The Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize is an annual prize given in honour of historian Isaac Deutscher and his wife Tamara Deutscher for a new book published in English "which exemplifies the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition." It has been ongoing since 1969.
As of November 2025, members of the Deutscher Jury include Gilbert Achcar, Alex Callinicos, Alejandro Colas, Ben Fine, Rob Knox, Chun Lin, Esther Leslie, Alfredo Saad-Filho, Gabriel Winant, and Lea Ypi.
Recipients include Jairus Banaji (2011, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation), David Harvey (2010, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism), Rick Kuhn (2007, for a biography of Henryk Grossman), Christopher Wickham (2006, for Framing the Early Middle Ages), Brian Kelly (2002, Race, Class and Power in the Alabama Coalfields), Francis Wheen (1999, for a biography of Karl Marx), Eric Hobsbawm (1995, for The Age of Extremes), Terry Eagleton (1989, The Ideology of the Aesthetic), Robert Brenner (1985, for The Brenner Debate), and G. A. Cohen (1978, for Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence).Recipients of the Prize
Winning authors may contribute to the Deutscher Memorial Lecture series the following year; the lecture, or a text based upon it, is published in a variety of outlets, including Historical Materialism, the New Left Review, International Socialism, and the International Socialist Review.
Recipients YearWinnerBookPublisherDeutscher Memorial Lecture1969"The Unknown Marx"New Left Review1970Marx's Theory of AlienationMerlin1971Not awardedN/AN/AN/A1972 and Andrew GambleFrom Alienation to Surplus ValueMacmillan1973From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and SocietyNLB1974Marxism and IslamAllen Lane1975Leninism Under LeninCape1976Socialist Ownership and Political SystemsRKP1977Karl Marx and World LiteratureVerso1978The Alternative in Eastern EuropeNLB1979Karl Marx's Theory of History: A DefenceOxford University Press'Freedom, Justice and Capitalism'1980Capitalism, Conflict and Inflation: Essays in Political EconomyLawrence & Wishart1981Lenin's Political ThoughtMacmillan1982The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab ConquestsDuckworth‘Class in Marx's Conception of History, Ancient and Modern’1983Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth CenturyVirago1984Marx's Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual ArtsCambridge University Press1985The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial EuropeCambridge University Press1986The Retreat from Class: A New "True" SocialismVerso1987Russia, 1905–07: Revolution as a Moment of TruthMacmillan1988Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State 1917 to the PresentVerso1989The Ideology of AestheticBlackwell1990Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The Final Solution in HistoryVerso1991City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los AngelesVintage Books1992 and A Theory of Human NeedMacmillan1993The Education of Desire: Marxists and the Writing of HistoryRoutledge1994The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International RelationsVerso‘Isaac Deutscher and the Lost History of International Relations’1995The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991M. Joseph1996One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth CenturyI.B.Tarius1997The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800Verso1998Not awardedN/AN/AN/A1999Karl MarxFourth Estate2000The Global Gamble: Washington's Faustian Bid for World DominanceVerso2001Ehud's Dagger: Class Struggle in the English RevolutionVerso2002Race, Class and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908–1921University of Illinois Press‘Materialism and the Persistence of Race in the Jim Crow South’2003Discovering the Scottish RevolutionPluto Press‘How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions?’The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International RelationsVerso'Bourgeois Revolution, State Formation and the Absence of the International'2004Michael A. LebowitzBeyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class (2nd edition)Palgrave Macmillan'The Politics of Assumption, the Assumption of Politics'2005Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal FactoryBerghahn Books'Can we write the history of the Russian Revolution?'2006Framing the Early Middle Ages, Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800Oxford University Press'Problems Concerning the Economic Logic of the Feudal Mode'2007Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of MarxismUniversity of Illinois Press'Economic crisis and the responsibility of socialists'2008Nomads, Empires, States: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political EconomyPluto Press'Historicising the International: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy'2009 and Ben FineFrom Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics: The Shifting Boundaries Between Economics and Other Social SciencesRoutledge‘“Useless but True”: Economic Crisis and the Peculiarities of Economic Science’2010The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of CapitalismProfile Books'History Versus Theory: A Commentary on Marx’s Method in Capital'2011Jairus BanajiTheory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and ExploitationBrill'Seasons of Self-Delusion: Opium, Capitalism and the Financial Markets'2012Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global CapitalismBrill'The Blood of the Commonwealth: War, the State, and the Making of World Money’2013 and Leo PanitchThe Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American EmpireVerso'Marxist Theory and Strategy: Getting Somewhere Better'2014In the Vale of Tears: On Marxism and Theology VBrill2015Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual BiographyMonthly Review'Deutscher, Lenin and the East-European Perspectives: On the History of the Theory of Socialism'2016Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global WarmingVerso'In Wildness Is the Liberation of the World: On Maroon Ecology and Partisan Nature'2017Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of CapitalPrinceton University Press'Marx’s Social Republic: Political not Metaphysical'2018Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political EconomyMonthly Review'Marx’s Theory of Metabolism in the Age of Global Ecological Crisis'2019The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal BritainVerso'Class, Assets and Work in Rentier Capitalism'2020The Return of Nature: Socialism and EcologyMonthly Review'The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity'2021 Stalin: Passage to RevolutionPrinceton University Press'Was Stalin a Marxist? And If He Was, What Does This Mean for Marxism?'2022Gabriel WinantThe Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt AmericaHarvard University Press'The Baby and the Bathwater: Class Analysis and Class Formation after Deindustrialisation'2023Heide GerstenbergerMarket and Violence: The Functioning of Capitalism in HistoryBrill'On the Political Economy of Maritime Labour'2024Matteo PasquinelliThe Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial IntelligenceVerso'Vectors For Workers: Models of Automation and Autonomy in the Long AI Century'2025Bruno LeipoldCitizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political ThoughtPrinceton University PressShortlists for each year can be found on the Deutscher Prize website.
References
External links The Deutscher Prize website