On Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx

In Sperber's account, Marx is a backward-looking figure rather than a prophet, responding to the eighteenthand early nineteenthcentury theories of political economy developed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, fascinated by the early modem privatization of land, and holding the French Revolution in mind as the model for political change. When one considers that Marx was baptized and raised as a Protestant, that Jews in the Rhineland (from which Marx hailed) benefitted from the universalist ideology ushered in by the French Revolution, and that Judaism as a racial identity did not emerge until the end of Marx's life, the apparently self-evident "fact" of Marx's Jewish identity looks a bit like a retrospective invention.