Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones (review)

Gareth Stedman Jones, like Jonathan Sperber in his own recent biography of Karl Marx, proposes “to put Marx back into his nineteenth-century surroundings” (5), leaping over the myriad posthumous interpretations of Marx’s life and thought. Yet this task is necessarily impossible for Stedman Jones, for he himself is an important part of this posthumous interpretative tradition.

Stedman Jones was one of the leading historians who, in the 1980s, rejected what they described as an overly deterministic and epistemologically naive social history in favor of what came to be known as a new cultural history. Above all, in his pathbreaking 1983 essay “Rethinking Chartism,” Stedman Jones suggested that E. P. Thompson did not go far enough in emphasizing the importance of culture and political ideas, since Thompson seemed to suggest that there was something like an already existing working class that could make itself. Stedman Jones, by contrast, suggested that class, or any other putative social reality, did not exist apart from the language used to describe it. Perhaps this was a scholastic quibble, but, as anybody who was there in the 1980s and 1990s will recall, it sharply divided several academic disciplines, including history (for an insightful discussion of this moment, see Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society, University of Michigan Press, 2005).

Stedman Jones’s fine essay on Chartism opposed functionalist as much as Marxist approaches to social history, but it became a signal event in a cultural turn against Marx in the 1980s and 90s, a turn based at least in part on a caricature of Marx as a dogmatic determinist, mechanistically reducing most of human life to what he was supposed to have called its economic base. It is thus fascinating to read what Stedman Jones makes of Marx three decades later, when Marxism is regaining some of the regard in mainstream academia that it had briefly enjoyed in the 1960s and 70s, prior to the cultural turn to which he was so integral.

One of the many virtues of Stedman Jones’s language-centered approach to Chartism was the sympathetic attention it gave to the words of Chartists themselves. This is not one of the virtues of Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. Stedman Jones is one of the great historians of nineteenth-century working-class political thought, a scholar, moreover, with a long and deep engagement with Marxism. It is thus surprising to find in this book a distracting, and often misleading, penchant for condemning and even belittling Marx. Here I must restrict myself to noting just a few of the most egregious examples.

As most readers of Marx know, Marx saw the achievement of political democracy and individual rights within the state as only a partial form of human emancipation. This political emancipation prefigured, but might also distract from, what Marx thought of as complete human emancipation. Stedman Jones, however, characterizes this position as a “hostility towards political democracy and universal suffrage” (337) and, a few pages later, as Marx’s “refusal to think of universal suffrage as anything other than a pathological symptom” (342). Such tendentious characterizations make virtually impossible any serious engagement with Marx’s politics.

Stedman Jones’s account of Marx’s economics is as weirdly distorted as his account of Marx’s politics. He goes to great lengths to discount Marx’s labor theory of value, but these efforts finally conclude in a sputtering rhetorical question (“If? . . . If?”) posed after quoting a single paragraph from the Grundrisse (401). One would have thought the first volume of Capital would be the place to go after Marx’s value theory. In fact, Stedman Jones later allows that Capital reveals how exploitation occurs through the apparent equal exchange of workers and capitalists on the labor market (549)—presumably via the very theory of value that Stedman Jones had rendered absurd earlier in the book. As this juxtaposition suggests, Stedman Jones does not offer a particularly systematic account...