Marx and the Politics of Abstraction

Many scholars see science and politics as mutually exclusive, where the latter’s influence contaminates the former’s purity. Karl Marx’s detractors often criticize him on these grounds. Paolucci shows that through his method of critique, Marx incorporates the relations of knowledge and power into abstractions and traces their historical movement. This corrective more readily lays bare capitalist societys exploitative nature. Paolucci convincingly argues that by mixing political and scientific analysis, Marx yields a method closest to that of scientific inquiry.