Volume 21, Number 17 · October 31, 1974
Big Problem for Marx
By J.E. Seigel
Karl Marx: His Life and Thought
by David McLellan
Harper & Row, 498 pp., $12.50
Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
by Karl Marx, translated with a foreword by Martin Nicolaus
Random House, 893 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Karl Marx was a man of revelations. What he saw lurking in the shadows of modern society—the 'specter of communism,' class struggle, surplus value—he sought to bring to the light of day. His belief that unveiling these secrets would provide the key to history seems reflected in his interpreters who look to hidden truths as the key to his history. That Marx left important works unfinished and unpublished has made revelation a large element in Marx studies. The now famous Paris manuscripts of 1844 disclosed a previously unknown (but not wholly unsuspected) Marx to a generation that found 'alienation' closer to its experience than class struggle. 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice' (so Marx launched The Eighteenth Brumaire), and the drama of finding the real Marx in a hidden manuscript now seems about to repeat itself.
Review, 5085 words
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