On the acknowledgments page of his most famous book, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982), Marshall Berman writes, "This is far from a confessional book. Still, as I carried it for years inside me, I felt that in some sense it was the story of my life." This desire to acknowledge the importance of personal experience is at the heart of Berman's work and identity as a Marxist and a New York intellectual. Throughout his career, he has used his own experiences as evidence with which to comprehend the tilt and whirl of the economy, modern art, and modern culture. His vision of the world is one in which the human is the fundamental measurement of any idea. Every great idea, for Berman, must prove itself in the final analysis in the realm of individual experience.

Berman was born in 1940 to a working-class...