The “rebellion” here is more Norman Levine’s against Lenin than Marx’s, for the obvious historical reason that when Marx died in 1883 Lenin was 13 years old. Moreover, Levine’s real antagonist turns out to be Engels and—in a very unusual though probably not original locution—“Engelsism.” The book is thus argumentative to a thesis that, again, is not particularly original, having its origin coterminus with that of “Marxism” in the later 1890s.

Given that Engels (d. 1895) was a considerable political actor within the international socialist movement of that era—even if largely epistolary and through his widely circulated works—how right was he about Marx? And how right was the theory, the science, the politics anyway? Of course, authoritative opinion was overwhelmingly on one side of these questions—Engels and Marx were always in agreement—yet there were nagging doubts, attempted resolutions, rewrites, and reworkings as the decades went by, and indeed much of Marxist “theory” was exactly this.

Lenin pitched in at various points, though not on the sacrosanct Marx—Engels relationship itself. Rather, his efforts concentrated on the philosophy/science, materialism/idealism, determinism/voluntarism aporia that followed from the basic problems that Engels had, albeit unwittingly, set up. Insofar as the book is really about Lenin, Levine resolves these discussions by arguing that Lenin allowed Engels to lead him astray on the nature of materialism and its relationship to understanding, explaining, and pursuing human activities. This happened because he—Lenin—did not in his lifetime have access to the works of Marx that would have put him straight.

For Levine, getting Marx right evidently involves reading the right materials, which are the posthumously published manuscripts made available only from the later 1920s. Apparently, according to Levine’s argument, if you read the Marx that Lenin (d. 1924) had available, you are likely to miss what he (Levine) terms Marx’s “naturalism.” And if you, like Lenin, read the works of Engels during this period that were readily available, then you will surely miss it.

More than half of Levine’s text argues that Marx’s “naturalism” followed from his own education and reading of philosophers, political economists, and historians, especially legal and anthropological ones, whose works made up the various tendencies of the Enlightenment. In this lengthy intellectual history, Levine sharply distinguishes between “materialists”—of the matter-in-motion variety—and “historicists,” for whom everything is subject to change.

Periodizing and “boundary-izing” Enlightenment thinkers is not of course a new activity, and it is certainly helpful to have a thesis of philosophical opposition starkly put. Levine states that natural-law thinkers and mechanistic/deterministic thinkers both approach humanity in such a way that “History” and “Time” are absent (pp. 43–44). By contrast, “historicist principles,” developed much earlier than Marx but thoroughly embraced by him, assume concepts of “development” in “successive stages” (p. 44). Levine sums up by saying that “naturalism shifted the loci of causality from physical laws to human action” (p. 181). This kind of thesis is not at all unfamiliar; it says pretty much what Marx says in his “Theses on Feuerbach,” which Engels published in 1888.

Where then did Engels go so wrong? Levine lists the well-known works of Engels that Lenin read or must have read and identifies them as the origin of “Engelsism” (pp. 175–76). But he says curiously little about them, with almost no textual citations to show us in what Engels’s “materialism” consisted. Levine’s purely argumentative point is that Lenin evidently accepted Engelsism, and that this “signaled the onset of [his] Entrapment” (p. 189). It is possible, as I have done over the years, to see Engels’s autodidactic efforts at “philosophizing” Marx’s ideas as a “science” as creating ambiguities rather than defensible distinctions, but for the author’s purposes, this kind of reading will not do. When “Lenin failed to draw a distinction between materialism and naturalism,” so Levine writes, “he became the prisoner of … Engels” (p. 189).

It is hard to argue that there are not some interesting problems here, and indeed much of the “Revisionist” controversy of the early 1900s was about just this mix. Putting the matter the other way, Leninism itself has been carefully examined, not least by Neil Harding, with whose works Levine’s text does not engage. And there are further puzzles in this book. Why exactly do we need the extensive intellectual genealogy (from Aristotle onward) to understand the fairly simple idea that Marx “turned philosophical critique from natural rights and political ethics to political economy” (p. 48)? After all, he said this himself in 1859, and in a text that has been canonical since the turn of the twentieth century. And again putting the matter the other way, how could such a dynamic and intellectually vigorous character as Lenin ever be so thoroughly haunted—even entrapped—by the specter of Engels?

I had my suspicions about these puzzles, and eventually got confirmation. Levine states that the “impact of naturalism on Marx’s definition of communism was the linkage between civil society and the [Paris] Commune of 1871” (p. 203). This does not look immediately like an odd statement to make, even if it would need some unpacking and defense. However, the revelation is that we have gotten to the end of the book without a single mention of Marx’s political activity at all, and no reference whatsoever to the revolutionary events and involvements of 1848–49.

Anyone looking at Levine’s text would assume, and indeed be told, that it was an exercise in intellectual history, and specifically in the history of ideas in what he says is a Pocockian vein. But even in that setting, this work is distinctly idealist in the philosophical sense. Only ideas matter, thinkers only have the ideas they read, minds become imprinted with other minds, and differences in “thought”—if and when they do—arise through conversion or negation, influence or break. The metaphors of imprisonment, divorce, enslavement (p. 157) and “Black Hole” (p. 194) join that of “Entrapment” in Levine’s dramaturgical construction. These tropes apply even more to Lenin’s relationship to Engels, and thus account, in Levine’s view, for the former’s undialectical materialism.

If you are happy with idealist intellectual history written within these dramaturgical terms, then Marx’s Rebellion Against Lenin is highly recommended. But for me, it generates more puzzles—and indeed mystifications—than it resolves.