Any discussion of Marx's thought is still suffering from the absence of a comprehensive critical edition of his works. The Marx–Engels Werke edition, now being completed in East Berlin, is despite its shortcomings the most comprehensive effort to collect Marx's and Engels' writings. Occasionally, however, it has to be supplemented by references to other editions, especially Riazanov's superb Gesamtausgabe which was discontinued during the Stalin purges.

In the present work, every effort has been made to refer to English translations of Marx's works. In cases where no such translation exists, I have rendered my own translation and referred the reader to the German edition I have used. Loyd D. Easton's and Kurt H. Guddat's selection Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Garden City, 1967), has unfortunately reached me too late to be used for this book.

Anyone who adds another volume to the already prolific literature on Marx can be expected to be accused of either repetitiveness or immodesty. I would not have presumed to write this book had I not been convinced that the discussion of Marx's political and social ideas has suffered from a double distortion conditioned by the intellectual history of those ideas themselves. Seldom has the debate about Marx been successfully divorced from explicit or implied political objectives; and the rediscovery of Marx's earlier writings has created an imbalance in most prevalent views about the nature of Marx's thought.