Researching and teaching in Mexico City, Julio Boltvinik is among the leading political philosophers writing in Spanish. It is fortunate that many more people can now study his important work thanks to the appearance in English of From Poverty to Well-being and Human Flourishing. Volume 1 of this magnum opus is themed Integrated Conceptualisation and Measurement of Poverty (Bristol: Polity Press 2024). The present Volume 2 offers A Marxian Approach, which Boltvinik understands in a rich and broad sense as very close to human well-being and flourishing. He is grappling, then, with the age-old question of what is a good-life for human beings and what is a good-society in which humans can lead such lives.

Boltvinik's discussion of these questions is distinctly Marxian, rooted in Marx's philosophical anthropology, which he takes to provide a convincing conception of the human essence. He argues that the human good is defined by the development and satisfaction of human needs and the development and exercise of human capacities. These needs and capacities are not fixed, however, but rather shaped and manifested differently under diverse social conditions. Nonetheless, there is enough of an invariant human essence – tied to uniquely human activities and self-creation through labour – to support the view that capitalist societies necessarily fail to enable full human flourishing by alienating human beings, and especially directed employees, from the product of their labour, their own potential, and their community. Good human life involves self-creation through free exertion (which transforms both nature and the agent) and, for the human species, a transformative development towards increasing freedom and universality.