ABSTRACT
No one would dispute that it is impossible to understand the intellectual and political history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without taking Karl Marx (1818-83) into account. Most believe, however, that Marx’s legacy was buried once and for all in the rubble of the Berlin Wall. This consensus is mistaken. It would be foolish to assert that Marx anticipated the correct answer to every signi…cant question facing us today. But it would be no less foolish to deny that Marx’s work presents a powerful challenge to contemporary political philosophy. In the …rst section I shall sketch Marx’s early theories of religious and political alienation. The heart of the chapter will then be devoted to Marx’s critique of political economy, concentrating on the role of money in capitalist society, the capital/ wage labor relation, the limits of democracy in a capitalist order, and the systematic tendencies to uneven development and crises in the world market. The chapter ends with brief comments on the shape of a feasible and normatively attractive alternative to capitalism and Marx’s relationship to Hegel.
