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Rating: 
Summary: Marx Meets His Match
Review: Peter Kreeft is professional philosopher, a prolific author, and an avid Christian apologist. He has written a number of books using the Socratic method of dialogue and questioning to stimulate thought, correct fuzzy thinking, and challenge our unexamined presuppositions.He is now in the midst of a new series of volumes, entitled Socrates Meets.... The series is designed to help introduce the reader to the major thinkers and their writings. In this book we have Kreeft (via Socrates) analyse and dissect The Communist Manifesto. This book, of course, belongs to that group of books which almost everyone knows about but very few people have actually read. Works by Darwin and Freud could also be mentioned (and one suspects that Kreeft has these authors in the pipeline as well). So it is quite important that someone who actually knows these Great Books quite well can make them accessible and understandable to the average layperson. These volumes do a very good job of distilling the contents and ideas of the Great Books, making them easy to understand and digest. The format of a debate or dialogue between Socrates and his antagonist makes for enjoyable and illuminating reading. Indeed, the format makes the book fun while helping the reader discover discerning and penetrating insights into the subject of the debate. By uniting a Christian worldview with the probing Socratic method, Kreeft is able to clarify an opponent's position, and point out the inconsistencies and fallacies therein. He is then in a position to show the superior claims of the Judeo-Christian position, over against that found in their works. This volume applies solid logic and the timeless truths of the Judeo-Christian tradition to one of the most influential of modern thinkers. It makes for a great introduction to this thinker, as well as an incisive critique of his thoughts. One can only look forward to future volumes in this excellent series.
Rating: 
Summary: Overall, good work
Review: This is a pretty nice book. In this engaging debate, Peter Kreeft has Socrates examine the claims of Marxism in the light of reason and history. This way, the reader learns ABOUT Marxism without learning Marxism. That is, Marx gets to say what he thinks, but Socrates shows how it is flawed. It is a very quick read and the conversation seems pretty realistic. On the downside, Kreeft (Socrates) succumbs to the very dangerous supposition that in our time (2003), Communism is dead. This is manifestly not the case. Communism is still in the open (China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, etc.) and also underground (Russia). And the underground version of communism is even more dangerous as it seems to the outside to have died down. Another disturbing fact is that, the setting of the conversation between Marx and Socrates being in the afterlife, Kreeft has actually placed Marx not in hell but in purgatory! This means, per Catholic theology (Kreeft professes Catholicism), that Marx is on his way to Heaven! This is outrageous to any Catholic, and while of course it is possible that Marx *repented* on his deathbed and thus was saved from hell, Kreeft still depicts him as not having repented one iota (of course, otherwise the debate wouldn't make sense).
Aside from these two things and perhaps another few minor issues, the book is a welcome complement to my library.
Rating: 
Summary: Gimme a break
Review: What two countries (2004) still practice marxism/stalinism? Give up? North Korea and Cuba. Need I say more. There are other more noteworthy economists to study. How about Bastiate? or Hayek? Or how about studying determinism? Give up the rhetoric and pick up some scholarly studies. This is mind-candy, junk science, speculative thought, pure conjecture. It means absolutely nothing. The next time you are in the mood to blast Ronald Reagan, if blasting the deceased is your thing, remember... post-soviet, eastern bloc countries adore Reagan. He loosened the grip of soviet domination. That's the truth baby. Pampered Americans have no concept of what oppression is all about. But prior soviet bloc citizen sure do. Listen to them now, because in 20 or 30 years now, we'll go back and repeat the same mistakes again. Every now and then people will stumble over the truth, pick themselves up, brush off the dust and continue on with whatever it was they were doing - Winston Churchill. Did I like the book? A quick read, should you take this work seriously? no.
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