Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life
Recent Marx biographies, such as Francis Wheen’s Karl Marx (2000) and Mary Gabriel’s Love and Capital (2011), leave scholarly room for Sperber’s cradle-to-grave portrait. A specialist in nineteenth-century European history, Sperber maintains that Marx, the power of his ideas having “run their course,” must be anchored historically to his youthful inspiration by Hegelian philosophy and the French Revolution. According to Sperber, Marx’s intellectualism, despite his prophetic visions of a Communist society, was retrospective. Sperber’s interpretations of Marx’s ideas might rankle a modern Marxist, who believes in their contemporary relevance, which implies a subsidiary purpose of Sperber’s work, to depict Marx the man before there was Marx the “ism.” That aim results in Sperber’s most interesting and accessible sections, which underscore Marx’s birth into bourgeois society, the conventions of which he never relinquished; the influence of his parents; and the poverty and exile his wife and children endured because of his revolutionary activities. Including the cast of Marx’s enemies and acolytes, Sperber superbly recounts the life Marx led. --Gilbert Taylor