Gareth Stedman Jones, like Jonathan Sperber in his own recent biography of Karl Marx, proposes “to put Marx back into his nineteenth-century surroundings” (5), leaping over the myriad posthumous interpretations of Marx’s life and thought. Yet this task is necessarily impossible for Stedman Jones, for he himself is an important part of this posthumous interpretative tradition.
Stedman Jones was one of the leading historians who, in the 1980s, rejected what they described as an overly deterministic and epistemologically naive social history in favor of what came to be known as a new cultural history. Above all, in his pathbreaking 1983 essay “Rethinking Chartism,” Stedman Jones suggested that E. P. Thompson did not go far enough in emphasizing the importance of culture and political ideas, since Thompson seemed to suggest that there was something like an already existing working class that could make itself. Stedman Jones, by contrast, suggested that class,...
