Karl Marx has fascinated and inspired generations of radicals in the past 200 years. In this new, definitive biography, Sven-Eric Liebman makes his work live once more for a new generation. Despite 200 years having passed since his birth, his burning condemnation of capitalism remains of immediate interest.

Now, more than ever before, Marx's texts can be read for what they truly are. In addition to providing a living picture of Marx the man, his life, and his family and friends - as well as his lifelong collaboration with Friedrich Engels - Sweden's leading intellectual historian Sven-Eric Liedman, in this major new biography, shows what Karl Marx the thinker and researcher really wrote, demonstrating that this giant of the nineteenth century can still exert a powerful attraction for the inhabitants of the twenty-first.

Sven-Eric Liedman, Professor Emeritus of the history of ideas at the University of Gothenburg, has been reading and writing about Karl Marx for over fifty years. His textbook on political ideologies (originally titled From Plato to Lenin in 1972, rechristened From Plato to the War Against Terrorism in 2014) has been reprinted in fourteen editions.