Book Review: The Young Karl Marx 1 0 5 David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, ix + 315 pp., $110. Benli M. Shechter University of Maryland, College Park
[email protected] Remarkably, the greatest critiques of Marxism surfaced not from among those in the right wing of the ideological spectrum, but from among those in its left wing—that is, from those even further out than today’s mainstream of Marxism. This means that, in certain respects, the collapse of the Soviet Union (assuming ideas do truly matter, and that the best—or at least second best—weapon of the revolutionary is the inked pen) owes more to the likes of anarchists, including Proudhon and Bakunin, than to the likes of liberal anti-communists, including Arendt and Aron. After all, Bakunin (1814-1876), the Russian anarchist and Marx’s chief rival for control of the First International, was the first to articulate what he saw as the Marx- ist swindle (ironically, as something all too similar to what Marx saw as the democratic swindle). Bakunin asked himself, What does it mean: “the proletariat raised into the ruling class?” Will the proletariat as a whole be at the head of the government? There are about forty million Germans. Will all the forty million be members of the government? The whole people will govern and there will be no one to be governed. It means that there will be no government, no State, but if there is a State in existence there will be people who are governed, and there will be slaves.