The Austro-Marxist school of thought, which flourished in Vienna from the end of the nineteenth century to 1934, has recently attracted renewed attention both as a general framework for a Marxist sociology and as a body of substantial research into major problems of structure and change in the advanced capitalist societies. Among its eminent members were Max Adler, Otto Bauer, Karl Renneer, and Rudolf Hilferding.

This study presents the first general assessment in the English language of Rudolf Hilferding's life and work. Hilferding was born in 1877 and died in the Gestapo prison La Sante in Paris in 1941. He is remembered as the author of Finance Capital (1910), as the theorist of "organized capitalism," as the chief ideologist of Weimar Social Democracy and as the theorist of the totalitarian state economy.

Working from archival materials and a wide range of primary and secondary sources, F. Peter Wagner interprets both Hilferding's life and work, particularly his generational position as an activist for European labor movements and his theoretical position as founding member of the school of Austro-Marxism.

Key aspects are traced and developed, from Hilferding's debate with the Austrian economist Bohm-Bawerk on the Marxian labor theory of value, to his leading role as social democratic intellectual and politician in the Weimar Republic and his return to his earliest the theoretical concerns after the fascist triumph in Europe.