On the History and Logic of Modern Capitalism: The Legacy of Ernest Mandel

Mandel's Late Capitalism is the last large-scale effort to make sense of the development of capitalism since 1945 that is linked to the tradition of classical Marxism. The book provides an excellent case to study the difficulties of any such enterprise to come to grips with the historical developments of capitalism at large or with any of its particular phases or epochs. The difficulties that Mandel tries to surmount in order to reintegrate the theory and history of modern capitalism are, however, closely linked to ambiguities already present in Marx's original general theory of capitalism.