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The baby’s crying in a family, the instinct of workmanship at the factory, the threat of dismissal as a housekeeper, the lure of profit in making dresses, the offer of a shilling: These are all persuasions to courses of action, connecting heart and hand. Without persuasion, the theory of economics is incomplete. And so it is incomplete without an account of language, language viewed not merely as “conveying” or “communicating” information originally “dispersed” (in Hayek’s terminology), but language as rhetoric — that is, as capable of moving us to action. The socialists’ favored form of speech is an order: “Go mine coal.” The Austrian economist’s favored form is an informative statement: “I like purple.” Neither of these quite do the economic task. You can be in the right job, and know exactly what to do. But unless the boss or the culture or the market or you yourself in the council of your soul has exercised sweet talk on your will, there you sit, ready to work. Enlightened, yes, but unmoved.

 
That Marx was a rhetorician of genius is not in dispute. David McLellan has emphasized his use of “slogan, climax, anaphora, parallelism, antithesis and chiasmus.” (He was particularly addicted to the last, as in phrases like “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, supplant the criticism of weapons.”) Edmund Wilson (who entitled one of his chapters on Marx “Poet of Commodities”) rightly drew attention to Marx’s comic gift (in his diatribes against the Young Hegelians); he remarked of his writing that it was “either inhumanly dark and dead or almost superhumanly brilliant,” and noted that his “method of stating ideas was a dialectical sequence of paradoxes; of concepts turning into their opposites.” In a striking passage, which Wheen does little more than to reproduce, Wilson singles out Das Kapital as a masterpiece of irony, in the tradition of Swift. The Marxist story, starting with capitalism’s “vampire thirst for the living blood of labour,” and ending with the peroration “This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated,” has reverberated with hypnotic and inspiring effect. Marx certainly had a gift for savage comic invention, which he could use to deadly effect.


The essay includes the famous catechism: “What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular God? Money.” In this context, “Judaism” may be said to be a synonym for capitalism. And the statement, “The emancipation of the Jews is, in the last analysis, the emancipation of mankind from Judaism,” may be taken as a prescription not for the civil emancipation of Jews but for the “human emancipation” from the money-dominated culture represented by Judaism — that is, capitalism. As one reads on in the essay, however, with its repeated references to the Jew as the deifier of money, and money as responsible for the degradation and the dehumanization of all of mankind, one is surely not far from an all too familiar kind of anti-Semitism, one shared by other socialists and socialist movements long before the virulent outbreak of anti-Semitism under Stalin. Today, when we are so sensitive to stereotypes of all kinds, when the very idea of a stereotype is reprehensible, it is odd to find so many serious liberal commentators on Marx (Shlomo Avineri and David McClellan among them) tolerant of this stereotype of the “secular Jew,” content to explain it as a symbol of the capitalist. In Marx’s later writings, it is clearly more than a symbol: he was talking of real live Jews. In the New York Tribune in 1856 (in an article not quoted by Wheen), Marx launched a bitter attack on the “loan-mongering Jews” — he specified the Rothschilds, Stieglitzes, Foulds, Mendelssohns, and half a dozen others — who exploited their family connections throughout Europe to finance the Russian war in the Crimea. He even took the occasion to reinforce this stereotype with another, that of the Jesuit: “Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every Pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.” Perhaps the best defense of Marx against the charges of racism and anti-Semitism is the argument that he was equally nasty about almost all other groups (Catholics, in the above quotation, but also Russians and Poles), as well as ideological opponents. His quarrels with former friends and associates were notoriously vituperative and obsessively prolonged: the 300-page Holy Family savaging the Bauer brothers, the 100-page The Poverty of Philosophy deriding Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty, the 300-hundred page Herr Vogt (containing, among other things, a graphic description of Levy’s nose), and all the other polemics that were almost as much invective (often scatalogical) as argument.

 
“The inventiveness seems to me in some ways to come to the heart of the matter, even though it’s subtler than the brutality,” Lang told me. “Primo Levi used the phrase ‘needless violence,’ which is not quite what I’m saying. It’s the element of gratuitousness, but it’s more than gratuitousness. There seems to be this imaginative protraction, elaboration that one finds best exemplified in art forms, and which in art we usually take to be indicative of a consciousness, an artistic consciousness.” This hyperattentive artistic consciousness could be found not just in the Nuremberg rallies but in the design of the death camps, in the hideous irony of the words above the gates to Auschwitz: “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work will make you free”).

 
Pascal’s contemporary, François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, wrote even more succinctly on the same moral question: “Il n’appartient qu’aux grands hommes d’avoir de grands défauts” (“Only great men can have great faults”). La Rochefoucauld did not write, “The greater the personage, the more destructive the faults.” Perhaps that is presumed evident. Instead he introduced a pun on the word grand, or “great.” Grand, like “great,” can mean “worthy of admiration and respect,” and also, more neutrally, “large in extent, big.” “Great men” employs the first meaning, “great faults” the second. When the two are said together, we hear a certain moral greatness and worthiness being attributed to the faults of the great — that is, to evil. Has La Rochefoucauld given us something more profound than a flippant pun? I think he has. Through the ironies that sparkle in the word “great,” he offers us a warning against the influence of such powerful figures.


The effect, and perhaps the intention, of his habit of turning his jokes around on himself is to short-circuit criticism, much in the way that the hideous men’s confessions of their own dishonesty are meant to make them appear, ultimately, sincere. But the effect of this kind of heavily defended discourse — whether metafictional or “real” — is ultimately to prevent communication, just as the impeccably logical seductions and repulsions of the hideous men are designed to protect them from the illogical messiness of genuine human contact.

 
In 1643, John Milton published his “Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce,” an essay addressed to the members of the English Parliament, in which he deplored matrimonial laws that imprisoned the unhappily married in “a drooping and disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption.” But the “Doctrine of Divorce” is also the reverse of what its title suggests: in defending divorce, Milton offers a meditation on what a marriage worth the name might consist of. In his tenderest phrase, Milton (whose own first, unhappy marriage must have been instructive in these matters) writes, “In God’s intention, a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage.” Milton would have understood “conversation” in a broader sense than we do now. The word derives from the Latin verb conversari, which means to live together, with connotations of habitual proximity and coöperation. Milton is not referring to marital chatter about school districts or visits to the in-laws or the follies of the Bush Administration, or even the familiar, forlorn spousal inquiry “What are you thinking about?” The conversation of true marriage, he suggests, is an intimate, easy, fruitful intercourse: not talk but life itself.

 
The last question that will be asked by the last Marxist will not be about modes of production or the proletariat; it will be about why people do any of the things they do. Why do they buy what they buy? Watch what they watch? Read what they read? Marxists have arrived at many answers to these questions, an indication that even they seem to know that all of them have been wrong. Their answers, in their very profusion, make for a revealing chorus: Because the ruling bourgeoisie propagandized them, goes one answer. Because they have been forced to have “false needs,” goes another. Because they’ve been hegemonized, goes a third. Because of the work of the consciousness industry, goes one more. The Marxist tradition has been so frustrated by history’s refusals that it has developed an even greater contempt for its “masses” than it ever had for the demon bourgeoisie. One answer of interest has recently come from the Marxist-influenced “Birmingham School” of cultural studies in England. It is almost the last possible Marxist answer: People watch what they watch, this school has concluded, because they take pleasure in the act. What pleasure? The pleasure, it unfortunately turns out, of “subversion.” The viewing audience enjoys substituting its own subversive meanings for the intended meanings of corporate creators. Culture remains oppression in this school, but personal pleasure, and even a contorted version of personal choice, have at least gotten in the schoolhouse door. A little more homework, perhaps, and the scholars will arrive at the answer which the audience itself found long ago.