Full Marx

The legacy of the great German philosopher and economist still reverberates

How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism

By Eric Hobsbawm

Little, Brown, 480pp, $55

Why Marx was Right

By Terry Eagleton

Yale University Press, 272pp, $32.95

KARL Marx was a creature of his times. A lucid stylist, the sometime journalist's tone mirrored the tempo of world politics, moving from triumphalist exuberance at the height of the 1848 revolutions to a cooler, more ironic and acerbic drumbeat in Capital with the fading of political hope. Yet it wasn't just as a writer and activist that Marx was a man of the moment. His complex thought modulated between magisterial analyses of all that was and a suspicion that the time of liberation would be an untimely moment. Able to paint a turbulent and globalising world in its many hues, the great theorist of the dialectic was nevertheless not the historical determinist he is portrayed.

Marx's legacies are multiple. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty once observed, to decide to be a Marxist has always been a choice of quite a different order than to, say, become a Spinozist. If the point of philosophy was not (just) to understand the world but to change it, then Marx could have been well pleased with the dimensions, if not perhaps the direction, of his posthumous legacy.

In 1960 Merleau-Ponty remarked that Marx had become part of a canon, his ideas perhaps suggestive, but no longer able to speak so clearly to urgent and fraught political choices of the time.

The French phenomenologist recognised, of course, that Marx and Marxism were not the same. He would well have understood that the many returns of Marx, even the conjurations of his ghost in the 21st century, might speak more to the present state of his legacies than to the desire to practice "ruthless criticism of all that exists".

And so, to two recent revaluations of Marx, whose authors' distinguished record as scholars, and precisely as Marxist scholars, might portend a treatment of magisterial dimension.

British literary critic and gadfly Terry Eagleton wishes to rescue Marx from the detritus of political dismissal in Why Marx was Right. Meanwhile, distinguished and venerable British historian Eric Hobsbawm reflects on Marx and the vicissitudes of...