Paolo Favilli provides both students and scholars with an original reading of themes and issues found in Karl Marx’s
Das Kapital
and its connections with present- day challenges. By way of continuous cross- referencing between present and past, Favilli demonstrates that claims regarding the scientific status of
, advanced by countless texts since its original publication, are themselves deeply imbued by the ‘spirit of the times’. If in 1963 Jean-Paul Sartre could write that Marxism was the unsurpassable philosophical horizon of our times, what could make an undergraduate student today consider such a claim plausible?
Informed by the latest research on Marxist theory and decades of teaching the Philosophy of History, Favilli employs a didactic approach stimulating student engagement and learning opportunities in the classroom. This approach allows for a better understanding of relationship between the present and the multiple temporalities that characterise and periodise the contemporary era. What follows is a critique of the contemporary academy for its hangover of post-1989 nuovismo (cult of novelty) and inability to make the proper distinctions between Marxism-as-party-state, the works of Karl Marx, and Marxism as an object of history. This led to the spectacle where after 1989, those who had spent most of their careers as Marxist-hued scholars not only abandoned this identity but also spurned any recognition that Marx and Marxism were worthwhile objects of enquiry.
This book was first published in Italian as
A proposito de ‘Il capitale’..., Il lungo presente e i miei studenti. Corso di storia contemporanea
(Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2021). This English translation includes a new foreword by the author.