Eugene Kamenka was born in Cologne in 1928 and taken to Australia in 1937. He was educated at the Sydney Technical High School, and went on to take first-class honours in philosophy at the University of Sydney under John Anderson. His doctoral thesis, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism, for the Australian National University, was published in 1962. Kamenka has lectured in philosophy at the University of Singapore and has lectured and reaearched in Europe, North America and most countries in Asia; he was Professor and Head of the History of Ideas at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Australian National University, and lived in Canberra. His other works include Marxism and Ethics (1969), The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach (1970), The Portable Karl Marx (1983), Bureaucracy (1989), and many others.