Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, XLVIII:1 (Sommer, 2017), 61–69.

Peter C. Caldwell
The Life of the Dead: Karl Marx in Context

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. By Gareth Stedman Jones
(Cambridge, Masse., Harvard University Press, 2016) 750 S. $35.00
“The Marx constructed in the twentieth century bore only an in-
cidental resemblance to the Marx who lived in the nineteenth”
(595). So concludes Stedman Jones’ monumental new biography
of Karl Marx. In part, he is making a speciﬁc point, familiar to
those who followed the debates among Marxists of the 1960s
through 1980s: Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, and others con-
structed the Marxism of the Second International, a closed doc-
trine of social development that could not encompass Marx’s
own intellectual surprises. Stedman Jones is also making an argu-
ment about intellectual history, which he conceptualizes as the
careful contextualization of ideas. Patterns of radical thinking,
the content of radical movements, and the events of radical politics
dominate his account of Marx’s intellectual development rather
als, Zum Beispiel, the social structure and cultural norms of the
educated bourgeoisie stressed in Sperber’s recent biography.1

Such a project poses signiﬁcant challenges, since Marx’s work
was resolutely interdisciplinary. Capital, Zum Beispiel, draws from
law, philosophy, political theory, and economics. To frame Marx’s
economic or political thought properly means to understand the
disciplines within which, and to which, he was responding; it re-
quires deep interdisciplinary knowledge, as well as an ability to dis-
cern what is new, what is old, and what is simply inaccurate from a
particular intellectual perspective. Stedman Jones approaches Marx
not just as a historian of political thought but also as someone well
versed in both political-science and economic theory.

Peter C. Caldwell is Samuel G. McCann Professor of History, Rice University. He is the
author of Love, Death, and Revolution in Central Europe: Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, Louise
Dittmar, Richard Wagner (New York, 2009); Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the
German Democratic Republic (New York, 2003).

© 2017 vom Massachusetts Institute of Technology und The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Geschichte, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_01089

Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life (New York, 2013).

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62 | P E T E R C. C A L D W E L L

Stedman Jones seeks to do full justice to Marx with respect to
his philosophical, politisch, and economic contemporaries. Er
brings out both those aspects of Marx rooted in—and, In der Tat,
limited to—the nineteenth century and those that seem out of line
or askew in their intellectual context. In spite of his concluding
passage, das Buch, perhaps unwittingly, indicates moments when
Marx steps out of his nineteenth-century context to inform later
radical discourse. To develop these moments further, Jedoch,
would have required a different kind of encounter with Marxist
economics, Soziologie, political theory, or law of the present day.
Although at several points, most notably in his discussion of value
theory in economics, Stedman Jones starts along this road, such is
not his primary objective.

PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION Stedman Jones writes, with a mor-
alizing tone, of Marx’s “solipsistic self-absorption” as he entered
the heady world of the Berlin academy (58). Marx was not simply
absorbing Georg W. F. Hegel and neo-Hegelianism; he was car-
rying forward the love of ancient Greece that had seized much of
the German intellectual world in the early nineteenth century, In-
cluding some of Marx’s teachers at the Gymnasium. Marx’s disser-
tation defended Epicurus against Democritus. Both of these
philosophers were materialists, but Epicurus stressed the role of
self-directed activity, not just determinism. This defense of self-
determination dovetailed with notions of self-consciousness com-
ing from radical interpreters of neo-Hegelianism, from Eduard
Gans to Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. As Stedman Jones
notes, the Paris manuscripts of 1844 pulsate with Feuerbachian
motifs—the ways in which human constructs like God, the state,
and religion become abstractions, standing above and apart from
humanity. But these motifs did not disappear in 1845/6, supposedly
extinguished in the cluster of works later termed “The German
Ideology.” As Stedman Jones shows, they reappeared throughout
Marx’s life. The radical, idealist gesture of reclaiming abstractions,
of bringing humanity to self-consciousness, was a consistent part of
the late Marx.

Other biographers who were committed to the notion of a
scientiﬁc Marxism, from Engels to Althusser, have stressed Marx’s
break with idealism and humanism.2 “The German Ideology,”

Louis Althusser (trans. Ben Brewster), For Marx (London, 1985).

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| 63

KA RL MA RX I N CO NT EX T
which Stedman Jones rightly identiﬁes with a compendium of early
works edited by David Riazanov during the ﬁrst decade of the
Russian Revolution, has served as the key evidence to support this
Schicht. Its different parts were not written solely by Marx and were not
designed to be published together. “The German Ideology” became
a building block of false ofﬁcial understandings of Marx. That said,
the different parts of the compilation ﬁt together intellectually, Und
probably deserved more attention. The “Theses on Feuerbach,” for
Beispiel, stressed both historical determination and the situated free-
dom of individuals; the criticism of utopian socialism rejected unsi-
tuated conceptions of revolutionary action. Revolution had to
emerge from an immanent process—thus the “enthusiasm bordering
on euphoria” of Marx and his circle after the Silesian weavers’ upris-
ing of 1844, which seemed to reveal an emergent source of radical
change within the existing system (162). This search for immanent
potential could also explain Marx’s strange infatuation with Russian
peasant collectivism at the end of his life, a moment that Stedman
Jones contextualizes particularly well.

Stedman Jones’ discussion of Marx’s “Greek” moment—that
Ist, Marx’s obsession with the utopian image of an undifferentiated
realm of self-determination exempliﬁed by the Greek polis—is
particularly strong. A lost manuscript by Marx about Christian
Kunst, of all things, serves as a starting point for Stedman Jones’
theme. Using Rose’s important work, he reconstructs the missing
essay and suggests the manner in which the aesthetic image of a
whole society, a society where work and religion and politics
are not clearly differentiated, runs throughout Marx’s work.3 This
aesthetic motif, connecting Marx with both the radical Jacobins
and the German Bildungsbürgertum, also sheds light on Marx’s
few descriptions of the post-revolutionary world in Capital, Und
it points forward to his reception by radical thinkers in the twentieth
Jahrhundert, a point missing in this biography. It also helps to explain
Marx’s spectacular association of socialism with “atheism.” Stedman
Jones notes how French socialist traditions were thoroughly soaked
in Christianity, how they expressed themselves in catechisms, im
form of new churches, and through preachers and holy men and
Frauen. Im Gegensatz, Marx’s socialism rejected Christianity, welche
he associated with the private conservatism oriented toward the

3 Margaret Rose, Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts (New York, 1984).

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64 | P E T E R C. C A L D W E L L
personal salvation espoused by contemporary pietism—characteristics
alien to his ideal of the polis.

Marx’s Hellenism was more than a yearning to re-establish a
lost moment, it coincided with a radical modernism that negated
die Vergangenheit. He described with respect the destructive impact of cap-
italism on traditional society, and he imagined the revolutionary
party as a radical force destroying illusions even further: “The social
revolution of the nineteenth century cannot create its poetry from
the past but only from the future,” he thunders in the Eighteenth
Brumaire. Proletarian revolutions “engage in perpetual self-criticism,
always stopping in their own tracks” to engage in self-criticism; Sie
cease to yearn for a mythicized past.4 But as Stedman Jones observes,
Marx’s references to “the Party” became increasingly illusory or even
delusional, as his “party” dwindled to an ever-smaller number of
supporters during the 1850s. The modernist moment was, Jedoch,
more than delusion. It reveals the tensions, even the paradoxes, In
Marx’s own thought, between his yearning for an imagined polis
and his afﬁrmation of the dynamic change that he associated with
capitalism and what would follow.

Stedman Jones’ big point nonetheless holds: Neither the
Hellenizing Marx nor the modernist Marx are at home in the
broader worlds of positivistic theories of evolution and materialis-
tic determinism of the 1850s and 1860s or in the ofﬁcial Marxism
of the late nineteenth century. Not that Marx was free from these
tendencies. As Stedman Jones shows, Marx’s notion of revolution
seemed to shift during the 1860s, from “event” to “process,” as
he was writing the ﬁnal version of Capital; certain passages in
Capital suggest a uniﬁed evolutionary theory of human development
(467–468). But when revolutionary events reappeared, as in 1871,
Marx returned to his modernist-and-yet-Hellenizing conception
of historical breaks.

Marx was decidedly a thinker of the early nineteenth century,
but his early, nineteenth-century thought came back to inspire im-
manent critiques of state socialism in the twentieth century. Für
Beispiel, Marcuse’s 1931 reading of the 1844 Paris manuscripts re-
opened the radical project of liberating labor; Bloch, Dunayevskaya,
and many others deployed Marx’s situated idealism and Hellenistic
utopia against the repressive machinery of state socialism during the

4 Marx (Hrsg. Terrell Carver), Later Political Writings (New York, 1996), 34–35.

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KA RL MA RX I N CO NT EX T
1950s and 1960s.5 Clearly, Marx’s philosophy of revolution could
function outside its nineteenth-century context.

| 65

POLITICS AND REVOLUTION Stedman Jones is by no means forgiv-
ing in his treatment of Marx’s political engagement and writing.
Marx, er argumentiert, fundamentally misunderstood the radicalism of
the mid-nineteenth century. Seeking to compress politics into
the category of class, rejecting movements for rights and political
representation in line with his political model of undifferentiated
self-rule in the polis, Marx failed to appreciate fully Chartism,
French radicalism, or even the representation of the masses through
German Social Democracy. Mit anderen Worten, he failed to understand
that the “languages of class” were really about inclusion—an inﬂu-
ential argument that Stedman Jones ﬁrst offered three decades ago.6
Few can describe the complex political events of mid-century
as well as Stedman Jones. His descriptions of the 1830 Revolution
in Frankreich, Chartism, the revolutions of 1848 in France and
Deutschland, and the Paris Commune achieve a clarity not often
found in the best general histories of the period. Again and again,
Marx misses the point. He misses the localism of the German rev-
olutions with his focus on German unity, hoping—in his political
journalism of the 1850s—for war with Russia as a way to unify
German protest, as though the French experience of 1792 could
be replicated in a different time and place. For Stedman Jones,
Marx’s biggest failure in his political writings concerns France after
1848. Marx failed to see that for many people, including many
workers, the workers’ revolt during the June Days was chaotic
violence against a democratic republic rather than that coherent
act of a uniﬁed working class. Politics dropped out of Marx’s
account, replaced by an abstract and illusory image of struggle
among classes and class fractions. Most importantly, Marx missed
the importance of democratic inclusion to the story: “Karl mis-
understood both the causes and remedies for this exceptional phase
of political antagonism” (311).

5 Herbert Marcuse, “The Foundation of Historical Materialism” (1932), in idem (trans. Joris de
Bres), From Luther to Popper (London, 1983), 1–48; Ernst Bloch (trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen
Plaice, and Paul Knight), The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, Masse., 1995), ICH, 249–286; Raya
Dunayevskaya, The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State Capitalism (Chicago, 1992).
6
(New York, 1984).

Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982

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66 | P E T E R C. C A L D W E L L

In der Tat, Stedman Jones argues that Marx’s most signiﬁcant
piece of political writing of the time, The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte, does not grasp the most salient piece of the story,
“the emergence of a novel form of democratic politics resulting
from the direct participation of ‘the people’ (or at least, adult
Männer) in the electoral process” (335). Marx misrepresents the peas-
ants, some of whom organized politically, and he uncritically rep-
licates the prejudices of middle-class commentators with his
description of the Lumpenproletariat. He did not see that Louis
Napoleon (and later Otto von Bismarck) had produced a different
kind of populist, charismatic, “representative” democracy. Marx
was not a prophet so much as a contemporary observer unable
to give up his class-based explanation of history even while a more
complex reality was unfolding in front of him.

Notwithstanding Marx’s illusions, Jedoch, more was at
work in the Eighteenth Brumaire than Stedman Jones allows. In diesem
essay, political representation assumed mythic qualities; it became a
process in which a multitude of people projected their ideas of the
nation onto one man during a moment of crisis, creating concrete
presence out of abstract representation. Whatever the limitations
of his story, Marx offered a theory that would, decades later, offen
the way for accounts of fascism (Gramsci) as well as the “subaltern”
(Spivak), which were attempts to comprehend democratic inclusion
in a new way.7

Accompanying these moments of insight are many moments
of illusion in Marx’s history, such as his account of the Paris Com-
mune. Written for the General Council of the International
Working Men’s Association, it was in large part “imaginary”—
not a description of what actually happened but an attempt to dis-
cover within the Commune an emergent world where the distinc-
tion between state and society was dissolving, bearing the traces of
the idealized polis of Marx’s youth (502, 506). The Civil War in
France made Marx famous for the ﬁrst time—and infamous as a
defender of chaos. This fame helped to propel him and Engels
to informal positions as chief thinkers of the nascent German Social
Democratic Party. Noch einmal, Marx missed the intent of this new,

7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?" im gleichen (Hrsg. Cary Nelson and
Lawrence Grossberg), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, 1988), 271–313; Antonio
Gramsci, “State and Civil Society,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York, 1971), 210–223.

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KA RL MA RX I N CO NT EX T

| 67

mass party as an attempt to include workers in civil rights and rep-
resentation, instead denouncing “the old democratic litany” of
rights, voting, and the people’s state (556).

ECONOMICS AND REVOLUTION Marx’s major project from 1844 Zu
the end of his life was to explain the place of labor in and against
capitalism. Stedman Jones shows beautifully the Feuerbachian mo-
tifs swirling through the economic work, as the promethean force
of human labor was transformed into a dead abstraction standing
above the laborer, a vampire or a Frankenstein monster echoing
the gothic literature of the nineteenth century. Stedman Jones as-
tutely shows how Marx called upon “bourgeois” political economy
to make his point: Every economic theorist from John Locke to
Adam Smith and David Ricardo wrote about labor as the source
of value while assuming private property that accumulated the
surplus produced by labor. Marx’s lifelong project in economic
Geschichte, Capital, was in part a work of intellectual history.

Marx intended Capital to provide the key to modernity and
the self-consciousness necessary for revolution. Marx and his entire
family suffered for it throughout the 1850s and 1860s. Stedman
Jones describes their poverty and illnesses in detail. The massive
project led to new complexities. Marx’s 1840s assertions about
the immiseration of the working class and the inevitable decline
of the rate of proﬁt acquired provisos; they became tendencies,
not laws. When Engels and Kautsky, the “pope” of German Social
Democracy, made them once more into iron laws, they also
created the “Marx” of the twentieth century. Both sides, Jedoch,
co-existed in Marx’s thinking—the tendency of capitalism to
alienate and impoverish labor and destroy its own foundation
and the presence of counter-tendencies. Try as he might, Stedman
Jones cannot easily separate the economics of “Karl” and “Marx.”
In der Tat, serious economists outside of the Anglo-American world,
like Streeck, return to these themes of Marxist economics—in
undogmatic, creative ways—in their attempts to describe capital’s
current crises and counter-tendencies.8 Stedman Jones seeks to
delineate the nineteenth-century Karl from the old Marx, Aber
current discussions have room for both.

8 Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (London, 2014).

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68 | P E T E R C. C A L D W E L L

Stedman Jones has a deeper argument about Marx’s economic
arbeiten, that it was an “intellectual defeat,” insofar as the attempt to
build the ediﬁce of Capital on the labor theory of value failed.
Marx could not situate capitalism as a necessary moment in the
grand, universal history of mankind or resolve the difference
between price and value (as had Ricardo). In the ﬁrst volume of
Capital, he set that problem and other ones aside, treating the labor
theory of value merely as a presupposition. But Stedman Jones,
not unlike Cohen (on whose work from the 1980s he relies), Ist
too quick to dismiss the theory.9 Marx’s approach continues to
inform, Zum Beispiel, Harvey’s account of the current crisis, Und
Postone has given us an interesting philosophical reading of
abstract labor, the key to the theory, as the essence of capitalist
alienation.10

Much more interesting are Stedman Jones’ discussions of the
late Marx’s alternative paths to socialism. In one of these paths,
Marx posited capitalism as a necessary stage, the world moment
that would eventually make way for a universal reclamation of
humanity. In another, Jedoch, he viewed capitalism as a jolt, A
break with the multiple “forms that precede capitalist production”
(as stated in the Grundrisse). The tension becomes clear in the re-
markable drafts of a letter to Vera Zasulich in early 1881, Sorge-
ing the question of whether the Russian peasant commune could
provide a means for resisting or even avoiding capitalism. Im
ﬁnal version of the letter, Marx restricted the claim of “historical
inevitability” to the countries of Western Europe, whereas in the
unsent drafts, he discussed collective forms of peasant ownership
from the ancient world of Germania forward. The drafts reveal
not only that Marx remained intellectually open even in his ﬁnal,
awful years, though still obsessed with revolution, but also that he
was still prone to obscure and often outdated literature from
decades before. Those historical works may have been outdated,
but the search for forms of communal life that could de-couple
from capitalism was just beginning.

9 Gerald A. Cohen, Geschichte, Arbeit, and Freedom: Themes from Marx (New York, 1988).
10 David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (London, 2014); Moishe
Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory
(New York, 1996).

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KA RL MA RX I N CO NT EX T

| 69

Stedman Jones undersells his accomplishment by concluding his
book with the distinction between the real “Karl” of the (early)
nineteenth century and the constructed “Marx” of the twentieth.
“Karl” is not reducible to his temporal context; he even rises up to
provide ammunition against the later “Marx.” Stedman Jones did
not set out to provide a history of Marxism, but given his juxta-
position of Marx and Marxism, such a history might have been
useful, suggesting answers to a number of questions that the book
raises: How could the Marx of the Paris Manuscripts return as the
critic of state socialism? How could the Marx of the Eighteenth
Brumaire return as a theorist of populism? And how could Marx
return as a theorist of globalization and, most lately, of global
economic crisis? Stedman Jones may have intended to produce a
monumental biography that could serve as a heavy stone lying
over the grave of a grand writer of the past. As an intellectual
Geschichte, Jedoch, his book succeeds for three reasons: Erste, it pro-
vides a comprehensive understanding not only of Marx but also of
his complex and contradictory intellectual and political context,
with a level of detail and understanding that surpasses other works
about Marx. Zweite, it provides a compelling account of the con-
text in which Marx aspired to greatness and an honest account of
the illusions that drove much of his work. Dritte, perhaps in spite
of its author intent, it succeeds in showing how remarkably lively
the dead can be.

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