Andrew Hartman is a professor of history at Illinois State University focusing on U.S. intellectual history. He is the author of Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (2008) and A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (2015). He is currently at work on his third book, "Karl Marx in America," which is contracted to be published by the University of Chicago Press. Hartman is the winner of two Fulbright Awards. He was the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark for the 2013-14 academic year, and he was the Fulbright British Library Eccles Center Research Scholar for 2018-19. Hartman was the founding president of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. He has been published in a host of academic and popular venues, including the Washington Post, Baffler, Chronicle of Higher Education, American Historian, Journal of American Studies, Reviews in American History, Journal of Policy History, Salon, Jacobin, Bookforum, and In These Times.
To read and think about Karl Marx is to grapple with the modern world that capitalism has made. This includes modern America—especially modern America. Because the United States is the nation in world history most committed to capitalism, and because Marx is the world’s most enduring theorist of capitalism, Marx is a veritable American alter ego. Karl Marx in America will investigate the meaning of Americans reading and thinking about Marx from 1861, when Marx made waves across the Atlantic with his astute analysis of the U.S. Civil War, to the present, when Marx is on many American horizons yet again. Why Marx? That question continues to provoke. Isn’t Marx anathema? On the surface, perhaps. But as this book will show, Marx is a ghost in the American machine. The aim of this book is to demonstrate the ways in which Marx has long been embedded in American thought and life. If there is capitalism, there will be Marx.