cover image Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion

Gareth Stedman Jones. Harvard Univ., $35 (720p) ISBN 978-0-674-97161-5

Jones, professor of the history of ideas at Queen Mary University of London, demystifies many elements of Karl Marx’s life in this clear-eyed biography of the founding theorist of communism. In Jones’s well-drawn portrait, Marx is an unappealing figure: self-absorbed, anti-Semitic (despite his Jewish ancestry), racist, and perpetually demanding money from relatives and friends to keep up bourgeois pretensions beyond his means. His redeeming features are his devotion to his wife, Jenny (though many believe he was the father of their housekeeper’s son), and a commanding air. Jones concentrates on Marx the thinker, situating him in the context of 19th-century German idealist philosophy—though the author’s exegesis of Marx’s philosophy is not always clear, perhaps unavoidably given the obscurity of Marx’s ruminations—and the factional infighting of those involved in contemporary radical politics. Jones’s criticism of Marx’s philosophy is sharp but balanced. He credits Marx with a telling journalistic exposé of capitalism’s excesses, but highlights gaps and contradictions in Marx’s economic theories. Jones also argues that Marx’s class analysis sprang from philosophical obsessions—with statehood, citizenship, religion, and authentic being—and systematically misunderstood the true circumstances and ambitions of workers. Jones’s sophisticated, scholarly prose is not always easy to read, but he does clear up some of the mythology surrounding this controversial icon and his thinking. Maps & illus. [em](Nov.) [/em]