Harry Harootunian spent most of his career teaching history and East Asian studies at the University of Chicago, where he is Max Palevsky Professor of History Emeritus. He is now adjunct senior research scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University, where he teaches a graduate course. He has published on various periods of Japan's intellectual and cultural history and on questions of Marxism and historical writing. He is also the author of History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life and Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan.
Harootunian's reading of Marx, in particular, is a revelation and should put to rest the facile assumption that Marx's conception of the historical is reducible to the banalities of modernization theory. Marx After Marx is a provocative and important intervention in a critical conjuncture by a major scholar. This is a landmark study within Marxist thought. Drawing largely on Marx's later works for its conceptual tools and theoretical method, Marx After Marx analyzes how different regions under differing circumstances cast a plurality of developmental forms all under the general code of capitalist accumulation. -- Michael Dutton, author of Policing Chinese Politics: A History Harry Harootunian is singularly qualified to give us a Marxism adequate to the conditions of a genuine 'world' (as against a Hegelian 'universalist') history in a global age. The Marx who emerges from this book is a nuanced, empirical, and genuinely historical thinker instead of the pseudo-scientific 'philosopher of history' met with in textbook accounts of Western Marxism. -- Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz