It has long been acknowledged that many of the basic categories of Marxist thought, including the opposition between “idealism” and “materialism” and “the materialist concept of history,” were more or less the invention of Friedrich Engels, and especially Engels’s efforts in later works, like Anti-Dühring and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, to impose coherence on Karl Marx’s otherwise sprawling investigations. The debate over whether, in taking up this task, Engels did more to obscure or illuminate Marx’s thought has been ongoing at least since the 1920s, when the Soviets initiated the still-unfinished project of publishing Marx’s and Engels’s literary remains. Nor is this debate complete today. To take just one example, until recently the manuscript called The German Ideology has routinely been interpreted as the moment when Marx “breaks” with the philosophical commitments of his youth and begins to develop “historical materialism.” But it now seems clear that most of the passages typically referred to as evidence of this break were in fact written by Engels. Indeed, it was Engels who, in his Ludwig Feuerbach, first posited the familiar distinction between the early and the mature Marx, and first published as evidence the famous “Theses on Feuerbach,” which he had found among Marx’s papers shortly after Marx’s death. Does Marxism take root in the difference between the early and the mature Marx, then, or in the difference between Marx and Engels?

While it gathers together an extraordinary range of unique details and insights, Tom Rockmore’s Marx’s Dream belongs to a collection of books that suggest we can distinguish Marx from Engels, and by extension from Marxism as well—a collection large enough to include two earlier books by Rockmore himself. In Fichte, Marx and the German Philosophical Tradition (1980), Rockmore situated Marx in the context of Fichte’s sometimes overlooked influence on nineteenth-century German thought, and proposed that, like Fichte, Marx understood subjective freedom, not in terms of an abstract capacity for knowledge but of worldly and embodied action. In Marx After Marxism (2002), Rockmore worked systematically through Marx’s major writings to reveal the extent of his debt to classical German philosophy, especially Hegel.

Marx’s Dream makes many of the same claims and covers much of the same ground. But here Rockmore widens the aperture in two directions. First, he proposes that the intention animating all of Marx’s work involves an effort to address “the ancient ethical theme of human flourishing.” And this single and abiding intention or “dream” locates Marx squarely within “the Western philosophical tradition” (p. 7). As Rockmore sees it, the Marxist conviction that Marx rejects philosophy in favor of science or economics obviates this crucial background. Second, after correcting the Marxist reading and recalling Marx’s “dream,” Rockmore asks whether this dream has ever been, or can ever become, a reality. Here, Rockmore is deeply pessimistic. “Though [Marx’s] theory turns on practice,” he writes, “in the final analysis it is not practical” (p. 234). In short, Marx’s dream has been misunderstood. And once we do understand it, we must allow that it was never anything more than a dream.

Rockmore’s first purpose, then, is to explain what he means by “the theme of human flourishing,” how it develops in “the Western philosophical tradition,” and how Marx transforms it. From Rousseau, Rockmore proposes, Marx adopts the principle that while the ancients conceived of flourishing as “happiness,” moderns conceive of it as “freedom” (p. 12). From Hegel and post-Kantian German idealism, Marx adopts the principle that freedom cannot be achieved in isolation, but rather requires the existence of an ethical and institutional framework. Freedom must be “social freedom” (p. 62). But, unlike Hegel, Marx also believes that modern industrial society and the liberal state cannot provide, or be reformed to provide, such a framework. Marx thus imagines a transition from the capitalist present, in which human individuals are alienated from their practical capacities, to a communist future, in which those capacities will be realized in action.

In the second half of his book, Rockmore examines four efforts to accomplish this transition from capitalism to communism: the messianic mission of the “Revolutionary Proletariat”; the theory of “Economic Crisis”; Marxist-Leninist “Politics”; and the academic project of “Critical Social Theory.” He marshals considerable scholarly resources to expose each of these efforts as dead-ends. And while it is hard to imagine mounting a serious defense of either a revolutionary proletariat or a vanguard party today, both the theory of economic crises and Habermasian discourse ethics have contemporary purchase, making Rockmore’s challenges trenchant. But the most contentious aspect of this book is reserved for its “Conclusion,” which proposes that Marx’s dream is least practical in the one place where, nominally at least, it still has practical existence, namely, China. This is so, the author proposes, not merely because China remains a dictatorship, and “dictatorship of any kind is incompatible with human freedom”; no, in Rockmore’s estimation, this is so because “Marx’s vision of human flourishing presupposes significant individual freedom,” and “the concept of the human individual is a Western concept” that “does not exist . . . in Chinese thought” (p. 236).

At this point, one is tempted to ask whether the great strength of the book also points toward a limitation. For Rockmore’s criticisms of Marxism rely on a contextualization of Marx. But this contextualization focuses largely on a particular definition of philosophy, elements of which Marx almost certainly would not have recognized. In the first instance, Rockmore correctly notes that Marx never used the phrases “historical” or “dialectical materialism,” and that Engels’s efforts to characterize Marx as a “materialist” led him to positions that are philosophically incoherent. More precisely, Rockmore demonstrates that Engels, whose lack of philosophical training he emphasizes more than once, confused Marx’s broadly ethical, “quasi-Fichtean” (p. 105) conception of the subject as a bundle of material practices with a robust epistemological or ontological materialism. In attempting to credit Marx with the invention of a new science, Engels reverted to a crude representationalism, correlationism, or “reflection theory of knowledge” (p. 125). He thus overlooked the constructivist account of knowledge on which Marx implicitly relied. On this account, the development of which Rockmore traces from Vico to Kant, Hegel, and Fichte to Marx, knowledge is not an accurate mental representation of an independent reality, but a function of our pragmatic engagements with the world. Whence Marx’s discussion of theory and practice.

Yet, while it is undoubtedly true that Marx never used phrases like “historical” or “dialectical materialism,” it is equally true that he never referred to “the ancient ethical theme of human flourishing” or “the Western philosophical tradition.” Indeed, the second of these phrases seems to have been concocted in the twentieth century in order to designate a certain anxiety—the disquieting sense that we have lost something that, as on another register we know as well, we never really possessed. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that no “tradition” exists in the past. Every tradition is, much like Engels’s invention of Marxist categories to explain Marx, an effort to make sense of the past from the perspective of the present. To name a tradition, perhaps to name any history whatsoever, is already to have exceeded it, and to speak from a place not contained by it. The act of naming contravenes the named content, and a “tradition” is torn open in the very effort to close it off. Surely this is something that would follow were we to apply Rockmore’s constructivist concern with practice to his own practice, or to any practice, of reading Marx.