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PARTISAN REVIEW
too, the activity of the person being rooted finally in deep, obscure
impulses of the individual.
And he often succeeds through his brilliant style and gift for
characterization in convincing the reader that this is so. His con·
ception of personality is the source of an endless stream of fine
aperc;us. When he wishes to show that Michelet's history of France
was inspired by his own sufferings and identification with the peo·
ple, we are enchanted and won over by the narrative itself. The
characterization of Michelet is in complete harmony with the
clearly told story of his life, with the circumstances oi the time
and the content and tone of his writings.
But in the corresponding interpretation of Marx there is a
disparity between the improvised "depth" psychology and the rich
substance of Marx's ideas. When he speaks of
Capital
as a projec·
tion of Marx's "trauma," when he says that "Marx has found m
his personal experience the key to the larger experience of society
and identifies himself with that society," Marx being the poet of
commodities and
Capital
a work of art in which he expresses by
the somber, relentless critique of capitalist exploitation his feeling
of guilt for the exploitation of his family and closest friend and
declares at the same time his tribulation as a wronged man; when
moreover Wilson derives Marx's theory of the fetishism of com–
modities from "his own deficiency ·of personal feeling; which he
projected into the outside world" (although the idea of self-aliena–
tion was one of the commonplaces in the writings of Hegel and
Feuerbach), we become aware then of the formula of "projection,"
which in its simplicity and mechanism resembles the Marxistic
conception of base and superstructure, the individual's vision of the
world being a mirror-like reflection of the pattern of his psychic
life. When he interprets Marx in this way, Wilson becomes looser
in his language and connects indiscriminately the emotional tone
and content of Marx's work, its rhetoric and its scientific results, as
if the first were an unfailing clue to the other. The reduction of this
concept to absurdity is reached when he ventures to account for
Einstein's physical discoveries by his Jewish psychology. Just as
the Jew Marx uses the economic plight of the workers as a lever to
overthrow the capitalist system, so Einstein observes "the few un–
emphasized anomalies in the well-operating system of Newton,"
and occupies himself with these pariah physical facts in order to
