A Man of His Time

Jonathan Freedland reviews Karl Marx, by Jonathan Sperber, at The New York Times.

"it’s telling that Marx’s prime vocation was not as an academic but as a campaigning journalist: Sperber suggests Marx’s two stints at the helm of a radical paper in Cologne represented his greatest periods of professional fulfillment. Accordingly, much of what the scholars have tried to brand as Marxist philosophy was instead contemporary commentary, reactive and therefore full of contradiction.

"Thus in 1848 Marx could make a speech denouncing as 'nonsense' the very idea of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, even though that notion formed a core plank of Marxist doctrine."