Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: our time and the Age of Marx -- Into the twenty-first century: the new parameters of global politics -- Twentieth-century Marxism and the dialectics of modernity -- After dialectics: radical social theory in the North at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

In this pithy and panoramic work-both stimulating for the specialist and accessible to the general reader-one of the world's leading social theorists, Goran Therborn, traces the trajectory of Marxism in the twentieth century and anticipates its legacy for radical thought in the twenty-first.