The Twists and Turns of Post-Marxism: Fragments of Intellectual History
Alexander Pavlov
Moscow: Gaidar Institute Press, 2026. — 424 p.
ISBN 978-5-93255-726-6
For a long time, the term “Western Marxism” was used to describe Marxist philosophers who combined Marx’s ideas with other intellectual currents of the 20th century. But by the late 1970s, when nearly all scholars and thinkers began speaking of a major crisis in Marxism, it became clear that changes in theory required a different term to describe the new left. This is how post-Marxism emerged.
Alexander Pavlov uses this term to encompass virtually all Marxists who began their active work in the 1970s, and he demonstrates that, in a positive sense, this label applies not only to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Among the book’s protagonists are Slavoj Žižek and Laclau, analytical Marxists, postmodern theorists, Marshall Berman, and Jörgen Therborn. In addition, the book introduces the philosopher Gillian Rose to the Russian academic context for the first time.