Karl Marx

by Francis Wheen

Overview

La biografía más humana, cercana y amena de uno de los filósofos más influyentes de todos los tiempos

Las ideas de Karl Marx son probablemente las que más han influido en el mundo después de las de Jesucristo. En esta apasionante y en ocasiones muy divertida biografía se nos presenta por primera vez a Karl Marx en su faceta más humana. Un apasionado agitador, que pasó casi toda su vida encerrado en la sala de lectura del Museo Británico; un hombre sociable y simpático que, sin embargo, acabó enemistado con casi todos sus amigos; un abnegado padre de familia que dejó embarazada a la criada; un intelectual profundamente serio al que le gustaba beber, contar chistes y fumar puros y un hijo pródigo al que su madre le dijo: «Habría preferido que reunieras un capital en vez de escribir sobre él.» La vida y las ideas de Marx, su encanto y su cólera, se muestran en toda su complejidad y contradicción: la de un brillante y provocador filósofo que vivió, como en los libros de Dickens, los tiempos difíciles de un caballero venido a menos.

Otros escritores y periodistas opinan...
«Leería cualquier cosa escrita por Wheen, incluso una biografía de Marx.»
Nick Hornby

«Este libro es una delicia.»
Niall Ferguson

«Un libro magnífico, divertido y fascinante, un triunfo de Wheen.»
A.N.Wilson

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788499922782
Publisher:	DEBATE
Publication date:	06/11/2015
Sold by:	PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE GRUPO EDITORIAL
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	639 KB
Language:	Spanish

About the Author

Francis Wheen es periodista y autor de Karl Marx (Debate, 2000), la biografía más importante del pensador alemán aparecida en los últimos años; Hoohahs and Passing Frenzies, libro que obtuvo el prestigioso Premio Orwell en 2003, y How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. Todos sus libros han tenido un extraordinario recibimiento tanto por la crítica como por el público.

Francis Wheen es periodista y autor de Karl Marx (Debate, 2000), la biografía más importante del pensador alemán aparecida en los últimos años; Hoohahs and Passing Frenzies, libro que obtuvo el prestigioso Premio Orwell en 2003, y How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. Todos sus libros han tenido un extraordinario recibimiento tanto por la crítica como por el público.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1
1 The Outsider	7
2 The Little Wild Boar	31
3 The Grass-eating King	61
4 The Mouse in the Attic	89
5 The Frightful Hobgoblin	115
6 The Megalosaurus	149
7 The Hungry Wolves	179
8 The Hero on Horseback	215
9 The Bulldogs and the Hyena	261
10 The Shaggy Dog	293
11 The Rogue Elephant	315
12 The Shaven Porcupine	349
POSTSCRIPT 1: Consequences	385
POSTSCRIPT 2: Confessions	387
POSTSCRIPT 3: Regicide	389
Acknowledgements	391
Endnotes	393
Index	421

Editorial Reviews

"It is time to strip away the mythology," writes Wheen, "and try to rediscover Karl Marx the man." In the first major biography of Marx since the end of the Cold War, Wheen does just that as he looks for the man lurking behind the myths of both enemies and disciples, the misinterpretations and the academic jargon. What he finds is somebody who will suit nobody's purposes--Marx, Wheen argues, lived his life messily. He was neither a clearheaded revolutionary nor an unrepentant hypocrite, but he wasn't the anti-Christ either. More or less incapable of holding down a steady, salaried job, he mooched off of his selfless wife, Jenny (an aristocrat fallen on hard times), and his well-to-do ideological partner, Friedrich Engels, and spent his time obsessively writing unreadable, unmarketable economics tracts. He also spent a good deal of time preaching the imminent revolution of the masses (with whom he appears to have had little affinity). Following Marx from his childhood in Trier, Germany, through his exile in London, Wheen, a columnist for the British Guardian, takes readers from hovel to grand house, from the International Working Man's Association to Capital, from obscurity to notoriety and back again. (Only 11 mourners attended Marx's funeral.) The narrative veers unsteadily from scorn to admiration for the bearded philosopher. Wheen begins by jeering at Marx's cantakerousness and ends by lauding him as a prophet and a brave survivor of poverty and exile. In the end, Wheen's breezy, colorful portrayal is as eccentric as its subject. 16 pages of illustrations not seen by PW. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Little about Marx was left undiscovered by David McLellan's highly regarded Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (LJ 3/1/74), but left-leaning British journalist Wheen attempts to add some new understanding. Wheen does correct a small error that McLellan advanced about Charles Darwin's nonrelationship with Marx, but otherwise his book is notable less for the quality of the scholarship--which is solid enough--than for his deft portraiture. Wheen's Marx is often charming and likable--and just as often not. An earlier generation of biographers depicted an impoverished Marx dependent upon the generosity of collaborator Frederick Engels, but Wheen demonstrates that Marx actually led a bourgeois lifestyle beyond his means--mostly for the sake of his daughters, whom he adored. Engels seemed to regard Marx almost as a fortunate younger sibling would a brilliant but unlucky older brother. Wheen's book is engagingly written, but his editors have done him a disservice by retaining an overabundance of British colloquialisms that simply do not travel well across the pond. Still, Wheen's compelling depiction of the truly historic Marx-Engels friendship combines with a bold prose style to commend his book to serious academic and public libraries.--Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

In this reportedly first major post-Cold War biography of the author of the , "the most influential pamphlet in history," a British columnist for London's newspaper portrays this middle-class German as a paradoxical representative of the oppressed masses in his relationships with family, Engels, and Bakunin, et al. Includes photos of Marx (1818-83). First published in London in 1999. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Wheen has engagingly reinterpreted Marx's exhaustively annotated life...his portrait of Marx's life is artfully shaped and makes delectable reading.
—The New York Times Book Review

Sylvia Nasar

Karl Marx: A Life is expertly researched, admirably objective, eminently humane, and plenty entertaining.
—The Boston Book Review

Corson

… Wheen has read not only widely but deeply in the great man's work… his account of Capital , the most daunting of door stoppers, is nothing short of masterful… It is hard to think of anyone since Isaiah Berlin who has written so persuasively and compellingly on Marx… The common reader, if such a creature still exists, will find cause here to rejoice.
— Irish Times

John Banville

Stunning… a witty, subtle, and beautifully written study that neither idolizes the old suer nor dismisses him… Wheen's Karl is a warm, rambunctious, imperfect, irresponsible, bundling giant.
&#!51; The Independent

Ben Timlott

Superb life of the thinker who, for better or worse, molded the 20th century. Marx once proclaimed, famously, that he was not a Marxist. If pressed, British journalist Wheen would probably claim Marxist credentials—if of a distinctly irreverent stripe. (For example, his extraordinarily well-conceived biography of communism's guiding light is probably the first to press the comedy troupe Monty Python into exegetical service.) Wheen's satirical edge does not, however, make his study any less serious; it is as well-documented as Isaiah Berlin's 1963 biography—and certainly more interesting to read. Marx, Wheen allows, was a paradoxical sort: a Jew who disavowed Judaism; an ardent moralist who fathered an illegitimate child by a servant; a communist firebrand who lived well beyond his means and aggressively mooched off well-to-do acquaintances (especially his forbearing colleague Friedrich Engels). But Marx was also fearless, unafraid of a good fight, and accustomed to a life in which "grubby police spies from Prussia lurked all too conspicuously outside, keeping note of the comings and goings, while irate butchers and bakers and bailiffs hammered on the door." Wheen makes a number of useful revisions to the historical record; whereas many biographers paint Marx's relationship with the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin as a bitter and hateful rivalry, Wheen documents that the two were friendly in person and borrowed liberally from one another's store of ideas. Engels emerges from the record, too, with his reputation restored: in Wheen's pages he is not the toady of other biographies, but a critical and thoughtful—ifsometimesbeery—participant in the shaping of Marx's thought. Wheen takes vigorous issue with those "countless wiseacres" who, on one hand declare that Marx's thought leads directly to the Gulag and, on the other, hold that Marx's ideas are irrelevant to the modern, post-Cold War world. Neither view, Wheen holds, is correct—and neither is useful to reckoning the extent of Marx's role in making the world in which we live. Respectful yet non-hagiographic, Wheen's life of Marx deserves a wide readership.

Kirkus Reviews