From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Mon Sep 11 2006 - 12:01:03 EDT
From a Brill page <http://brill.nl/hm>
..................................................................
Exploring Marx's Capital
Philosophical, Economic and Political Dimensions
Jacques Bidet. Translated by David Fernbach. Preface to
the English Edition by Alex Callinicos
Books
Forthcoming
Expected: January 2007
Series: Historical Materialism Book Series, 14
ISBN-10: 90 04 14937 6
ISBN-13 (i)The ISBN (International Standard Book
Number) will change from 10 to 13 digits on 1
January 2007: 978 9004149 37 3
Cover: Hardback
Number of pages: 400 pp.
List price: € 129.00 / US$ 168.00
About the author(s)
Jacques Bidet is Professor at the University of Paris-X,
holding the chair of Political Philosophy and Theories of
Society. His other publications include Theorie de la
modernity (1990), John Rawls et la theorie de la justice
(1995), Theorie generale, Theorie du droit, de lâ'economie et
de la politique (1999) and (with Jean-Marc Lachaud) Habermas:
Une politique da'liberative (1998).
This book, originally published in French under the
title Que faire du Capital?, offers a new interpretation
of Marx's great work. It shows how the novelty and
lasting interest of Marx's theory arises from the fact
that, as against the project of a "pure" economics, it
is formulated in concepts that have simultaneously an
economic and a political aspect, neither of these being
separable from the other.
Jacques Bidet conducts an unprecedented investigation of
Marx's work in the spirit of the history of science,
exploring it as a process of theoretical development.
Traditional exegesis reads the successive drafts of
Capital as if they were complementary and mutually
illuminated one another. In actual fact, like any
scientist, Marx only wrote a new version in order to
correct the previous one. He started from ideas borrowed
from Ricardo and Hegel, and between one draft and the
next it is possible to see these being eliminated and
restructured. This labour, moreover, was never fully
completed.
The author thus re-assesses Marx's entire system in its
set of constitutive categories: value, market,
labour-power, classes, working class, exploitation,
production, fetishism, ideology. He seeks to pin down
the difficulties that these encountered, and the
analytical and critical value they still have today.
Bidet attaches the greatest importance to Marx's order
of exposition, which assigns each concept its place in
the overall system, and makes the validity of the
construction depend on the pertinence of its initial
presuppositions. This is particularly the case with the
relationship between market mechanism and capitalism and
thus also between the market and socialism.
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