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Title: Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, Fourth Edition by Isaiah Berlin, Alan Ryan ISBN: 0-19-510326-2 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: July, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.29 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: IT'S THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS
Comment: Isaiah Berlin's biography of Karl Marx is as erudite as it is compelling. Taking one of the more controversial and laborious men of the twentieth century as his subject matter, Berlin weaves the intricate and sometimes confounding thoughts of his subject into a patterned and complex whole.
Karl Marx is treated fairly in this book--neither with sycophantic adulation nor with profound cynicism typical of other treatments of Marx and his philosophy. Perhaps because of the political consequences of Marx's ideas, the negative overview's of his life have emphasized his tempermental side, the irony of being funded by an aristocratic Engels, or the silliness of his labour theory of value premise (shared by David Ricardo). Meanwhile, on the other side, there are writings on the life of Marx that stick to his genius, his profound impact on the world, and further entrench his cult status.
It is this latter part that I found most interesting in Berlin's work--the exploration of Marx's temper tantrums with anyone who should deviate from Marx's conception of how things must be. Proudhon, for instance, is castigated by Marx. So, too, is Feuerbach and the Young Hegelians (Berlin muses about whether or not this has to do with the mighty influence these have had on Marx's own thought and Marx's desire to be seen as a wholly original thinker). Bakunin does not escape public ridicule when they differ on the value of the State as a mechanism to be used by the proletariat. Bakunin, of course, did not believe in hierarchical orderings of any kind--whether in capitalist industry, or in the socialist state--and issued proclamations and gave speeches to that effect, explicitly cautioning people about the possibility of the government violating the freedom it was supposed to secure. Marx was not impressed, and consequently mocked him openly. Engels was perhaps the only man to escape the eventual polemical wrath of Marx, saving himself from such a fate possibly because he simply agreed with whatever Marx said, and indulged him in most everything else.
Still, what comes across most forcefully is the life of a man steeped in ideas, and interested in the fundamental, radical underpinnings of society as a whole. Marx is often enough considered a genius of the highest calibre, with impeccable literary credentials to back it up. It is this attention to minute detail, and his incredible analysis of society (or rather, the historical 'movement', if you will, of human relationships which reciprocally interact with the concrete, material conditions of their existence) that makes this praise seem a bit understated.
This singular fact--Marx as a man of ideas, and the fact of the practical consequences of his ideas--is touched upon in a self-conscious bit of irony by Berlin. For Marx explained that it isn't ideas that do anything, really, but are, instead, the consequences of material conditions, these conditions being fundamental. And yet it was the writings of Marx that sparked several revolutions and formed the primary cause of the one in Russia which stuck around for a while (no one is here implying a monistic view of history... the lessons Marx tried to teach are not entirely lost on me).
What we're left with is an incredibly vivid picture of Marx, the man (not the myth, or the legend; although a little bit of both is tossed in for spice). Berlin does a masterful job, so anyone picking this book up should find it entirely enjoyable.
Rating: 4
Summary: PURE AND PROPER INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
Comment: Let me say that if you are looking for a biography of Marx's life you had better look elsewhere. There are no long chapters about his school days, his relations with his Sisters, Mother or Father. You will not find detailed references to every argument Marx had or every aspect of his squallid and, at times, extremely personally irresponsible lifestyle. You must look elsewhere for those details.
This book is about ideas and the struggle between ideas. It is about Marx emersed in the ideas of his time and how those ideas shaped his thinking, whether changing his ideas, borrowing or regjecting them outright Berlin has a wonderful, at times unique grasp of the issues and the ideas of the times that Marx lived.
Starting with a broad description of the Rational-Empiricist debate and the Hegelian reaction to empiricism, Berlin describes Marx as a unique German Hybrid of British Empiricism married to a searching German Hegelian spirit, dissatisified with the traditional historical interpertations offered by Hegel and his German offshoots, the Young Hegelians.
Along the way Marx comes across a uniques set of millenarian and social theorists of his time; Proudhom, Bakunin, Engels, Lasalle, Feuerbach and others, whom all, even though perhaps disliking Marx personally, respected his argument style, his learning, and his deep insight into the problems of the time.
I would not classify this as a beginning book on Marx. There is a lot of ground covered here and if one does not have at least a thumbnail sketch understanding of the times, the social and political issues, then there will be a chance that the author will loose some of his readership. Berlin's prose has been described variously as dense and hard to understand. It may be for some readers. But Berlin is not excessively wordy (it is a slender volume), but he does have the ability to cover a lot of ideas and currents in a single sentence. It is this juggling and keeping in mind of a lot of ideas and concepts in a single sentence that may necessitate one to reread certain sentences, or at least know the concepts to which he is referring.
If you do have general outline of the ideas of the age then you will love this book. I sat down thinking that this was my "serious reading." I fully expected it to be a labourious process to get through this book. Instead I was profoundly surprised by the breath and depth Berlin covers in his lucid prose.
I found it hard to put the book down.
There is no analysis of whether Marx was right or wrong. Of how his ideas become to become the bible of the oppressed on the earth or how it eventually was transmogrified in some cases to justify the mass killing of those who stood in the way of historical materialism. This is a book of ideas, and as such the ideas discussed of Marx, his contemporaries, and his intellectual primogeniteurs are a ripping good read.
Rating: 5
Summary: Shows how capable philosophers can be.
Comment: The philosophical side of this book might be a strong support for the idea that philosophy was in bad shape when Nietzsche found it. The political side of the book ought to establish that it was no wonder. Before I bought this book, I had a copy of THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY by Karl Marx, which was written when Nietzsche was quite young. It was an attack on the thoroughly political view of economics which had been adopted by Proudhon. According to Berlin, "Marx was convinced that Proudhon was constitutionally incapable of grasping the truth; that, despite an undoubted gift for telling phrases, he was a fundamentally stupid man; the fact that he was brave and fanatically honest, and attracted a growing body of devoted followers, only made him and his fantasies more dangerous;" (Berlin, p. 87). In a move that is sure to remind historians of how often Communists turned against others who thought that they were on the same side, Marx's book attacked the roots of Proudhon's system in Chapter 2, The Metaphysics of Political Economy, with his usual summary of Hegel. "As to those who are not acquainted with Hegelian language, we would say to them in the sacramental formula, affirmation, negation, and negation of the negation. . . . Instead of the ordinary individual, with his ordinary manner of speaking and thinking, we have nothing but this ordinary manner, pure and simple, minus the individual." (Marx, p. 115).
Berlin is capable of providing summaries of the issues, even admitting that "Marx took immense trouble to demonstrate that Proudhon was totally incapable of abstract thought, a fact which he vainly attempted to conceal by a use of pseudo-Hegelian terminology. Marx accused Proudhon of radically misunderstanding the Hegelian categories by naively interpreting the dialectical conflict as a simple struggle between good and evil, which leads to the fallacy that all that is needed is to remove the evil, and the good will remain. This is the very height of superficiality: to call this or that side of the dialectical conflict good or bad is a sign of unhistorical subjectivism out of place in serious social analysis." (Berlin, pp. 85-86).
The current clash of civilizations might be considered as stupid as anything that Marx analyzed in Proudhon's system, by those who are sure that philosophy is a style adopted by the good side, while anyone who has adopted the politics of mounting destructiveness has all the faults which the free world has always attributed to communism. Plenty of poisons have entered this contest in the last 155 years, since Karl Marx tried to side with the rising class while arguing against their unexamined notions of good and evil, but philosophies have been as powerless on this kind of question as Nietzsche might be considered absurd for attempting to encompass powerful ideas. People who can't relate to this book must lack an appreciation for something that philosophers always wanted, even in the days of the pre-Platonics. It might be considered tough to read, having been revised little since it was Isaiah Berlin's first great book in 1939. I thought it was better than a lot of what I have tried to read about Hegel, and I wasn't trying very hard.
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