The Making of a Marxist Philosopher: A Memoir: by Sean Sayers (1962)

Sean’s father was the son of a Jewish-Irish businessman who was a friend of Michael Collins and other leaders in the Irish struggle for independence. He became a writer who was given his first job by T. S. Eliot, shared a flat with George Orwell, went to America and was blacklisted under McCarthyism. Sean’s mother was the American-born daughter of a world famous Italian American anarchist. She became a communist and lived and worked in China. Sean was born in New York and grew up in London. He studied philosophy in Cambridge and Oxford Universities in the 1960s and has become an internationally known Marxist philosopher. As one of the founders of the journal Radical Philosophy and the creator of the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, Sayers has been at the centre of the development of philosophy on the left in the English-speaking world during the past fifty years.

Reflecting on the fate of Marxism in an engaging, thoughtful way, The Making of a Marxist Philosopher is filled with revealing family photographs which Sayers uses to craft an original must-read on left-wing thought and politics.