . There’s also an interesting one on Henri Bergson in the same series by Mark Sinclair. I’d recommend that too for those who want to go a bit deeper after Emily Herring’s biography. What Edwards and Leiter’s book does is introduce Marx to the intelligent reader, as if you’ve never encountered Marx before. Which might be the case for many readers. Some people come to Marx through economics. They might come through politics and The Communist Manifesto . Others come through philosophical ideas about alienation or ideology. This book offers a superbly clear overview of Marx’s life, and most importantly his key ideas. I particularly like the chapter on ideology. Ideology, in Marxist terms, is the way in which the structure of society conditions all aspects of our lives without us realising it, and privileges the interests of the ruling class. But there are different notions of ideology within Marx’s writing, different emphases. Questions that are difficult for some Marxist theorists to answer are addressed here too—this isn’t a neutral summary. The book doesn’t shy away from engaging with Marxist arguments as well as spelling out what the mainstream interpretations of Marx’s writings are. It benefits from the huge secondary literature on Marx, but doesn’t get bogged down in it. Sometimes, in just a sentence or two, the authors illuminate things that I’ve never fully understood before. There’s a section on Georg Lukács, the Hungarian philosopher and political exile who was a significant Marxist thinker. In a few paragraphs, they gave me an overview that helped me understand references to his writing that I’d seen before and put them in a better perspective. Similarly, on Gramsci, the imprisoned Italian philosopher. There are well-written summaries and insights into other Marxist thinkers too. Including the glossary—which is, again, very useful—it is 275 pages. This is not a book that people would usually read all the way through. It’s a reference book. And it’s not the last word on Marx by a long shot. No doubt some Marxist philosophers will find fault with some aspects of it. But it is certainly an extremely useful book that should become a standard book for students and anybody interested in understanding Marx. Other books purport to do that, but not usually with this level of communicative skill. It’s written by philosophers who can write and who are thinking critically about what they are writing about. It’s not an inert summary, but something that brings Marxist ideas alive, and shows their strengths and limitations."