ABSTRACT
A NEW interest revolves around the theme of alienation. Marx is read not as an economist or political theorist—not for the labor theory of value or the falling rate of profit, not for the theory of the State or even of social classes, and certainly not as the founder of dialectical materialism—but as a philosopher who first laid bare the estrangement of man from an oppressive society. Alienation is taken to be the critical tool of the Marxist method, and the new canon is derived from the early, and in his lifetime unpublished, philosophical manuscripts of Marx. Even non-Marxists accept this new emphasis. Thus in Père Jean-Yves Calvez’s comprehensive La Pensée de Karl Marx, published in 1956, 440 of a total of 640 pages are devoted to the concept of alienation and its use in social and political analysis.
