Thomas Müntzer in the Marxist Imagination Available to Purchase

This essay explores Thomas Müntzer’s polysemous reception in three classic works of Marxist historiography: Friedrich Engels’s Peasant War in Germany (1850), Karl Kautsky’s Forerunners of Modern Socialism (1895), and Ernst Bloch’s Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of the Revolution (1921). All three studies track essentially the same events, but each author renders this past differently in light of their respective understandings of communism’s contemporary challenges. Tracking the character of Müntzer in these accounts allows insight not only into the changing concerns of three successive generations of Marxists, but also into the ever-renewable actuality of history for the present.