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.

"Megill's analysis is based on the highest level of scholarly erudition....there is no doubt that in terms of both scholarly references to original materials and thorough guidance to secondary literature, Megill's work is invaluable. ...There is much of value in Megill's book; it deserves the serious attention of anyone interested in Marx, either as a theorist of human history or as a critic of the modern capitalist world." - Political Studies Review

"It is a pleasure to turn to Allan Megill's Karl Marx. Allan Megill shows things—this being the mark of the true scholar. Megill's argument is one that is going to have to be confronted, and met. It provokes and challenges the reader. It also bristles with thought, or, more precisely, with thinking. Megill gets an almost alarming number of things right." - Perspectives on Politics

"Meticulously developed thesis." - Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

"I would like to teach a course with Allan Megill. This thought occurred to me already when reading the second page of his book. By the time I had finished the book, I concluded that it would have to be a year-long course. For Megill's meticulously researched, densely packed analysis addresses so many important issues in Marx's work, and raises so many more for intellectual history, that it would take that long to do them justice. Because his [Megill's] book raises so many essential issues concerning historiology, Marx's complex thought, and its contemporary relevance, it deserves to be considered in much greater breadth and depth than I could do here. If it gets the attention it deserves (which in this era that has buried Marx in an unmarked grave, is not a foregone conclusion), then Megill will have realized his goal of starting what could be a very valuable debate." - History and Theory

"One simply revels in the academic and intellectual quality on offer here: scholarship, thought, and engagement of a rare kind." - Contemporary Political Theory

"I believe Megill has given us something of real worth here. In particular his readings of the significance and origin of the early work is excellent; his attempts to unravel the ontological, epistemological, and methodological underpinnings of Marx's work as a whole are particularly illuminating; and I can't think of a better account of the materialist basis of 'historical materialism.' Above all, one simply revels in the academic and intellectual quality on offer here: scholarship, thought, and engagment of a rare kind. Megill has, as Wittgenstein put it, gone 'the bloody hard way,' and it shows." - Modern Intellectual History

"Intellectual historian Allan Megill's Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason holds the distinction of being the first English-language book that uses the new MEGA as its principle source. This erudite study is that rare commodity, a serious and well-informed yet strongly critical exploration of Marx's thought.... One of the merits of a truly scholarly work like this one is that the author presents his arguments and evidence, as well as the acknowledgments of counterarguments and counterevidence, so judiciously that even readers with opposing standpoints can find support within the text with their arguments against those of the author....In the Preface he indicates that he may write a sequel focusing on Capital. That would be a happy development indeed." - Contemporary Sociology, May 2005