Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, Marx was regarded as a thinker doomed to oblivion about whom everything had already been said and written. However, the international economic crisis of 2008 favoured a return to his analysis of capitalism, and recently published volumes of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA-) have provided researchers with new texts that underline the gulf between Marx-s critical theory and the dogmatism of many twentieth-century Marxisms. This work reconstructs with great textual and historical rigour, but in a form accessible to those encountering Marx for the first time, a number of little noted, or often misunderstood, stages in his intellectual biography. The book is divided into three parts. The first - ''Intellectual Influences and Early Writings'' - investigates the formation of the young Marx and the composition of his Parisian manuscripts of 1844. The second - ''The Critique of Political Economy'' - focuses on the genesis of Marx-s magnum o
