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Gareth Stedman Jones has written a scholarly and interesting biography of Karl Marx, framed by the plausible idea that the 'authentic' Marx needs to be recovered from layers of 20th-century misinterpretation. The book focuses more on the political context than the intellectual content of Marx's ideas, and its treatment of the latter has some limitations. Not least, the author underestimates the complexity, interest, and relevance, of certain elements of Marx's thought.

This article examines Friedrich Engels's little noticed communitarian sympathies, especially as expressed in his 1844 article 'kommunistischen Ansiedlungen'. These sympathies are in conflict with the considered and more critical view of communitarian socialism that he subsequently came to share with Karl Marx. I have four ambitions in the article: first, to provide some characterisation of this 'communitarian moment' in Engels's early intellectual evolution; second, to raise a number of worries about the argument of this particular article; third, to illuminate some of the interesting variety in nineteenth-century communitarianism; and fourth, to insist on the complexity of questions about 'feasibility'. I maintain that Engels underestimates the variety of contemporary communitarianism, and that his appeal to the existence of intentional communities in America and Britain as proof of the feasibility of communism is unsuccessful.

The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer, Douglas Moggach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. x, 290Bruno Bauer (1809-1882) is neither a well-known nor an easily
accessible figure. Despite making a significant contribution both to the evolution of Hegelianism and to nineteenth-century German controversies about the historical Jesus, his work is now little read and only infrequently discussed. His name appears often enough, not least in
sketches of Karl Marx's intellectual evolution (on which Bauer had a disputed impact), but serious studies of his work are few and far between (in any language).