Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
1 book analyzed
Biography
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was born in Trier, Prussia, to a middle-class Jewish family that converted to Protestantism. His father was a lawyer. Marx studied philosophy and law at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, where he encountered Hegel's dialectical philosophy and joined the Young Hegelians, a group of radical intellectuals who applied Hegel's methods to critique religion and the Prussian state. He earned a doctorate in philosophy but was blocked from an academic career by the Prussian government. He turned to journalism, editing the radical Rheinische Zeitung before it was suppressed. Exiled from Germany, he moved to Paris (1843), Brussels (1845), and finally London (1849), where he spent the rest of his life in often desperate poverty, supported financially by his collaborator Friedrich Engels. Engels (1820-1895) was the son of a wealthy German textile manufacturer who owned factories in Manchester, England. He witnessed industrial working conditions firsthand, published The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) at age 24, and became Marx's intellectual partner, financial supporter, and co-author. The Communist Manifesto was commissioned by the Communist League in late 1847 and published in London in February 1848 — weeks before revolutions erupted across Europe. Marx and Engels had been developing their theory of historical materialism since 1845, and the Manifesto was its first public, popular expression.