Gareth Jones

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 dominated by extraordinary challenges and new notions about God, human capacities, empires, and political systems—and, above all, the shape of the future. In the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, a Europe-wide argument began about the industrial transformation of England, the Revolution in France, and the hopes and fears generated by these occurrences. Would the coming age belong to those enthralled by the revolutionary events and ideas that had brought this world into being, or would its inheritors be those who feared and loathed it? Stedman Jones gives weight not only to Marx’s views but to the views of those with whom he contended. He shows that Marx was as buffeted as anyone else living through a period that both confirmed and confounded his interpretations—and that ultimately left him with terrible intimations of failure. Karl Marx allows the reader to understand Marx’s milieu and development, and makes sense of the devastating impact of new ways of seeing the world conjured up by Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Ricardo, Saint-Simon, and others. We come to understand how Marx transformed and adapted their philosophies into ideas that would have—through twists and turns inconceivable to him—an overwhelming impact across the globe in the twentieth century.

In standard interpretations of the history of socialism, the cosmological and providential side of nineteenth century socialist thought tends to be ignored. What still today is often considered the core of socialist reasoning was its preoccupation with the claims of producers, its championing of the cause of the working class, its critique of political economy. In the twentieth century, the most characteristic goal of socialist parties - at least until the advent of Tony Blair - has been the socialisation of the means of production. The particular association of socialism with a language of productivism - with work, producers, the character of labour, and a critique of political economy - goes back to the commentaries of the 1830s and 1840s. Adolphe Blanqui, the brother of the famous revolutionary, in his History of Political Economy in Europe published in 1837, described Fourier and Owen as 'utopian economists',1 while Lorenz von Stein in his Der Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs, first published in 1842, defined socialism as a theory which made work the sole basis of..

A victim of a crime may claim that the criminal must make restitution of the benefit gained at his expense. The enrichment may arise directly from the criminal act. For example, a criminal demands money with menaces or obtains Property by fraud. No legal system will allow him to retain his enrichment gained at his victim's expense. More difficult problems arise if the criminal's enrichment is an indirect enrichment, for example, if he or members of his family used information relating to his criminal activities and published his story. The victim's common law claim may be defeated by such submissions as: the benefit was not gained at the plaintiff's expense or the criminal did not act wrongfully in using the information so acquired. There is also the forfeiture rule which insures, in England, that neither the legal nor beneficial title to property vests in the criminal; in contrast, in the United States, the criminal will be deemed to hold the property on constructive trust. These issues are discussed in Part I and Part II of the article respectively. Part III of the article discusses briefly the English legislation which seeks to deprive criminals of the profits of their criminal activities. An important statute, the Criminal Justice Act 1988, is not well drafted. The existence of such statutes should not exclude the possibility of a common law restitutionary claim where no confiscation order has been, or can be, made. This point is examined further in Part IV of the article, which discusses the implications of the important decision of the English Court of Appeal in Attorney-General v. Blake in 1998, where the defendants conduct amounted, not only to a breach of contract, but to a serious criminal offense. Part V of the article asks whether there should be further legislative intervention and suggests that the American statutes provide only limited guidance for the English draftsman. The nature and scope of any future English legislation must now take into account the United Kingdom Human Rights Act 1998. Its possible impact is discussed in the final Part, VI, of the article.

This collection is an exploration of the historical course and nature of early Christian theological traditions. The contributors reconsider classic themes and texts in the light of the existing traditions of interpretation. They offer critiques of early Christian ideas and texts and they consider the structure and origins of standard modern readings of these ideas and texts. Christian Origins provides a fresh and often ground-breaking analysis of the origins of Christian thought and offers a comprehensive and synchronic overview of the development and influence of that thought.