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Nonfiction Books » Politics & Society

Capital: Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx & Paul Reitter (translator)
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Capital: Critique of Political Economy

by Karl Marx & Paul Reitter (translator)

Commentary

Of course, this list should really include the works of Marx. But The Communist Manifesto doesn’t have much to do with what I thought Marx was, or what anyone else thought Marx was afterwards. It’s just a piece of old-fashioned politics. And Das Kapital is one those books that people claim to have read, but no one has really read it to the end. Still, it accumulated into a creed.

The best books on Communism recommended by Robert Conquest

One has got to remember that some of the people who were strongly influenced by Hegel are also not that easy to read. Kierkegaard and Schelling studied Hegel closely and neither of them is particularly easy to read. Marx worked on parts of Hegel’s Logic which then went into his doctoral dissertation and into Das Kapital, which isn’t an easy read. Heidegger read parts of Hegel, Gadamer did, Derrida did, Hyppolite did. None of these people are easy.

The Best Hegel Books recommended by Stephen Houlgate

I chose The Communist Manifesto, rather than, say, Capital because it shows in a much easier-to-read, shorter work something that is central to Marx’s vision. Capital is much drier, and a lot of it is focused on economics, although there are some remarkable passages of Capital describing the conditions of industrial workers in England at the time.

Peter Singer on Nineteenth-Century Philosophy

Other books by Karl Marx and Paul Reitter (translator)

The Communist Manifesto by Friedrich Engels & Karl Marx

The Communist Manifesto
by Friedrich Engels & Karl Marx

Early Writings by Karl Marx

Early Writings
by Karl Marx

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