Gareth Stedman Jones

I picked this up for two reasons: Sven-Eric Liedman's okay biography used this one as a whipping post, and made it sound very interesting. And, second, I read Gazza's essay tearing Lukacs to pieces, which was irresponsible, silly, and hugely enjoyable. Gazza wrote that essay, I assume, from a kind of Althusserian anti-humanism. He wrote this biography from a kind of anti-Marxism liberalism. Nothing is quite so productive for an intellectual as changing sides and lashing out at your previous love. Unfortunately, this one is nowhere near as irresponsible, silly, or enjoyable.

There's plenty of detail, and much of it is interesting and useful. The frame is ludicrous, though. One paragraph on page 241 is dedicated to telling us what Marx achieved: being the first person to systematically explain capitalism as a system; to explain capitalism as a history; to explain its concrete effects on laborers and others; to emphasize its effects on our subjectivity and desires; to reveal its revolutionary destructiveness (more famously described by Schumpeter). Most of the rest of the book is dedicated to explaining that Marx was somehow full of shit. Now, that seems a bit wrong. Do we really need a hundred pages detailing Marx's empirical failings as a writer for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung? That's useful, yes. But it's funny to read paragraphs like the one on page 241, and then realize that Gazza thinks Marx was a *failure*.

So, this book is great, because it isn't hagiographical. It is good on the shifts in Marx's own political positions, and it would be great if ultra-leftist types could read it and reconsider their revolution-or-nothing positions. But they won't read it, because of the idiotic satanographic framing that is somehow meant to show us the 'real Karl' instead of St. Marx. Probably somewhere in between.

Oh, and on Capital, Gazza is terrible. Naughty Gazza!… (mehr)

This towering intellectual biography allows us to
understand both the greatness and the illusion
that lie at the heart of an extraordinary man
As the nineteenth century unfolded, its inhabitants had to
come to terms with an unparalleled range of economic,
political, religious and intellectual challenges. Distances
shrank, new towns sprang up, and new inventions
transformed the industrial landscape. In the shocked
aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, a European-wide
argument began (which has in many ways continued ever
since) about the industrial transformation in England, the
Revolution in France and the hopes and fears generated by
these events.
One of the most distinctive and arresting contributions to this
debate was made by Karl Marx, the son of a Jewish convert in
the Rhineland and a man whose entire life was devoted to
making sense of the puzzles and paradoxes of the nineteenth
century world. It was an era dominated by new ideas (many
of which we now take for granted) about God, human
capacities, empires and political systems - and above all, the
shape of the future. In a world where so many things were
changing so fast, would the coming age belong to those
enthralled by the revolutionary events and ideas which had
brought this world into being, or to those who feared and
loathed it?
Gareth Stedman Jones is currently Professor of the History of
Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a Fellow of
King's College, Cambridge and taught at the university for
many years, becoming Professor of Political Science in 1997.
He is the author of Outcast London, Languages of Class and An
End to Poverty? as well as being the editor of the Penguin
Classics edition of The Communist Manifesto.… (mehr)

The Roots of Social Democracy

Long before Marx, debates about improving the human condition and elimination of poverty were carried out through enlightened thinkers such as Thomas Paine and Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet. In "An End to Poverty?", Cambridge Policital Scientist, Gareth Stedman Jones contextualizes the most important 18th and 19th century philosophical works into a concise debate over the social inequalities of the post-revolutionary period.

Essentially Jones is arguing that the major debates and resulting proposals by Condorcet and Paine "derived from a unique juncture between the rationalist optimism of the Enlightenment, the impact of democratic revolutions and an exhilarating sense of the possibility of marrying Smith's conception of the potential of commercial society with a modern republican form" (p.235). The idea of marrying social security with citizenship had emerged from this school of thought. By the twentieth-century, however, the extremes of laissez-faire individualism and Marxist socialism took hold mostly due to the influences of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus.

"An End to Poverty?" is meticulously researched, based entirely on the primary sources of such philosophers as Thomas Paine, Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, J.S. Mill, Edmund Burke, Karl Marx, and others. I'm not a philosophy major, however, Jones' conclusions based on the writings of Paine and Condorcet that education and emancipation of labour are cornerstones to the elimination of poverty are fundamentally rational.

In reading "An End to Poverty?", one cannot stop from thinking about the growing inequality crisis we face today and the endless debates over what to do. We have solutions, the ideas are as old as the American Revolution of 1776. We have concrete strategies in place today such as the Millennium Development Goals to eliminate poverty by 2015. In my opinion, the problem is largely structural, that a "culture of poverty" exists whereby poverty is institutionalized. It is the paradox that the cycle must be broken by the powerful few who have no incentive to alter it.

Anyone who has pondered the "Social Question" should read this book to better understand what the philosophical foundations of the major contemporary solutions are based on.… (mehr)