The lives and time of Karl Marx

There is something intrinsically ambivalent about the idea of a biography of Karl Marx. On the one hand, Marx believed that humans are fundamentally social creatures, suggesting there is little to be gleaned about our world by studying the life of a single individual. On the other hand, it would be difficult to imagine a historical figure whose work more readily invites a biographical treatment, which explains why more than thirty major biographies have appeared to date. As I would hardly be the first to point out, the vast majority of what we know about Marx comes from manuscripts and letters that were never published in his lifetime, but that his followers diligently collected and preserved, resulting in an archive so expansive that, despite over a century of efforts, often backed by immense institutional powers and investments, its full publication remains not only incomplete, but largely incomplete to this day. The Marx we know today is not the revolutionary journalist and political organiser known to a relatively select nineteenth-century reading public. It is the individual who worked in private, endlessly producing, and endlessly discarding, drafts of a comprehensive picture of modern society that ultimately proved much too comprehensive for him, or any other individual for that matter, to finish. Marx's lifelong struggle to find order in the sprawling mess of capitalism is suitably recapitulated in his biographers' struggle to find order in the sprawling mess of his literary remains.