Marx's Fate: The Shape of a Life

by Jerrold E. Seigel

Marx’s Fate is an intellectual biography of Marx that combines historical, textual and psychological analyses to provide major new insights into the philosopher’s writings and development.

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly I found this take on Marx super fascinating. Admittedly I kinda skimmed past all the psychohistory stuff (like, not all of it, just the parts where it's reeally going into the weeds of e.g. Marx's relationship with his mother and how the traumas of its badness manifested later), but that's not to say that it wasn't valuable -- in fact, it was extremely refreshing to finally read a book that's not just hagiographically praising Marx's "genius" or whatever, but analyzing him as just a normal, flawed, neurosis-filled human like the rest of us. Kind of similar to what the movie "The Young Karl Marx" did. I'm 100% on board with it. Oh, I especially appreciate the skepticism in this book about all the handwaving around Marx's Jewish heritage. From everything I know, Marx's Jewish heritage was about as important to him as it was to me, which is to say zero importance units: like, me having "Jewish heritage" pretty much just means I spent years doing math problems/puzzles in my head for hours every week to pass the otherwise completely-fucking-unbearable time until services or Hebrew school ended. I feel like (unless someone has some evidence to the contrary) Marx was "impacted" by it in a similarly inane way.