Karl Marx in America

""'As long as capitalism persists, Marx cannot be killed.' So writes Andrew Hartman in a capacious, captivating, and learned study that demonstrates why every generation of Americans, on the right as well as left, has been compelled to grapple with and reinterpret Karl Marx and all his works. This is a brilliant, provocative, and highly readable history, essential to an understanding of American capitalism and its critics, past and present."" -- Nelson Lichtenstein, author of 'A Fabulous Failure: the Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism' ""From Brussels to London and across the Atlantic, Karl Marx’s revolutionary ideas traversed the borders that once presumed to divide American liberals from conservatives, free market boosters from believers in the welfare state, the left from the right. Given Marx’s enduring influence on American thought, we owe a debt of gratitude to Andrew Hartman for reconstructing this important history and presenting it in compulsively readable prose."" -- Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin-Madison ""Karl Marx in America is a fascinating and long overdue book. As Andrew Hartman notes, not only was Marx an active participant in American political debate as a correspondent for the New York Tribune for the crucial decade leading up to the Civil War; he has been a specter haunting American political debate since the Gilded Age. Much American social reform discourse—from fin de siecle meliorist socialism and Progressivism through postwar industrial and interest-group pluralism, as well as Cold War liberalism, to a neoliberalism experiencing legitimation problems—has been shaped in typically unacknowledged debate with, or opposition to, Marx and Marxism. The topic is important, and it is particularly well treated by a deft intellectual historian like Hartman."" -- Adolph Reed, Jr., University of Pennsylvania ""Marx was in exile for most of his adult life, so he was a kind of foreign import wherever he got read.  But his studies of the United States, what he called the ""most modern form of bourgeois society,"" reshaped his thinking at a critical moment, and this thinking, Andrew Hartman claims, found a home here.  That sounds unlikely, almost ridiculous, in view of the way Marxism has been treated by American intellectuals and activists from Left to Right—as an exotic essence from the other shore which must be spoon fed to the masses or handled as a deadly contaminant, either way appearing as something counter to American values.  But Hartman proves the point in this comprehensive, convincing, and yes, even entertaining book, Karl Marx in America.  It's a brilliant tour de force that might persuade Americans that we are the other shore, inhabitants of the place that Marxism was made for."" -- James Livingston, Rutgers University ""A nimble study that sheds new light on Marx’s thought and enduring influence."" * Kirkus Reviews, starred review * ""Recent books on Marx have oscillated between presenting him as a singularly nineteenth-century figure or as a timeless savant whose ideas are applicable across all of the spaces and times of capitalist modernity. Hartman’s approach, disaggregating the man from the posthumous deployment of his later ideas, allows him to stand on both sides of that divide. The result is an astute and politically useful book about a vital strand of American intellectual thought."" * Jacobin * ""Students of U.S. history and thought will benefit from this study."" * Library Journal * ""If you’ve never read about Marx’s life, Hartman’s book doubles as a short biography; if you’ve never read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Hartman’s book is a primer on a variety of Marx’s most cited and important philosophy. If you’ve never read Marx’s interpreters—who are many, from Kenneth Burke to Frantz Fanon and David Harvey—Karl Marx in America is a road map. But the most interesting insight in the book comes from the laundry list of Marx’s haters, and their complete inability to land a good punch on our boy."" * Los Angeles Review of Books *