Barer is an Israeli writer who writes in English, and his The Magic Carpet was a memorable account of the exodus of 50,000 Jews from the Yemen. The Doctors of Revolution is an extensive study of the lives and ideas, personal and political contexts of the key figures in the growth of Communism. Central are Marx, Heine, Hess, and Bakunin. Barer’s approach is to weave biographical facts about their lives, their encounters with each other and with each other’s ideas and publications, with the wider cultural, political and religious cross‐currents of their age. Such an approach provides a realistic understanding of how influential thinkers evolve ‐ for example Marx began to think of the proletariat only after years of thinking about issues of rationality, freedom and the state. It shows a Foucaultian distrust of mainstream historiographic paradigms which assume that history is the history of ideas, not just the people who think them up and put them into social effect.
They are “doctors” because they were intellectuals as well as men (all are men in this book) “expressing their personas in their ideas and the theories they launched upon the world”, involved with both philosophy and social action, interpreting and vying with each other. There was Bauer caught up in battles between religion and philosophy, Hess developing his ideas about democracy and social action, Heine’s argument with Börne about constitutional structures in Germany, Saint‐Simon’s ideas about an industrial age in a united Europe, and, over‐arching all, Hegel’s ideas about independent consciousness, the philosophy of right in a moral society, and phenomenological paths to truth. Hegel’s influence on Marx is well‐known, and Marx is the central character in Barer’s wide sweep of history. It starts with the French Revolution where, with Babeuf and Buonarroti, the origins of “communism” begin. It ends in the 1850s with Marx in England, Bakunin in Russia, Heine dying in Paris, and, in a long epilogue, teases the historical impact of the Communist Manifesto up through Lenin and Communist China to the collapse of Communism itself. At all stages and often in dramatic and minute detail, Barer describes the historical events around which these ideas grew and how events, personalities, and ideas affected each other ‐ the Decembrists, the rise and fall of Louis‐Philippe, the intellectual honey‐pot of Paris in the 1850s, battles over free expression and censorship in Germany, the impact of the Rheinische Zeitung as a mouthpiece for the ideas of Hess and Marx, and, as a climax, the making of the Manifesto and the revolutionary beginnings of the French Republic in 1848.
Barer shows a wide knowledge of his subject, drawing on classics like E.H. Carr’s Romantic Exiles and Michael Bakunin as well as on more controversial historical interpretations (like Mendel’s psycho‐biographical study of Bakunin). He picks up many strands from the many debates about what made these “doctors” and why they thought and felt as they did, above all for Marx himself, where he gives special place to Marx as a Jew. Marx’s well‐known attack on the Jewish Question, linking Judaism with political conservatism in an evolving critique of capitalism, is part of the picture. The other is the “personal darkness” of Marx’s self‐concept as a Jew, emphasised by biographers like Künzli in 1966, arguing for personal alienation as a recurring theme in his life and work. A long “excursus” and an appendix demonstrate Barer’s concern to highlight the Jewishness of Marx, although an elaborate prosopographical account tracing his ancestry back has probably the makings of another book (and that’s where it should have gone).
More widely, the urge to include everything, small and great, in the book, makes it both a fascinating and irritating read ‐ Heine and Bakunin and Hess are important, and, by turns, each is the focus of attention with equally elaborate detail: other characters (like Fourier and Ruge, Engels and Lassalle, Herzen and Herwegh) take centrel stage at times. They meet up, read each other, converge in Paris or at Communist Internationals, and there are indeed ongoing debates in Marx circles about issues of Heine’s place in Marx Studies. These two approaches in the book ‐ the Jewish dimension, and the amount of information about their lives and families and personal circumstances ‐ will attract readers who like the view that history is people with baggage and agendas, but will frustrate readers wanting the history of ideas straight. Indeed, for all the sprawlingness of the book, the overall impression is heavily deterministic ‐ that everyone and everything converges on the Communist Manifesto and then they all found it difficult to agree afterwards. I’m not wholly convinced that the metaphor of “doctors” is entirely right ‐ in raising profound doubts about the rightness and fairness of political and social systems, they brought about change, and as intellectuals they successfully converted metaphysical ideas into action (“we must change history, not just interpret it”). Now, with the collapse of Communism, the patient needs new doctors, not a connotation in the book but one which inevitably readers will draw. It is a useful addition to any serious library, personal and institutional, on the subject, but not for beginners because it is a rich thick soup of a book with attitude.
