Bringing Karl Marx Back to Life

Trier, the small town in southwest Germany where Karl Marx was born in 1818, is a former Roman capital still littered with ruins, in a Catholic part of the Rhineland known mostly for its wine. When Mary Shelley passed through in 1840, she was exhausted by the long carriage ride over bad roads, horrified by the miserable peasants she saw along the way, and frustrated that there was no steamship on the winding Moselle River to take her to the Rhine. How could such a backward, remote place have shaped an author of The Communist Manifesto? The way Jonathan Sperber answers this question in the first chapter of Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life illustrates and vindicates the historical method suggested in his subtitle, showing just how badly we needed a new life of Marx and why it needed to be written by a historian.