Trotsky, by David Renton, Haus Publishing, London 2004, 181 pages, paperback £9.99 Review by Alex Miller Having recently slated Ian Thatcher's woeful 2003 biography of Trotsky (SR February/March 2007), I approached David Renton's contribution to the Haus Publishing "Life and Times" series with some trepidation. Would this be another piece of incompetent anti-Trotsky hackwork?
My worries were unfounded. Renton has produced a clear and informative biography of "the man who refused to compromise, who followed the Revolution to its end, who wrote and argued and never gave up".
It constitutes a sympathetic but far from uncritical portrait of perhaps the most controversial leftwing figure in the history of the 20th century.
For an inexpensive paperback, the book is beautifully produced, containing dozens of photographs.
The main text s interspersed with brief "enyclopedia-style" entries on famous events, historical figures, and concepts and theories.
For the most part, brevity does not lead to a loss of clarity or theoretical focus, but there are a few occasions where Renton slips up. For example, in the entry on dialectical materialism he says
"The doctrine of dialectical materialism was first associated with the German philosopher G W F Hegel, but it was later developed by Engels to become part of the wider notion of historical materialism.'
This is misleading in two respects. While the notion of dialectic is indisputably Hegelian, it is of course inaccurate to associate Hegel with dialectical materialism.
Leaving out the distinctively idealist aspect of Hegel's dialectic blurs the respect in which Marx, having found Hegel standing on his head, famously stood him right-way up again.
And on the standard presentations of Engels' philosophy, historical materialism is narrower than dialectical materialism rather than vice-versa.
But such slips are rare, and on the whole Renton does a good job of filling out the theoretical background to Trotsky's life.