Karl Marx: Selected Writings

Karl Marx seems to have read everything—and used his reading in his philosophical texts, in his writings on economic and social theory, and in his many political polemic. He knew the Bible well, had strong Greek and Latin, and read widely in French and German literature. His literary references to these sources have often gone unnoticed, and his artful prose is overlooked amidst the blaze of his profound thinking and furious critiques of capitalism. Nevertheless, when we carefully look at his prose we will find it to be rich metaphors and figures of speech, cunning rhetorical technique, and a harmonious and expressive style that helped to create the nearly incomparable force of his words. He was, in fact, a virtuoso at one of the hardest tasks facing the writer whose subject is ideas: he could transform complicated and abstract ideas into an immediate reality that forces itself upon readers, urging them to re-think basic beliefs and to take action.

As one scholar puts it: “Marx was a writer: he left an imposing work. This work constitutes a scientific corpus, a theoretical weave. But this corpus, in addition to its conceptual skeleton, possesses an expressive musculature; concrete literary threads have warped this theoretical weave. The scientific system is supported by an expressive system.”

In this seminar we will read Marx both for his ideas and and for the pleasures of his prose. We will observe his use of Greek myths and other legends, the inspiration he took from European fiction and poetry, his journalistic reports of life in his own day, his lively historical accounts, his vast range of allusions from literature, his critiques of the arts, and his refined expression of his sense of the tragedy and the hope in life. He became the man of letters he wanted to be from his youth by finding for his literary work the deep insights into human behavior, our relation to nature, and the dramatic panorama of human life that he developed over his whole career. He turned his literary ambitions into a force that affects philosophy, political theory, economics, ethics, religion, and the arts to this day.

Texts (titles will be available at Literary Arts bookstore)
Karl Marx, Marx: Selected Writings, edited by Lawrence H. Simon (Hackett)
Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, edited and translated by Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Hackett)
Ludovico Silva, Marx’s Literary Style, translated by Paco Brito Núñez (Verso)
Other texts will be supplied in pdf.”

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