KARL MARX: A Life.

By Francis Wheen. Norton. 431 pp. $27.95

There are good reasons for not reading this biography. First, although Marx was German, his mode of thought was German, and he wrote mainly in the German language, the author’s reach does not extend beyond English-language sources. Second, Wheen, a columnist for the Guardian in London, sometimes writes in an infuriatingly chatty style, as if sitting in a pub describing an irksome colleague. When Marx embraced a bizarre theory that soil triggers evolutionary changes, for instance, we learn that his lifelong friend and patron Friedrich Engels "thought the old boy had gone barmy." A third possible complaint is that the book offers little that is new. The author simply read 10 or 20 books and wrote one more.

If these objections turn away the potential reader, though, it would be a pity, for this is a good read and something more besides. Having earlier published a study on the 1960s and a history of television, Wheen rolls out his tale at a brisk clip. He spares us the turgid details of how Marx the intellectual gymnast stood Hegel on his head. And, unlike most biographers of this prickly and often savage polemicist, Wheen actually seems to like Marx, or at least the Marx he conjures up for his 21st-century readers.

Wheen’s Karl Marx is neither the laboring man’s messiah who founded the revolutionary workers’ movement nor the satanic force who unleashed the horrors of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Having been stripped of this baggage by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of all but a few die-hard communist parties, Marx is now neither prophet nor threat. What is left? A peculiar, frustrated, and generally unhappy 19th-century intellectual, whose outer world was that of a stolid Victorian bourgeois and whose inner world was defined by "paradox, irony, and contradiction."

Later Marxists loved to speak of the "objective" forces that moved history, generally in the direction they wished. It is all the more surprising, therefore, to see the extent to which Marx’s own life and thought were dominated by a veritable army of highly subjective prejudices, many of them quite nasty. The French were deceitful, the British obtuse and incapable of rigorous thought, and the Russians primitive and hell-bent on conquest. When provoked, he could drop anti-Semitic or racist slurs as capably as any good 19th-century European burgher.

And that’s just the point. As Marxism recedes into the past, the man who created it stands forth ever more clearly as an emanation of his era. His intellectual concerns, his hopes and fears, and even his private life (which Wheen, without resorting to Freud, describes with considerable sensitivity and skill), were all very much the product of his class, gender, and historical epoch.

Is there anything surprising in that? Certainly not. Nor is Wheen the first to make the observation. But, coming on the heels of the great communist crackup, this biography has a poignancy that earlier works lacked. As we part company with Marxism-Leninism, we also bid farewell to its chief architect, with all his will to power, apocalyptic dreams, petty squabbles, ritual humiliations of opponents, and wretched private life.

—S. Frederick Starr