Introduction

This chapter opens with a puzzle that runs throughout this book: why, when appeals to need are ubiquitous in politics and everyday life, do political theorists so often treat them as if they stand outside of politics? Whilst such accounts might be able to explain the everyday intuition that needs carry an extra-political normative force, they also run the risk of displacing or masking conflicts over needs, obscuring the role of power in those conflicts, and failing to fully account for how needs are mobilised in practice. Similarly, Marx's interpreters have sometimes looked to extract a transcontextual ‘theory of need’ from his writings, detaching his theoretical work from his radical political activism. It is those two observations, then, that structure my approach in this book, which aims to recapture a distinctively political conception of need from Marx's writings that can help to confront the closures and distortions of contemporary theories of need. Having set out this agenda, the chapter turns to some conceptual preliminaries on the language of need before concluding with an outline of the book's structure.