Stedman Jones builds a rich account of the intellectual debates of the era, as Marx responded to and recast the language of Proudhon, Bauer, Feuerbach, and others. He sees the key contribution of Marx’s early years as his clear statement and radical critique of political economy: asking why the ostensibly free exchange between the wage-earner and the capitalist benefited the capitalist so disproportionately.

Yet the picture Stedman Jones builds of Marx the man in these years is not so flattering. He sees Marx as highly self-absorbed and entitled, one who shirked his family responsibilities and parental obligations in his single-minded pursuit of his work. Although Marx and his wife were devoted to each other, he impregnated their housekeeper Helene Demuth, who gave birth to a son the same time as Jenny did. Stedman Jones also presents Marx as a profligate spender, incapable of managing money. Marx’s meeting with Engels in Paris was to be an opportune moment for the thinker, as Engels would come to be his long-term co-author, personal confidant, and benefactor. As Marx and his family struggled financially in London, living in hovels and suffering ill health, Engels’s comfortable job and family inheritance often allowed him to bail out his friend and eventually move them into better circumstances.

Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and Marx's daughters Jenny Caroline, Jenny Julia Eleanor, and Jenny Laura, c. 1860s (via Wikimedia Commons)Stedman Jones differentiates between the early works of Marx on political economy and his next works: his famous political tract The Communist Manifesto (1848) and his historical appraisal of Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852). Stedman Jones sees these works, inspired by Marx’s own participation and observations of the mid-century revolutions, as less successful than his political economy oeuvre. He sees the modernising vision of the Manifesto as one that comes to be identified closely with Marx’s thought, but whose abstract figures of ‘class struggle’, ‘proletariat’, and ‘bourgeoisie’ possessed less explanatory power than his earlier work. Stedman Jones says that Marx fudged the categories of classes involved in the insurrectionary battles of 1848 in his The Eighteenth Brumaire. The classes who supported Bonaparte the political outsider were not simply the small-holding peasants and lumpen proletariat whom Marx derided, but also the labouring poor in the cities whom Marx so valorised.

Some of these criticisms are fair, and many others have also pointed to Marx’s enthralment with the bourgeoisie and capitalist modernity in his Manifesto, and his dismissal of the peasantry and the so-called lumpen proletariat as figures doomed to the dustbin of history and incapable of political action. But for a political history, Greatness and Illusion pays surprisingly little attention to genre and form. The Manifesto was written specifically as a political tract designed to inspire political agitation, and so, by nature, its language was less nuanced and more essentialising than his earlier works. The Eighteenth Brumaire was written as a piece of journalism for the American monthly magazine Die Revolution. It was not intended to advance the academic and theoretical insights of Marx’s earlier work so much as to see how the class forces of bourgeois revolution played out in reality.

It was during the final stage of Marx’s life and career, when he carried out the research for his magnum opus Das Kapital (published in 1867), that he began to succumb most deeply to the illness that had plagued him for most of his life. Despite Marx’s genetic predispositions to pulmonary disease, his unhealthy lifestyle, and his poor and unsanitary living conditions, Stedman Jones argues that the insomnia, fevers, staph infections, and liver disease that Marx suffered were strongly related to his incessant wrestling with high theory. Marx found the theoretical work so demanding and draining that at one point in 1862 he applied for a job as a railway clerk.

Karl Marx, 1875 (photograph by John Mayall, Wikimedia Commons)Stedman Jones also sees this later period as one of the most fertile and self-aware in Marx’s life, one that produced alternative formulations of political change that were not incorporated into the version of Marx we receive due to the posthumous editing of his work by Engels. In his third, unpublished volume of Das Kapital, Marx wrote about his vision of post-capitalist society, outlining a transition from bourgeois property to associated producers such as cooperative factories. During this period, and especially in his engagement with the insurrectionary 1871 Paris Commune which governed the city for ten weeks, Marx began to embrace the trade union movement as a means for class consolidation, and he rejected the political party as a vehicle for revolution.

This period also saw Marx shift from his earlier support for British colonial occupation of India and other parts of Asia as a progressive force helping to bring about the transition to modernity, towards a view of the pre-capitalist village community and peasant communal ownership as resilient structures that could provide an alternative to capitalism. Stedman Jones argues that Engels did not look favourably on these views and concluded that it was a historical impossibility for a ‘lower’ stage of economic development to solve the conflicts that could not arise until a later stage of development. Following Marx’s death in 1883, Engels edited Volumes II and III of Das Kapital, which were published in 1885 and 1894 respectively. Engels did not integrate these ideas, effectively erasing them from Marx’s thought.

On the whole, Greatness and Illusion gives too much agency to Engels in shaping Marx’s thought and promoting Marxism as a modernising theory, without considering the purposes for which Marx wrote different texts. Nevertheless, Stedman Jones’s revelations in this latter part of the book provide fruitful material for how we analyse Marxism and consider its ongoing contemporary relevance, particularly given the decline of the industrial working classes and the critiques of bureaucratic communism.