''Making Sense of Marx'' is a 1985 book about
Karl Marx
Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...
by the social and political theorist
Jon Elster
Jon Elster (; born 22 February 1940) is a Norwegian philosopher and political theorist who holds the Robert K. Merton professorship of Social Science at Columbia University and since 2005 professor of social science at the Collège de France.
...
, in which the author reevaluates Marx's ideas. The book has received a mixture of praise and criticism from commentators.
Reception
''Making Sense of Marx'' was praised as "sharp" and "hard-headed" by the political scientist
David McLellan.
[ McLellan 1995. p. 441.] The political philosopher
Richard W. Miller called Elster's work "erudite".
[ Miller 1999. p. 77.]
Conversely, the
Marxist economist Ernest Mandel
Ernest Ezra Mandel (; 5 April 1923 – 20 July 1995), also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter, was a Belgian Marxian economist, Trotskyist activist and theorist, and Holocaust survivor. He f ...
gave the work a negative review, while the philosopher
Jan Narveson wrote that the work was, "greeted with highly mixed feelings by those who had hoped the title meant that there was sense to be made" of Marx.
[ Narveson 2001. p. 348.]
Bibliography
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References
1985 non-fiction books
Books about Karl Marx
Books by Jon Elster
Cambridge University Press books
English-language non-fiction books
Rational choice theory
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