William Clare Roberts's Marx’s Inferno is an ambitious and well-researched book that offers an original re-interpretation of Marx’s Capital, Volume One. This re-interpretation rests, first, and as signaled by the book’s intriguing title, on the claim that the Inferno section of Dante’s Divine Comedy provides a crucial and largely unheeded interpretive key to Capital. This is not merely a question of a recurring literary allusion that helps illuminate hidden additional facets of Marx’s argument. Rather, the claim is that the very structure and inner logic of Capital, long a matter of contention among rival interpretations, only comes to light through an appreciation of its deliberate parallels with that of Dante’s work. Secondly, Roberts’ re-interpretation of Capital insists that a proper understanding of Marx’s argument requires putting into focus the existing socialist and republican political traditions of England and France, and particularly the conception of freedom articulated by the latter. These, it is argued, constitute the immediate political arguments Marx sought to evoke, reformulate, and subvert in Capital on the way to his own distinctive and epoch-making critique of capitalism.

These two principal arguments are each connected to broader theoretical and methodological conceptions. The notion that Dante’s Inferno is the overarching model for Capital is bound up with a definite view of Marx’s efforts that seems primarily conceived of as a form of moral criticism rather than a scientific advance in the cognition of the objective workings of the capitalist mode of production. The importance of reading Capital in the context of existing socialist and republican arguments emerges out of protocols that seem to be strongly influenced by the Cambridge School, leading to a “political” interpretation of Capital that is itself to be understood in a very specific sense.

Although there is much to learn from in Marx’s Inferno, the work is beset by a number of serious problems and ultimately fails to establish its fundamental claims.

Concerning the importance of Dante’s Inferno, many of the preliminary maneuvers involved in the argument, such as establishing Marx’s fascination with Dante’s work, are persuasively argued and unearth interesting material that is not likely to be familiar to most readers. Moreover, the book cogently presents the interpretive impasse it seeks to overcome in the form of two influential rival interpretations: that the fundamental structure of Marx’s work is essentially historical, tracing the actual development of economic forms through different stages, as opposed to dialectical, unfolding and progressively refining through the text conceptual categories of Hegelian logic. In particular, Roberts’ argument about the shift from a cyclical series of economic processes to a more properly historical development after part four of Capital (148–9; 184) seems insightful and promising. Finally, the more limited notion that overt as well as esoteric literary allusions to Dante’s Inferno abound in Capital—though one should add that, due to Marx’s encyclopedic knowledge, this is also the case for other important cultural and artistic sources—and that some of them have a certain political significance within the general economy of the work, is now much clearer thanks to Roberts’ work. However, the more ambitious claim about the significance of Dante’s Inferno in Capital is inconsistently developed and in the final analysis implausible.

In the first two substantive chapters of Roberts’ book that begin to examine Capital (chapters 3 and 4), the question of Dante’s inferno is dealt with an in a perfunctory manner. It is invoked at the beginning, picked up again at end, but seems substantially disjointed from the analysis of Capital developed in those two chapters. Chapter five offers a more substantial attempt to establish the connection between Dante and Marx, developing a systematic parallel between the three monsters of fraud found deep into Dante’s Inferno and what Marx regarded as the threefold fraud of capitalism, concerning its productivity, wages, and forms of association. The chapter is interesting, but it casts Marx’s endeavor as fundamentally a moralizing tale. Related, the part of the argument concerning the “fraud” of capitalist productivity is perhaps the weakest of the book. If the point were simply to highlight the profound contradiction between the promise of the economic and technological development of capitalism and its dismaying social and political results, one would readily agree, while at the same noting that interpretive acrobatics inspired by Dante are not exactly necessary for the task.

The author, however, sends numerous, if muddled signals that for Marx the problem is modernity as such. For example, there is a suggestion that workers’ control of the factory cannot resolve the more fundamental issue of alienating interactions with machines (169). Thus the development of the productive forces, instead of constituting the actual and necessary basis for socialism, is for Marx a mere fraud. Roberts is no doubt pushed in this direction by the fact that his argument depends on the strongest possible correspondence between Dante’s moralizing allegories and what can be found in Capital. But a pinch of old-fashioned materialism should suffice to recognize that Roberts is also influenced by a prevailing intellectual and political climate of the post- and anti-modern kind, and that only in such a climate would it be possible to entertain the notion that the question of Marx’s attitude toward modernity and technology can be settled by means of literary considerations.

What’s left of the notion of “Marx’s Inferno” in relation to Dante’s, in the end, is an attractive title that will undoubtedly help with the book’s popularity, some interesting interpretive insights, but also a sense that the loftier expectations set up in the introduction were not met, and indeed could not be met without fanciful and ill-considered revisionism. The other major argument of book, the significance of the previous socialist and republican traditions for a proper understanding of Capital, nets similarly uneven results.

With respect to utopian socialism, the book’s care and attention to this literature casts in sharper relief not only specific passages of Marx’s work, but also his conscious, but not always obvious attempts to deploy its vocabulary and concepts in order to inject them with a new content and ultimately supersede them politically. The discussion of Proudhon’s views on “cooperation” and “collective force,” for example, is learned and interesting. But even in such cases, once we reach the actual payoff concerning Marx’s argument, it hardly seems worth the fuss. For example, we are told that Marx’s understanding of exploitation breaks from utopian socialism by rejecting the distinction between “the productive and the unproductive,” as well as rejecting the notion that “the exploitation of the laborer by the capitalist is ... an echo ... or a renaissance of feudalism” (128, 132). Similarly, the discussion of Dante’s centaur-dragon hybrid monster Cacus—the wage “fraud” of capitalism, in relation to the views of Proudhon among others—culminates with the point that what “seems to emerge from capital’s pocket ... was first extracted by capital from the laborers” (176). At its weakest, Marx’s Inferno evokes Engels’ acidic quip about leaving solemn and ponderous discussions of utopian socialism to the “literary small fry.”

As to republicanism, its role in the book is similarly problematic. First, Roberts’ argument on this score is inconsistent. At times, one finds the plausible claim that some of Marx’s ideas emerge out of a confrontation not only with utopian socialism, but republicanism as well. However, even in this modest form, the specific content of the argument is only clarified very late, when we are informed that the republicanism Marx engaged with was not just the antimonarchical one of the French Revolution, but other strands as well, which moreover intersected with the socialism of Robert Owen (246–7). In other instances, however, there is a much stronger claim that Marx is really best understood as a republican. This claim is quite implausible, particularly considering how Roberts readily concedes that Marx was uninterested or hostile to most of the concerns historically associated with republicanism (246–7). More broadly, the claim points to certain difficulties that arise in writing a book on Marx, even when, as is the case with Roberts’, it ultimately demurs in the face of the inevitably large political stakes involved, falling back on “modest” interpretive goals (256).

Marx’s Inferno actually begins with strong signals concerning the need to read Capital not just as a work of political theory in the disciplinary sense, but as “political theory.” Rather than engaging with the actual struggles punctuated and activated by Capital as a text in the past and present, however, this “political” approach turns out to be primarily concerned with rhetoric and speech acts. In this way, as argued by Richard Ashcraft in his criticism of the Cambridge School, “politics” is reduced to a “verbal tennis match ... a struggle over the forms and substance of political speech,” or, as Marx and Engels lamented as newly minted communists, to a mere struggle between the phrases of this world (Richard Ashcraft, “On the Problem of Methodology and the Nature of Political Theory,” Political Theory, Vol. 3, no. 1 [1975]: 13). In Marx’s Inferno, references to the International Working Men’s Association, for instance, are few and far between, and references to the urgent problems of the capitalist present are even scarcer. Most importantly, the political history of Marxism after Marx is virtually absent from the book. Only in this remarkable vacuum and through these peculiar methodological parameters is it possible for Roberts to advance the thesis that Marx is best understood as a republican. In introducing this attempt, it is revealing that the “political” context in which Roberts seeks to intervene is described as the “contemporary reconstruction of republicanism,” or the “neo-republicanism presently on the table” (8). Even a cursory survey of the actual political landscape in the United States or Europe should compel the author to reflect on exactly which, or perhaps whose table he is referring to.

It should be noted that Roberts is a consistently sympathetic interpreter of Marx, defending him, for example, from stock accusations of anti-Semitism (137), plagiarism (156), and more generally against facile and uninformed dismissals of his ideas. Unfortunately, the relationship between Marx and Marxism and the broader understanding of politics as a struggle among living forces—an elementary proposition in that political tradition—remain terra incognita. I remain unconvinced by Roberts’ interpretation, but he is to be commended for writing a provocative book, and even more for insisting that Capital is a central work of political theory warranting our serious attention.