Marx And Modernity

In this illuminating and concise collection of readings, Karl Marx emerges as the first theorist to give a comprehensive social view of the birth and development of capitalist modernity that began with the Second Industrial Revolution and still exists today.

May 5, 2018 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Heinrich Marx, German scientist, philosopher, economist, and sociologist. His creative genius created a system-functional model of contemporary society, defined its socio-economic character, and formulated scientific and philosophical approaches for its cognition. Marx also developed methodological clues for identifying and substantiating the economic nature of phenomena, processes and the socio-economic relations that mediate them, which are of critical relevance today. Before Marx, political economy was an eclectic combination of separate theories and concepts espoused by various philosophers. Marx was able to transform the field into a coherent science with a single systemic approach. Today, the generally recognized economic mainstream has no way of explaining in detail the causes of the ongoing global economic crisis. However, it is generally accepted that modern Marxist legacy researchers have advantages in their analyses. They believe that at the start of the 21st century capitalism does not tend to self-destruct. However, its failings are more and more clearly manifested. They believe that the capitalist system has not outlived its weaknesses, and the old bourgeois financiers have not been replaced, as was necessary, by a generation of new leaders armed with new methods of management and capable of coming up with solutions to current problems. The philosophical underpinnings of the capitalist economic system have laid a time bomb under the whole ideology of capitalism. Capitalism as a development system ceases to exist. The truth, which was found in the past writings of Marx, cannot be completely rejected, nor should it be venerated as a museum exhibit. This book is aimed at reactivating fundamental political and economic studies on the rules and functioning of the global geo-economic system from the point of view of a modern interpretation of Karl Marx's concept of objective processes in the conditions of the current systemic crisis of capitalism.

First Published in 2004. The nature of modernity, and its connection with capitalism, are questions at the forefront of contemporary sociological debate. Derek Sayer re-examines the answers given by Karl Marx and Max Weber, authors of two of the most profound sociological critiques of modernity. His reassessment of Marx and Weber on capitalism and modernity provides a new reading which reveals the remarkable consonances between their sociologies of the modern condition. Going beyond the well-known stereotypes of ‘the Marx-Weber debate’, Professor Sayer shows that both Marx and Weber produced a challenging critique of the nature of power and subjectivity in modern society, a critique which retains all its intellectual force and moral relevance today. A major work of original scholarship, Capitalism and Modernity is clearly and accessibly written. It is an authoritative and provocative commentary on a debate central to modern sociology and politics and will be a key text in social theory for students of sociology, politics and philosophy.

An excellent window on Marx's and Nietzsche's overall theories and on the foibles of modern society. Her analysis of their views on the nature of man and their consequent theories of history is competent and probes deeply into the teachings of Marx and Nietzsche.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.

Kellner writes, "As we move into the 1990s critical theory might help produce theoretical and political perspectives which could be part of a Left Turn that could reanimate the political hopes of the 1960s, while helping overcome and reverse the losses and regression of the 1980s."

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

For over a century, Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism has been a crucial resource for social movements. Now, recent economic crises have made it imperative for us to comprehend and actualize Marx’s ideas. But without a knowledge of Karl Marx’s life as he lived it, neither Marx nor his works can be fully understood. There are more than twenty-five comprehensive biographies of Marx, but none of them consider his life and work in equal, corresponding measure. This biography, planned for three volumes, aims to include what most biographies have reduced to mere background: the contemporary conflicts, struggles, and disputes that engaged Marx at the time of his writings, alongside his complex relationships with a varied assortment of friends and opponents. This first volume will deal extensively with Marx’s youth in Trier and his studies in Bonn and Berlin. It will also examine the function of poetry in his intellectual development and his first occupation with Hegelian philosophy and with the so-called “young Hegelians” in his 1841 Dissertation. Already during this period, there were crises as well as breaks in Marx’s intellectual development that prompted Marx to give up projects and re-conceptualize his critical enterprise. This volume is the beginning of an astoundingly dimensional look at Karl Marx – a study of a complex life and body of work through the neglected issues, events, and people that helped comprise both. It is destined to become a classic.

As a tribute to Javeed Alam and his exemplary life, some of his close friends and admirers have come together in this volume with reflections on the range of themes that he pursued in his work with such intelligence and relish for some four decades: the nature of capitalism and the various angles of a Marxist response to it, the nature of secularism and liberalism and the forms of modernity which they usher in, and Gandhi’s political ideas in the context of Indian society and India’s own unfolding modernity.