Karl Marx
Greatness and Illusion
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ELIZABETH LONGFORD PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY 2017
'A deeply original and illuminating account of Marx's journey through the intellectual history of the nineteenth century... a profound reappraisal and a gripping read' Christopher Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers
As the nineteenth century unfolded, its inhabitants had to come to terms with an unparalleled range of political, economic, religious and intellectual challenges. Distances shrank, new towns sprang up, and ingenious inventions transformed the industrial landscape. It was an era dominated by new ideas about God, human capacities, industry, revolution, empires and political systems - and above all, the shape of the future.
One of the most distinctive and arresting contributions to this debate was made by Karl Marx, the son of a Jewish convert in the Rhineland and a man whose entire life was devoted to making sense of the hopes and fears of the nineteenth century world. Gareth Stedman Jones's impressive biography explores how Marx came to his revolutionary ideas in an age of intellectual ferment, and the impact they had on his times. In a world where so many things were changing so fast, would the coming age belong to those enthralled by the events which had brought this world into being, or to those who feared and loathed it?
This remarkable book allows the reader to understand as never before the world of ideas which shaped Marx's world - and in turn made Marx shape our own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 expos 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.
