Reading Capital

New York: Pantheon Book, 1970. Hardcover. Fine/fine. Privately owned hardback with good clean dust jacket. Classic Text. Almost new. Althusser's project is to reconstruct Marx's theoretical practices at a very high level of rigor, clarifying, for example, the specific differences between Hegel's understanding of "dialectics" and Marx's. In doing so he produces a series of new concepts: "structure in dominance", "overdetermination", "problematic", "epistemological break", "combinatory" and others. While none of these *terms* is present in Marx's writing, the things they refer to definitely are. In turn, this labor makes it possible to clearly understand the theoretical differences between Marx's early works and his mature ones; that is, between his "Feuerbachian" youth and his Marxist maturity. This is a difficult work, but a profoundly rewarding one for those interested in what it is that makes Marx Marx.