Online research in philosophy

This book is a complete translation of Marx's critical commentary on paragraphs 261-313 of Hegel's major work in political theory.

This paper examines the logic of explanation in the political theory of Karl Marx, and specifically in his theory of the capitalist state. Major controversies have centered around the status of the instrumentalist and state autonomy conceptions in Marx's work, and also around the value of the functionalist logic of explanation that Marx allegedly employs. Major interpretations and criticisms of Marx's conception and logic are evaluated on the basis of a reading of the explicitly political texts written by Marx after the 1848 revolutions. I argue that only a version of state autonomy associated with Marx's general concept of alienation appears in these writings as a descriptive conception of characteristic capitalist states. I particularly argue that functionalist interpretations that posit conscious collective actors are incompatible with Marx's own analyses.

The political doctrine of Karl Marx is to be found in a broad range of both published and unpublished writings. This volume, the first of two which together span his entire output, presents his early texts of 1843-7, which predate the Communist Manifesto. excerpts from the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and from the Paris Notebooks, Points on the State and Bourgeois Society and other writings are newly translated and arranged in a sequence that illuminates the development of Marx's thought, while the introduction discusses the intellectual context of the theories he constructed. A chronology of Marx's life and career and an annotated bibliography complete a volume which will be an invaluable guide to the formation of one of the most influential doctrines in the history of political thought.

Marx: Later Political Writings brings together new translations of Marx's most important texts in political philosophy written after 1848. Marx challenged poitical theory to its very fundamentals, as his works do not follow traditional models for exploring politics theoretically. In his introduction, Terrell Carver situates Marx in a politics of democratic constitutionalism and revolutionary communism. The works are presented here complete, according to the first editions or the earliest manuscript state, and include the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the Preface of 1859 to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, The Civil War in France, and the little-known Notes on Adolph Wagner. More than most political theorists, Marx made contemporary politics the focus for his theoretical work. He created a distinctive kind of political theory, and this volume makes it accessible today.

No one would dispute that it is impossible to understand the intellectual and political history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without taking Karl Marx (1818-83) into account. Most believe, however, that Marx‘s legacy was buried once and for all in the rubble of the Berlin Wall. This consensus is mistaken. It would be foolish to assert that Marx anticipated the correct answer to every significant question facing us today. But it would be no less foolish to deny that Marx‘s work presents a powerful challenge to contemporary political philosophy.