Sublime

As for ourselves, Marx represents for us, at best, a doctrine; far more often just a name that one hurls at the head of an opponent to pulverize him; almost never a method.

Marx...was among the very first to recognize that the fever-fits of financial crisis and depression that afflict modern market economies were not a passing phase or something that could be easily cured, but rather a deep disability of the system...

Kierkegaard and Marx jointly criticized Hegel for the philosophical form that his work took

for both Kierkegaard and Marx, the challenge of philosophy was not the conservative task of merely understanding the world. Instead, the challenge was to change it,

he justified culture to the Marxists by showing how to condemn it in Marxist terms. And in doing so he provided crucial concepts to Adorno and the thinkers of the Frankfurt School – concepts that were later to emerge as the basic repertoire of ‘Marxist humanism’.

Here, I believe, is the most cunning feature of Marxism: that it has been able to pass itself off as a science.

In short, I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers—from a dialectical point of view, combining a partial yes and a partial no. Insofar as Marx posited a metaphysical materialism, an ethical relativism, and a strangulating totalitarianism, I responded with an unambiguous no; but insofar as he pointed to weaknesses of traditio