Marx in Hell: The Critique of Political Economy as Katabasis

This paper examines one of the many Judeo-Christian allu-
sions in Marx’s corpus, his citations of Dante in the “1859
Preface” and the preface to the first edition of Capital. It demon-
strates that Marx borrowed key features of Dante’s Inferno for
his own critique of political economy, and that Marx thereby
situated his critical journey through economics as the heir to
the Western tradition of the katabasis, the formative descent
into the underworld. This undermines the dichotomization of
religion and science prevalent in Marxology, and suggests that
Marx must be read outside both of these traditional categories.

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