Professor Gareth Stedman Jones has been a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge University since 1974, Director of the Centre for History and Economics since 1991; Professor of Political Science, History Faculty, Cambridge University since 1997. Gareth has served on the Editorial Board of the New Left Review and was a joint founder of the History Workshop Journal.
Gareth’s latest book, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, is a seminal biography of the most important figure of nineteenth-century politics. This remarkable new book allows the reader to understand the development of Marx like no other work before it. It is an intellectual biography which makes sense of the devastating impact of the new ways of seeing the world conjured up by Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Saint-Simon and others, and how these were adapted and transformed by Marx. This biography places Marx firmly in the context of the period, explaining how the ideas of one man came to transform the political landscape of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.