Abstract

It would have been one of the minor pleasures of my life, while writing this review, that I could report that Paul Gottfried attributed the strange death of Marxism to its internal contradictions. Gottfried, however, has denied me that pleasure, the one that consists in the satisfactions that irony brings. This is not to say that his arguments are not valid, on one hand, or not congenial to me, on the other.

The death of Marxism, he argues, and it is truly strange, is that its founders and earlier disciples subscribed to doctrines of economic determinism and historical materialism, whereas…