ABSTRACT
The collapse of Marxist communism in the Soviet Union and Europe's central and eastern countries just over a decade later seems altogether to have transformed not only the geopolitical but also the geophilosophical horizon. Marx and Marxism now have a somewhat puzzling position in the history of modernity that we have been following in the transition from “what it was like to be alive then” to “what it is like to be alive now”, a stubborn wrinkle in the history of the process of democratisation in Europe. The chapter follows two spectral Marx-survival stories in European cultural life. First, the case of contemporary leftist thought, it explores in relation to Robert Pippin's study of the European intellectual left. Second, and more obliquely but in some ways more interestingly, the case of contemporary liberal thought, something the chapter explores in relation to developments of liberalism in the work of Wiggins and Shklar.
