Mathias Fuelling at The Baffler:
Condensing the history of Marxist thought in the United States to one volume is an unenviable task. For those immersed in Marxism, the result is bound to be woefully inadequate, and it risks alienating the merely Marx-curious with its vastness and complexity. It’s a tall order to produce something thorough yet accessible, succinct but rigorous, without coming off as yet another short introduction to Marxism (of which there are no end) or as a dense tome only appropriate for the initiated. Fortunately for all comers, Andrew Hartman has pulled off this feat, more or less, with Karl Marx in America. Hartman’s book is now the best available on the subject, though admittedly it is a small field, displacing Paul Buhle’s Marxism in the United States (published 1987, updated 2013) and John Nichols’s The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition . . . Socialism (2011, updated 2015). Hartman’s specialization as an intellectual historian serves him well, having previously chronicled the political battles over education in the United States during the Cold War, as well as the history of the culture wars since the 1960s.
Hartman adheres to a basic schema: Marxism is a pillar of American political thought—not always as an explicit tradition but rather as the ghost in the machine—a powerful, often oppositional force influencing Americans of all political persuasions.
more here.
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