Karl Marx in America - by Andrew Hartman (Hardcover)

About the Book

"The vital and untold story of Karl Marx's stamp on American life. To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx's ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures. Yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism's centrality to American life. In Karl Marx in America, historian Andrew Hartman argues that even though Karl Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him. Since the beginning of the Civil War, Marx has been a specter in the American machine. During the Gilded Age, socialists read Marx as an antidote to the unchecked power of corporations. In the Great Depression, communists turned to Marx in hopes of transcending the destructive capitalist economy. The young activists of the 1960s were inspired by Marx as they gathered to protest an overseas war. Marx's influence today is evident, too, as Americans have become increasingly attuned to issues of inequality, labor, and power. After decades of being pushed to the far-left corner of intellectual thought, Marx's ideologies have crossed over into the mainstream and are more alive than ever. Working-class consciousness is on the rise, and, as Marx argued, the future of a capitalist society rests in the hands of the people who work at the point of production"--

Book Synopsis

The vital and untold story of Karl Marx's stamp on American life.

To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx's ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures. Yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism's centrality to American life.

In Karl Marx in America, historian Andrew Hartman argues that even though Karl Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him. Since the beginning of the Civil War, Marx has been a specter in the American machine. During the Gilded Age, socialists read Marx as an antidote to the unchecked power of corporations. In the Great Depression, communists turned to Marx in hopes of transcending the destructive capitalist economy. The young activists of the 1960s were inspired by Marx as they gathered to protest an overseas war. Marx's influence today is evident, too, as Americans have become increasingly attuned to issues of inequality, labor, and power.

After decades of being pushed to the far-left corner of intellectual thought, Marx's ideologies have crossed over into the mainstream and are more alive than ever. Working-class consciousness is on the rise, and, as Marx argued, the future of a capitalist society rests in the hands of the people who work at the point of production. A valuable resource for anyone interested in Marx's influence on American political discourse, Karl Marx in America is a thought-provoking account of the past, present, and future of his philosophies in American society.

Review Quotes

"Hartman is a really clear writer. He sums up Marx and debates about Marx in really clear ways. That's perfect for post-Cold War generations ready for Marx."-- "Left Voice"

"Karl Marx in America is about as comprehensive a history of its subject as one could want. It is a book many of us had long hoped would one day arrive, and now it is here and the hopes are vindicated. Whether Marx will ever get a fair hearing in the United States is an open question; that he has been and will remain an important figure in its discourse is now a closed one."-- "Damage Magazine"

"What we need more than ever is a Marx for the age of Trump, a time when the brilliance of Marx's understanding of capitalism is widely acknowledged even as the political solution of the Marxist project (working-class revolution) seems to be in question. In Hartman's scholarship, we find confirmation that it is in Marxist critiques of Marxism that one can find the most thought-provoking avenues for possible explanations and guidance. In Karl Marx in America, this is achieved through a double exposure: A kind of presentation of the past in the present, a process of relearning what we have forgotten or perhaps never knew. After all, if we don't first interpret the world, we sure as hell can't change it."-- "New Politics"

"Karl Marx in America is a start in building the narrative of how a generation of American intellectuals are beginning to analyze the history of Marxism in the United States not as a failure but as a continuing tradition, with the present being an historically important moment in its development and to which we can contribute. After all, we have nothing to lose."-- "The Baffler"

"Hartman sweeps with gusto through over a century and a half of U.S. history, revealing the influence of Marxism on dozens of institutions, individuals, and events, obscure and famous. . . . to show that both liberal critics and right-wing demonizers got his favorite thinker terribly wrong."-- "The New Republic"

"Karl Marx in America significantly contributes to our understanding of the twists and turns of the periodic Marx booms. Throughout its 500 pages and nine chapters, the text adroitly historicizes a wide range of American readers' uses of Marx since the mid-19th century."-- "Foreign Policy"

"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"

"Students of U.S. history and thought will benefit from this study."-- "Library Journal"

"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"

"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

"A nimble study that sheds new light on Marx's thought and enduring influence."-- "Kirkus Reviews, starred review"

"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

"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

"'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'

About the Author

Andrew Hartman is professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, published by the University of Chicago Press, and Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. He is also the coeditor of American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times.