“There is now the nagging fear that Marx’s spectre may return to be the ghost of revolutions yet to come.” Jonathan Clark reviews Ellen Wood’s Liberty and Property for the TLS
Against this method, and on the usefulness of Marxism as a tool for understanding important historical transformations, Clark writes:
“Why religious conflict destroyed so many polities, why mixed monarchy theory failed, why republicanism proved weak and democracy belated, are questions that Marxism did not really answer”. But on other matters (interactions between property and the state, how self-interested worked alongside professions of principle, how material goals marked out social constituencies, why polities differed in their long-term political trajectories) Marx still has much to offer.”
All this is very promising. But does Wood deliver?
Visit the TLS to read the review in full.