Per its introduction, Paul Kengor’s new book, The Devil and Karl Marx, “deals with the grim, disturbing, militant atheism and intense anti-religious elements of Marx and other founders and practitioners of communism.” The history of the last century gives Kengor no shortage of examples of these “elements,” and, as a superb researcher, he is well suited to the task he has set himself. The book contains almost 700 footnotes, and he is clearly well acquainted with practically every biography of Marx in print. Nary a point is made about the life of Marx, or the Soviet Union, or domestic Communist infiltration, without citations from primary or secondary sources (in most cases, both).
The great virtue of the book is the attempt it makes to correct those who would “separate Marx the man from the evils ushered in by Marxism.” Kengor’s point of departure is the observation made by Aristotle that “men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.” He sets out to show that the salient features of Marxist ideology are each and all putrid emanations from Marx’s miserable, morally destitute private life. But he doesn’t devote any significant space in the book to a forensic and dispassionate deconstruction of Marx’s ideas; he merely contents himself with illustrating Marx’s many flaws and implying that Communism can be explained in terms of those flaws alone. In so doing, he leaves himself open to the critique of those who would point out that an idea can’t be refuted by simply observing or explaining its historical origins. So an extra chapter detailing how the ruinous results of Marxist ideology flow ineluctably from its intellectual premises, quite apart from the manifold defects of Marx’s personal character, would have been welcome.
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