It is hard to imagine a more appropriate author of a biography of Karl Marx than Gareth Stedman Jones, the world-renowned historian whose pathbreaking works—one need only think of Outcast London (1971) or “Rethinking Chartism” (in his collection of essays Languages of Class [1983])—have profoundly influenced the study of social structures, political movements, and social and political thought, especially in nineteenth-century Europe but also in a broader arena. For two decades a member of the editorial board of New Left Review, a major forum of marxisant ideas in the English-speaking world, Stedman Jones is currently on the International Marx-Engels Foundation advisory board that directs the publication of the Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), a criticial edition of the complete works of the two founders of modern communism. He has edited an admirable edition of the Communist Manifesto (2002) and directed a host of relevant doctoral dissertations, especially Christine Lattek's excellent work published in 2006 under the title Revolutionary Refugees: German Socialism in Britain, 1840–1860. Altogether, this is an impressive list of credentials, both as a historian and as a Marxologist. Word of Stedman Jones's plans to write a Marx biography has been out for at least the past decade and the finished book has been eagerly anticipated. It has now appeared and is an admirable work of scholarship, combining profound insights with compelling arguments. The book is also, in spite of its considerable length, at times peculiarly fragmentary and incomplete.
The author announces at the very beginning that he is planning to write an intellectual biography, focusing primarily on Marx's ideas in their nineteenth-century context and emphasizing the difference between them and twentieth-century Marxisms. Whether, as he asserts, past biographers have failed to do so—relating rather than analyzing Marx's ideas and concentrating on his personal life because of a fear of the “violent and still simmering political passions” (xv) surrounding Marx's writings—might be open to question. But the book's emphases certainly offer a valid and intellectually fruitful way to approach Marx's life.
For all his focus on ideas, the author cannot avoid describing Marx's personal life, and the book deals elegantly and effectively with its main themes: his parents, his youth in Trier, his university studies, his love affair with and marriage to Jenny von Westphalen, the years of poverty and illness in London, and the fate of his daughters. The one really new point in the book's treatment of Marx's personal life concerns the author himself, who withdraws his previous endorsement of the assertions made by the British Marxist Terrill Carver, in the latter's 1990 biography Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought, that documents surfacing in the 1960s, which supposedly showed that Marx had been the father of the family maid's child, were Nazi forgeries. He now accepts Marx's paternity of Lenchen Demuth's son Freddy.
More central to Stedman Jones's interests are Marx's political activities. The book's account of Marx during the Vormärz and the 1848 revolution follows carefully the lines of the latest scholarship, while its discussion of Marx's work with the International Workingmen's Association (IWMA), from its founding in 1864 until the Paris Commune of 1871, breaks new ground. One example of such new perspectives are the connections the author draws between Marx's political commitments and his changing theoretical conceptions and formulations in Capital. Stedman Jones also suggests that Marx's views of the transition from capitalism to socialism were changing as a result of his affiliation with the IWMA—moving from a belief in a dramatic revolutionary transformation to a longer-term and more gradual evolution in which producers’ cooperatives would play an important role, and emphasizing the significance of trade unions over political parties. The author must nevertheless admit that even in the midst of such reformist commitments, Marx still favored revolution in some countries, such as Ireland, and that, by the early 1870s, he had returned both to the advocacy of revolution and to his belief in the central revolutionary role of a workers’ political party.
The heart of the book is the author's explication of Marx's theories, which has brought him accolades from reviewers including Peter Gordon in the New York Times and Mark Mazower in the Financial Times. The main theme is the emergence of Marx's ideas from the intellectual development of German idealism, moving from Immanuel Kant via Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the Young Hegelians, especially Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach, to reach the young Marx. Stedman Jones explicates this development both elegantly and precisely, combining an impressive command of the extensive scholarly literature with his own critical insights. Particularly interesting is his discussion of how Marx came to see labor as a central characteristic of the human species and the most important form of human self-activity, tracing this back to Kant's reflections on the nature of spontaneity and freedom and to the German philosopher's understanding of human activity as the moral shaping of natural desires by subjecting them to rational scrutiny.
This heritage of German idealism is the book's leitmotif in the exploration of Marx's ideas. Contrary to some interpretations, proferred in David McLellan's classic 1973 biography, for instance, or in most Marxist-Leninist accounts, Stedman Jones does not see the works of Marx and Engels in the second half of the 1840s—The Holy Family, the so-called German Ideology (which, as the author notes, was an invention of later compilers and never existed as an actual work of Marx and Engels), The Poverty of Philosophy, or the Communist Manifesto—as marking a departure from the Hegelian-inflected thinking of the Paris manuscripts, the critiques of Hegel's philosophy of law, and the essay on the Jewish question. Stedman Jones extends this assertion of a primacy of Hegelian thinking to Marx's post-1850 works. One example is his discussion of Marx's writings on economics. Drawing heavily on the Grundrisse—the first draft of Capital from 1857–58—as well as on the one surviving and previously little-considered chapter from the 1863 draft of Marx's economic treatise, Stedman Jones argues that the main theme of Marx's economics was the analysis of the historical development of a social form: “the unity of production and valorization” (382). Starting from the earliest versions of human society, in which production was associated with small groups, families, and tribes, exchange developed via mercantile intermediaries among these still collective forms of production. From there, in the course of historical development, it penetrated the process of production itself, as seen in the movement from seigneurial labor relations to money rent, the growth of wage labor production separating labor and property, the division of labor, and, finally, the mechanization of production. Stedman Jones argues that the relationship between production and exchange in Marx's fully developed economic thought followed intellectual lines set out in Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik (1812), as well as Feuerbach's understanding of the relationship between humanity and its imagined divinity, which became a way of criticizing and also revising David Ricardo's labor theory of value.
The author brings this interpretation of Capital to bear on Marx's late thoughts on anthropology and on his consideration of the potential of the Russian peasant commune, both for a revolution in the tsar's realm and for a postrevolutionary transition to a communist society. Marx's reading of the American anthropologist Lewis Morgan led him, Stedman Jones suggests, to an understanding of, on the one hand, the earliest phases of human society as a primitive communism, and, on the other, a broad panorama of human history as a movement from this primitive communist state to an exchange-dominated, individualized, capitalist society—and from there to a fully developed communism. But, as the author notes, this was not a view of history as an inevitable progression through a series of stages. Primitive communism, in Marx's later thought, was a remarkably tough and resistant form of social organization that had survived from ancient times into the present—in the form of the Russian peasant commune, for instance. Its very persistence suggested the future potential of a communist society.
This impressive commentary on Marx's thought (and the account of it in this review is a very abbreviated discussion of a much longer and more complex argument), will offer Marxist theorists and cultural and intellectual historians much to contemplate and will spur discussion and debate. Yet there are some striking lacunae and, at times, somewhat forced interpretations that raise questions about the author's main line of argument. These appear in four interpretative arenas.
The author asserts that he wants to understand Marx's work in its nineteenth-century context—which he very much goes on to do. But there are many nineteenth-century contexts and, at times, the argument involves a considerable abstraction from the contemporary political controversies through which Marx framed his ideas. Stedman Jones discusses Marx's 1842 essay for the Rheinische Zeitung about freedom of the press without considering the debate about freedom of the press in the Rhenish Provincial Diet and in Prussia more generally. He comments at length and in interesting fashion about On the Jewish Question (1844) without actually mentioning the Jewish question—either Bruno Bauer's 1843 essay of that name, which inspired Marx's own reflections, or the broader debate about Jewish emancipation in central Europe.
This reluctance to consider the central European political context of Marx's writings may reflect the author's relative unfamiliarity with political developments in nineteenth-century Germany, as opposed to philosophical ones. A number of small but annoying errors of fact reinforce this impression. Kreuznach is in the Hunsrück, not the Palatinate (124), Neuenahr in the Ahr Valley southwest of Cologne, not the Black Forest (564). Düsseldorf was never part of France (165). Friedrich Engels was not brought up in a “strongly Calvinist household” (181), since the Awakening, of which his family members were prominent adherents, rejected the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and insisted that individuals’ salvation required a personal and emotionally felt connection to Jesus, very much not a Calvinist idea. The past participle of zusammenbrechen, as in Zusammenbruchstheorie, is not zusammengebracht (566).
A second interpretative arena is the intense focus in the analysis of Capital on the Hegelian interpretation of the advance and triumph of exchange, leading to the creation of a social formation linking production and valorization. Many of the important questions concerning Marx's economic thought, the subject of lengthy consideration by Marx himself, as well as by his later interpreters and critics—the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the transformation of values determined by labor time into market prices, the origins and nature of economic crises, or the input-output analyses of capitalist production and exchange (the so-called production diagrams at the end of volume 2 of Capital)—receive, at best, a brief mention. When Stedman Jones describes Marx's concept of “expanded reproduction,” in which Marx used his production diagrams to analyze economic growth, as meaning “the expansion of capitalist relations across the world” (569), we can see the author's own preoccupations overwhelming Marx's meaning.
A third interpretative arena is Stedman Jones's analysis of the heritage of German idealism primarily in terms of ethics and morality. The epistemological and ontological dimensions of Kant's and Hegel's thought are absent. Kant had posed the question of how subjects can know that their sense perceptions provide a valid knowledge of the objects of their perception. Hegel replied that this knowledge was only possible through the unity of subject and object, when subjects came to know objects as their own creation—a knowledge that they had originally been lacking. This idea of alienation and its overcoming in the unity of subject and object was used by the Young Hegelians for an understanding of the nature of divinity and their contentious atheism. Marx deployed it in his early writings to envisage a future in which the division between civil society and the state would be overcome, and, of course, to describe the way that, in capitalism, workers’ own human species activity in labor had been externalized from themselves and become an object existing independent of them and having power over them. Communism would be the abolition of this separation between subject and object of production—and an end to alienation. When Stedman Jones describes alienation as a synonym for abstraction (e.g., 193, 199, 392), he ignores this epistemological and ontological element of the German idealist tradition.
In a fourth arena of interpretation is the central assertion of Stedman Jones's argument: the separation of Marx's own thought, in the tradition of German idealism, from a later “historical,” “scientific,” and mechanistic materialism, the Marxism of Georgi Plekhanov, Karl Kautsky, and Vladimir Lenin, articulated in the Second and Third Internationals. In this respect, Stedman Jones is following a line of argument most extensively developed in Norman Levine's 1975 book The Tragic Deception: Marx contra Engels, namely, that Engels's reinterpretations of Marx's thought marked the point at which Marx's ideas were both distorted and transformed into Marxism. But Stedman Jones goes further and sometimes takes Marx himself to task for not following his own ideas. For example, in his discussion of Class Struggles in France (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), the author criticizes Marx for understanding classes as social formations with an objectively determined existence independent of human discourse or self-activity. Marx's assertion that objectively existing social classes were linked one to one with forms of thought and political tendencies and, in fact, determined them—ideas articulated in his concept of base and superstructure—comes in for additional censure, above all for rejecting the autonomy of the political. In making these observations, Stedman Jones is reprising the criticisms he developed of Marxist historians in “Rethinking Chartism.” These historians, he noted, had assumed that the sociological characteristics of most Chartists, as members of the working class, meant that their political movement had a distinct class character and at least socialist implications. Such an assertion, Stedman Jones pointed out, ignored the Chartists’ own language (and the intellectual and discursive traditions out of which it developed), which targeted the British state, not the capitalist economic system, and perceived remedies in the realm of political action. In the Marx biography, Stedman Jones deploys this argument not against Marx's disciples but against the master himself, in the name of Marx's own thought.
In a similar way, Stedman Jones deplores Marx's downplaying of the history of the exchange form and its eventual unity with production, as developed in the Grundrisse when it came time to revise that work for publication in 1859 and 1867. Instead, Marx developed a logical and abstract argument about the development of the exchange form and the extraction of surplus value from the nature of exchange. The empirical evidence he deployed was primarily contemporary rather than historical, focusing on conditions at the time under British capitalism taken from journalism and parliamentary investigations.
If the author has to chastise Marx for not following his own Hegelian ideas, one does have to wonder if Stedman Jones is not taking his leitmotif of Marx's German idealist heritage a little too far and neglecting the influence of scientific and positivist ideas on Marx's own thought. Marx wrestled for decades with the reconciliation of the Hegelian ideas of his youth and the growing post-1850 influence of positivist scholarship, the natural sciences, and an epistemology based on their practice. This positivist influence is perceptible in a number of Marx's texts, including his description of human history as a movement through stages of modes of production in the introduction to On the Critique of Political Economy (1859)—yet another place where Stedman Jones criticizes Marx for not being Hegelian enough. While Marx was certainly no Plekhanov, and one can only agree with Stedman Jones that the confident, late-nineteenth century interpretations of Marx's thought by the initial Marxists verged on parody, Marx's own ambivalent feelings about the heritage of German idealism do tend to be understated in this study.
In spite of its very considerable length, this book is less a biography, even an intellectual biography, and more an extended essay on one particular, if extremely important, element in the development of Marx's thought. As such, it is a work filled with subtle arguments, elegant formulations, and intriguing and thought-provoking ideas. Yet it remains a very partial account. Perhaps the aspiration to a more total understanding of Marx's thought is a chimera, and Theodor Adorno's assertion that the whole is the false applies to an understanding of Marx. For readers who aspire to a more rounded and complete picture, this excellent work of scholarship may be just a bit disappointing.
