A Requiem for Karl Marx

Marx makes better sense from his critics and having proceeded through all I could find in the JC series in the stacks I came across this one. Not bad, although a few cliches are crusting around the edges, this from the author of the fine mega-volume, Utopia in Western Thought. This title might go well with Derrida's Spectre of Marx. The problem is that people have been refuting him since the end of the nineteenth century, and many of these first critics were the most acute. Marx as a self-hating jew is a canard, although his tract on the Jewish Question is seen now rightly as a tale of unintended consequences. The strangeness of Marx lingers in the combination of brilliance and shoddiness that left his work bound in its mystique, one that loses the obvious insights of the 1840's journalist. All in all however this is worth reading. Like a rubber duck, Marx always seems to reflotate, and the journalist of the 1840's still haunts modernity.

In this book, Frank E. Manuel attempts to give the reader an unbiased, historical account of Marx as he really was. We, as a group, were left with the impression of Marx as a self-loathing man on a self-prescribed "heavenly" quest. His rejection of his Jewish heritage colored his dealings with the rest of the world. He spent his life fighting for the liberation of a people that he neither knew nor liked on a personal level. The cost of this quest was his financial freedom, family life and physical health.Manuel's biography of Marx provides the reader with a gripping account of one of the most fasciniting characters of the 19th century. An overall captivating depiction of his life, work and death. It is well written and we recommend it to anyone studying Marx or his theories.

This is a wonderful reading about Marx the man and his particular brand of "scientific" socialism. It reveals Marx's insecurities, self-loathing, bigotry, and financial failures, as well as his life as essentially an attempt to burry all that in a heavenly vision of a new society, which Marx constantly nurtured through intense intellectual persuites.This is a portrait of Marx, a humanistic intellectual, as he is revealed in his correspondence with Engels and his actions in a Victorian/Dickensian London. This is a man whose idealism and a feeling of being discriminated against led him eventually to adopt the attitude of suspicion and contempt for almost all human beings, this is Marx-Halevy trying to escape his own roots and ending up planting seeds of communist revolutions in backward, agrarian societies for which he had so much contempt.