Citing Marx

The global success of Marxism is one of the most important developments in modern intellectual history. By the mid-twentieth century, Marxist ideas had come to inform thinkers and activists on every inhabited continent, with enormous consequences for local and global politics. However, the international diffusion of Marx’s texts and the appeal of his ideas around the world were by no means preordained, for Marx had focused his analytical attention on the economic histories and conditions of Western Europe. This project aims to build a resource that will help scholars study this development by allowing them to understand how Marxists globally drew from Marx’s corpus of writings.

Beginning in the Fall of 2024, the CDH team will focus on developing methods for identifying quotations from Marx within a small subset of Marxist literature: the German-language journal Die Neue Zeit. The goal is to lay the methodological groundwork for the larger project of identifying the uses of Marx within a multilingual corpus of Marxist literature.