Often referred to but rarely read, The Communist Manifesto is one of the great documents of world history. Written by Marx and Engels and published in London in 1848 (in German originally), it presented a totally different view of social and political organization, as revolutionaary as Darwin's On the Origin of Species. The Manifesto's effect on world politics was incalculable, but though it might seem to have been discredited by the late 20th century,...

"In this combative and controversial book, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the prejudice that Marxism is dead and done with. Taking ten of the most common objections to Marxism--that it leads to political tyranny, that it reduces everything to the economic, that it is a form of historical determinism, and so on--he demonstrates in each case what a woeful travesty of Marx's own thought these assumptions are. In a world in which capitalism has been...

Contrarian economist Chang blasts holes in the "World Is Flat" theories of Thomas Friedman and other neo-liberal economists who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, today's economic superpowers--from the United States to Britain to his native South Korea--all attained prosperity by protectionism and government intervention in industry. We in...