Providing a lucid and accessible introduction to Marx, complete with pedagogical boxes, a chronology and guides to further reading, Etienne Balibar makes the most difficult areas of his philosophy easy to understand. One of the most influential French philosophers to have emerged from the 1960s, Balibar brings a lifetime of study and expertise to create a brilliantly concise portrait of Marx that will initiate the student and intrigue the scholar.

He examines all the key areas of Marx’s writings, including his early works, The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology and Capital, explaining their wider historical and theoretical context. Making clear such concepts as class struggle, ideology, humanism, progress, determinism, commodity fetishism and the state, Balibar includes brief yet incisive biographical studies of key Marxists such as Althusser, Gramsci, Engels and Lenin.

The Philosophy of Marx will become the standard guide to Marx’s thought. “A very intelligent and creative work—succinct and informative; it explores the ways in which Marxism as such challenges traditional philosophy (and the problems the latter possesses for it). It would certainly have a privileged place on the shelf of contemporary studies of Marx.”—Fredric Jameson

“A trenchant and exciting analysis of the philosophy of Marx. It is intelligent and original, and makes us understand the ways in which reading Marx lucidly can be very useful to us today. No dogma here and no banalities. A refreshing book.”—Immanuel Wallerstein