The Marxian Revolutionary Idea

"In his parting word about Marx at Highgate Cemetery, Engels characterized his friend as 'before all else a revolutionist.' This was a true summation of Marx both as a man of action and as a thinker. For as a theorist Marx was before all else a theorist of revolution. The revolutionary idea was the keystone of his theoretical structure. Marxism, as he fashioned it with the assistance of Engels, was in its essence a theory and program of revolution."

In this volume Robert C. Tucker looks critically at the later writings of Marx and Engels, not only as political theory but as the ideology for political revolution. From the vantage point established in his earlier work--that there is a continuity underlying Marx's writing from the newly discovered manuscripts of 1844 to the mature work, Capital--Professor Tucker examines Marx as a social, moral, and political theorist, and a theorist of modernization. "The Marxian Revolutionary Idea" is followed, in thought and application, through infancy to maturity, in success and failure, and finally as it has been transformed by modern socialism.