Analytical Marxism (late 1970s)

Analytical Marxism, also called "rational-choice Marxism," developed in the English-speaking world. The founding work is Gerald A. Cohen's book Marx's Theory of History, published in 1978.

It was followed by further books by John E. Roemer and Jon Elster. All three are considered founding fathers of analytical Marxism, whose heyday was in the 1980s and 1990s. The current takes guidance from analytical philosophy and insists, like analytical philosophy, on clear propositions that are rational and in accordance with the principles of formal logic. On the basis of this paradigm, dialectical and Hegelian reasoning is rejected. An introduction to analytical Marxism is provided by the entry in volume 1 of the Historico-Critical Dictionary of Marxism, written by Philippe Van Parijs and available in English here.