In this illuminating and concise collection of readings, Karl Marx emerges as the first theorist to give a comprehensive social view of the birth and development of capitalist modernity that began with the Second Industrial Revolution and still exists today.

Robert J. Antonio is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas. He has written widely on Marx, critical theory, and classical and contemporary social theory, and is the co-editor of A Weber–Marx Dialogue (with Ronald Glassman, 1985).