Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx und die Geburt der modernen Gesellschaft: Biographie und Werkentwicklung. Band 1: 1818-1841, Schmetterling Verlag 2018.[1]

Review: Karl Marx and the birth of modern society

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2021-06-21 00:00:02

Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx und die Geburt der modernen Gesellschaft: Biographie und Werkentwicklung. Band 1: 1818-1841, Schmetterling Verlag 2018.[1]

Michael Heinrich has raised the standards of biographical writing with Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society. In content and scope, it is an unparalleled work of scholarship. It makes Marx relevant to our understanding of capitalist society, while cutting down the overgrown myths about him. It confronts those sworn enemies of Marx’s thought with the weapons of critique. It will challenge the ways avid readers of Marx think about the meaning his times, concepts and ideas have for the present.

The book’s title has a twofold meaning: Marx was a child of “modern society” with the economic and political transformations of Western Europe and North America between 1780 and 1860, and the encroaching dominance of the capitalist mode of production – but he was also the most outstanding witness of these new bourgeois social relations.

Heinrich’s first volume captures Marx’s youth, his dashed poetic hopes, legal training in Berlin, the turn to Hegel’s philosophy and friendship with Bruno Bauer, all of which led up to his doctoral dissertation on The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, and the biography is left hanging. It is not yet enough to fulfil the intellectual promise opened, but it points in the direction of genuinely new territory for Marx scholarship.

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