#jonathan sperber

[j2parman]

Readers familiar with historians' practices will recognize two modes of re-evaluation of the past: revival of forgotten individuals and accomplishments, and evocation of lost possibilities.

Jonathan Sperber, TLS, 26 November 2021, p. 4.

[asongaboutpirates]

Who the hell designed this book cover?

It looks like a friggin' tumblr post

[maruivo]

Karl Marx era burguês ?

‘(…)In 1842, for example, when he was appealing to a liberal audience, he attacked communism and advocated force of arms to halt it. In 1848, just six months after co-authoring The Communist Manifesto, he dismissed the notion of the dictatorship of the…

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[beamlyus]

Meet Ivan Saric, the very handsome Croatian man hoping to land his dream job as a correspondent for The Daily Show. Think of Ivan when you're watching Jon Stewart do his thang with tonight's guest, Author Jonathan Sperber, and send him a shout out on zeebox why don't you? (via 'Hire Me, Jon Stewart': Ivan Saric Wants To Be A 'Daily Show' Correspondent (VIDEO))

[myimaginarybrooklyn]

A Man of His Time 

‘Karl Marx,’ by Jonathan Sperber

By JONATHAN FREEDLAND

The Karl Marx depicted in Jonathan Sperber’s absorbing, meticulously researched biography will be unnervingly familiar to anyone who has had even the most fleeting acquaintance with radical politics. Here is a man never more passionate than when attacking his own side, saddled with perennial money problems and still reliant on his parents for cash, constantly plotting new, world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both deadlines and personal hygiene, living in rooms that some might call bohemian, others plain “slummy,” and who can be maddeningly inconsistent when not lapsing into elaborate flights of theory and unintelligible abstraction.

Still, it comes as a shock to realize that the ultimate leftist, the father of Communism itself, fits a recognizable pattern. It’s like discovering that Jesus Christ regularly organized bake sales at his local church. So inflated and elevated is the global image of Marx, whether revered as a revolutionary icon or reviled as the wellspring of Soviet totalitarianism, that it’s unsettling to encounter a genuine human being, a character one might come across today. If the Marx described by Sperber, a professor at the University of Missouri specializing in European history, were around in 2013, he would be a compulsive blogger, and picking Twitter fights with Andrew Sullivan and Naomi Klein.

But that’s cheating. The express purpose of “Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-­Century Life” is to dispel the dominant notion of a timeless Marx — less man, more ideological canon — and relocate him where he lived and belonged, in his own time, not ours. Standing firm against the avalanche of studies claiming Marx as forever “our contemporary,” Sperber sets out to depict instead “a figure of the past,” not “a prophet of the present.”

And he succeeds in the primary task of all biography, recreating a man who leaps off the page. We travel with Marx from his hometown, Trier, via student carousing in Bonn and Berlin, to his debut in political journalism in Cologne and on to exile and revolutionary activity in Paris, Brussels and London. We see his thought develop, but glimpse also the begging letters to his mother, requesting an advance on his inheritance, along with the enduring anxiety over whether he can provide for the wife he has loved since he was a teenager. We hear of the sleepless nights that follow the start of the American Civil War: Marx is troubled not by the fate of the Union, but by the loss of freelance income from The New York Tribune, which, consumed by matters closer to home, no longer requires his services as a European correspondent. We see the trips to the pawnbrokers, the pressure to maintain bourgeois living standards, “the show of respectability,” as Marx put it to his closest friend and co-conspirator, Friedrich Engels.

The picture that emerges is a rounded, humane one. Marx is committed to revolution, without being a monomaniac. He is an intensely loving father, playing energetically with his children and later grandchildren, but also suffering what would now be diagnosed as a two-year depression following the death of his 8-year-old son Edgar. He is clearly also an infuriating colleague, capable of spending 12-hour days in the reading room of the British Museum but stewing on book projects for years, only to fail to deliver. Engels, Sperber writes, spent decades repeating the same message: Get the work done!

Besides the long, devoted marriage to Jenny, there is another love story here: the partnership with Engels, who it seems was prepared to do anything for his comrade. Engels famously subsidized Marx; perhaps less well known is that he spared his friend a scandal by claiming paternity of the child born to the Marx family servant, Lenchen Demuth: the boy was in fact Karl’s son. After the great man’s death, it was Engels who waded through Marx’s scrawled notes to assemble, and publish posthumously, the final two volumes of “Das Kapital.” Even Marx’s signature text, “The Communist Manifesto,” included a 10-point program lifted almost verbatim from an earlier Engels program. Engels was Aaron to Marx’s Moses, able to speak in public and so make up for the deficiencies of his partner, who was burdened by both a strong Rhineland accent and a lisp. Such was his devotion that Engels even planted anonymous reviews of “Das Kapital” in the German press. Imagine what the pair would have got up to in the age of Amazon.

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