Rolf Hosfeld's prizewinning “short, essayistic intellectual biography” (n.p.) of Karl Marx vividly reinserts an iconic theoretician into the political landscape of his day. Written for a broader audience, the book informs and inspires specialists with its exemplary narrative, nicely rendered in this lively translation, and its critical exposure of Marx's delusions. Hosfeld reinvents Marx as a lesser mortal shaped by personal relationships and local environments. Immersion in Marx's extensive papers enables Hosfeld to delight readers with colorful scenery and anecdotes, such as Marx and Bruno Bauer irreverently riding donkeys through officious Prussian towns. The surge in mobility enabled by the railroad and steamship structures Hosfeld's historical tableau, effectively capturing the pan-European scope of Marx's life and impact. Frequent citations infuse Marx's voice into Hosfeld's narrative, while Hosfeld's often biting wit maintains the critical distance of a biographer. Secondary sources factor largely as supporting evidence for Hosfeld's own claims; his engagement with historiography is fleeting.

The main contribution Hosfeld makes to appreciations of Marx is to distinguish two entangled currents in his intellectual production, which, in Hosfeld's view, explain the wildly divergent impact of Marx's ideas. On the one hand, Hosfeld profiles a “political and historical-theological Marx” (p. 176) whose early exposure to Hegelian philosophy “misled” (p. 146) him into fantastical speculation and irrational, eschatological expectations of humanity's immanent redemption. Hosfeld presents the historical materialism of the young Marx as a quasi-religious doctrine, mired in a “strange, unconscious pantheistic” (p. 36) belief in predestination. His prophesies and messianic expectations, according to Hosfeld, encouraged the dangerous megalomania of Bolshevist revolutionaries eager to usher in communism as “salvation from the east” (p. 168). The book's original German title, Die Geister, die er rief (roughly translated as “the spirits he conjured”) embodies this argument better than its translation. On the other hand, Hosfeld shows greater sympathy with Marx as a significant, yet underappreciated “theoretician of capitalism” (p. 176). Grounded in the traditions of British political economy, the later Marx made “lasting scientific discoveries” (p. 132), according to Hosfeld, as a labor-value theorist and diagnostician of capitalism's crises and contradictions.

The book's chapters follow Marx's intellectual development from his student years to his death, culminating with the “unintended consequences” that his ideas bequeathed to German social democracy and Leninist Russia. As befits an essay of this length, the discussions of Marx's conceptual edifice are inevitably truncated and occasionally impressionistic. The first chapter distills the five main “Ideas” through which “worldly-pious atheists” such as Marx kept alive an “eschatological flame” in the “secular” nineteenth century (p. 49). Hosfeld quite conventionally situates the central tenets of historical materialism within the framework of Marx's reckoning with speculative German philosophy and its theological entanglements. The second chapter, “Deeds,” convincingly asserts the decisive influence that the nineteenth century's continental revolutions had on Marx's thought. It traces the rise and fall of his “revolutionary euphoria” (p. 75) from the Parisian workers' rebellion of June 1848 through the crushing of the Paris commune after the Franco-Prussian war. Hosfeld decries the “personal overexcitement” (p. 62) and dangerous “sense of superiority” (p. 60) that befell Marx during his affiliation with the Communist League; historical materialism deluded Marx into the presumption of being the “self-conscious and authentic mouthpiece” (p. 60) of the historical will. An “alarming” (p. 79) pairing of revolutionary and imperialist rhetoric, acquired by Engels in Britain, resurrected Jacobian revolutionary terrorism, Hosfeld intriguingly observes, on a “more modern, globally expanded level” (p. 78). After 1848 the “trauma” (p. 88) of failed revolution and British exile imparted a “new reticence” (p. 108) on Marx. When, after twelve years of hunkering in the British Library, Marx again embraced a political affiliation, he had lost many of his revolutionary illusions. According to Hosfeld, Marx assumed leadership of the First International Workingmen's Association as a “dignified theorist of the need for union politics” (p. 109). A solid economic appreciation of capitalism had transformed the revolutionary Marx into a “social democrat wearing a Jacobian hat” (p. 110).

“Discoveries,” the third chapter, pays critical homage to the “sharp-sightedness” (p. 132) with which Marx interpreted the economic effects of the Industrial Revolution. Marx's insights into the cyclical crises that plagued capitalism, as well as into the production and circulation of capital, “were indeed discoveries” (p. 145), Hosfeld ventures. Lingering “historical-theological emotions” (p. 144), however, caused Marx to be “blinded” by antinomic assumptions. He declared the contradictions of capitalism to be unsolvable, rather than controllable, and overlooked the potential of regulation and reform. The final chapter on the “Consequences” of Marx's theories details his uneasy relationship with German social democracy through the lens of his encounters with Ferdinand Lassalle and Karl Liebknecht. Hosfeld argues that the SPD's reformist Gotha Program, which Marx denounced, and its Erfurt Program of 1891 grounded Marx's messianic prophecies in earthly practicalities. A new phase of economic prosperity in the mid-1890s deferred the prospect of immanent revolution and warmed German socialists to gradualism. By contrast, the “unconditional dominion of . . . heaven” (p. 168) persisted unabated in the Russian reception of Marx, its tragic outcome serving to confirm Hosfeld's distaste for prophesy. This reading of Marx as a conjurer of demons rightly rails against Marx's own proclaimed secularization of German idealism. Hosfeld wisely returns religion to an important corner of German intellectual life, even if its effects on Marxist doctrine are often depicted in broad, archetypical terms.