Karl Marx: Thoroughly Revised Fifth Edition

KARL MARX

ISAIAH BERLIN WAS BORN IN RIGA, now capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia; there in 1917, in Petrograd, he witnessed both revolutions – social democratic and Bolshevik. In 1921 he and his parents came to England, and he was educated at St Paul’s School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

At Oxford he was a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory, and founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy. In addition to Karl Marx, his main published works are The Age of Enlightenment, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Liberty, The Soviet Mind and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.

Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin’s Literary Trustees. He has edited (or co-edited) many other books by Berlin, including all those listed above, and a four-volume edition of his letters. He is co-editor of The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin (2007), editor of The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin (2009), and author of In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure (2018).

Alan Ryan is emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford. He was Warden of New College from 1996 to 2009, and is the author of On Politics and several works on J. S. Mill and the philosophy of the social sciences.

Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol. His extensive publications on Marx and Engels include the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Engels, his own translations of Marx’s Later Political Writings, and a thematic reappraisal of Marx’s thought in The Postmodern Marx. His most recent books, which reflect a ‘political turn’ in Marxism studies, include Marx (2018) and Engels before Marx (2020), as well as a thirtieth anniversary edition of The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels (2020).

For further information about Isaiah Berlin visit <https://isaiah-berlin.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/>

ALSO BY ISAIAH BERLIN

*

The Hedgehog and the Fox

The Age of Enlightenment

Russian Thinkers

Concepts and Categories

Against the Current

Personal Impressions

The Crooked Timber of Humanity

The Sense of Reality

The Proper Study of Mankind

The Roots of Romanticism

The Power of Ideas

Three Critics of the Enlightenment

Freedom and Its Betrayal

Liberty

The Soviet Mind

Political Ideas in the Romantic Age

with Beata Polanowska-Sygulska

Unfinished Dialogue

*

Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946

Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960

Building: Letters 1960–1975

Affirming: Letters 1975–1997

Isaiah Berlin in 1939 (when this book was first published), by Helen Muspratt

KARL MARX

ISAIAH BERLIN

Fifth Edition

Edited by Henry Hardy

Foreword by Alan Ryan

Afterword and

Guide to Further Reading

by Terrell Carver

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Published in the United States of America, its territories, dependencies, and the Philippine Islands by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press.

press.princeton.edu

First edition published in the Home University Library

by Thornton Butterworth 1939

Second Edition published by Oxford University Press 1948

Third edition 1963

Fourth edition 1978

Fifth edition published by Princeton University Press 2013

Copyright Isaiah Berlin 1939, 1948

© Isaiah Berlin 1960, 1963, 1978

© The Trustees of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust and Henry Hardy 2013

Foreword © Alan Ryan 1995, 2013

Afterword © Terrell Carver 2007, 2013

Guide to Further Reading © Terrell Carver 2013

Editorial matter © Henry Hardy 2013

Photo of Isaiah Berlin by Helen Muspratt, Ramsey & Muspratt,

© The Trustees of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust

The moral right of Isaiah Berlin and Henry Hardy to be identified as the author and editor respectively of this work has been asserted.

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berlin, Isaiah, 1909–1997.

Karl Marx / Isaiah Berlin; edited by Henry Hardy; foreword by Alan Ryan; afterword and Guide to Further Reading by Terrell Carver. – Fifth edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-15650-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

eISBN 9781400848119

Version 2.0

ISBN-10: 0-691-15650-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. 2. Communists – Biography. I. Hardy, Henry. II. Title.

HX39.5.B4 2013

335.4092–dc23 2012051126

[B]

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

To the memory of Marie and Mendel Berlin

CONTENTS

Editor’s Preface to the Fifth Edition xi

Foreword by Alan Ryan xix

Preface to the Fourth Edition xxix

Note to the Third Edition xxxiii

Note to the First Edition xxxv

1 Introduction 1

2 Childhood and Adolescence 22

3 The Philosophy of ‘The Spirit’ 33

4 The Young Hegelians 57

5 Paris 76

6 Historical Materialism 112

7 1848 149

8 Exile in London: The First Phase 168

9 The International 205

10 ‘The Red Terror Doctor’ 220

11 Last Years 248

Afterword by Terrell Carver 267

Guide to Further Reading by Terrell Carver 291

Index 297

EDITOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION

The author’s admirable ability to translate many abstruse and obscure notions of Marxism into a clear language and his virtuosity in showing connections between personalities, characters, attitudes on the one hand and doctrinal issues on the other are unparalleled in the existing literature.

Leszek Kołakowski¹

I

ISAIAH BERLIN’S INTELLECTUAL biography of Karl Marx, first published in 1939, has long been recognised as one of the very best concise accounts of the life and thought of a man whose doctrines Berlin described in the closing words of the book as ‘the most powerful among the intellectual forces which are today permanently transforming the ways in which men act and think’. With his celebrated genius for empathising with those whose views he does not share, Berlin enters into the mind of his subject and shows us the view from within:² without jargon, and without the obscurity of much of Marx’s own prose, he presents and explains Marx’s ideas, their origins and their power.

Reviewers of the first edition immediately perceived the book’s virtues. The historian of Russia Richard Charques called it ‘a model of objective clarity’.³ The British historian A. L. Rowse wrote: ‘Berlin’s attitude to his subject is exemplary, and on the whole it is the best introduction to it that we have. […] The great quality of the book is its absence of parti pris and its completely impartial and objective approach. In consequence it makes Marx intelligible, both as a person and as a thinker; and without any undue admiration.’⁴

Forty years on the verdict was equally positive, as exemplified by the judgement of Leszek Kołakowski – one of the foremost twentieth-century authorities on Marx and Marxism – quoted above. Moreover, as Alan Ryan and Terrell Carver explain in the essays included in this new edition (the first for thirty-five years), Berlin’s account has remained fresh and convincing to this day, remarkably unaffected – not least because of the detachment praised by the reviewers – by the torrent of scholarship about Marx that has appeared since it was first written.

II

The book, then, is still very much alive, and shows no signs of being superseded as one of the most successful introductions to a crucially important but notoriously difficult subject. However, even after the appearance of four successive editions prepared by the author over a period of more than forty years, there remained some not insignificant problems in the text which needed to be resolved. In order to explain what I mean by this I need to be briefly autobiographical.

The previous edition of the book appeared in 1978. I was the editor at Oxford University Press responsible for overseeing the publication of that edition, and I was also then in the midst of editing (not under my OUP hat) the four collections of Berlin’s essays, originally published under the collective series title Selected Writings, that began my still continuing work on his texts. It was not part of my task at that time to give Karl Marx the attention all his work needed in order to turn – in his own characteristically but absurdly self-deprecating phrase – ‘what were mere belles-lettres into scholarship’.⁵ But I knew from my experience with his other writings that this need existed, and it was then that I became aware that one day this text, too, should be attended to in this spirit. The quotations were unreferenced, sometimes misattributed, and often somewhat approximate or worse, starting with the opening epigraph from Joseph Butler, which contained at least three infidelities in twenty-three words. The punctuation was often erratic, and there were numerous other minor blemishes of form and substance that ought to have been spotted by the previous publishers, and were ripe for elimination.

I do not wish to exaggerate: this is still very much the same book. But lest the flaws I have alluded to should be thought merely trivial, let me give an (admittedly extreme) example which reveals how unreliable Berlin’s scholarship could be. Even if this unreliability rarely made what he wrote seriously misleading, and even if in some cases his errors may be thought venial when the comparatively impoverished bibliographical and technological conditions in which he worked are borne in mind (let alone the somewhat loose scholarly standards that prevailed in the 1930s),⁶ it cannot be denied that (like Marx and Engels themselves) he often failed to ensure that his quotations and (where he supplied them) his references were accurate.

In previous editions of the book, the paragraph on page 257 of the present volume beginning ‘This English exceptionalism’ reads as follows:

‘In England’, he wrote, ‘prolonged prosperity has demoralised the workers … the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of lands would seem to be the establishment of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat side by side with the bourgeoisie … the revolutionary energy of the British workers has oozed away … it will take long before they can shake off their bourgeois infection … they totally lack the mettle of the old Chartists.’⁷

Here Berlin presents these passages as drawn from the same text (not specifying its identity, its recipient or its date). In fact, as may be seen on page 257, each of the five passages separated by ellipses comes from a different letter, three from Engels to Marx, two from Marx to Engels, covering between them a period of more than a decade. Credit where credit is due: Berlin (presumably) brought these passages together from different sources and saw what they had in common and what they revealed. But censure where censure is due, too: perhaps in this case nothing of importance stands or falls by this kind of scholarly sloppiness, but it deserves to be put right, if only as a matter of principle.

III

The resetting and reissue of the book by Princeton University Press in this new fifth edition has provided the opportunity and the stimulus finally to put the necessary work of correction and referencing in hand. The publication of improved editions of many of the works Berlin quotes (not to mention the transforming effect of the internet on scholarship) has made it easier to ensure increased faithfulness to the original texts, some of which, indeed, were written in English but back-translated by Berlin from editions in other languages – the only ones available when he was writing. In addition, the completion of the English-language edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, available both in print and online (see page 292 below), makes possible a single method of referencing quotations from those authors, by volume and page (thus: CW 20: 45).⁸

Berlin often translates somewhat creatively. Where his version is not unreasonably inaccurate, it has usually not been altered to bring it into line with that in CW; where it is demonstrably erroneous, or where a different translation has become iconic, the version in CW has normally been used.

Terrell Carver’s expert knowledge of most of the texts quoted by Berlin speeded up the process of identification, referencing, checking and correction, and I am greatly in his debt for his always cheerful and efficient help. I am also grateful to him for updating his guide to further reading, and for allowing me to include, as an afterword, a slightly revised version of the essay first published as ‘Berlin’s Karl Marx’ in George Crowder and Henry Hardy (eds), The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin (New York, 2007). My thanks are also due to other colleagues and scholars who helped me with individual points: Shlomo Avineri, Al Bertrand, John Callow, Joshua L. Cherniss, Georgina Edwards, Steffen Groß, Nick Hall, Jürgen Herres, Helen O’Neill, Ulrich Pagel, Tatiana Pozdnyakova, Jürgen Rojahn, Norman Solomon, Simon Toubeau and Josephine von Zitzewitz.

The footnotes in this edition are editorial, except where the author relegated a comment to a note. It should be self-evident which these authorial notes are, but, for the avoidance of doubt, editorial notes that go beyond the provision of bibliographical references are enclosed in square brackets. Cross-references to pages are by page number alone; those to notes are in the form ‘123/4’, i.e. page 123, note 4.

A number of drafts of the first edition of the book survive, as well as research notes, showing how the text developed on its journey to published form. One factor at play was the word limit set by the editors of the series in which it appeared – the Home University Library – which necessitated substantial cuts in Berlin’s original text.⁹ Towards the end of his process of revision he wrote to his friend Cressida Bonham Carter: ‘I must finish K. Marx, of which now only 7000 words remain to be cut: it is an absolutely hateful process, every evening I count up little drops of blood & measure the cup: all the purple passages are gone, & now the turn of the facts has come, towards which I now feel vindictive & eliminate them gaily.’¹⁰

Three more editions appeared in Berlin’s lifetime, though the additions made in a reprint of 1960 (provided originally for a 1959 German translation) would have made it more appropriate to call that a new edition than so to describe the only slightly amended 1948 text; but the transition from Thornton Butterworth to Oxford University Press in the latter year was very naturally so marked. Readers interested in the history of the text, before and after its first publication, are invited to visit the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, where information on this topic is assembled, including a complete text of the first edition in which many of the cuts have been restored: see <http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/>.

Berlin dedicated Karl Marx: His Life and Environment,¹¹ as the book has been called until now, to his parents, Marie and Mendel Berlin, who gave him his own life and provided the environment that shaped him. This edition is dedicated to their memory.

Heswall, August 2012

H.H.

¹ Endorsement for the fourth edition, 1978.

² This ventriloquistic gift of Berlin’s left his readers unclear, not for the first time, about where exactly the boundary lay between the exposition of his subject’s views and his expression of his own. On 29 October 1939, shortly after the book was published, Berlin’s friend Mary Fisher wrote to her friend Flora Russell: ‘Did I tell you that last Sunday Corinne & I met Mr & Mrs Berlin père et mère & Mrs. B. was brought to confess that every weekend Mr. B. reads the book aloud to her – & she at intervals interrupts to say Is that Marx or is it Shaya? [familiar form of ‘Isaiah’] & he reassures her No no – that is only Marx: it is not Shaya?’

³ R. D. Charques, ‘In the name of Marx’, The Times Literary Supplement, 7 October 1939, 570. He also wrote: ‘One could wish that Mr Berlin had a taste for shorter sentences, but on the other hand it must be said that his elaborate and almost neo-Augustan precision of style is not without charm.’

⁴ Political Quarterly 11 no. 1 (January 1940), 127–30 at 128.

⁵ Quoted in a letter from Pat Utechin, Berlin’s secretary, to Henry Hardy, 12 December 1997.

⁶ On these cf. (mutatis mutandis) my note on eighteenth-century references in my edition of Berlin’s The Roots of Romanticism, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 2013), xxv/2.

⁷ KM1 (269/1) 241–2.

⁸ CW, despite its title, is not complete, but Berlin did not use material by Marx or Engels excluded from it. (Any attempt to distinguish separately published works from articles in journals etc. founders on a broad reef of penumbral cases: so almost all titles of items in CW are given in italics.)

⁹ The original contractual allowance was 50,000 words, increased in 1938 in response to Berlin’s pleas to 65,000 words. Berlin wrote over 100,000 words, which he cut to the published length of 75,000 words. Fisher had told him that ‘squeezing the book into Home University format – from its original vaster size, which I pleaded for in 1936 – would be the making of the book’ (IB, letter to Noel Annan, 31 August 1973).

¹⁰ Letter of 28 August 1938, in Isaiah Berlin, Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946, ed. Henry Hardy (London, 2004), 280.

¹¹ I have dropped the subtitle from the present edition. It doesn’t comfortably fit a book so extensively devoted to its subject’s ideas, even if ‘environment’ is understood in an intellectual sense. ‘Life and Opinions’, perhaps.

FOREWORD

Alan Ryan

KARL MARX WAS Isaiah Berlin’s first book. He was just thirty years old when it appeared. In Oxford and London he was already known as a dazzling conversationalist and a strikingly gifted young philosopher; but it was in Karl Marx that he first revealed his special talent as a historian of ideas – the discipline in which he enthralled his readers for the rest of his writing life. That talent is, as such gifts often are, a talent that is easier to admire and enjoy than it is to describe; but it emerges as an astonishing ability to do justice both to the thinker and the thought – to paint a picture of the personalities of the men and women he writes about, without for a moment forgetting that we want to know about them because of their ideas rather than their marital adventures or their tastes in dress, and to make the picture vivid just because, although ideas have a life of their own, they are also stamped with the characters of the men and women whose ideas they are.

It is a talent that made Berlin’s essays on great ideas and great men a considerable art form. As readers of his collected essays know, Personal Impressions – the volume devoted to encounters with his contemporaries, memorial addresses, and accounts of the greatness of the century’s great men – is hardly different in tone and style from his Russian Thinkers or Against the Current – the companion volumes of essays in the history of ideas. It seems almost inconsequential that Berlin never talked to Turgenev as he talked to Anna Akhmatova, that he never discussed the history of Florence with Machiavelli as he did discuss the history of eighteenth-century England with Lewis Namier. It has been suggested that all serious thinkers inhabit an ‘invisible college’, where a silent conversation goes on between the living and the immortal dead, and Plato is as present as the newest graduate student wrestling with his work. Berlin’s writing suggests the image of something livelier and more spirited than most colleges, perhaps a vast intellectual soirée where the guests come from every social stratum and all possible political persuasions. Whatever one’s favourite metaphor, the effect is to bring all his subjects fully and thoroughly to life.

All the same, historians of ideas are not novelists, nor even biographers. Although Berlin gave Karl Marx the subtitle ‘His Life and Environment’, it was Marx’s life as the theorist of the socialist revolution that Berlin was chiefly concerned to describe, and the environment that Berlin was interested in was not so much the Trier of Marx’s boyhood or the North London of his years of exile, but the political and intellectual environment against which Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto and Capital. The moral of Karl Marx, however, must be taken as a comment on both Marxism and Marx himself; in his final paragraph, Berlin observes:

[Marxism] sets out to refute the proposition that ideas govern the course of history, but the very extent of its own influence on human affairs has weakened the force of its thesis. For in altering the hitherto prevailing view of the relation of the individual to his environment and to his fellows, it has palpably altered that relation itself, and in consequence remains the most powerful among the intellectual forces which are today permanently altering the ways in which men think and act.

Marxism, by way of the activities of the communist parties it inspired, turns out to be a cosmic philosophical joke against the man who created it. Marx was a theorist who argued that individuals were the playthings of vast and impersonal social forces; but as the inspiration of Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong, the individual Marx was himself the originator of vast social forces. Marx argued that ideas were epiphenomena, the reflections of social interests that they disguised and rationalised; but his own ideas changed the world – even if, ironically, it was in ways he would mostly have deplored. Karl Marx offers its readers many pleasures, and not the least of them is the wry picture that Berlin paints of the way its subject set in motion a historical drama that called his whole life’s work into question.

Berlin later argued at length against the doctrine of historical inevitability, and against any attempt to make the study of history ‘scientific’ by evacuating it of moral and political concerns. Marx was the most obvious inspiration of these views during the 1930s and afterwards. While it is hard to believe that his indignation against the capitalist order was fuelled by anything other than a strong sense of justice, he frequently claimed that his historical materialism superseded any ‘moralising’¹ critique of the existing order, and Engels at any rate said of him that what he had uncovered was the law of ‘development of human history’ and the law of the ‘present-day capitalist mode of production’,² the laws that dictated the inevitable collapse of capitalism and its replacement by socialism.

Berlin is neither the first nor the last critic of Marx to notice that his professed indifference to moral considerations is hard to square with his evident hatred of the injustice and cruelty so visible in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, and that his assertion of the inevitability of the downfall of the capitalist order was equally hard to square with the way he sacrificed his health and domestic happiness to promoting the revolutionary cause. What was distinctive about Berlin’s reaction to Marx is not that he was affronted by these logical tensions and inconsistencies, but that he spent the rest of his intellectual career thinking and writing about their origins, about alternative visions of the world, and about the contemporaries and successors to Marx who thought about them too.

Berlin’s Marx is an interesting figure because he was simultaneously so much a product of the Enlightenment, and so much a product of the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment. Like the French materialists of the eighteenth century, Marx believed in progress, believed that history was a linear process, not, as the ancient world had thought, that it was a repetitive cycle of growth and decay; but, like critics of the Enlightenment such as Burke, Maistre and Hegel, he thought that social change had not occurred in the past and would not occur in the future merely because some enlightened persons could see that it would be more reasonable to behave in a different way. It was violent and irrational forces which brought about significant change, and the rationality of the whole historical process was something we could understand only after the event. His encounter with Marx seems to have inspired Berlin to grapple with the anti-Enlightenment; he wrote afterwards at length about the anti-rationalist critics of revolutionary and liberal projects, such as Herder, Maistre and Hamann.

In much the same way, it was the people Marx slighted during his career who later came to interest Berlin particularly. Moses Hess was the first person to appreciate Marx’s formidable energy and intelligence, but the kindest way Marx referred to Hess was as a donkey.³ Berlin was intrigued by the fact that Hess saw something which Marx systematically refused to see – that the condition of the Jews in modern Europe was impossible to resolve by the liberal recipe of assimilation – and thus became one of the founders of the benign, liberal Zionism on which Berlin has written so movingly.

Again, Marx was contemptuous of his contemporary and rival, the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin; almost until the end of his life he regarded Russia as the home of every sort of backwardness and repression. The thought that there might be a route to freedom and democracy that suited the Russian people’s Russianness as well as their ordinary humanity was one that could hardly find room in his mind; Marx’s detestation of what he thought of as the Slav character was only part of the problem, the other being his contempt for all sentiments of nationality that did not more or less directly foster the advance of socialism. In the 1950s Berlin went on to reveal to English and American readers the riches of nineteenth-century Russian populism and liberalism as represented by Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky and Ivan Turgenev, and to argue something we need to remember today more than ever, that nationalism can be and has been an ally of liberalism as well as the expression of atavistic and irrational allegiances that we should all be better off without.

It is more than seventy years since the first edition of Karl Marx was published, and they have been tumultuous years. The book went to press shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War; after that war, we saw forty years of cold war, followed by an uncertain peace in which hostility between two great ideological camps has given way to a coolish friendship between great powers, and continuous low-level ethnic and nationalist conflict in the Balkans, the Trans-Caucasus and much of Africa.

The book was published in London as Britain went to war with Nazi Germany – and its author went to a dazzling career in the British Embassy in Washington; it reappeared in successive editions in a very different world. The second edition was published soon after the war; by then the cold war was firmly established, and the Soviet interpretation of Marxism was as rigid as ever. There was nothing in the work of apologists for the Soviet regime to make one think that Berlin’s emphasis on the deterministic rigidity of Marx’s vision of history was excessive, and nothing to make one think that Marx’s materialism might have been less extreme than his disciples had suggested.

By the time the third edition appeared in 1963, Nikita Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956 had taken the lid off Stalinism in front of a Russian audience; the Hungarian Revolution had disillusioned British Communists and had forced the much larger and more robust Communist parties of France and Italy to rethink their political and intellectual allegiances. This was when a new ‘humanist’ Marxism was discovered (or perhaps one should say invented); attempts at a rapprochement between left-wing Catholics and philosophically sophisticated Marxists were a striking feature of the late 1950s and 1960s, and the thought that Marxism was essentially a religious faith could be seen as something of a compliment rather than a complaint. One of this movement’s fruits was ‘liberation theology’, a phenomenon that would surely have been savaged by Marx himself, but another was the idea that the young Marx at any rate had been a more subtle and interesting moral critic of capitalist society than had been thought.

A fourth edition of Karl Marx appeared in 1978. Even after forty years it had worn extremely well, but in the previous twenty years there had been a flood of work by writers on both sides of the Atlantic that might have made any author reconsider his former views. Much of it was work of deep and dispassionate scholarship. Although many of Marx’s modern interpreters continued to admire Marx as the scourge of capitalism, many others were motivated by the challenge of knowing just what Marx was after. The less simple-minded and the more sympathetic Marx appeared, the harder it was to give a clear account of his thinking. Was there one Marx or two? Had he changed in 1846 from a young Hegelian humanist and idealist to a scientific anti-humanist, as Louis Althusser claimed? Or was he rather a cultural critic, a social analyst concerned with the alienated state of the soul of man under capitalism? The popularity of such books as Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization suggested the rich vein of social criticism that might be mined by somehow reconciling Marx and Freud.

The flood of scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s revealed something that a reader would guess from the sheer exuberance of Berlin’s account, but which is not much emphasised in Karl Marx. For the half-way sympathetic reader, Marx offers innumerable enticements – as a voracious reader and a savage critic, who worked by testing his ideas against those of his predecessors and opponents, Marx whets the modern reader’s curiosity about nineteenth-century economics, German philosophy, ancient history, the French revolutionary underground, and more. This has its dangers; just as Marx increasingly became unable to finish any work he started because he wanted to read everything ever written on the subject, students of Marx can find themselves trying to read everything Marx ever read as well as everything he wrote.

Still, the attraction is undeniable. The intellectual world Marx inhabited is far enough away to be somewhat strange to us, but close enough to give us some hope of understanding it. It presents a challenge, but not irreducible obscurity. It cannot be said that the new scholarly climate produced any particular consensus on just what Marx had achieved or had hoped to achieve, but it marked the first time in many years that he was accorded the sort of calm, scholarly respect that less contentious figures had always received. Oddly, perhaps, this flood of new work called into question little in Berlin’s account of Marx.

Berlin acknowledged in 1963 that there was one change in his own and the scholarly community’s understanding of Marx that he had incorporated into the revisions he had made to the book. The wide circulation of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 on the one hand, and the seemingly endless post-war prosperity of the United States and Western Europe on the other, had persuaded many social critics that it was foolish to go on reciting Marx’s predictions of the inevitable and imminent collapse of capitalism; but Marx’s philosophical critique of a society that sacrificed men to machines, that valued culture only in cash terms, and allowed itself to be ruled by the inhuman and abstract forces of the marketplace could hardly be written off as outdated in the same way. The Marx of the first edition of Karl Marx was, as Berlin acknowledged, the Marx of official Marxism, the Marx of the Second and Third Internationals, hailed by his followers as a social scientist, not as a humanist philosopher. Now that the dust has settled, it is clear that Berlin was right to do no more than adjust his account a little; the more one thinks about the theory of alienation, the clearer it is that Marx was right in