“... Richter may be painting after the ‘subject of history’ (the proletariat in some readings of Marx) has left the stage, but he is still making paintings on the subject of history and its agents.This line of argument is presented with exemplary patience and learning in a series of long, leisurely essays written across several decades and collected here. It ...”

“... sovereign infrastructure all the rest flowed. The picture might be blurred, by reference to Marx’s more liberal writings or to, say, Althusser’s notion of ‘relative autonomy’ for literature, but, by and large, the direction of the logic of explanation, from materio-economic ground to any-and-every sort of consequent, was clear and unilinear. In ...”

“... into English, Baudrillard places himself at the revisionary end of a line that begins with Marx and his commodity law of value and that was later variously transformed by Benjamin, as in his most famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man, a major text for the Sixties, and by the ...”

“... these mechanisms? In its fixation on the wage relation (the original source of injustice for Marx), it hasn’t given adequate attention to the family. In her new book, Melinda Cooper argues that the family has been pivotal in the reform of capitalism since the early 1970s, but that this fact has been disguised by the slipperiness of conservative ...”

“... those ideas back … as gifts’. This is strikingly reminiscent of the communist’s role, per Marx, as someone who shows ‘the world what it is really fighting for’. And indeed, Graeber described himself at one point as a ‘libertarian, practice-oriented Marxist’. There was ‘no necessary contradiction’ between Marxism and anarchism, he ...”

“... and judicial powers to set the house in order. His preferred candidate for the role was Eduard Karl Joseph Michael Marcus Antonius Koloman Volkhold Maria Habsburg-Lothringen, Hungary’s ambassador to the Holy See. The back-up, in case Habsburg proved unavailable, was the commander of the Pontifical Swiss Guard.As an analyst of the modern administrative ...”

“... was spot-on: the vignette would not have seemed so telling had he chosen to compare his teacher to Marx or Durkheim or Pareto or Parsons. A second-order characteristic that Gellner shared with Weber was the way his work and career fell across several conventionally defined disciplines. An obituary tribute to Gellner pointed to this affinity by quoting ...”

“... lover Leo Jogiches. ‘We live in turbulent times,’ she wrote in 1906 to Luise and her husband, Karl Kautsky, also from prison, this time in Warsaw, convicted of aiming to overthrow the tsarist government. ‘All that exists deserves to perish,’ she wrote, quoting Goethe’s Faust. It is of course the whole point of a revolution that you cannot know ...”

“... The second book was Terrorism and Communism (1919) by the German Social Democrat, Karl Kautsky. ‘The leaders of the proletariat,’ Kautsky wrote, ‘have begun to resort to extreme measures, bloody measures – to terror.’ Koba has ringed these words, and written ‘ha-ha’ in the margin. These off-the-cuff reactions are scarcely ...”

“... dominate the massive bookshops on Fujian Road, where in the 1920s and 1930s intellectuals read Marx and Lenin and dreamed of revolution. American and European businessmen crowd hotel lobbies and expatriate cafés and bars – slicker versions of the old taipans, they can still be heard complaining of high local wages and the shortage of skilled ...”

“... resolution – inflation, public and private debt – had reached its endpoint. Streeck knows his Marx. But the core of his crisis theory is non-Marxian. It does not rest on the violence of original primitive accumulation, or on the alienation or exploitation inherent to the productive process, or even primarily on the declining rate of growth or ...”

“... the emergence during the Restoration of the textual procedures associated with the German scholar Karl Lachmann, usually regarded as the main originator of modern techniques of recension – as opposed to emendation – of ancient texts, which he applied to Lucretius, the Nibelungenlied and St Luke alike. La genesi del metodo del Lachmann assured Timpanaro an ...”

“... which bears a resemblance to Kropotkin’s ‘mutual aid’, covers relationships answering to Marx’s dictum: to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities. People act as communists not only towards friends and family but often towards guests, neighbours and strangers: ‘What is equal on both sides is the knowledge that the other ...”

“... decade earlier because they got the same train to Glasgow University (Maclean introduced Maxton to Marx), made themselves unpopular with the school board by speaking at anti-war meetings. The Sunday night meetings on Bath Street in the city centre that Maclean began in late 1914 are Henry Bell’s nomination, in his biography of Maclean, for ‘the birthplace ...”

“... ideas than its counterparts elsewhere. The students who triggered the movement not only read Marx with the ease and lack of distance that we associate with reading Smith or Mill (studying any classic in one’s own language is a very different experience from scrutinising celebrated texts from another); they were also formed by the legacy of ...”