As a specialist in analytical English and American philosophy, Márkus wrote his dissertation on Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he had previously translated into Hungarian for the first time, and spent 1965–1966 at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States supervised by Wilfrid Sellars and Willard V. O.

The first publication that brought international attention to Markus was his Marxism and Anthropology (1978), originally published in Hungarian in 1965 and translated later into Spanish, Japanese, Italian, English and German.

The second period is marked by a more critical standpoint on Marx and a special focus on the methodological limitations of the orthodox Marxian paradigm of labour.

Markus also begins in this period to engage more with non-Marxist theorists like Hans-Georg Gadamer, Leo Strauss as well as renewing his interest in Wittgenstein.

Here the extensive scope of Márkus’ grasp of developments in the wider philosophical world allowed him to engage critically with the variety of ways in which ‘language paradigm’ had gained ascendancy in twentieth-century humanistic studies.

Márkus argued against this linguistic model, advocating a view of culture as a type of productive process better understood along (expanded) Marxist lines.

Via a critique of Habermas’ communicative turn, he argues that the legacy of this paradigm had prevented the critical theoretical tradition from giving a sufficiently rich account of the subject's concrete interactions with nature as also a thoroughly social process.

Habermas had also recognised the normative deficit of this paradigm but largely abandoned it altogether, opting instead - in a Kantian twist - for an idealised, transcendental perspective extracted from the conditions of linguistic interaction.