A rough egalitarianism belongs to the twentieth century; it has chopped down political hopes and beliefs of every stripe. From Liberalism to Marxism, none has survived intact. Talk of the Gulag is hardly answered by talk of Auschwitz; nor can analysis of one replace analysis of the other. The wreckage extends in every direction. The vastness of the junkyard encourages, almost compels, retreat and resignation.

Yet, as Herbert Marcuse once remarked, there was no God that failed, only men and women. The debacle allows no escape. With care and caution we must sift through the theoretical rubble. Marx and Weber and Freud remain our contemporaries not because little of import has been said since they wrote but because the society they dissected, and sometimes denounced, still wheezes along. The temptation to flee into the future and begin conceptually afresh is marked by fright, and it yields staler results than less ambitious efforts to think through the past.

This book was written in the spirit of rescue and retrieval. To be sure, recently there has been no dearth of histories of Marxism. This one, however, parts from the usual textual study or narrative monograph; it is both more and less modest. It is more modest in that I do not seek to elucidate the entire oeuvre of Marx; it is less in that I am not content with a flat historical reconstruction. I do not view this study as a Sunday tour through the museum of Marxism, stopping here and there to gaze upon extinct specimens. There are no simple lessons here nor instructions on how to save the world.