We begin this episode with a clip from a 2009 talk by philosopher Angela Davis, currently Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, courtesy of AfroMarxist.
Today’s special guest is Andrew Hartman, Distinguished Professor of History at Illinois State University, where he teaches courses in U.S. history, as well as courses in the philosophy of history, historiography, and pedagogy. Hartman, who has been one of the guiding figures of the new American intellectual history, has focused his work on the meaning of “culture” in the United States, and where the battles over what counts as American culture have occurred since World War II.
Culture wars are, in a way, a proxy for political struggles over major social institutions—schools, families, churches—as well as what United States citizenship means and requires. Inevitably, Hartman was drawn to a European intellectual who reappears as an inspiration if you are a progressive or radical thinker, a danger if you are a liberal, or a curse if you are conservative. That’s Karl Marx, much of whose work was not available in the United States in his lifetime, but whose thinking reverberates to each new generation and helps us think about what it means to be free.
Andrew and I sat down to talk about his new book, ten years in the making, Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), and how this visionary traveled across space and time to help Americans think about who we want to be.
Today’s theme is Pont Marie by Rêves Français. The transcript of this conversation has been lightly edited for clarity, and is only available in full to paying subscribers.
Image: Karl Marx, The Prophet, by Carlos Latuff (2009)
Claire Potter: Andrew, your new book, Karl Marx in America for nine years: where did you start and how did you end up with a comprehensive intellectual history of Karl Marx in America?
Andrew Hartman: Well, when I was putting the finishing touches on my last book, A War for the Should of America: A History of the Culture Wars (2019), I was looking around for another project. I had just read Jennifer Ratner Rosenhagen’s wonderful book, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (2012). I really liked the concept of reception history, tracing how Americans have thought about this European, this seemingly foreign thinker, and how they tried to make sense of their worlds through the eyes of Nietzsche—or at least through his thought.
I thought, surely somebody has done this with Marx, and that’s the book I wanted to read. But I did a little digging, and nobody had. I thought, well, maybe I’m the right person to do that since I’m a trained intellectual historian and have spent the better part of my adult life sort of obsessed with Marx. It was about 2015, 16 when I just started reading a lot and trying to conceptualize the project.
So, did you actually begin by reading all of Marx?
I started reading Marx in the early 1990s when I was in my early 20s. Throughout graduate school, I belonged to a Marxist reading group. So, I had read a lot of Marx, probably all of the most important works well before I undertook this project. I did re-read a lot of it during the research for this book. So, what I did was research how Americans have put Marx to work, how Americans have conceptualized Marx to make sense of their worlds. If they turned to a particular text or particular aspect of Marx, that’s when I reread and tried to learn anew.
As I was reading the book I realized what a touchstone Marx was in my own life as a very young intellectual, even in high school.
It was cool to read Marx. People would walk around with large modern library editions of Das Kapital and so on. It marked you as serious. It marked you as being kind of counterculture, but better than that. And then, my first year in college, the Yale class Facebook, which was an actual book, if you failed to send in your picture, they used a picture of Karl Marx instead. And that was a huge joke on Yale.
But perhaps not accidentally, one of the things I did my first semester in college to announce my own intellectual freedom was to take a seminar in Marx. So, why does Marx keep speaking to us even as our history changes and his doesn’t because he’s dead?
