Abstract
This is a brief memorial tribute to Marshall Berman, which portrays him as a humanist chronicler of the “heroism of modern life.” Berman’s four books achieve this by creative variations in three broad themes: modernism, Marxism, and the metropolis. In Berman’s work, the works of Marx are fruitfully mined for their humanistic vision (with no distinction between the early work and the later “scientific” work), but he makes use of many intellectual and artistic perspectives as well, transcending ideological or disciplinary boundaries, in search of an understanding of the promises and perils of modernism. The metropolis as the theater of the modern life is the implicit or explicit backdrop in his works, and he draws upon his own urban biography to demonstrate the everyday heroism of ordinary people. While vulnerable to criticism as eclectic and naively optimistic, Berman’s writing is critical and empathetic, and true to the spirit of a humanist Marxist understanding of both the disasters and opportunities of modernist capitalist society.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.