Ruled by a demon -- Early writings -- The spectre of communism -- Political writings, 1848-1852 -- The whole economic muck -- Outlines of a critique of political economy -- An immense accumulation of research -- Volume one of Capital -- The tantalizing model of Paris -- The circulation of...

As much a portrait of his time as a biography of the man, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion returns the author of Das Kapital to his nineteenth-century world, before twentieth-century inventions transformed him into Communism's patriarch and fierce lawgiver. Gareth Stedman Jones depicts an era...