Volume 18, Number 4 · March 9, 1972
Through the Marxian Maze
By Robert L. Heilbroner
Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society
by Bertell Ollman
Cambridge University Press, 325 pp., $10.50
Alienation and Economics
by Walter Weiskopf
Dutton, 202 pp., $7.95
Marx continues to brood over our intellectual life. In view of the immense impact that Marx has had on history, the fact would hardly be worth nothing were not his writing often so baffling. The famous historical essays and a few parts of Capital still have the effect of thunderbolts, but much of his earlier work, not to mention tedious chapters in the later volumes of Capital, are murky in a way that rouses both skepticism and impatience. That we nonetheless go on reading Marx, torturing ourselves by trying to penetrate the obdurate prose, can only be ascribed to a stubborn conviction that there is something of inestimable value beneath this opaque surface, if only we could discern exactly what it was.
Review, 3922 words
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