Böcker av Gareth Stedman Jones

ECONOMIST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2016'A deeply original and illuminating account of Marx's journey through the intellectual history of the nineteenth century... a profound reappraisal and a gripping read' Christopher Clark'There is no better guide to Marx than Gareth Stedman Jones' Economist'Rich and deeply researched' John GrayAs the nineteenth century unfolded, its inhabitants had to come to terms with an unparalleled range of political, economic, religious and intellectual challenges. Distances shrank, new towns sprang up, and ingenious inventions transformed the industrial landscape. It was an era dominated by new ideas about God, human capacities, industry, revolution, empires and political systems - and above all, the shape of the future.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 hopes and fears of the nineteenth century world. Gareth Stedman Jones's impressive biography explores how Marx came to his revolutionary ideas in an age of intellectual ferment, and the impact they had on his times. In a world where so many things were changing so fast, would the coming age belong to those enthralled by the events which had brought this world into being, or to those who feared and loathed it?This remarkable book allows the reader to understand as never before the world of ideas which shaped Marx's world - and in turn made Marx shape our own.

This collection of essays by Gareth Stedman Jones proposes a different way of seeing both historians' analytical conceptions of 'class', and the actual manifestation of class in the history of English politics and English culture since the 1830s. As the progenitor of the first generally acknowledged working-class movement, the English working class provided the initial empirical basis for not only the original Marxist theory of modern industry and proletarian revolution, but also subsequent historians' reactions against, or adaptations of, the Marxist theory of class. In Languages of Class Gareth Stedman Jones draws a distinction between two conceptions of class: the everyday and commonplace perception of its pervasiveness in England, and the Marxist idea of its revolutionary significance. He proceeds to challenge the predominant conceptions of the meaning and development of 'class consciousness' by stressing the political and discursive conditions in which particular languages appeared and receded. Among the themes of individual essays in the book are a rethinking of 'the making of the English working class' and the phenomenon of Chartism, a novel exploration of the formation and components of 'working-class culture', and, in the light of these, a new approach to understanding the history of the Labour Party.