István Mészáros

István Mészáros was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, described by Monthly Review as one of the foremost political philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. He wrote mainly about the possibility of a transition from capitalism to socialism. His principal work, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (1995), drew a conceptual distinction between capitalism and capital and analyzed the structural crisis of contemporary capitalist society. He was also interested in critiquing bourgeois ideology, including the idea that there is no alternative, and in analyzing the failures of what was called real socialism.