Stedman Jones's book is not, or not only, an intellectual biography of Marx. Rather, his intention is to recover Marx's original intention, as he understood himself, in the context in which he lived and wrote, scraping away the layers of interpretation that became orthodox Marxism. In Stedman Jones's words, “my aim in this book is like that of a restorer, to remove the later retouching and alteration contained in a seemingly familiar painting, and restore it to its original state” (xv). The orthodoxy that Stedman Jones seeks to peel away is not Marxism-Leninism, but rather the official Marxism created by the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party, following Engels's lead in The Anti-During (1878), in the thirty years following Marx's death (see 559–64). Prominent Party intellectuals not only sanitized Marx's biography, for instance, the birth of his illegitimate child, but recast his theory of history in a scientific vocabulary drawn largely from Darwin's theory of evolution, significantly diverging from Marx's original thought. Stedman Jones treats Marx's “writings as the interventions of an author within particular political and philosophical contexts that the historian must carefully reconstruct” (xv). He is well positioned to carry out this recovery: Stedman Jones is a distinguished historian whose own work, especially his studies of English Chartism, abandoned orthodox Marxist categories of class in favor of an understanding of class as the lived consciousness of human beings responding to a particular experience with the linguistic and conceptual tools available to them (see 306–13). His text offers an exhaustive account of nineteenth-century intellectual and political history. Curiously, however, especially in a book that seeks to recover Marx's original intention, Stedman Jones is virtually silent about the various ways in which capitalist economic arrangements arose and developed in the different regions of Western and Central Europe.

Stedman Jones has produced a lengthy (768 pages) study providing a great deal of detail about Marx's life, his personal successes and failings, his courtship and marriage, his family life, his friends and enemies, his journalistic and political activities, his political and intellectual context, and his theoretical work. Is there an overarching theme about Marx that emerges from these pages? I will focus on one—because it provides a fruitful entry to Marx's thought and to Stedman Jones's biography: the unfinished quality of Marx's theory. Stedman Jones stresses that Marx failed to complete Capital, his major theoretical contribution, and became increasingly exasperated with reminders of his repeated broken promises to provide the missing volumes (see 535–40). He considers, and dismisses, excuses that Marx's frequent bouts of ill health and poor financial circumstances impaired his ability to work. To the contrary, it seems that “the need to confront theoretical difficulty … brought on headache attacks, insomnia, and liver disease” (537). Perhaps most emblematic of the character of Marx's writings is the Grundrisse (1857–58), an outline or sketch (as its title indicates) of his critique of political economy that Marx never finished. To be sure, he published the first volume of Capital (1867), but the anticipated second and third volumes were written by Engels after Marx's death, drawing on a “‘disordered jumble of quotations,’” Engels complained, “‘which certainly cannot be deciphered by anyone but me, and then only with difficulty’” (540; see also 569). Stedman Jones rightly characterizes the Grundrisse as “clumsy and disjointed,” its presentation “chaotic” (376). Nevertheless, he concludes, “it is wrong to interpret this disorganization in a wholly negative light. In part, it was the result of a period of intense creativity marked by desperate attempts to jot down thoughts which properly belonged to much later stages in the argument than the topics supposedly to be covered in the initial volume” (376–77).

Stedman Jones identifies, but in the end glosses over, the significance of this central feature of Marx's work—namely, its incomplete character. Marx's inability to resolve theoretical difficulties, to settle on a coherent conceptual framework, produced disparate, often incompatible, explanations of complex historical trends and events. In this sense, Marx's own thought was diametrically opposed to the picture of Marx's system presented by orthodox Marxism, a synoptic vision, in Isaiah Berlin's words, “of that boundless, absolute kind which puts an end to all questions and dissolves all difficulties” (quoted on p. 5). Marx himself did not seem to be able to “put an end to all questions,” in effect leaving them open. I will focus on one example that features prominently in Stedman Jones's work: Marx's account of the transition to capitalism. One explanation of this transition—the only one that Stedman Jones discusses in any extended way—privileges the spread of markets and money, the development of exchange relations within the “interstices” of premodern societies, corroding their communal modes of subsistence, giving rise to modern capitalist markets (see 382–89). A second explanation of capitalism's rise, grounded principally in Marx's preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), privileges the progressive development of the forces of production, which determined the transition from feudal to capitalist social relations according to how they promoted or discouraged technological progress (407–8). Both of these explanations are situated within a general theory positing a universal law of historical change, assigning causal primacy to markets or technology (see 538, 569–70). A third theory of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which stresses the distinctiveness of particular social formations in history, privileges class and class conflict and explains capitalism's rise by a process of primitive accumulation whereby the late-medieval peasantry was forcibly expropriated from its holdings, creating the characteristic capitalist class relations between capitalists and propertyless wage workers (428–31). Marx's interpreters have drawn on these incongruent theories to produce alternative versions of historical materialism: see, for example, the debate between G. A. Cohen (privileging productive development) and Robert Brenner (assigning causal primacy to class and class conflict).

Marx's understanding of capitalism's rise is not the only theoretical problem he left unfinished: others include his theory of class (uniquely social-economic phenomenon or lived response to exploitation incorporating subjective experiences and culture); the transition to socialism (violent overthrow guided by a revolutionary party or evolutionary process of formation and self-emancipation of the working class); the conception of the socialist polity (centralization of administrative tasks or federalist organization); the socialist understanding of liberty (unbound time beyond necessary productive activity or democratic control of productive activity itself). Each of these alternatives has produced extensive debate among Marx's interpreters about the “real” Marx. Stedman Jones does not stress these diverse theoretical emphases in Marx's work. One reason may be that, although he rightly distinguishes between Marxism after Marx from Marx's own thought, he also avoids discussion of Marx scholarship. For example, Stedman Jones's discussion of Marx's theory of class refers to his own historical studies (306), but makes no mention of the alternative view of class provided by, say, his fellow historian E. P. Thompson.

Stedman Jones succeeds in restoring “Marx himself—who he was, how he behaved, what he believed, what he thought about” (4), but it cannot tell us which of Marx's theoretical frameworks best represents Marx's intention. Rather, he shows that Marx developed and moved between different conceptual outlooks without settling on any one of them. Orthodox Marxism itself is not necessarily wrong, Stedman Jones shows, but rather the product of selecting from Marx's work one of his alternative readings of history and revolution (see 564).

Stedman Jones's biography repays close study. Not only does it succeed in dispelling Marx mythology; it shows us what a fertile mind Marx's was, even if the written product was inchoate.