Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography by Rolf Hosfeld (review)

Bert Hosfeld’s brief intellectual biography of Karl Marx, which was highly praised when it appeared in German in 2009, has now been made available in English. It is an excellent short sketch of Marx’s ideas, placed very carefully in their original nineteenth-century context. There are areas where interpretations will differ, of course, but that is to be expected when dealing with a figure whose ideas were so substantial and complex. Marx being the revolutionary he was, any discussion of his ideas must also include an account of his political actions. Here the work is somewhat weaker, hampered by omissions and annoying errors of fact. Overall, though, the book is an intellectually stimulating essay, both historical reconstruction and ideological critique.

The first of the book’s three sections deals with the origins of Marx’s ideas, tracing his intellectual development through the 1840s. Hosfeld emphasizes both the influence of the Young Hegelians and the origins of their thought in liberal Protestant theology. Bruno Bauer looms large in the account, whereas Ludwig Feuerbach and the distinctly Feuerbachian Paris manuscripts of 1844 play less of a role than in many other interpretations. The author argues that Marx developed a simplified and utopian version of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s thought, in which a revolutionary movement would lead to the abolition of all social and political oppositions—between classes, between individuals and civil society, between civil society and the state—rather than following the master, who had seen the abolition of opposites only via a mediating element in human society: the state. More generally, Hosfeld suggests, Marx was never able to develop a theory of the state independent of his analysis of social classes.

In the second section, Hosfeld follows Marx’s efforts to implement his political vision in the revolution of 1848–1849, in London exile, and then, in the 1860s, with the German labor movement and the International Workingmen’s Association. He also discusses Marx’s intellectual encounter with post-midcentury positivism and the increasing influence of the natural sciences. The third section deals primarily with Capital, describing it as an enormous attempt to subject the intellectual categories and economic observations of political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Hegelian conceptual criticism, and to correct, revise, and enhance their vision of the workings and ultimate fate of capitalism.

This outline of the basic elements of Marx’s thought is effective, though there are a few places where one might place different emphases. For example, Hosfeld describes Friedrich Engels as the chief influence on Marx’s intellectually crucial decision to deploy the Young Hegelians’ theories of alienation to describe a capitalist economy and society. This downplays very considerably the importance of Moses Hess (who gets little recognition in the book), the Darmstadt radical Wilhelm Schulz, or Marx’s own reading, in French translation, of Smith and Ricardo. There is also a good deal more that could be said about Marx’s post-1850 encounter with both positivist social theory and the natural sciences. Hosfeld is keenly aware of the significance of the theory of the declining rate of profit for Marx’s economic thought. But he is unaware of just how much and how deeply Marx wrestled with this problem, because he did not use the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, the complete edition of Marx’s and Engel’s writings, but instead the older and much less complete East German Marx-Engels-Werke (the English translation has very helpful references in the notes to the English-language edition of the Collected Works). This failure to consult the definitive edition of the two men’s writings is a more general shortcoming of the book.

The section on Marx’s politics emphasizes his efforts at organizing the working classes in the direction of communist revolution. This is not wrong, but it tends to neglect Marx’s fierce hatred of both the Prussian monarchy and the Czarist Empire, which he saw as bulwarks...