Name: Karl Marx
ISBN: 9781841151144

Francis Wheen

This biography presents Karl Marx as a man of both brilliance and frailty, as a poverty-stricken Prussian emigre who became a middle-class English gentleman, as an angry agitator, as a gregarious and convivial host and as a devoted family man.

A Life

Karl Marx

Edward Steel

Gavin

Portrait of Karl Jeremiah Wooster Cosby Marx. Wheen’s an ideal biographer: fearless, careful, sympathetic on balance. (So, ideal for the readers rather than the subject.) 

Most of his shortish book is debunking slanders; the rest is in cementing others. Was Marx a bully? No: bullies take weak targets. A dogmatist? No; he spent twenty years researching one-quarter of his big book, and admired his bourgeois forebears Ricardo and Feuerbach. Was he a Whig ‘historian’? Sort of. Petty? Oh yes indeed. A hypocritical idealist? Tried not to be. Anti-semite? Yes, or, used the same language. Russophobe? Definitely somewhat. A bourgeois patriarch? Very much so. A heartless philanderer? Once. A show-off? Yup. 

I came up with an epitaph for him – “KM. Excellent journalist, journeyman economist, awful leader.” but I am not learned enough to assert it yet. Wheen is in a rush (Hegel’s system gets five lines) but he writes well, seems to have read everything in the vicinity.

Karl Marx A Life

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