Product Description

First published over fifty years ago, Isaiah Berlin's compelling portrait of the father of modern Communism has long been considered a classic of modern scholarship and the best short account written of Marx's life and thought. It provides a penetrating, lucid, and comprehensive introduction to Marx as theorist of the socialist revolution, illuminating his personality and ideas, and concentrating on those which have historically formed the central core of Marxism as a theory and practice. In turn, Berlin presents an account of Marx's life as one of the most influential and incendiary social philosophers of the nineteenth century and depicts the social and political atmosphere in which Marx wrote.

This edition includes a new introduction by Alan Ryan which traces the place of Berlin's Marx from its pre-World War II publication to the present, and elucidates why Berlin's portrait, in the midst of voluminous writings about Marx, remains a classic account of the personal and political side of this monumental figure.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #641617 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-01
• Original language: Spanish
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
Este brillante relato de la vida y el pensamiento de Marx se ha convertido en un clasico y se considera el mejor estudio critico del autor de El capital. La presente edicion incluye un prologo de Alan Ryan y una bibliografia actualizada. ""Lei por primera vez Karl Marx hace treinta y cinco anos, y lo devore de una sentada. Los nuevos lectores lo encontraran igual de absorbente."" Alan Ryan ""La biografia de Marx abrio el ancho universo al que Isaiah intuia pertenecer: la historia de las ideas."" Michael Ignatieff ""Como era posible que un partidario insobornable del sistema democratico, tan hostil a toda forma de colectivismo, escribiera uno de los mas honestos y penetrantes estudios sobre Marx?"" Mario Vargas Llosa ""La admirable capacidad del autor para traducir muchas nociones abstrusas y oscuras del marxismo a un lenguaje claro y su virtuosidad para mostrar la relacion entre personalidades, caracteres y actitudes, de un lado, y las cuestiones doctrinales, de otro, no tiene parangon en la literatura existente."" Leszek Kolakowski --Los editores

Review

Praise for previous editions:
"[Berlin's] accounts of Marx's theses are sometimes more effective than Marx's own words, and his descriptions of Marx as a man are remarkably vivid."--Political Studies

About the Author

Isaiah Berlin is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University, and past President of the British Academy. He is the author of The Age of Enlightenment, Four Essays on Liberty, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber, Vico and Herder and Russian Thinkers.

Customer Reviews

Brian Wayne Wells, Esquire, reviews "Karl Marx"
Like him or not Karl Marx had more impact on the twentieth century than any other thinker in history. He certainly was more important to the twentieth century than to his own nineteenth century. As a result very few people are neutral about Marx. Most of the world either either loves him or hates him.

Isaiah Berlin's 1939 biography of Marx that does a good job in covering the events and people involved in Marx's life, however, the reader must filter out all the anti-communist bias that has been added the text. The bias is unfortunate. This critic feels that Berlin knew better, but the political tenor of Britain and Western Europe in 1939 required hinm to clearly slant his writing in this way.

Because of this slant in the writing the book unintentionally reveals much about British intellectual society in 1939 and the prevailing fear of the Soviet Union which permeated certain sections of the scholastic society in Britain at that time.

As a consequence, the book can not distinguish any of the differences that may have existed between Marx'x theory and the Soviet state of the 1930's.

PURE AND PROPER INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
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.

IT'S THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS
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.