Putting Karl Marx into context

Karl Marx

A 19th-Century Life

By Jonathon Sperber

Liveright. 672 pp. $35

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Reviewed by Robert J. Dobie

Why another biography of Karl Marx?

As the subtitle of this new biography indicates, Jonathan Sperber, a professor of Central European history at the University of Missouri, proposes to place Marx's life and thought squarely within their 19th-century context. For too long, Sperber argues, the various images or "icons" of Marx as prophet, visionary, or anti-Christ have obscured what is truly interesting and unique about his life and thought.

Sperber even claims that it may help our understanding of Marx's life and thought to see him as a "backward-looking" figure, for whom, to give just one example, the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1792 remained the models of historical change and revolution.

Sperber also aims to show that Marx was very much a creature of the 19th century in his lifelong devotion to the philosophy of Hegel, which he had imbibed as a student at the University of Berlin in the 1830s. Hegel had argued that objective phenomena can only be understood in relation to a historically evolving self-consciousness. But another philosophy, positivism, which claimed that the natural sciences alone deliver genuine knowledge, came to eclipse the philosophy of Hegel.

Marx himself was impressed by the claims of positivism and he conducted his work in economics in the positivist spirit. Nevertheless, as a Hegelian, Marx always maintained a critical distance from positivism. Thus, while Marx was impressed upon reading Darwin and welcomed his work as a blow against religion, it seemed to him that "Darwin had transposed the struggle for existence in English laissez-faire capitalism into the natural world, so Darwinists saw this as reason 'for human society never to emancipate itself from its bestiality.' "

Likewise, in his masterwork, Capital, Marx stays firmly within the conceptual world of early 19th-century political economy. Nevertheless, in his economics Marx strove to uncover what he called the secret (Geheimnis) or inner logic of the capitalist system and thus transcend it in both thought and action. So, while Marx was certainly a creature of the 19th century, he was not a prisoner of it, a fact that challenges Sperber's main thesis.

For the general reader, however, some of the most interesting passages concern Marx's private life. Sperber's book contains harrowing accounts of the misery and poverty of the Marx family's early years of exile in London. A salient feature of Marx the man was his love for his children. There is an account of how Marx and a political colleague one day played "cavalry" with Marx's daughters riding on their backs. And despite the Marxes' dire poverty, Karl and wife Jenny made every effort to educate their daughters as proper young bourgeois "ladies." Moreover, off-color jokes and bawdy songs were strictly off-limits in the Marx household.

To us today, an unconventional lifestyle is often seen as proof of the authenticity of one's political convictions. But this was not the case in Marx's day. Marx's friend, colleague, and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, had the much more bohemian lifestyle of the two friends, living openly with a working-class Irish mistress and then, after her death, with her sister. But as a result, Engels became deeply unpopular with Marx's working-class associates, for whom sexual license and capitalist exploitation went hand in hand.

Finally, at the center of Marx's personal life was his wife Jenny. This marriage was later romanticized as a sort of 19th-century West Side Story: she the beautiful Prussian aristocrat, he the scholarly Jew. In reality, as Sperber points out, Karl's father, Heinrich, was a prosperous and well-respected lawyer in Trier and a Protestant convert; the von Westphalens were minor nobility of very recent origin and of modest means. And as far as Marx being Jewish was concerned, Sperber notes that "Jewishness" at the time was understood entirely in religious and cultural terms - racial notions of Jewishness would not emerge until the end of Marx's life. So any social obstacles to the marriage were few.

Nevertheless, whatever the difficulties married life brought to Karl and Jenny - and the stresses of exile, poverty, the death of five of their children, and Karl's fathering of an illegitimate son by the family servant certainly put severe strains on their marriage - the two remained deeply in love with each other until the end, with Jenny functioning not only as her husband's secretary but also as his confidant.

Sperber's biography provides a vivid, well-researched, and thought-provoking window not only into the life of a history-changing individual but also into another thought-world, so similar and yet so strangely different from our own.