Marx’s Capital has been the focus of widespread interest in the wake of the international financial crisis that erupted in 2008, as hundreds of leading daily and weekly papers throughout the world discussed the contemporary relevance of its pages. Many are again looking to an author who in the past was often wrongly associated with the Soviet Union, and who was too hastily dismissed after 1989. New or republished editions of Marx’s work have become available almost everywhere. The literature dealing with Marx, which all but dried up twenty-five years ago, is showing signs of revival in many countries, and there are now many international conferences and university courses dedicated to his most significant work published in 1867.

This Handbook provides an extensive survey of the dissemination and reception of Marx’s Capital throughout the world, providing a more exhaustive account of the formation of Marxism than has previously been offered. The editors have assembled a cast of international experts of Marx’s Capital. They explore, and critically reconsider, the history of the dissemination of Marx’s Capital in all the languages (more than 70) in which the book was entirely translated. All the chapters are written by national authors and each chapter provides a short history of the penetration of Marxism in that country; tells the story of the different translations of Capital; explores the reception of Capital from both a political and a theoretical perspective; highlight the most influential interpretations of Capital and how they influenced the overall interpretation of Marx; and evaluates the importance of Capital in terms of the overall understanding of Marxism and, more broadly, Socialism.

At a time when Marx’s ideas - liberated from the chains of Soviet ideology - are being hailed for their prescience, an exhaustive account of the dissemination of his magnum opus will have significant implications not only for the understanding of the genesis of Marxism, but also the re-founding of a critical thought intended to transform the present.