Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
I liked this book immensely; it places Marx fully within the nineteenth century, follows, to some extent, the development of his ideas, enlarges on the editorial and organizational influence of Engels, and presents a clear view of the construction of v. 2-3 of DAS KAPITAL.Sperber also makes clear the basic sources of Marx's ideas for the 21st-c reader: EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE . . ., THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY, GRUNDRISSE, CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM, ON THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, CAPITAL, of course. The "ANTI-DUHRING" as well as KAPITAL, V.2-3, presents the Engels prism through which Marx's views have most often been seen, an important distinction.The writing style is clear and easy to follow, an aspect much appreciated in discussions of Marx's shifting views (he was a fine example of the Emersonan dictum "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds") and in tracing the economic and social ideas that formed Marx's actual beliefs. Marx, too, comes through in a sympathetically drawn character, as husband, father, and friend buffeted by the constraints created by his commitment to fairness and equality. The four chapters near the end of the book--"The Theorist," "The Economist," "The Private Man," "The Veteran" (pp. 387-545)--reflect Sperber's attempt to grasp the whole man, to include his contradictions, and the bourgeois values at the heart of his existence, that of a very much 19th-c man.I was stunned, at an exhibition at the NYPL, to see that the first US edition of THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO was published in 1884, the same year as HUCKLEBERRY FINN, 36 years after its original publication. Just reading a TLS review of the new biography of Bertolt Brecht, I was surprised to learn of the paucity of interest in Brecht, surely one of the great dramatists and poets of the twentieth century, in both the US and England. Capitalism turns out to be a better censor than either the Tsar or Stalin, I find--HUAC, ack, ack, spew. A remarkable book. Sperber wears his immense learning lightly, and offers what seems to me, as a layman, a balanced account of a passionate and conflicted life. I was very much taken on the late chapter on Marx as a a private man. And, as someone who had never read a biography of Marx before, I was fascinated by his life—by the way he blended scholarship and revolutionary activism, by the difficulty he had in finishing writing projects, by the intensity of his relationships—quick and strong to friendship, sudden and intractable to anger.
What do You think about Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013)?
A fair, balanced look at one who impacted the way modern dissenters operate.
—jorge
A very thorough look at a very complicated man.
—vinay
