This is the second Marx issue of Social Research. The first (Summer 1976) focused on the current reception of Marx within the different intellectual disciplines. Our focus is on the state of Marxian social theory as a whole. That it is in crisis is nothing new, but an ever recurring state of affairs of the last hundred years. If only its intellectual failures and political successes were counted, it would be impossible today to be a follower of Marx. Yet because of the promise of his theoretical synthesis, it is necessary that in some sense we follow Marx as long as the dream of a critical theory of existing societies is not itself dead.

This dream itself has recently been challenged in terms that seek to link it to Gulag and to terrorism. The shoddy scholarship of these attacks along with their obvious political motivations should not drive us to blindly affirm the opposite, that there is now in existence a Marxian theory linked only to human liberation which is a sensitive, sophisticated interpretation of the present. Wherever official, Marxism has degenerated into a crude legitimating "science" of a new historical form of domination. Elsewhere orthodox Marxism is an ideology either of etatist modernization or of a technocratic rationalization masked as the science of late capitalism. To be sure, at the political and cultural peripheries of existing societies, East and West, there have been serious attempts to work out new, self-critical versions of Marxist theory, uniting the idea of critique with that of an emancipatory philosophy of history. And yet in view of the historical weight of the dominant interpretations and the fragility of creative, revised, reborn or reconstructed versions, we have to ask if this very situation is not rooted in the work of Marx himself.

The fundamental concept of contemporary Marx interpretation is the antinomy. This is not a confrontation of young and old Marx, of philosopher and scientist, but rather the problem of a thought at all stages divided and opposed to itself because of its innermost structure. It is this concept of antinomy that guides the structure of this issue of Social Research. It emerges as a series of clashes--a dogmatic, metaphysical philosophy of history linked to an authoritarian, rationalist utopia of a fully transparent society versus an open theory of discontinuous social formations with a sense for the density of the symbolic realm (Lefort); the incompatibility of an economics derived from the physis of man as animal laborans versus a social-historical project seeking the free constitution of a society able to create and question its own institutions (Castoriadis); the opposition of the utopian moments of the fully unfolded value theory to a traditional Marxism that accepts the existing structure of labor for all industrial society (Postone); the clash of a critical sociology of stratification with a panological theory of class, sustaining only statist technocratic or apolitical visions of the future (Cohen); the contradiction between the dream of substantive democracy and a theory of politics and of formal democracy that indirectly legitimates only a new mode of hierarchy and domination (Heller and Vajda).