A new biography of Karl Marx, tracing the life of this titanic figure
and the legacy of his work
Karl Marx remains the most influential and controversial political
thinker in history. He died quietly in 1883 and a mere eleven mourners
attended his funeral, but a year later he was being hailed as "the
Prophet himself" whose name and writings would "endure through the
ages." He has been viewed as a philosopher, economist, historian,
sociologist, political theorist, even a literary craftsman. But who was
Marx? What informed his critiques of modern society? And how are we to
understand his legacy?
In Marx and Marxism, Gregory Claeys, a leading historian of socialism,
offers a wide-ranging, accessible account of Marx's ideas and their
development, from the nineteenth century through the Russian Revolution
to the present. After the collapse of the Soviet Union his reputation
seemed utterly eclipsed, but now a new generation is reading and
discovering Marx in the wake of the recurrent financial crises, growing
social inequality, and an increasing sense of the injustice and
destructiveness of capitalism. Both his critique of capitalism and his
vision of the future speak across the centuries to our times, even if
the questions he poses are more difficult to answer than ever.
