Updating his 1976 triptych on the “Main Currents of Marxism” in 2005, the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski predicted that Marx himself would become “more and more what he already is: a chapter from a text book of the history of ideas, a figure that no longer evokes any emotions, simply the author of one of the ‘great books’ of the 19th century – one of those books that very few bother to read but whose titles are known”.
That assumption seemed credible then. But one consequence of the financial crash of 2008 has been the intellectual rehabilitation of Marx. Outside academic precincts, his ideas have been slowly, if not wholly, exfoliated of their association with dictatorship and state-sponsored terror. Recent, if only partial, exonerations have been issued by the Economist and the New York Times, as well as by high-ranking superintendents of the neoliberal order, including Alan Greenspan and Francis Fukuyama.
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