Reflections on Sven-Eric Liedman’s Marx-Biography “A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx”

• Main Author: Christian Fuchs
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: tripleC 2018-05-01
• Series: tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique
• Subjects: Karl Marx; Sven-Eric Liedman; Marx-biography; A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx; bicentenary; 200th anniversary; 5 May 2018; 1818
• Online Access: https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/1039

The English translation of Sven-Eric Liedman’s Marx-biography A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx was published two weeks before Marx’s bicentenary. This article presents reflections on Liedman’s book and asks how one should best write biographically about Marx. The paper compares Liedman’s biography to the Marx-biographies written by Jonathan Sperber (Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life) and Gareth Stedman-Jones (Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion). A biography is a way of repeating a person’s life, works and age in a process of reconstruction and retelling. The question that arises is how to write a biography as a dialectical text. Sven-Eric Liedman: A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx. London: Verso, London, 2018. 768 pages., £35.00 hbk. ISBN 9781786635044