Breaking up is hard to do. Unless you’re Karl Marx.

It’s probably been done before, though I don’t know of the book if it has, but one could write a terrific book on Marx and his breakups.

The model here would be Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives. Instead of a book about five Victorian marriages, however, and the mix of intellectual, personal, and political sparks they emitted, this would be a book about Marx’s intellectual and political divorces. And how each was a critical turning point in his thought and life.

The criterion for inclusion would be that Marx had a personal relationship with these individuals. No chapters on Hegel or Smith or Aristotle. Otherwise it would be too sprawling and insufficiently personal, more of a standard intellectual history rather than the biography of mutual minds that I have in mind.

There would be chapters on Marx and Bauer, Marx and Ruge, Marx and Hess, Marx and Grün, Marx and Feuerbach, Marx and Proudhon, Marx and Bakunin, Marx and Lasalle, and so on. There’d also be a final chapter on Marx’s one enduring love: with Engels.

Where Rose’s book is interested in what marriage brings to and does for a mind, this book would focus on what divorce brings to a mind. Some of the questions it might ask: Why was it so necessary for Marx not only to break with other minds but also to project onto those minds positions that he once held, using those minds as a way of working himself to another position? Why did so many of Marx’s breakups occur in such a concentrated period of time (1843 to 1848), when Marx was in his twenties. Relatedly, why are one’s twenties such a critical moment in intellectual and political formation more generally? And what was so different about Marx’s relationship with Engels that allowed both for the relationship to endure and for Marx to grow inside of it?

Such a book also would allow readers to see that some of the ideas people associate with Marx are in fact the ideas of the partners he ultimately rejected.