From Each According To His Ability

Essays on Karl Marx and Classical Political Economy

For thirty-five years, Robert Paul Wolff has been carrying on a deep study of the tradition of social and economic theory that started with the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith and was brought to its highest point of development by Karl Marx. Wolff is unique among students of the thought of Marx in his ability to address the philosophical underpinnings of Marx's thought, the formal mathematical reinterpretation of Marx's economic theories carried out in the 1960's, 70's, and 80's by economists around the world, and also the theoretical significance of the extraordinary literary style of Marx's greatest work, Capital. No other scholar has even attempted an integration of these different dimensions of Marx's writings. In these essays and papers, we see Wolff working through the several aspects of Marx's thought and bringing them into fruitful and unified conjuncture.

The volume opens with two literary/philosophical readings of Marx's writings, and then turns to the tradition of Classical Political Economy, with detailed analyses of the writings of David Ricardo and his modern interpreter, Piero Sraffa. Included here is Wolff's own original contribution to the modern mathematical reinterpretation of Marx's economic theories, together with responses to Wolff's work by two major modern Marxist thinkers, John Roemer and David Schweickart.

In the third section of the volume, Wolff offers penetrating critiques, from a Marxist perspective, of the work of Jon Elster and Hannah Arendt.

The volume concludes with a bitter-sweet essay entitled "The Future of Socialism."