Book Review: Marx’s Wager: Das Kapital and Classical Sociology

Journals often ask whether a submission would fit better in another journal. Tom Kemple’s splendid book fits squarely into the frame of this one. It consists of a close reading of Capital as inter alia an aesthetic whole, focused in particular on Marx’s constant quotation of Goethe’s Faust. For Kemple, this influence goes all the way down. Marx’s ‘wager’ is not just his lost bet with Engels that he would finish volume one by the end of the summer of 1865 (p. xii, n. 3). Like Faust, sickened by existing scholarship, in his case political economy, he engages himself in a lifetime struggle against it and thereby to provide the intellectual resources for the overcoming of what Marx mostly called the bourgeois mode of production and soon came to be called capitalism. Like Faust, he will never rest on his laurels (Faulbett). As Kemple puts it, ‘my model is less Goethe’s life-long desire to transform his life into a work of art than Marx’s tireless efforts to create a literary representation of the capitalist world that might also contribute to its transformation. . .My own wager (hypothesis) in this book is that Faust is one of the best guides to Capital and that Capital is among our best guides to classical sociology and contemporary critical theory’ (pp. xii–xiii). A proof-reading error in the quoted passage has ‘word’ for world, but it could as well be a Freudian slip. Marx’s critique is both of the words of the classical and what he calls ‘vulgar’ political economists and of the reality which they more or less inadequately describe. And Goethe’s words are not just embellishment. In Marx’s classic discussion of commodity fetishism, for example,