Our primary aim in this course will be to read and understand several key works by Karl Marx. This will require us to consider Marx's critique of Hegel, and his intellectual debt to the political economy of Adam Smith. We will to make sense of some of Marx's earlier writings, before turning to a consideration of Capital. We will also read a number of significant commentaries on Marx, to help us along the way. And we will try to form an understanding of key notions in Marx's writing, such as class struggle, alienation, ideology and commodity fetishism.