The Life of the Dead: Karl Marx in Context
Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. By Gareth Stedman Jones
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2016) 750 pp. $35.00
REVIEWED BY Peter C. Caldwell
“The Marx constructed in the twentieth century bore only an incidental resemblance to the Marx who lived in the nineteenth”. So concludes Stedman Jones’ monumental new biography
of Karl Marx. In part, he is making a specific point, familiar to those who followed the debates among Marxists of the 1960s through 1980s: Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, and others constructed the Marxism of the Second International, a closed doctrine of social development that could not encompass Marx’s own intellectual surprises. Stedman Jones is also making an argument about intellectual history, which he conceptualizes as the careful contextualization of ideas. Patterns of radical thinking, the content of radical movements, and the events of radical politics
dominate his account of Marx’s intellectual development rather than, for example, the social structure and cultural norms of the educated bourgeoisie stressed in Sperber’s recent biography.