Karl Marx: greatness and illusion
GARETH STEDMAN JONES

When he was a young student in Berlin in the late 1830s, Karl Marx fancied himself a poet. The bulk of his verse was ­standard issue, hormonal adolescent stuff: “Jenny! Do I dare avow / That in love we have exchanged our souls / That as one they throb and glow / And that through their waves one current rolls.” But now and then he was more mordant than maudlin. Here he is satirising his hero Hegel: “Words I teach all mixed up into a devilish muddle, / Thus anyone may think just what he chooses to think.”

Anyone who’s read more than a page or two of The Phenomenology of Spirit will know what Marx was on about. But the ­thesis of Gareth Stedman Jones’ deeply learned new book is that while he wrote a great deal more clearly than Hegel, Marx’s words, too, have been devilishly muddled. Generations of leftists have believed just what they chose to believe about his ideas. They have acted as if he were a monolithic thinker whose every sentence was part of an unassailable system.