Thomas Piketty, a French economist and academic, has become an overnight sensation thanks to his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, a bestseller that has sparked debate on all sides for its detailed analysis of inequality under capitalism, with elation and praise from the reformist left, and horror and fright from the free-market right. Adam Booth takes a look at the response to Piketty’s Capital.

Karl Marx’s Capital is an undeniable masterpiece of political economy. Marx’s magnum opus, however, remains a dense and difficult book to penetrate and absorb. To help guide readers through the pages of Capital we are publishing a series of articles that give a chapter by chapter analysis of this great Marxist classic. We begin with Volume One, Chapter One, in which Marx discusses the concept of the commodity and the question of value.

On Wednesday 2nd April 2014, roughly 450 people filled the LSE’s Old Theatre to hear a lecture on ‘The Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism’, given by the prominent Marxist academic, Professor David Harvey, who was launching his new book on the Marxist theory of capitalist crisis. Josh Holroyd reviews Harvey’s analysis of the crisis of capitalism.