Isaiah Berlin on Marx
Isaiah Berlin waxes eloquent at the close of his introduction to Karl Marx. He captures here in vivid terms something of that “messianic spirit” of Marx that Derrida affiliates himself with.
“His attack upon bourgeois society was made at a moment when it had reached the highest point of its material prosperity, in the very year in which Gladstone in a budget speech congratulated his countrymen on the ‘intoxicating augmentation of their wealth and power’ which recent years had witnessed, during a mood of buoyant optimism and universal confidence. In this world Marx is an isolated and bitterly hostile figure, prepared, like an early Christian, or a French enrage, to reject boldly all that it was and stood for, calling its ideals worthless and its virtues vices, condemning its institutions because they were bourgeois, that is because they belong to a corrupt, tyrranous and irrational society which must be annihilated totally and for ever. In an age which destroyed its adversaries by methods not less efficient because they were slow, which forced Carlyle and Schopenhauer to seek escape in remote civilisations or an idealised past, and drove its arch-enemy Nietzsche to hysteria and madness, Marx alone remained secure and formidable. Like an ancient prophet performing a task imposed on him by heaven, with an inner tranquillity based on clear and certain faith in the harmonious society of the future, he bore witness to the signs of decay and ruin which he saw on every side. The old order seemed to him to be patently crumbling before his eyes; he did more than any man to hasten the process, seeking to shorten the final agony which precedes the end.”
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, (4th ed, Oxford 1978), 15-16.
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