Karl Marx entitled his first major work on the theory of capitalism an Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, not, it should be stressed, An Introduction to … Political Economy. The inclusion of the crucial ‘the critique of provides the key to Marx's break with classical political economy. As much as he respected the contribution of bourgeois writers, especially Ricardo, he did not consider himself a radical member of the political economy school. That the political economy school's most outstanding (...) members focused upon class relations did not save them from an analysis that, in Marx's judgement, was ‘vulgar', in that it focused upon the appearance of phenomena rather than their underlying causes. Political economy focused on relations of exchange, rather than on class relations among human beings. As he wrote famously in an oftquoted letter, for at least a generation before him bourgeois writers had recognised both class divisions in capitalism and that the basis of profit was exploitation; were these the central elements of his work, his contribution would have been trivial. (shrink)

Those familiar with the contributions of Robert Brenner to understanding of the historical development of capitalism, and his devastating critique of the ‘regulation school’ must, like myself, have felt a sense of anticipation as they began his recent volume on global capitalism since the end of World War Two. While the editor's introduction was pretentious to the point of embarrassment, this unfortunate excursion into naive idolatry should not be attributed to the author himself. However, even those most supportive of Brenner's (...) previous work, could not help but be disappointed by the contents of ‘;Global Turbulence’. (shrink)

A Research Guide to the Ancient World: Print and Electronic Sources is a partially annotated bibliography that covers the study of the ancient world, and closes the traditional subject gap between the humanities and the social sciences in this area of study. This book is the only bibliographic resource available for such holistic coverage.