It strikes me that personally, my bolshiness about "great man" criticism/theory as it's been practiced in the Western academy springs from two main sources: Grade 8 Philosophy with Mr. Bowker jumping up out of his chair to point an accusing finger and yell "Appeal to authority!" and shame you in front of your smart-class friends and later steal your hat or chocolate bar (yes, my teacher really did steal our shit on a regular basis, but we loved him for it), AND, more amorphously, my early Marxism, which made me suspicious of the whole idea of a canonical philosophical tradition that lionized a grindy bastard like Kant (e.g.) and put an asterisk next to my beloved Trotsky (e.g., but I really did daydream about worldwide revolution) as "socialist thinkers" or what have you. It provided me with a tradition that the mainstream itself was defining as external, which problematizes the whole notion of canonicity early on (and, let's face it, it was the early '90s. Fuck corporate philosophy!)

More than that, there's something about treating Marxism in particular as a roverboat ride of maitres penseurs that can turn icky. Because, you know, if this faith is about anything, fundamentally, surely it's about not tugging the forelock. And as I come back to Marxism in my old age (I think that's what I'm doing?), I find myself thinking that if it's anything, it's faith. I mean, not that Marx and people working in his tradition haven't done incredible scholarship - but what's changed the world is the ideas of Marxism, of revolution, of social justice, of the General Strike, etc., etc. It's about living with human dignity in a world full of forces trying to take it away, and in that sense the power of thinkers like the ones Merrifield presents to inspire and be your friend is a lot more like the power of the Virgin Mary or St. Christopher to cure your cancer or keep your luggage safe than it is what happens when people wrap themselves in a critical approach (or, like, look at everything through the lens of The Economist.

Without trying to give the Althusserian (or let's say it, Stalinist) strain in Marxism more facetime than it deserves, Merrifield presents an alternative lineage of firekeepers consisting of Marxism's wild, beautiful and damned. On the ostensible "Marxism and the City" level, Metromarxism is a little textbooky and doesn't present much beyond a (principled, entertainingly written) review of familiar Marxist ideas on urbanism (Marx and commodity fetishism, Engels and housing, Benjamin and the arcade of delights, Lefebvre and festival, Debord and freaky maps, etc.). But what it does that I really appreciate is tells a bunch of stories about some cool smart guys who walked something like the path you, the reader, are walking or trying to figure out how to walk or flirting with at least. Engels as Marxist Batman! Karl all sickly in his chair, and then 100 years later dancing on the cover of that dude's book! "I am a Marxist so later on we can all be anarchists"! Marshall Berman, of whom I'd never heard, and a "Marxism that helps old ladies across the street." And all along, I know I risk turning this into Benjaminism or something but hell: the City. Womb of the future, site of the alchemy, heart of all the things that will make the future worth living. I'm gonna volunteer for the NDP in the next election, I think. ( )

fascinating read ( )