A new book on Karl Marx, Marx, A Nineteenth Century Life, is out and it does well to present Marx as a "figure of the past," a real person, with real human instincts, rather than as Marx the eternal "prophet of the future."
Jonathan Sperber, an University of Missouri scholar, has done well to rescue Marx from the cobweb of iconism.
An excerpt from a review of the book:
[...] It comes as a shock to realize that the ultimate leftist, the father of Communism itself, fits a recognizable pattern. It’s like discovering that Jesus Christ regularly organized bake sales at his local church. So inflated and elevated is the global image of Marx, whether revered as a revolutionary icon or reviled as the wellspring of Soviet totalitarianism, that it’s unsettling to encounter a genuine human being, a character one might come across today. If the Marx described by Sperber, a professor at the University of Missouri specializing in European history, were around in 2013, he would be a compulsive blogger, and picking Twitter fights with Andrew Sullivan and Naomi Klein.
No comments :
Post a Comment