Mao meets Oakeshott

John Lanchester: Britain’s new class divide, 21 October 2004

Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain 
by Ferdinand Mount.
Short Books, 320 pp., £14.99, September 2004, 1 904095 94 1
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... conflicting and co-operating interests. But the Industrial Revolution, as interpreted by Marx with ‘his ferocious rhetoric, his thundering certainties and his air of scientific infallibility’ made it much simpler to divide society into two groups: Us and Them, the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisie, ineluctably at war. Mount argues that ...

President François Misprint

Richard Mayne, 1 April 1983

The Wheat and the Chaff: The Personal Diaries of the President of France 1971-1978 
by François Mitterrand, translated by Richard Woodward, Helen Lane and Concilia Hayter.
Weidenfeld, 284 pp., £12.50, October 1982, 0 297 78101 4
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The French 
by Theodore Zeldin.
Collins, 542 pp., £12.95, January 1983, 0 00 216806 5
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... Three years later came a further instalment, L’Abeille et l’Architecte – an allusion to Marx’s distinction between the unthinking bee and that self-conscious builder, man. Mitterrand’s musings contain more wheat than chaff: they also suggest that he’s an artful architect, not just a bee. ‘One must be born in the provinces and feel one’s ...

In the Iguanodon Diner

J.W. Burrow, 6 October 1994

Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist 
by Nicolaas Rupke.
Yale, 462 pp., £35, February 1994, 0 300 05820 9
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... often looks to the outsider as though Sir Lewis Namier had formed an implausible alliance with Karl Marx, with both of them on more than nodding terms with Michel Foucault. So, either as separate enterprises or in conjunction, we get scientific faction-formation, faction-fighting and clientage as a key to all mythologies (here we have a good deal of ...

Jowls are available

Jenny Diski: ‘Second Life’, 8 February 2007

... my home and auto shop, where I have set aside a small area commemorating the influential ideas of Karl Marx,’ a notice says. Slobodan had been a leading member of the now defunct Second Life Socialist Party and Second Life Communist Party, but had given it up. ‘Joining a party that claims to reverse the whole of human history is bogus,’ the notice ...

Prophetic Chattiness

Patrick McGuinness: Victor Hugo, 19 June 2003

The Distance, The Shadows: Selected Poems 
by Victor Hugo, translated by Harry Guest.
Anvil, 250 pp., £12.95, November 2002, 0 85646 345 0
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Selected Poetry 
by Victor Hugo, translated by Steven Monte.
Carcanet, 305 pp., £12.95, September 2001, 1 85754 539 7
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Selected Poems of Victor Hugo: A Bilingual Edition 
edited by E.H. Blackmore and A.M. Blackmore.
Chicago, 631 pp., £24.50, April 2001, 0 226 35980 8
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... Aragon endorsed: ‘Hugo was born on the eve of Empire,’ he wrote, ‘and died two years after Karl Marx.’ After my songs, I meditate; I raise The fallen emperor a shrine; I praise Liberty for its fruits, the crown and king For its due honour and its suffering – True to my parents’ blood in every way, He from the army, she from the ...

Seeing it all

Peter Clarke, 12 October 1989

The Time of My life 
by Denis Healey.
Joseph, 512 pp., £17.95, October 1989, 0 7181 3114 2
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... as ‘an eclectic pragmatist’ when he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, he comments: ‘Karl Popper played a far more important role in my thinking than Karl Marx-or Maynard Keynes, or Milton Friedman.’ Perhaps he was wise, however, not to have declared a Popperian policy as his objective. As Defence ...
From Bauhaus to Our House 
by Tom Wolfe.
Cape, 143 pp., £6.95, March 1982, 0 224 02030 7
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... allegedly unsympathetic style on themselves, he had better go back to corporate history, not the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna. Wolfe is not alone in despising it, of course: all those in revolt against Amerika-with-a-Nazi-k despised it too, because they saw in it an especially American failure, an especially American lack of ...

Life in the Colonies

Steven Rose, 20 July 1995

Naturalist 
by Edward O.Wilson.
Allen Lane, 380 pp., £20, August 1995, 0 7139 9141 0
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Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration 
by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O.Wilson.
Harvard, 228 pp., £19.95, November 1994, 0 674 48525 4
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... formicomorphise humans: ‘It would appear that socialism really works under some circumstances. Karl Marx just had the wrong species.’ Analogy does not imply homology, however, and it is just such smart-arsery which got Sociobiology into trouble. Adjectives derived from descriptions of the richly social, highly conscious and historically specific ...

Pulp

Scott Bradfield, 14 December 1995

Jim Thompson Omnibus: The Getaway, The Killer inside Me, The Grifters, Pop. 1280 
Picador, 570 pp., £7.99, November 1995, 3 303 34288 1Show More
Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson 
by Robert Polito.
Knopf, 543 pp., $30, October 1995, 0 394 58407 4
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... and children, and from his jobs. He lived as a hobo, promoted get-rich-quick oil investments, read Karl Marx and dabbled in Wobblie politics. Then he buckled down for a while and worked part of his way through the University of Kansas, where he became the creative writing programme’s star pupil, publishing stories and poems in both the university ...

Bad Times

Andy Beckett: Travels with Tariq Ali, 20 February 2025

You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024 
by Tariq Ali.
Verso, 799 pp., £35, November 2024, 978 1 80429 090 3
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... airport. His hand luggage contained two objects which were regarded as suspicious: a book by Karl Marx and a copy of the Times Literary Supplement, which included a review, annotated by Ali, of a volume about Algeria. These items were confiscated and he was taken to the airport’s police headquarters. ‘You can’t travel with books like ...

Radical Heritage

Conrad Russell, 1 September 1988

Bertrand Russell: A Political Life 
by Alan Ryan.
Allen Lane, 226 pp., £16.95, June 1988, 0 7139 9005 8
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... optimist, was the belief that, as Dr Ryan puts it, ‘only socialism could avert another war.’ Marx, in his attempts to link war to the development of capitalism, provided a generation with a way of explaining war without wholly abandoning the faith in human nature by which they had previously lived. The temptation was a very powerful one, and it is one to ...

Unhoused

Terry Eagleton: Anonymity, 22 May 2008

Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature 
by John Mullan.
Faber, 374 pp., £17.99, January 2008, 978 0 571 19514 5
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... writer without being truly part of his or her work. Not every text which bears the signature of Karl Marx is necessarily ‘Marxist’. There is a difference between what Middlemarch is seeking to do at any particular point, and what George Eliot had in mind at the time, if she had anything particular in mind at all. The literary intentions that matter ...

We simply do not know!

John Gray: Keynes, 19 November 2009

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism 
by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller.
Princeton, 230 pp., £16.95, February 2009, 978 0 691 14233 3
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... worries fed into the theory of alienation developed by that other celebrated classical economist, Karl Marx. If Akerlof and Shiller’s grip on the history of economic thought is shaky, they also fail to grasp why Keynes rejected the idea that markets are self-stabilising. Throughout Animal Spirits they portray him as reintegrating psychology with ...

Phantom Gold

John Pemble: Victorian Capitalism, 7 January 2016

Forging Capitalism: Rogues, Swindlers, Frauds and the Rise of Modern Finance 
by Ian Klaus.
Yale, 287 pp., £18.99, January 2015, 978 0 300 18194 4
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... by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.’ Independently of Karl Marx – little known and never influential among Victorian intellectuals – a great many critics fustigated this way of thinking. Fire and brimstone evangelists like Carlyle, agonised agnostics like Matthew Arnold, Arts and Crafts socialists like ...

Last Leader

Neal Ascherson, 7 June 1984

Citizen Ken 
by John Carvel.
Chatto, 240 pp., £8.95, May 1984, 0 7011 3929 3
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... over us twenty thousand years ago.’ Well, it was there in the thinking of a lot of people around Karl Marx as well. But Ken Livingstone, a man for compassionate issues rather than ideologies who was brought up in South London suburbs rather than among proletarian terraces, simply points to the city around him as evidence of negative evolution. People ...