Karl Marx was born in 1818 in the ancient
city of Trier, in western Germany (then Prussia). Marx’s father
was a prosperous lawyer, a Jew who converted to Lutheranism to advance
his career at a time when unbaptized Jews did not have full rights
of citizenship. Marx studied law at the University of Bonn and later
at Berlin, where he switched to studying philosophy. He moved again
to the University of Jena, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation
on ancient Greek natural philosophy. Following the death of his
father in 1838, Marx attempted to find a job as lecturer but ran
into difficulties because of controversies surrounding his teacher
and mentor Bruno Bauer (1809–1882), who had lost his professorship
due to his unrepentant atheism. Marx decided instead to try journalism
and became editor of the Rhenish Gazette, a liberal
newspaper in Cologne but the paper ran afoul of government censors
and closed in 1843. Marx then married Jenny von Westphalen, the
daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and moved to the more politically
hospitable atmosphere of France. There he encountered another German
émigré, Friedrich Engels, with whom he took up an interest in economics
and class struggle.
One of Marx’s most important intellectual influences was
the philosophy of George Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel’s signature
concept was that of the dialectic, a word that
originally referred to the process of logical argumentation and
refutation. Whereas earlier philosophers had treated dialectic as
a process for arriving at true ideas, Hegel maintained that ideas
themselves evolve according to a continual process of contradiction
and resolution and that human history is driven by this dialectical
evolution of ideas. Hegel’s influence on Marx is evident in Marx’s
belief that history is evolving through a series of conflicts in
a predictable, unavoidable direction. Hegel also influenced Marx
in his characterization of the modern age. Hegel once famously declared
that “man is not at home in the world,” by which he meant that while
human beings had achieved an unprecedented degree of personal autonomy
and self-awareness in the modern age, this accomplishment had resulted
in the individual’s alienation from collective political and cultural institutions.
The more conservative of Hegel’s followers, the so-called
Right-Hegelians, looked to Hegel’s writings on politics and the
state to justify the political status quo in contemporary Prussia,
arguing that the modern state represents the height of historical
evolution and the final resolution of historical contradictions.
The Left-Hegelians, including Marx, believed that society is far
from fully evolved and for proof looked not only to the authoritarianism
of the Prussian government but also to the social divisions and
civil unrest created by industrialization and the increasing polarization
of society into rich and poor. Socialism, an ideology advocating
the abolition of private property, was then gaining influence among
the more politically radical European intellectuals. Although he
was attracted to socialism, Marx was dissatisfied with the quality
of socialist thought that he encountered in France, such as that
of the utopian Socialist Saint-Simon (1760–1825). Feeling that most
Socialists were naïvely idealistic, Marx, following his meeting
with Engels, set out to develop a theory of Socialism grounded in
a better understanding of both economics and philosophy. From that
point on, Marx’s project synthesizes these two distinct intellectual approaches,
combining a Hegelian, philosophical view of historical evolution
with an interest in capitalism that builds on the insights of classical
economic theorists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
Together with his coauthor Engels, Marx produced such
important early works as The German Ideology (1846),
which was a critique of Hegel and his German followers, and The
Communist Manifesto (1848), in which Marx and Engels distinguish
their idea of socialism from other currents of socialism and demonstrate
how socialism arises naturally from the social conflicts inherent
within capitalism. Shortly after the publication of The
Communist Manifesto, revolutionary unrest broke out in
much of Europe. Although the Communist League of which Marx and
Engels were leaders was in a state of disorganization, Marx took
part in the revolution in Germany as editor of a the New
Rhenish Gazette in Cologne, which became a platform for
radical political commentary. Following the unrest, Marx left Germany
with his family and settled in London. The tumultuous events of
1848 and 1849 had impressed Marx deeply and formed the subject matter
of later historical studies such as The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte (1852).
While in London, Marx participated in the growing international
workers’ movement while working toward a new synthesis of his economic
and social theories. In 1867, he published the first volume of Capital (Das
Kapital), his mammoth treatise on economics. Having mastered
all of the classical political–economic theorists, Marx intended
in Capital to explain the modern class struggle
in terms of economic principles. Capital remains
Marx’s greatest achievement, a powerfully insightful analysis of
the nature of capitalism and its effects on human beings. Although
most people no longer accept Marx’s conclusion that the contradictions
within capitalism will lead inevitably to a worker’s revolution
and the worldwide establishment of Socialism, Capital nonetheless
remains a uniquely compelling book because of its ability to describe
and explain the phenomenon of capitalism. Ironically, the proponents
of capitalism are the people most likely to reject Marx as worthy
of study, but it is to Marx that we owe the concept of capitalism
and the perception that modern society is capitalist. (The word capital first
acquired its importance with the publication of Capital.)
One of the main challenges a person faces in reading Marx
is in abandoning preconceptions of Marx’s work resulting from the appropriation
of Marx’s ideas by Communist political movements throughout the
twentieth century. Many see the recent collapse of the Soviet Union
as an end to the international appeal of Marxism as revolutionary
political movement. At the same time, Marx’s ideas continue to stimulate
and engage thinkers in a variety of fields, including political
theory, history, and literary criticism.
