Karl Marx : Greatness and Illusion / Gareth Stedman Jones.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stedman Jones, Gareth, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Marx, Karl, 1818-1883.

Marx, Karl.

Philosophy, Marxist.

Communism and society.

Europe--Intellectual life--19th century.

Europe.

Europe--Politics and government--1789-1900.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (750 pages) : illustrations, maps, portraits

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

As much a portrait of his time as a biography of the man, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion returns the author of Das Kapital to his nineteenth-century world, before twentieth-century inventions transformed him into Communism’s patriarch and fierce lawgiver. Gareth Stedman Jones depicts an era dominated by extraordinary challenges and new notions about God, human capacities, empires, and political systems—and, above all, the shape of the future. In the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, a Europe-wide argument began about the industrial transformation of England, the Revolution in France, and the hopes and fears generated by these occurrences. Would the coming age belong to those enthralled by the revolutionary events and ideas that had brought this world into being, or would its inheritors be those who feared and loathed it? Stedman Jones gives weight not only to Marx’s views but to the views of those with whom he contended. He shows that Marx was as buffeted as anyone else living through a period that both confirmed and confounded his interpretations—and that ultimately left him with terrible intimations of failure. Karl Marx allows the reader to understand Marx’s milieu and development, and makes sense of the devastating impact of new ways of seeing the world conjured up by Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Ricardo, Saint-Simon, and others. We come to understand how Marx transformed and adapted their philosophies into ideas that would have—through twists and turns inconceivable to him—an overwhelming impact across the globe in the twentieth century.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Maps

Acknowledgements

Prologue: The Making of an Icon, 1883–1920

1. Fathers and Sons: The Ambiguities of Becoming a Prussian

2. The Lawyer, the Poet and the Lover

3. Berlin and the Approaching Twilight of the Gods

4. Rebuilding the Polis: Reason Takes On the Christian State

5. The Alliance of Those Who Think and Those Who Suffer: Paris, 1844

6. Exile in Brussels, 1845– 8

7. The Approach of Revolution: The Problem about Germany

8. The Mid-Century Revolutions

9. London

10. The Critique of Political Economy

11. Capital, Social Democracy and the International

12. Back to the Future

Epilogue

Notes and References

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed Feb. 24, 2017)

ISBN:

9780674974821

0674974824

9780674974807

0674974808

OCLC:

984676693