Reviews

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones

jeremy's review against another edition

4.0

The book does an excellent job of setting Marx in his original intellectual and historical context--a 19th century German idealism largely untouched by Darwin. The key argument here seems to be that Marx the man is largely different from Marxism, the latter reflecting the selective emphasis of Engels and the beliefs of a new generation of the 1870s. If anything the book seems to emphasize the Marx's limitations--the incompleteness of his account of capitalism, the very limited readership of works like the 18th Brumaire or indeed the Communist Manifesto at the time he wrote them, or his petty grudges and attacks. As Bakunin said, "There is no lie or calumny that he would not invent or disseminate against anyone who had the misfortune to arouse his jealousy or his hatred, which amounts to the same thing." I think it's hard to understate the tremendous impact of Marx's ideas, but perhaps this biography actually does that. Maybe the key thing is extending the idea that man created God to the state or the economy. Marx is his milieu is more about his jealousies and hatreds, and the book is more about that page-by-page; I think the important ideas do come through, but they feel like a secondary concern.

I don't know 19th century European history well, and I thought the book did an excellent job situating Marx in that time and place. I enjoyed the intellectual and historical background.