Abstract

Nach Marx is a German volume of twenty essays on Marx and social philosophy today, edited by Rahel Jaeggi of Humboldt University in Berlin and Daniel Loick of the Goethe University in Frankfurt. The collection comes from the “Re-thinking Marx” conference in Berlin of 2011, organized by Jaeggi with contributions from philosophers and political theorists who are German-speaking (Hauke Brunkhorst, Alex Demirović, Rainer Forst, Axel Honneth, Rahel Jaeggi, Daniel Loick, Andrea Maihofer, Oliver Marchart, Christoph Menke, Hartmut Rosa, Michael Quante, Titus Stahl), Anglophone (Wendy Brown, Daniel Brudney, Andrew Chitty, Raymond Geuss, Frederick Neuhouser, Terry Pinkard, Moishe Postone) and Francophone (Etienne Balibar). All the authors can be said to have sympathy with the Frankfurt School approach to critical theory, although what that concretely entails is open to interpretation. Perhaps the only points of agreement are that Marx inaugurated the critical approach to society, and that capitalism is the object of critique. But how to read Marx and how to critique capitalism are anything but settled.