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Four women have been conventionally framed as wives and/or mistresses and/or sexual partners in the biographical reception of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) as heterosexual men. These women were Jenny Marx (née von Westphalen) (1814–1881), Helene Demuth ("Lenchen") (1820–1890), Mary Burns (1821–1863), and Lydia Burns (1827–1878). How exactly they appear in the few contemporary texts and rare images that survive is less interesting than the determination of subsequent biographers of the two "great men" to make these women fit a familiar genre, namely intellectual biography. An analysis of Marx–Engels biographies shows how this masculinized genre enforces an incuriosity that makes gendered political partnerships unthinkable and therefore invisible. By contrast, a positive interest in these women, which rethinks what a gendered political partnership is or could be, results in a significantly different view of the two men. As historical figures, they shift from being individualized or paired‐with‐each‐other "great thinkers" to communist/socialist activists working in and through everyday spaces and material practices. Their pamphlets, articles, and books thus appear more as immediate political interventions and less as timeless theorizing or as the raw material for such intellectualizing reconstructions.

The context through which readers have come to know Marx as 'Marx' was not discovered. It was constructed by Marx in the first instance, and by others during his lifetime and afterwards. What he told us about himself at different stages of his life has been assimilated in various ways to reinforce what more-or-less authorised biographers think we should know about his 'life and thought'. These accounts are based on what bibliographers present as his 'collected works', graded by significance. Intellectual biographies are couched in a genre that is neither the contingent everyday (since readers are presented with a life story that has ended) nor the publicity-minded autobiographical (as Marx's self-characterisations certainly were). Marx himself posted a public notice in 1847, putting a project in self-publicity underway. His own autobiographical and auto-bibliographical Preface of 1859, and Engels' summarising review of Marx's book of the same year, both had somewhat wider contemporary audiences. In recounting his activities and works, Marx's inclusions and emphases are quite different from twentieth- and twenty-first-century canons. A Collected Essays project for Marx was mooted by himself in the early 1850s, but the plan was to recirculate only those items which would raise issues that were still politically current. In 1872, a number of German socialists consciously embarked on a political process of constructing Marx and Engels as iconic founding fathers. Their mass recirculation of The Communist Manifesto sparked an enormous number of reprints and translations. This highly readable text made Marx 'great'. After his death in 1883, the situation changed dramatically. Engels' republication of Marx's works with new introductions and prefaces, along with Engels' own works, promoted Engels' projects and ideas as following directly from, and intentionally supplementary to, Marx's 'thought'. Franz Mehring's 1902 catalogue listing of the Marx–Engels archival legacy laid the basis for the first biography of Marx, ...

In his own time Hobbes became a public intellectual even if at times a banned author. Political theorists of today will in some cases recognise similar pressures and dilemmas. As a classic author, however, Hobbes has become a trope in political theory through an overt process of anachronism. The authors in this special issue – Browning, Jaede, Boyd, Prozorov – proceed from this common and canonical content, as does Prokhovnik in her Introduction. The scholarly template, presumed in this discussion, focuses on the first two books of Leviathan, and on the life-and-death dilemmas posed there in relation to political power and obligation. The four articles thoroughly explore the concepts of nature and artifice within that reading strategy. The conclusion of this critical review of their work is that within broader commentary in political theory nature and artifice are themselves tropes, and that the natural life of humans is inherently artificial.