Books That Shook the World

[bradams]

Books that shook the world

Can ideas change the world? The famous words of Karl Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, inscribed on his gravestone in Highgate cemetery, seem to suggest not. 'The philosophers,' Marx wrote, 'have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.' This ringing declaration has often been taken to mean that ideas are futile. But Marx can't have meant anything quite as crude as that – for one thing, he presumably intended his words to have an effect on whoever read them. He certainly thought the world would change only through active revolutionary struggle, but the revolution nevertheless had to be guided by ideas. It's ideas that change the minds of the people whose actions then change the world.

Something like this appears to be the thinking behind a new series from Atlantic Books. Its 'Books that Shook the World' are short 'biographies' of texts that can lay claim to world-historical significance, and among the first batch to be published are Simon Blackburn on Plato's 'Republic', Christopher Hitchens on Thomas Paine's 'Rights of Man' and Francis Wheen on the magnum opus of Marx himself.

Like any book about Marx, Wheen's splendid little volume on 'Das Kapital' has to meet an obvious and rather substantial challenge: that what appears in Marx's work as a kind of prophecy – about the emergence of an organised working class who would be the 'gravediggers' of the system that produced them; about a future material abundance that would guarantee equality – has not been confirmed by history but destroyed by it.

Wheen meets this challenge in two, not necessarily compatible, ways. On the one hand, he acknowledges Marx's errors and unfulfilled prophecies, but insists that these are nonetheless 'eclipsed and transcended' by his devastatingly accurate description of the nature of capitalism. On the other hand, Wheen insists that the portrayal of Marx as a 'mechanical determinist' is in any case a caricature, and that Marx believed human beings to be capable of making their own history (albeit in circumstances not of their choosing).

Of course, if it's impossible to predict equality on the basis of iron-clad historical laws, then one has to argue for it, and so advocacy replaces prophecy. In Wheen's reading, 'Das Kapital' is a kind of source-book for socialist argument; not a premonition, therefore, but rather the description of a system that deforms and crushes the human spirit. And as long as that system endures, so will Marx's masterpiece.

'Das Kapital', Wheen argues, is an attempt to map the terra incognita of an emergent industrial capitalism. And this exploratory character accounts for what the critic Edmund Wilson described as the 'brain-racking subtleties' of Marx's prose. In fact, Wheen has learned from Wilson not to try to look past Marx's extraordinary style, but instead to see in its 'Dickensian' textures an attempt to embody the way in which, under capitalism, 'all that is solid melts into air'. He brilliantly evokes the atmosphere of Victorian Gothic that pervades the pages of 'Das Kapital', as Marx attempts to disclose the injustice and exploitation behind the phantom-like objectivity' of commodification.

The idea that genuine knowledge requires us to penetrate the veils of illusion is not Marx's own, of course. It goes back two thousand years to Plato. In his book on the 'Republic', Simon Blackburn sets himself the task of disentangling that idea from the thickets of Platonic metaphysics.

Like Wheen, Blackburn thinks his subject has been 'horribly betrayed' by his followers. He's particularly hard on the Christianised version of Platonism that took hold in the fourth and fifth centuries. There's nothing to be said for the idea of illumination through transcendental ascent and we do Plato no favours, Blackburn thinks, by trying to save it. But in that case, one might ask how we can make any sense of the famous Myth of the Cave, which seems to identify reality with the unchanging and the eternal?

Easy, says Blackburn. Once you've cleared away the metaphysics, what remains is a quite straightforward 'plea' for the scientific and mathematical understanding of reality. The threatening-sounding eternal 'forms' are in fact unchanging structures of understanding which allow us to discern in the world properties and relations susceptible to being ordered in quantitative terms.

Christopher Hitchens has a much easier job than either Blackburn or Wheen, for Thomas Paine's language of the 'rights of man' remains and 'will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend'. Consequently, he doesn't devote much space to substantive analysis of Paine's ideas, preferring instead to establish the context in which the book was written.

Hitchens is particularly interested in Paine's relationship with Edmund Burke, to whom his tract was ostensibly addressed, and in the friendships that didn't survive the later attacks on religion launched by Paine in 'The Age of Reason'. And he is too intelligent not to recognise that many readers will find it hard to avoid thinking at the same time of the psychodrama of Hitchens' own recent political trajectory, with its broken friendships and abandoned alliances. Who said ideas don't matter?

'Plato's Republic: A Biography' by Simon Blackburn; 'Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography' by Christopher Hitchens; and 'Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography' by Francis Wheen are published by Atlantic Books at £9.99 each. Others in the first series are Bruce 'The Qur'an: A Biography' by Bruce Lawrence and 'Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography' by Janet Browne.

Johnathan Derbyshire, Fri Jul 14 2006

[bradams]

Has anybody read any of these biographies? Has anyone read any of the actual "Books that shook the world"?

I've read P.J. O'Rourke's biography of Wealth of Nations and just borrowed Francis Wheen's biography of Das Kapital. I was unimpressed by O'Rourke although I am impressed by Adam Smith.

I enjoy Simon Blackburn's writing so I'll check that out, ditto for Christopher Hitchens.

As for the actual world-shakers I've only read Plato's Republic. I'm hoping to move onto Marx sometime soon.

[irishrosem]

Of the books listed here, I've only read The Rights of Man. Well, I read The Republic in the sense that I read every word in the book. But I never comprehended the bulk of it to the point that I consider it a book under my belt. Parts of it I have a handle on, but not much of it. Now the question is, do we agree that they are the books that should be targeted as "Books that Shook the World"?

[bradams]

I think all the books on the list did shake the world. I wouldn't say they're the only books that shook the world but they certainly did in my opinion.

[Dissident Heart]

I've read Francis Wheen's Karl Marx: A Life and fell in love with the art of biography, and grew very fond of the cantakerous, obnoxious, pugnatious, brilliant and frightfully endearing subject of his book, Herr Marx. Wheen provides accessable summaries of Marx's corpus in this biography (including the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital) and tracks a superhuman correspondence of letters, newspaper articles, meeting minutes...and conversations and anecdotes that portray a human, and humane, Marx as something fundamentally different from the terrible bogeyman I was raised to despise.

[Robert Tulip]

Hi B. & thank you for this interesting reference. I know Plato quite well, and was just thinking the other day, after seeing the Bradbury thread here, about how the image of the fully screenwalled television room from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 echoes the story of Plato's cave, with the ascent from illusion and ignorance through belief to knowledge. So our television matrix culture today cocoons us in illusion, and we have difficulty turning to knowledge of the truth. Plato amplifies this image with the divided line, demarcating epistemology into categories of false belief, true belief, knowledge of reality and knowledge of the good. Blackburn seems to leave out the idea of the good. The review says

Blackburn thinks [Plato] has been 'horribly betrayed' by his followers. He's particularly hard on the Christianised version of Platonism that took hold in the fourth and fifth centuries. There's nothing to be said for the idea of illumination through transcendental ascent and we do Plato no favours, Blackburn thinks, by trying to save it. But in that case, one might ask how we can make any sense of the famous Myth of the Cave, which seems to identify reality with the unchanging and the eternal? Easy, says Blackburn. Once you've cleared away the metaphysics, what remains is a quite straightforward 'plea' for the scientific and mathematical understanding of reality. The threatening-sounding eternal 'forms' are in fact unchanging structures of understanding which allow us to discern in the world properties and relations susceptible to being ordered in quantitative terms."

I have to disagree with Blackburn's rejection of illumination through ascent. In rejecting the flat earth cosmology holus bolus more care is needed in assessing Plato's ideas on this topic. For example, I've just read a comment from Joseph Campbell in his 1971 essay 'Envoy: No More Horizons':

"Plato in the Timaeus (90cd) declares that '... the motions that are akin to the divine principle within us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe'."

This is a hard thought for moderns to comprehend, but it remains true, and illustrates how the concept of ascent to a universal knowledge can remain valid. Blackburn speaks of Plato's ideas as quantitative, but this is an empiricist distortion, missing the rational beauty and quality of the moral ideas.

"Once you've cleared away the metaphysics"

in Blackburn's no-nonsense way, where are truth, justice, beauty and love?

[Randy Kadish]

Here's my list of books that shook the world:

The New Testament

Copernicus: On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres

Galileo : Dialogues on the Two Chief Systems of the World

Newton: The Principia

Darwin: Origin of Species

Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams

Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity

[bradams]

I've just finished reading Wheen's biography of Das Kapital and found it extremely engaging. I'm even motivated to tackle the book itself, which has previously seemed intimidating and foreboding simply by virtue of its size and reputation.

[bradams]

Well, I have to admit that Das Kapital has again defeated me. One look at the daunting 900+ pages (and that's just volume 1!) was enough to scare me away. I think if somebody dropped all three volumes in a hardcover edition it would truly be a book that shook the world!

I've sought out David McLellan's Marx: Selected Writings which is commonly recommended as the best starting point for reading Marx in books about Marx. While I'm waiting for it to be delivered I've taken Dissident Heart's advice and borrowed Francis Wheen's biography of Marx. I also picked up a biography of former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, What's Left?by Nick Cohen, and How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen. I've really taken to Wheen's writing style.