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

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