A man of his time

The Karl Marx depicted in Jonathan Sperber's absorbing, meticulously researched biography will be unnervingly familiar to anyone who has had even the most fleeting acquaintance with radical politics. Here is a man never more passionate than when attacking his own side, saddled with perennial money problems and still reliant on his parents for cash, constantly plotting new, world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both deadlines and personal hygiene, living in rooms that some might call bohemian, others plain "slummy", and who can be maddeningly inconsistent when not lapsing into elaborate flights of theory and unintelligible abstraction.

Still, it comes as a shock to realise that the ultimate leftist, the father of Communism itself, fits a recognisable pattern. So inflated and elevated is the global image of Marx that it's unsettling to encounter a genuine human being, a character one might come across today. If the Marx described by Mr Sperber, a professor at the University of Missouri, were around in 2013, he would be a compulsive blogger, and picking Twitter fights with Andrew Sullivan and Naomi Klein.

But that's cheating. The express purpose of Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life is to dispel the dominant notion of a timeless Marx - less man, more ideological canon - and relocate him where he belonged, in his own time, not ours.

And he succeeds in the primary task of all biography, recreating a man who leaps off the page. We travel with Marx from his hometown, Trier, via student carousing in Bonn and Berlin, to his debut in political journalism in Cologne and on to exile and revolutionary activity in Paris, Brussels and London. We see his thought develop, but glimpse also the begging letters to his mother, requesting an advance on his inheritance, along with the enduring anxiety over whether he can provide for the wife he has loved since he was a teenager. We hear of the sleepless nights that follow the start of the American Civil War: Marx is troubled not by the fate of the Union, but by the loss of freelance income from The New York Tribune, which, consumed by matters closer to home, no longer requires his services as a European correspondent. We see the trips to the pawnbrokers, the pressure to maintain bourgeois living standards, "the show of respectability", as he put it to his closest friend, Friedrich Engels.

The picture that emerges is a rounded, humane one. He is an intensely loving father, playing energetically with his children and later grandchildren, but also suffering a two-year depression following the death of his eight-year-old son Edgar. He is clearly also an infuriating colleague, capable of spending 12-hour days in the reading room of the British Museum but stewing on book projects for years, only to fail to deliver. Engels, Mr Sperber writes, spent decades repeating the same message: get the work done!

Besides the marriage to Jenny, there is another love story here: the partnership with Engels, who it seems was prepared to do anything for his comrade. Engels famously subsidised Marx; perhaps less well known is that he spared his friend a scandal by claiming paternity of the child born to the Marx family servant, Lenchen Demuth: the boy was Karl's son. After the great man's death, it was Engels who waded through Marx's scrawled notes to assemble, and publish, the final two volumes of Das Kapital. Such was his devotion that Engels even planted anonymous reviews of Das Kapital in the German press. Imagine what the pair would have got up to in the age of Amazon.

All this is fascinating enough as human drama. But it has extra value. For the act of reclaiming Marx as a man, and a man of his time, alters the way we understand his ideas. Mr Sperber's approach is pragmatic. He accepts that Marx was not a body of ideas, but a human being responding to events.

Only in one area do Mr Sperber's efforts at contextualisation fall short. He argues that Marx's writings on the Jewish question, including his hostile comments about Jews, should be understood as "embedded" in the attitudes of the age and therefore not straightforwardly anti-Semitic. But such a view is not easy to hold given the evidence Mr Sperber himself marshals, including an 1875 letter to Engels in which Marx - born a Jew, apparently just before his father's conversion to Protestantism - casually describes a fellow train passenger as a "little Yid", before offering a description that Mr Sperber, to his credit, concedes "is a stereotypical denunciation of an uncultured and greedy Jew".

Not that this relatively soft treatment of Marx's anti-Semitism detracts from the book's overall achievement. Mr Sperber forces us to look anew at a man whose influence lives on. For all the books that have been written about America's founding fathers, for example, we still await the historian who will do for them what Jonathan Sperber has done for Karl Marx.

KARL MARX
A Nineteenth-Century Life
Jonathan Sperber
Liveright Publishing Corp; 648 pages; $35

©2013 The New York Times News Service