Why did Karl Marx want to exclude politics and the market from his vision of a future socialism? In Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason, Allan Megill begins with this question. Megill's examination of Marx's formative writings casts new light on Marx's relation to philosophy and reveals a hitherto largely unknown 'rationalist' Marx. In demonstrating how Marx's rationalism permeated his attempts to understand politics, economics, and history generally, Megill forces the reader to rethink Marx's entire intellectual project. While Megill writes as an intellectual historian and historian of philosophy, his highly original redescription of the Marxian enterprise has important implications for how we think about the usability of Marx's work today. Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason will be of interest to those who wish to reflect on the fate of Marxism during the era of Soviet Communism. It will also be of interest to those who wish to discern what is living and what is dead, what is adequate and what requires replacement or supplementation, in the work of a figure who, in spite of everything, remains one of the greatest philosophers and social scientists of the modern world.

In the past thirty years, historians have broadened the scope of their discipline to include many previously neglected topics and perspectives. They have chronicled language, madness, gender, and sexuality and have experimented with new forms of presentation. They have turned to the histories of non-Western peoples and to the troubled relations between "the West" and the rest. Allan Megill welcomes these developments, but he also suggests that there is now confusion among historians about what counts as a justified account of the past. In "Historical Knowledge, Historical Error," Megill dispels some of the confusion. Here, he discusses issues of narrative, objectivity, and memory. He attacks what he sees as irresponsible uses of evidence while accepting the art of speculation, which incomplete evidence forces upon historians. Along the way, he offers succinct accounts of the epistemological road historians have traveled from Herodotus and Thucydides through Leopold von Ranke and Alexis de Tocqueville, and on to Hayden White, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Lynn Hunt.

Frustrated with the usual methods of scholarly inquiry, Ewa Domanska hit upon the idea of interviewing some of the world's most original and important theorists and philosophers of history to get at the heart of contemporary understandings of "history." The result is Encounters, an exciting collection of these dialogues. So old-fashioned as to seem revolutionary, the interview format allows for a concise presentation of the main ideas of each writer, providing easy access to theories that have shaped modern historiography.

No one book could encompass the vast territory of contemporary historiography, but this text gives us a sense of what underlies some of the most interesting and challenging work in the field. Although Domanska's interlocutors hold widely divergent views, they agree about which issues are important. Most strikingly, all share the belief that aesthetics, objective reality, and meaning are the most crucial concerns in our understanding of history today. The interviews also address such pressing issues as the relation of history to its modes of presentation, the relation of particular works of history to the notion of history in general, and the personal and civic functions of history. Ewa Domanska's Encounters offers a unique look into the hearts and minds of today's most stimulating historical theorists.

In this book, the author presents an interpretation of four thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. In an attempt to place these thinkers within the wider context of the crisis-oriented modernism and postmodernism that have been the source of much of what is most original and creative in twentieth-century art and thought.