Karl Marx in America with Andrew Hartman

A video of this October 26, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.

Historian Andrew Hartman introduces his new book, Karl Marx in America. To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine. Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures, yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life. Karl Marx in America argues that even though Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him.

Andrew Hartman is professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of Karl Marx in America (2025) and A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (2015), both published by the University of Chicago Press, and Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (2008). He is also the coeditor of American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (2018). Hartman has been published in a host of academic and popular venues, including the Washington Post, The 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.