Top Menu

Intellectual archaeology: Green Left Weekly explains why we need Michael Heinrich’s biography of Marx

Lázaro Saavedra, 1964

Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work (Volume I: 1818-1841)
390 pp, $34 cloth, ISBN 978-1-58367-735-3
By Michael Heinrich

Reviewed by Barry Healy

“In the very opening lines of the preface of this book Michael Heinrich quotes from an 1868 letter in which Karl Marx mentions a publisher’s request for a biography. ‘Not only did I not send one’, said Marx, ‘I did not even reply to the letter.’ ¶ Yet Marx has been the subject of over 30 biographies since then, not bad for a man who rejected any public honours in his lifetime, calling them a ‘cult of personality’. So, why read another account of his life? ¶ Well, one reason is that the entirety of Marx’s writing has now been made public by the Marx Engels Collected Works (MEGA2) project….”

Read the review at Green Left Weekly

Comments are closed.