Excerpt

In the tradition of classical political economy, Marx is usually read as an oppositional figure, rejecting the optimistic dogma of free trade and replacing it with a catastrophic vision of capitalism's self-destruction. Yet Marx was also a cosmopolitan figure who, like the classical economists, rejected a narrow nationalism for the vision of an internationally just economic sphere. The Communist Manifesto, for example, is addressed to “Workers of All Nations” and not just German workers. Marx saw his intervention as a combination of idealist German philosophy, radical French politics, and English economics.¹ Marx's own travels from the Rhineland of his birth…