In 1980 Alvin Gouldner identified two traditions of Marxist thought--Marxism as science and Marxism as critique. This book is concerned with the first and by far the most politically influential of those traditions--Marxism as science. It analyzes the claim, first made by Marx and Engels themselves, that Marxism is some kind of "hard" natural science of society able to identify laws of social development and to provide a scientific guide to revolutionary...