Understanding Marx: A Reconstruction and Critique of Capital

by Robert Paul Wolff

Overview

This book explains the development of the classical theory of value from Adam Smith to Karl Marx in a form readily accessible to readers unfamiliar with anything more than elementary arithmetic, while at the same time offering to the specialist a fundamental criticism of Marxian political economy and an original and controversial interpretation of Capital. The author clarifies recent mathematical interpretations of classical political economy, so that philosophers, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists interested in Marx's theories can understand the modern rehabilitation of his political economy.

In the past quarter of a century economists and policy makers have increasingly concerned themselves with the question of economic growth and the distribution of wealth and income. The classical political economy of Smith, Ricardo, and Max focused directly on these two issues. Understanding Marx contributes to an appreciation of how the fundamental insights of Ricardo and Marx have become directly relevant to policy debates.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940044363090
Publisher:	Society for Philosophy & Culture
Publication date:	03/06/2013
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert Paul Wolff received a doctorate in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1957. He has taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the University of Massachusetts, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. He has published twenty-one books on the history of modern philosophy, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of education, economics, and Afro-American Studies. Among his best-known books are Kant's Theory of Mental Activity and In Defense of Anarchism, which has just been translated into Croatian, Korean, and Malaysian. In 1992, he was invited to join the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies to assist in the establishment of a doctoral program, which he has coordinated since it was established in 1996. Wolff is now the director of the new university- wide Program for Undergraduate Mentoring and Achievement which provides mentoring and instructional services to traditionally underrepresented students in their first year at UMass. In 2005 Wolff published Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, a meditation on the experience of joining an Afro-American Studies Department and what it taught him about America. In 1990, Wolff founded University Scholarships for South African Students, a charitable organization that offers financial aid to poor Black students studying at South Africa's historically Black universities and technikons.