Reading Capital

by Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Ben Brewster (Translator)

Overview

Establishing a rigorous program of “symptomatic reading” that cuts through the silences and lacunae of Capital to reveal its philosophical core, Louis Althusser interprets Marx’s structural analysis of production as a revolutionary break—the basis of a completely new science. Building on a series of Althussers’s conceptual innovations that includes “overdetermination” and “social formation,” Étienne Balibar explores the historical and structural facets of production as Marx understood them, scrutinizing many of the most fundamental points in Capital, as though for the first time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781844673476
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	06/09/2009
Series:	Radical Thinkers
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Louis Althusser was born in Algeria in 1918 and died in France in 1990. He taught philosophy for many years at the Ecole Normale Superieur in Paris, and was a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party. His books include For Marx; Reading Capital (with Etienne Balibar); Essays in Ideology; Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx; Machiavelli and Us; and The Spectre of Hegel.

Étienne Balibar is a French Marxist philosopher and the most celebrated student of Louis Althusser. He is also one of the leading exponents of French Marxist philosophy and the author of Spinoza and Politics, The Philosophy of Marx and co-author of Race, Nation and Class and Reading Capital.

Table of Contents

Translator's Note

Foreword to the Italian Edition

Part I: From Capital to Marx's Philosophy

Louis Althusser

Part II: The Object of Capital

Louis Althusser

1. Introduction

2. Marx and his Discoveries

3. The Merits of Classical Economics

4. The Errors of Classical Economics: An Outline for a Concept of Historical Time

5. Marxism is not a Historicism

6. The Epistemological Propositions of Capital (Marx, Engels)

7. The Object of Political Economy

8. Marx's Critique

9. Marx's Immense Theoretical Revolution

Appendix: On the `Ideal Averge' and the Forms of Transition

Part III: The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism--Etienne Balibar

1. From Periodization to the Modes of Production

2. The Elements of the Structure and their History

3. On Reproduction

4. Elements for a Theory of Transition

Glossary

Index

Editorial Reviews

One reads his passionate study with attention, even excitement.”—Eric Hobsbawn, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

One reads his passionate study with attention, even excitement.

Eric Hobsbawm

One reads his passionate study with attention, even excitement.— Eric Hobsbawn

Times Literary Supplement