Edmund Wilson published the history of revolutionary Marxism in 1940, just at the beginning of World War II, when the only reference of the new social experiment was the Soviet Union. Later, in 1971, he made a revision, but without prolonging the history that ends with Lenin's arrival at the Finland Station, in St. Petersburg. The study is objective and critical, meticulous, with a classic vision, combining theory and biography, thought and life, a linear tour of Marxist thought and the passage from theory to revolutionary practice. Wilson begins with pre-Marxist French thinkers, Michelet, Renan and Anatole France, the most debatable point of the work, for it could have been others, to continue with Marx and his association with Engels, Lasalle, Bakunin to arrive at Lenin. In the end it is the European history of social upheaval, the struggle to achieve a utopia, paradise on earth, although the price has been very high, leaving millions of corpses and many more human lives destroyed.
The book is interesting to know the history of our time, to deepen in the origins of a political current that lives on propaganda and lies, because the bases and principles are very clear and have been written for many years.