Abstract

Planned as an “Introduction” to a collection of essays on Western Marxism, Anderson's global evaluation of this tradition is presented here independently as a result of the sudden disappearance of the publishing house which originally commissioned it. This seemingly trivial detail actually captures the essence of the book understood as a “concluding balance-sheet of the legacy which [New Left Review] had sought to make available in an organized form” (p. viii): both efforts have ended up in abortions. The journal's intellectual long march through a tradition of Western Marxism which had been successfully repressed —and was practically unknown only a decade ago—has not resulted in any new theoretical syntheses.