Why should Marx’s native land and early life merit such centrality? The answer lies in the subtitle of Sperber’s book: ‘a nineteenth-century life’. The guiding theme and clear emphasis of Sperber’s biography is the need to present Marx squarely in his historical context. The problem Sperber addresses is that the name of Karl Marx has become entwined with the experience of state socialism in the 20th century. Marx has been for over a decade alternately celebrated or condemned as the prophet of 20th-century communism. Even more than 20 years after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the end of the Cold War, the association of Marx with the Soviet experience remains strong. Some undergraduates, encountering the subject for the first time, are even surprised to hear that Marx did not actually live in the 20th century.

In the first part of the book we learn about the ‘society of orders’ of Marx’s childhood to which he was deeply opposed and that came to be dissolved in the course of his life. Sperber makes clear the impact that Prussian rule had on the Rhineland and he explains why Karl’s father, Heinrich Marx, converted from Judaism to Protestantism in the 1810s. In the second chapter, we learn why Marx’s courtship of and engagement to Jenny von Westphalen was one of the most radical aspects of his life. The early engagement, long before Marx was in a position to have a secure income, to a woman four years his senior without a dowry, defied 19th-century conventions. Sperber convinces us that Marx and Jenny were connected by true love, and his description of Marx’s relationship to his wife is one the highlights of the book. So much is clear: they really loved and were committed to each other. Despite their chaotic and unstable living situation and Marx’s repeated failure to stabilize the family’s finances, Jenny remained loyal to Marx. She took an active interest in his work, and defended him in even the pettiest of his many disputes with political and philosophical rivals.

Subsequent chapters address Marx’s relation to the Young Hegelians and his journalistic activity for the Rheinland News. Sperber retells the more familiar aspects of Marx’s life, such as the beginnings of his friendship with Engels, but also brings to light previously obscure issues. For instance, he rightly stresses the role of Karl Grün, a character who is only very briefly treated, if not completely absent from most existing Marx biographies. Grün is today virtually unknown, but he was one of Marx’s most important rivals in the 1840s. Like Marx, he discovered socialist ideas in the early 1840s, and went on to promote them both within the German Confederation and, following his expulsion, among the German workers in Parisian exile. It was because of his influence among the Paris community that he increasingly came to be viewed as a rival by Marx and Engels in the second half of the 1840s. They began to consciously ostracise Grün, and translated personal antipathy into philosophical attacks, most notably in the German Ideology, where Grün was first denounced as a ‘true’ German socialist, allegedly ‘backward’ because of his emphasis on the humanistic content of socialism. Sperber comments on the relationship between Marx and Grün: ‘The conflict between the two men arose precisely because they were so similar, because they were both seeking to occupy the same nice in the German socialist movement: that of the theorist who could provide the missing link between French ideas and German social conditions’ (p. 185).