ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that Karl Marx’s method cannot be metaphysically separated from the whole history of western philosophy. It provides the advance made by Hegel over the system of thought developed by I. Kant, with his insistence on the a priori categories of reason. The book explains a detailed examination of the nature of commodity fetishism, the process exclusive to capitalism whereby the natural human relation of man to man is transformed into a relation between ‘things’. With the advent of monopoly capitalism in the late nineteenth century, and the rapid increase in the size of the urban working class, the English policy of laissez-faire had been gradually abandoned. The state, crucial to capitalist development since its inception, in Britain at least since the Tudor Period, had come to play an increasingly central role in economic life.
