Reflections on Sven-Eric Liedman’s Marx-biography “a world to win: The life and works of Karl Marx”

Abstract

The English translation of Seven-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.