Rockmore's book on Marx appears to be very promising. On the back cover it states that Rockmore seeks to recover Marx' philosophical ideas and his relation to Hegel, and that he wants to do this free of "Marxism" (by which writers these days usually mean the official Leninist party line). So far, so good. But unfortunately, Rockmore fails to write even one page that is not either stating the obvious or clearly false.

Most of the book itself can be skipped entirely, since it consists of a recap of Hegel's philosophy of history and then an overview of the works of Marx. It's not clear why this was included in its entirety in Rockmore's work and it is certainly superfluous considering the very large amount of philosophical overviews of Marx' collected work in print today, but apparently it's quantity that counts here. Rockmore's analysis itself is not particularly bad, it must be granted, though nothing special either. Instead of reading these chapters, one might do better to read for example Allen Wood's book on Marx: that also gives an overview of Marx focusing on his philosophy, and is also written by a general opponent of Marx (though not an unsympathetic one, but Wood is a Kant specialist).

The first chapter and the final two are the extent of Rockmore's actual thesis. In this, he defends three points:
- Marx did not entirely abandon philosophy at any point in his career;
- Marx was a Hegelian;
- Marx was an idealist.
This of itself is already very odd, considering that the first is very well-known and not really disputed by anyone. Certainly writers such as Lukacs feel that Marx went beyond philosophy, but this means philosophy as mere abstract contemplation such as Kant or the scholastics, not philosophy as 'abstract thought of any kind'.

The second claim is muddled by Rockmore's tendency to go on the defensive where Hegel is involved, wanting to save him from his harshest critics who claim Hegel merely conceived of history in a theological manner. This may or may not be a correct criticism, but in any case it has little to do with Marx, who rejected Hegel for misunderstanding the nature of the relation between civil society, the economy and the state in history. At some points Rockmore does mention this, but in the last two chapters he suddenly beats a hasty retreat and simply states that anyone who reasons in a historicist manner can be considered "Hegelian", and that, therefore, Marx was a Hegelian. Why this is triumphantly presented as a discovery and why we should consider this a meaningful analysis in the first place is left to the reader.

The same approach also characterizes Rockmore's analysis in his third and most bizarre claim, the one where Marx appears as an idealist. He sets out by correctly stating that idealism can mean various things, and that the idealism of Berkeley and Plato is not the same as that of Kant or Hegel (though he overstates the difference). Then he quotes Marx as saying that the only way man can perceive the world is through his mind. Just like with the claim about the "Hegelianism" of Marx, this is suddenly adequate to call someone meaningfully an idealist, and voilà, Rockmore has established that Marx was really an idealist all the time! The whole issue of the analytical priority of mind or matter, or the question of theology vs economy, etc. are forgotten entirely.

It may sound hard to believe that this is really all there is to the book, especially considering the positive reviews of the other readers here on Amazon, but that can't be helped. I'm quite baffled as to why this was published. Any undergraduate student paper could do what Rockmore did, and smart students can do better. ( )