First published over fifty years ago, Isaiah Berlin's compelling portrait of the father of socialism has long been considered a classic of modern scholarship and the best short account written of Marx's life and thought. It provides a penetrating, lucid, and comprehensive introduction to Marx as theorist of the socialist revolution, illuminating his personality and ideas, and concentrating on those which have historically formed the central core of Marxism as a theory and practice. Berlin goes on to present an account of Marx's life as one of the most influential and incendiary social philosophers of the twentieth century and depicts the social and political atmosphere in which Marx wrote. This edition includes a new introduction by Alan Ryan which traces the place of Berlin's Marx from its pre-World War II publication to the present, and elucidates why Berlin's portrait, in the midst of voluminous writings about Marx, remains the classic account of the personal and political side of this monumental figure.
Readership: Undergraduate students of politics & philosophy.
Sir Isaiah Berlin, Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford
""Exceptional...as a portrait of the man and the intellectual climate of the mid-nineteenth century it is , perhaps, the finest we have in any European language."--Chimen Abramsky, Jewish Chronicle"
""Presents a view of Marx which is both sympathetic and detached. Berlin seizes the point of what Marx wrote and did without sharing Marx's illusions. His accounts of Marx's theses are sometimes more effective that Marx's own word's, and his descriptions of Marx as a man are remarkably vivid in a book that is so largely concerned with ideas."--Political Studies"
""The author's admirable ability to translate many abstruse and obscure notions of Marxism into a clear language and his virtuosity in showing connections between personalities, characters, attitudes on the one hand and doctrinal issues on the other are unparalleled in the existing literature."--Leszek Kolakowski"
