Marx for our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique

Without denying the contradictory character of Marx's thought, the French philosopher Daniel Bensad sets out to demonstrate that it was not a philosophy of the end of history, an empirical sociology of classes, or a positive science of economics positing an inexorable progress towards an ineluctable communism. Instead, Marx's 'critique of political economy' encompassed three great critiques of the scientific and political canons of its agehistorical reason, sociological rationality and scientific positivismwhich make this 19th-century thinker relevant to the 21st century of global capitalism. Indeed, we find here a 'post-postmodern Marx' inhabiting a contemporary world replete with contingency, crisis and contradiction. Bensad's book is an invitation to rediscover our foremost contemporary thinker, Karl Marx.

"The result of a long process of research, this book offers us an analysis of the thought of Marx and of its relevance which should be considered as a new landmark, and which opens up new perspectives and polemics which will no dolubt continue to live on for some time." â?? Le Monde

"Bensaïd furnishes us with a new reading of Marx which both criticizes and surpasses the debates and problematics of the past. A Marxist reading of Marx, in the sense of the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: interpreting the world in order to transform it â?¦ A reading which is neither apologetic nor conservative." â?? Le Quinzaine littéraire

Daniel Bensaïd teaches philosophy at the University of Paris VIII and is the author of books on Marxism, Walter Benjamin, the French Revolution and Joan of Arc.