A Requiem for Karl Marx

“Frank Manuel calls his wise and elegant study a requiem, but it is by no means clear that Marx is dead… [Manuel] is too fine a historian to suppose that a discredited doctrine exhausts its capacity to generate consequences… Manuel’s book, part biography, part reflection on Marx’s reputation and academic afterlife, is an excellent place to begin thinking about his largely nefarious impact. It is based on extended research into the Marx–Engels correspondence, and of course on Manuel’s decades of study of the intellectual and political history of the West since the Enlightenment, its utopian traditions especially. The book is a calm yet scathing reckoning, dispassionate yet trenchant. The soul of the world’s most famous materialist is not laid to rest, it is laid bare; and the result has the reader both admiring and recoiling… Manuel’s biography is extremely powerful in explaining how much of Marx’s analytical enterprise was driven by hatred… Manuel’s book leaves us with a sense of wonder at the achievement and at its great cost; and this sense of wonder at the most familiar figure in the history of modern thought is a testament to the freshness, the candor and the intellectual tautness of this book.”—Michael Ignatieff, The New Republic

“The contributions to scholarship in A Requiem for Karl Marx are large… [Manuel] provides a searing, genuinely fresh biographical sketch of Marx, the man, the theorist, and the political activist.”—Eugene D. Genovese, National Review

“[Manuel] has given us a penetrating psychological portrait of, until recently, the bearded idol of millions… Manuel must be applauded for his witty strategies of using Marxist phraseology to turn the art of biography on its head.”—Glenn Spear, Boston Book Review

“A wonderful biography… [It] has everything you ever wanted to know about the personal and professional life of the man his friends call ‘Old Moor’ (because of his dark coloring)… All this is rendered by Manuel with the eye of a novelist.”—David Warsh, The Boston Sunday Globe

“A master biographer and intellectual historian, Manuel has here presented us with the mature reflections of years of pondering the Marxist phenomenon… [In] this pithy and elegantly written volume…Manuel has…succeeded in giving us grounds for renewed reflection and perhaps even new insight [into Marx].”—Irwin M. Wall, Central European History

“Manuel’s erudition as an intellectual historian and his self-confessed attitude as a ‘skeptical utopian’ justify the publication of another book on Marx. A combination of monograph and biography, this book makes an excellent case for the continued study of the ‘hidden Marx.’”—Library Journal