Introduction

Abstract

‘Who’, asked a BBC poll, ‘is the greatest thinker of the millennium?’ Karl Marx topped the list.² Another survey, this time of the USA’s Library of Congress — the world’s largest library — found that, with nearly 4000 works, Karl Marx was the sixth most written about individual ever (Jesus Christ came first and Lenin third).³ For all his celebrity, Karl Marx remains an enigma; in the words of Engels’s eulogy, the ‘best hated’ man of his times, and one difficult to overlook: for some a genius, for others a monster. His legacy is an elusive riddle, either an Orwellian nightmare or a world rid of exploitation and oppression; his ideas are either bankrupt or immanently relevant.

‘For Marx was before all else a revolutionist … And, consequently, Marx was the best-hated and most calumniated man of his time … Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him … His name will endure through the ages, and so will his work!’

F. Engels’s graveside speech (1883)¹