The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works

by David Harvey

The world's leading Marxist geographer and economist guides general readers through major concepts in capitalism and Marx's masterwork

For decades, David Harvey has been teaching Marx's work, particularly Capital, to great acclaim. He has analysed chapter by chapter - sometimes line-by-line - Marx's three volumes and the Grundrisse. This new book opens up the mental universe of that work for a general reader.

In The Story of Capital, Harvey takes a synoptic approach to the conceptual architecture as a whole and guides us through the key moments, from labour and technology to the state and geopolitics, via the profit rate, social reproduction, the relationship to nature, fictitious capital and the return of the rentiers. In doing so, Harvey has produced a work which will become a key reference for all those trying to grasp the nature of contemporary capitalism.

Genres: Nonfiction, Economics

400 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 24, 2026

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

David Harvey (born 1935) is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). A leading social theorist of international standing, he graduated from University of Cambridge with a PhD in Geography in 1961.

He is the world's most cited academic geographer (according to Andrew Bodman, see Transactions of the IBG, 1991,1992), and the author of many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline.

His work has contributed greatly to broad social and political debate, most recently he has been credited with helping to bring back social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marx’s Capital is hard going. I’ve read Harvey’s two volume commentary on the first two volumes, and they are a great help – particularly since, while I’m interested in economics, I’ve never studied it. So, normally, I would have just suggested people read his commentaries before tackling Marx himself. Now I think I would recommend this book instead. As Harvey says, he sort of inadvertently wandered into his long study of Capital. This is a one volume exploration of its chief ideas, including some that Marx said he wanted to analyse but never got around to doing, and some new ideas that have become important since. I’ve recommended it to my daughters – and now I’m recommending it to you.

[Tacitus · Rating 3.75 out of 5]

This was an engaging read, but it was still challenging to understand the ideas without having read Marx before. Harvey provided plenty of recent and relevant examples to underscore the points, which was helpful. However, the prose was sometimes slack and repetitive, and the Marxist and academic-level terminology further complicated reading. This style tends to undermine the intent of providing an explainer of how capital works for "everyone." Nevertheless, I got a lot out of it and felt rewarded for giving it my time and attention.