David Harvey tackles Marx's notebooks that have spawned wide-ranging and raging controversies When leading scholar of Marx, Roman Rosdolsky, first encountered the virtually unknown text of Marx's Grundrisse—his preparatory work for his masterpiece Das Capital—in the 1950s in New York Public Library, he recognized it as "a work of fundamental importance," but declared "its unusual form" and "obscure manner of expression, made it far from suitable for reaching a wide circle of readers." David Harvey's Companion to Marx's Grundrisse builds upon his widely acclaimed companions to the first and second volumes of Capital in a way that will reach as wide an audience as possible. Marx's stated ambition for this text is to reveal "the exact development of the concept of capital as the fundamental concept of modern economics, just as capital itself is the foundation of bourgeois society." While respecting Marx's desire to "bring out all the contradictions of bourgeois production, as well as the boundary where it drives beyond itself," David Harvey also pithily illustrates the relevance of Marx's text to understanding the troubled state of contemporary capitalism.
Author
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. David Harvey (born 1935) is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). A leading social theorist of international standing, he graduated from University of Cambridge with a PhD in Geography in 1961. He is the world's most cited academic geographer (according to Andrew Bodman, see Transactions of the IBG, 1991,1992), and the author of many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. His work has contributed greatly to broad social and political debate, most recently he has been credited with helping to bring back social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form.
