The History and Theory of Fetishism, the expanded version of Iacono's enduring classic Teorie del feticismo and available for the first time in English, aims to provide the historical context necessary to understanding the concept of "fetishism" and offers an overview of the ideologies, prejudices, and critical senses that shaped the Western observer's view of otherness and of his own world. Iacono examines the moment when the Western observer turned his colonizing and evangelizing gaze to continents such as Africa and the Americas, while attempting to simultaneously destabilize and look at his own world critically.

Introduction
1. The Theoretical and Historical Assumptions Underpinning the Concept of Fetishism
2. Charles de Brosses' Theory of Fetishism
3. The Concept of Fetishism as a Theoretical and Historical Problem
4. Marx's Theory of Fetishism
5. History, Nature and System. Marx's Anthropological Conception
Bibliography

Alfonso Maurizio Iacono holds a chair in History of Philosophy at the University of Pisa, Italy. He also taught at the Université de Paris 1 (Sorbonne-Panthéon), France. Formerly a Dean of the Faculty of Letters, he is currently Director of the Pisa University Museum Network. His research areas of interest are the relationship between philosophy, politics and anthropology, with an emphasis on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century debates.