Making Sense of Marx

Making Sense of Marx

File:Making Sense of Marx (first edition).jpg Cover of the first edition
Author	Jon Elster
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Subject	Karl Marx
Published	1985 (Cambridge University Press)
Media type	Print (hardcover and paperback)
Pages	556
ISBN	978-0521297059

Making Sense of Marx is a 1985 book about Karl Marx by Jon Elster, in which Elster reevaluates Marx's ideas. The book has received a mixture of praise and criticism from commentators.

Summary

Elster reevaluates Marx's ideas from a rational choice perspective, arguing that Marx at his most insightful was in some sense a methodological individualist.

Scholarly reception

Making Sense of Marx was praised as "sharp" and "hard-headed" by political scientist David McLellan in the 1995 edition of Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. Richard W. Miller, writing in The Cambridge Companion to Marx (1991), called Elster's work "erudite".

Conversely, the Marxist theorist Ernest Mandel gave the work a negative review entitled "How to Make No Sense of Marx", while philosopher Jan Narveson writes that Making Sense of Marx was, "greeted with highly mixed feelings by those who had hoped the title meant that there was sense to be made" of Marx.

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