A Humanising look at Charlie Marx
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Karl Marx has often been described as one of the most evil men ever to have lived. Indeed, there is a book listed on amazon entitled "Was Karl Marx a Satanist?" Responsible for Stalin? For North Korea? This book paints a different picture. What Wheen has done here is to reveal the man behind the monster. From his yearly days at university filled with drinking and youthful discussion on philosophy in smoke filled rooms, to social agitator and someone disgusting by the inhumanity of capitalism and Prussian state dictatorship, and to a loving and doting father and husband in his mature years, Marx Comes across as throughly likable. Whether you are a fascist, a communist, a liberal, a socialist, a conservative or whatever label you attach to yourself, you will love this book. When I first read it, I wished that he were still alive so that we could go for a pint. Oh well, I still have this magnificent biography.
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Excellent, but with a few flaws.
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Francis Wheen's biography of Marx is excellent. It's witty, realistic, sympathetic, well written, easily read and thoroughly enjoyable - so read it.
Usually, Marx is caricatured as either a wild eyed revolutionary lunatic or a dry academic who spent his life in the British Museum. He was, of course, neither.
What is very clear from Wheen's book, is the fact that Marx was a practising revolutionary as well as a theorist. Marx would throw his energies into the waves of revolutionary political activity that occurred during the 1840's and again at the end of the 1860's/early 1870's. When these waves were defeated, Marx would retreat into theoretical study in order to learn the lessons and hone the theoretical understandings he hoped would enable the working class to liberate itself and, thus, humanity.
Unfortunately, I think Wheen adopts a rather mocking tone towards Marx's political activities which I think detracts from his biography.
Marx also comes out of Wheen's book as a human being with all the strengths and weaknesses present in all of us, complete with binge drinking and an illegitimate son, not at all the distorted figure at the centre of a Stalinist personality cult.
I had started reading 'Capital' and had just read the first three, apparently most difficult, chapters before feeling in need of a break by reading something else. One of my 'something elses' was Wheen's biography, which motivated me to go back to reading 'Capital'. It's a great introduction to Marx the man and to his ideas.
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enjoyable, insightful
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I previously knew nothing about Karl Marx except that he wrote the communist manifesto.
My preconceptions of the man, were fairly ignorant.
I always saw him as an extreamist who inspired terrible dictatorships.
I am now aware these regimes took Karl Marx's work out context.
Im in my 20's and trying to find out where i stand politically.
A communist, i am not. Right Wing, definately not.
A socialist within a capitalist society .. maybe
I have never given much thought to politics before, its all new food for thought.
This book was a pleasure to read, and it has been a great introduction to Karl Marx.
Its inspired me to now read Das Kapital also by francis Wheen, and then i will give the communist manifesto a go.
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Little Dynamo!
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I never knew Karl Marx was so much fun! Here Herr Marx leaps from the pages destroying enemies with invective, scorn and stinging wit; loving his wife and family as a kindly paterfamilias; continually, hideously and pitifully suffering from the most wretched physical health; and drinking, (!) excessively, with fellow left wing lights. Francis Wheen gives us a Marx we can love whilst setting to right many of the myths that have grown-up about Marx. He, in particular, pays attention to his dismissal by British Academia correting many false assumptions about him. Marx is more a prophet than a destructive Red Terror. He is more a wit, than a tedious economist. He is more creator than destroyer. A very fine and interesting read that moves along in an attractive, zestful prose style with an enlightening amount of intellectual stimulation. Brilliant!
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Karl Marx, an iluminating biography from Francis Wheen
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Frances Wheen biography on Karl Marx is a benchmark in recent books on famous political thinkers. The way he comprehends Karl personality as a human being and a political philosopher in the context of its time and stress with major irony the underlining contradictions, enlighten us the power, complexity and premonition of Marx's thought beyond the linear propaganda of socialism and communism as ideologies. Like Nietzsche Marx was a aman ahead of its time, condemend and rarely accepted in its life, out of the circle of German exiled in Paris or London. Several decades later he was plaid guilt - like Nietzsche - by the outrageous acts of bloshevism (as Nietzsche for the Nazism) as some argue that they were rooted in its vision and prophecies of the world and mankind. It's difficult to find such a strain in Karl's thought - although its radicalism - in its fine irony, its thunder wording, the analytical spirit, the stubborness. Frances analysis of Marx-Engesl intimate cumplicity is much enlightening as Marx dimension as a bourgeois man of family and its rarely preceived sympathy with English society and culture. When there is a new return to Karl main political essays by sociologista and political scientists out of the common left-right ''wall'', Frances passionate and fresh biography give us the figure of a common man and an ideologue, not the myth or the vilain. For a complete balance on Marx political thought I would sugest a reading on Raymond Aron ''Les étapes de la pensée sociologique'', Bsic Books and Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey ''History of Political Thought'', University of Chicago Press or John Shumpeter ''Capitalism, socialism and democracy''. Arnaldo Gonçalves
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