Word: schwarzschild
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Biographer Schwarzschild is no admirer of Marx or Marxism. He is pointing to the fact that since World War I no other mind has so potently influenced the political and economic thinking and action of our times. There are masses of unconscious Marxists-men & women who have never read Marx's Capital, and who would rather be found dead than reading the Communist Manifesto, but whose thinking about the role of economic forces in history, the responsibility of government for the individual, and the importance of economic security v. political freedom has nevertheless been profoundly influenced by the choleric...
Even the efforts to fight Marxism with its own weapons have inevitably taken a Marxist turn. Both Naziism and Fascism, Biographer Schwarzschild points out, are Marxist mutations whose predestined political form is therefore the police state. In Nazi concentration camps, as in Russian forced-labor camps, Karl Marx was the presiding genius. In the name of human progress, Marx has probably caused more death, misery, degradation and despair than any man who ever lived...
...monstrous, this biography is singularly debonair. It is certainly the most readable life of Marx available. For those who wish to see so alarming a monster debunked, it is a complacent job of debunking. Nor need readers fear exposure to the rigors of Marxist political theory or economics. Biographer Schwarzschild lightly writes off those arid involutions...
...Schwarzschild's indictment is most effective when describing Marx's personal and political life from 1818 to 1883. Here is Marx the boy taken to a church in Trier, in the recently Prussianized Rhineland, and baptized a Lutheran. His father, the first lawyer in an interminable line of distinguished rabbis, admired Prussia and its official religion. Here is Marx the future socialist, unsocially shunning his school fellows while his mental acrobatics charm Ludwig von Westphalen, a much older man of a much higher social position. Marx later repaid Westphalen for this early interest by marrying his daughter, Jenny...
...Author Schwarzschild's biographical facts are true, as far as they go. But the Marx he presents is a man with his brain cut out. Hence the facts add up to a caricature. Schwarzschild's thesis is that Karl Marx was 1) a rabbinical thinker whose pyramids of abstract logic were brilliant, but had nothing to do with facts; 2) a vicious egomaniac determined to ruin any man or group that he could not dominate; 3) a political seer whose prognostications were almost always wrong; 4) a self-styled "scientific" socialist whose science was about as scientific...