Karl Marx Essay, Research Paper

1818-83, German social philosopher and revolutionary; with Friedrich Engels, a

founder of modern Socialism and Communism. The son of a lawyer, he studied

law and philosophy; he rejected the idealism of G.W.F. Hegel but was

influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach and Moses Hess. His editorship (1842-43) of

the Rheinische Zeitung ended when the paper was suppressed. In 1844 he

met Engels in Paris, beginning a lifelong collaboration. With Engels he wrote

the Communist Manifesto (1848) and other works that broke with the tradition

of appealing to natural rights to justify social reform, invoking instead the laws

of history leading inevitably to the triumph of the working class. Exiled from

Europe after the Revolutions Of 1848, Marx lived in London, earning some

money as a correspondent for the New York Tribune but dependent on

Engels’s financial help while working on his monumental work Das Kapital (3

vol., 1867-94), in which he used Dialectical Materialism to analyze economic

and social history; Engels edited vol. 2 and 3 after Marx’s death. With Engels,

Marx helped found (1864) the International Workingmen’s Association, but his

disputes with the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin eventually led to its breakup.

Marxism has greatly influenced the development of socialist thought; further,

many scholars have considered Marx a great economic theoretician and the

founder of economic history and sociology.

Bibliography

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