In 1846, two years before the publication of The Communist Manifesto and twenty-one years before the publication of Das Kapital, Karl Marx published an essay titled "Peuchet on Suicide." Based on the writings of Jacques Peuchet, a leading French police administrator, economist, and statistician whose memoirs included discussions of suicides in Paris, Marx's essay is not a straightforward translation of Peuchet but instead an essay reflecting his own strong positions on the subjects addressed in Peuchet's work.

Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist movement.

Eric A. Plaut is a professor emeritus of Northwestern University Medical School.

Gabrielle Edgcomb was a poet and social critic.

Kevin Anderson is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Northern Illinois University.

"Plaut and Anderson's book represents a significant contribution to and expansion of sociologists' understanding of Marx's support for women's liberation. . . . Marx's views regarding women's oppression in the bourgeois family are made poignantly clear." --Social Pathology

"This essay, expertly retranslated and intelligently introduced, confirms how far Marx's interests ranged beyond the problems of the proletariat and sheds new light on the young Marx—not the least on the self-aggressiveness of his own emotional life."

—Louis Dupré, Yale University

"This unknown fragment of early Marx provides occasion for three engaging contributions: an introduction to Peuchet's pioneering text on suicide; provocative glosses on issues of self-destructiveness in Marx's biography; and a knowing recovery of Marx's views on gender and the family. Fascinating."

—Donald N. Levine, University of Chicago