I know I’m not the only one thinking that our world has lost its mind. It’s not easy being some relatively sane person nowadays. At the best of times, politics is bankrupt. At its worst, it’s toxic, dominated by demagogues, liars and cheats. Their falsehoods fly wholesale, rarely disgruntling masses of people, let alone damaging a demagogue’s political career.

The longest chapter in Capital is the fifteenth, on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry.”

Enter Marx, the first thinker, Marshall believes, to make these two worlds connect. It was Marx, after all, who wanted to discover the underlying unity of life. Marx’s horizon is vast and his vision packs together an enormous range of things and ideas that nobody had thought of throwing together before, breaking down boundaries, piling things together that seem to clash and totter on the brink.