[1] The first volume of the series, On Revolution (1971), broke little original ground for Marx scholars, containing only a spate of articles from the 1850s from Horace Greeley's New York Tribune on the contemporary situation in Spain that were not already readily available in other publications.
[1] Padover's failure to maintain a chronological presentation of documents was criticized by one reviewer, who observed that Marx's own views on the nature and time span of the revolutionary process evolved considerably during the second half of the 1800s.
[1] Padover's lengthy introduction to the first volume, "Karl Marx as Revolutionist", was likewise criticized as biographical rather than introductory to the material presented and the book's bibliography was panned as "highly selective, if not parochial" for its lack of works published outside the United States.
[2] His own editorial contribution was deemed to be problematic, however, with Padover's bibliographic notes said to "contain more errors of commission and omission" than could be conveniently cited in short academic review.
The book's importance was already diminished by the forthcoming appearance of initial volumes of the Marx-Engels Collected Works through a well-funded international effort spearheaded by three Communist Party-related publishing houses.
[3] Jordan considered such a division to be a "doubtful" assumption, noting that Marx's primary fight as a journalist by the time of his Neue Rheinische Zeitung editorship had been not for freedom of the press per se, but rather "to stem the rising tide of the counter-revolution, led by the King of Prussia and his ministers, who used censorship effectively, to restrict the activities of their political opponents and, finally, to silence the opposition altogether.
[5] The structure of the fifth volume included a 19-page introductory essay by Padover followed by division of the textual material into three parts, dealing with "Christianity and Religion in General", "Judaism and the Jews", and "Personal Letters".