On Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx

Abstract

Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, by Jonathan Sperber. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. xx, 648 pp. $37.00 US (Cloth). A lengthy new biography of Marx--even one as accessible and well-conceived as Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life--raises questions. How does one find something new to say about an iconic figure whose life and work have been treated exhaustively? Even if there are still many new things to say about Marx the man, how do the details of his life illuminate the formidable body of intellectual work? Do the particulars of Marx's rather chaotic work habits, for example, help us understand the complex, fragmentary writings that made up the Paris manuscripts of 1844, or is our time better spent wading through those manuscripts themselves, working to glean what Marx himself wanted to tell us? The reader interested in Marx will probably want to do both. In Sperber's biography we find a real man rather than an icon--a man plagued by insecurities and failures, but also possessed of an almost endless capacity for work, consistently engaged in theoretical pursuits and activity in the world, and passionately connected to the people and world around him. There is no need to make an argument for the fecundity of Marx's thought--this case has made by generations of authors and activists. Yet it is more difficult to grasp the richness of Marx's nineteenth-century life, filled as it was with soul-destroying economic hardships, strenuous efforts to keep up appearances, and internecine conflicts with political allies and rivals. Yet Sperber is able to illuminate and draw convincing connections between Marx's life, work, and historical contexts. Sperber's project is to return Marx to the innovative, tumultuous, and above all distant world of nineteenth-century Europe. Marx's ideas may feel relevant and modem to twenty-first century readers, as though he were speaking of our world. Yet Sperber argues that Marx is better understood as a man shaped by and responding to a very particular set of nineteenth century developments, among them a half-century of revolutions beginning in 1789, the path-breaking intellectual innovations of Hegelianism, and the rise of socialism as an active political force in Europe. In Sperber's account, Marx is a backward-looking figure rather than a prophet, responding to the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theories of political economy developed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, fascinated by the early modem privatization of land, and holding the French Revolution in mind as the model for political change. This insistence on distance--on Marx as a man from a world different from our own--also characterizes Sperber's approach to received knowledge, to the stories we think we know about Marx. Sperber did painstaking research to complete this work, reading canonical and more obscure writings (including Marx's prodigious output as a journalist), his extensive correspondence, and a wide variety of other sources contained in the complete edition of the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, known as the MEGA (Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe). Skeptical of previous biographers and interpreters (including Engels) who have tried to sum up Marx's life and thought, Sperber casts new light on seemingly settled questions. Take, for example, Marx's status as a German Jew, an identity that has been used to denounce communism as a world conspiracy and to bolster claims that Marx was a self-hating Jew. When one considers that Marx was baptized and raised as a Protestant, that Jews in the Rhineland (from which Marx hailed) benefitted from the universalist ideology ushered in by the French Revolution, and that Judaism as a racial identity did not emerge until the end of Marx's life, the apparently self-evident fact of Marx's Jewish identity looks a bit like a retrospective invention. Similarly, the story of Marx's long and passionate marriage to the aristocratic Jenny von Westphalen has been retrospectively recast as an unlikely meeting of the revolutionary Jew and the well-to-do aristocratic lady. …