Marx and the Village Community

In this lecture, Professor Gareth Stedman Jones looks at the last decade and a half of Marx’s life, a period in which he effectively gave up further work on Capital and read up instead on the village community and the early history of man. He was interested in particular in the new work on pre-history which developed from the 1860s onwards connecting this with a notion of primitive communism and an epoch in history before patriarchy and political hierarchy.

Professor Gareth Stedman Jones is Director of the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, and a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge University since 1974. He was Professor of Political Science, History Faculty, Cambridge University from 1997 and in 2010 became Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London. His publications include An End to Poverty? (2004), a long introduction to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (2002), and The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, co-edited with Gregory Claeys, 2011.

He is currently working on an intellectual biography of Marx commissioned by Penguin and a more general work on political thought between the French Revolution and the Revolutions of 1848.

Doors open at 7pm and wine and nibbles will be served. The talk starts promptly at 7.30pm and will last about an hour.

Tickets are non-refundable but, as a courtesy to others, please let us know if you cannot attend.