In 1977 and 1978, Paul Hirst and Barry Hindess published with their collaborators the two volumes of Marx's "Capital" and Capitalism Today. In the latter year Gerald Cohen published Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. In retrospect, it is possible to see in these events a turning-point for Anglophone Marxist theory, and the latest evidence of the remarkable capacity of Western Marxism to renew itself, despite everything. Hirst and Hindess, who had been for almost a decade the most influential English exponents of Althusserian Marxism, seemed to announce in 1977 their utter despair at systematic social thought in general and Marxist theory in particular. It appeared that the Althusserian project, initially promising nothing less than a total reconstruction of history and politics on a new basis of social science, had lapsed and crumbled into dust.² The virtues of Cohen's work only served to throw this denouement into sharper relief. It might be said tendentiously that while Althusserians talked a great deal about rigour, Cohen actually practised it. His argument was careful, painstaking: chock-a-block with nice distinctions other people hadn't dreamt were there.³ It proceeded step by step, analytically. It was no longer a case of gathering Marxism into one great mouthful to be swallowed whole or not at all. Instead, Marxism was to be sorted into a list of distinct claims: each one deserving its own interrogation for meaning, coherence, plausibility and truth. The logical relation between claims was an explicit topic of the theory, so that it became more open to judgement which parts of a complex Marxist corpus stood and fell together.