Karl Marx

Abstract

The idea to write an entire book on the father of communism was not Berlin’s. The invitation came in 1933 from Thornton Butterworth publishing house, which decided to include a volume about Karl Marx in their Home University Library series. Herbert Fisher, one of the series’ editors, was asked to find “someone on the Left to author it.” Fisher knew Berlin very well: Berlin held his first position as lecturer at New College when Fisher was its Warden, and he was a close friend of Fisher’s exceptionally talented daughter, Mary, who attended Somerville College at the time. Berlin, however, was not Fisher’s first choice for the project. In fact, he was approached only after a number of other candidates, including Harold Laski, A. L. Rowse, Frank Pakenham, Richard Crossman, Sidney Webb (aka Lord Passfield), and perhaps even Cole, declined the same offer. ¹ Clearly, Fisher considered Berlin part of the same lot of Leftist moralists. The fact that he did not approach him first is not surprising: in his conversations with Ignatieff, Berlin admitted that he felt that senior fellows of his college, who were aware of his reputation as a social figure, thought “I [Berlin] was a time-wasting chatterbox who would never write anything and wasted the time of people who might.” And indeed Berlin admits in the same interview that at the time he “didn’t show any signs of settling down to work and getting things out.”² Given the context in which Berlin wrote Karl Marx, examined in the previous chapter, it becomes evident that one motivating force behind the book was the attempt to find a “pink,” social-democratic golden path that would collapse into neither a liberal/ conservative order, nor into “nihilist” communism. Fisher, thus, made a good bet. He approached a man of the Left who was willing to undertake a serious investigation into the historical roots of the ideology that was transforming the world, but who was not too radical or unable to criticize its founding father.