Abstract

The appearance of Marx's Oeuvres has been hailed as a “sign of the times.” For some 50 years after his death, Marx had been published by a variety of intellectuals associated with labor parties. University culture had generally neglected the Marxian intellectual legacy, which was viewed as the work of a revolutionary agitator and not as that of a social scientist. Despite the persistently inaccurate and poorly documented critiques that Marx's writings continued to receive from academic circles, this situation changed in the West only after 1945. The “economic” Marx of the Oeuvres — the second volume of which appeared only in 1968 — immediately emerged as the most diligent result of a scrupulous Marxological research.