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His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels) and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his intellectual endeavours.
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- Early years
Karl Marx was a German philosopher during the 19th century. He worked primarily in the realm of political philosophy and was a famous advocate for communism. He cowrote The Communist Manifesto and was the author of Das Kapital, which together formed the basis of Marxism.
How did Karl Marx die?
Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883, when he was 64, after succumbing to a bout of bronchitis. Not owning any land when he died, he was buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Originally, his headstone was nondescript, but in 1954 the Communist Party of Great Britain etched the stone with “Workers of all lands unite,” the last line of The Communist Manifesto, along with a quote from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (1845).
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What was Karl Marx’s family like?
Karl Marx was one of nine children. When he got older, he married his childhood sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen. The two had seven children together, four of whom died before reaching adolescence. Because of Marx’s anti-capital core beliefs, his family was impoverished for much of their lives.
Karl Heinrich Marx was the oldest surviving boy of nine children. His father, Heinrich, a successful lawyer, was a man of the Enlightenment, devoted to Kant and Voltaire, who took part in agitations for a constitution in Prussia. His mother, born Henrietta Pressburg, was from Holland. Both parents were Jewish and were descended from a long line of rabbis, but, a year or so before Karl was born, his father—probably because his professional career required it—was baptized in the Evangelical Established Church. Karl was baptized when he was six years old. Although as a youth Karl was influenced less by religion than by the critical, sometimes radical social policies of the Enlightenment, his Jewish background exposed him to prejudice and discrimination that may have led him to question the role of religion in society and contributed to his desire for social change.
Marx was educated from 1830 to 1835 at the high school in Trier. Suspected of harbouring liberal teachers and pupils, the school was under police surveillance. Marx’s writings during this period exhibited a spirit of Christian devotion and a longing for self-sacrifice on behalf of humanity. In October 1835 he matriculated at the University of Bonn. The courses he attended were exclusively in the humanities, in such subjects as Greek and Roman mythology and the history of art. He participated in customary student activities, fought a duel, and spent a day in jail for being drunk and disorderly. He presided at the Tavern Club, which was at odds with the more aristocratic student associations, and joined a poets’ club that included some political activists. A politically rebellious student culture was, indeed, part of life at Bonn. Many students had been arrested; some were still being expelled in Marx’s time, particularly as a result of an effort by students to disrupt a session of the Federal Diet at Frankfurt. Marx, however, left Bonn after a year and in October 1836 enrolled at the University of Berlin to study law and philosophy.
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Marx’s crucial experience at Berlin was his introduction to Hegel’s philosophy, regnant there, and his adherence to the Young Hegelians. At first he felt a repugnance toward Hegel’s doctrines; when Marx fell sick it was partially, as he wrote his father, “from intense vexation at having to make an idol of a view I detested.” The Hegelian pressure in the revolutionary student culture was powerful, however, and Marx joined a society called the Doctor Club, whose members were intensely involved in the new literary and philosophical movement. Their chief figure was Bruno Bauer, a young lecturer in theology, who was developing the idea that the Christian Gospels were a record not of history but of human fantasies arising from emotional needs and that Jesus had not been a historical person. Marx enrolled in a course of lectures given by Bauer on the prophet Isaiah. Bauer taught that a new social catastrophe “more tremendous” than that of the advent of Christianity was in the making. The Young Hegelians began moving rapidly toward atheism and also talked vaguely of political action.
The Prussian government, fearful of the subversion latent in the Young Hegelians, soon undertook to drive them from the universities. Bauer was dismissed from his post in 1839. Marx’s “most intimate friend” of this period, Adolph Rutenberg, an older journalist who had served a prison sentence for his political radicalism, pressed for a deeper social involvement. By 1841 the Young Hegelians had become left republicans. Marx’s studies, meanwhile, were lagging. Urged by his friends, he submitted a doctoral dissertation to the university at Jena, which was known to be lax in its academic requirements, and received his degree in April 1841. His thesis analyzed in a Hegelian fashion the difference between the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus. More distinctively, it sounded a note of Promethean defiance:
- Marx: A Very Short Introduction, by Peter Singer. Marx: A Very Short Introduction. BY PETER SINGER. Famed contemporary philosopher Peter Singer’s Marx: A Very Short Introduction is a fantastic place to start for anyone with a budding interest in Karl Marx or Marxism generally.
- Why Marx Was Right, by Terry Eagleton. Why Marx Was Right. BY TERRY EAGLETON. In his accessible 2011 Why Marx Was Right, popular literary theorist Terry Eagleton takes common criticisms of Marxism and shows why they are often based on misconceptions of what Marxism actually is, and aims to demonstrate how Marxist critiques of capitalism are as alive and relevant today as ever before.
- Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, by Gareth Stedman Jones. Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. BY GARETH STEDMAN JONES. If you’re seeking to dive a little deeper with your Marx scholarship, consider Gareth Stedman Jones’s Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, first published in 2016.
- Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kolakowski. Main Currents of Marxism. BY LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI. If you’re looking to understand not just Marx but all the subsequent strands of Marxist thought, look no further than renowned philosopher Leszek Kolakowski’s epic 1976 Main Currents of Marxism, consisting of three volumes that investigate the entire history of Marx and Marxism (‘The Founders’, ‘The Golden Age’, and ‘The Breakdown’).
Our most recommended biography of Karl Marx is Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013) by Jonathan Sperber. For a biography that’s more focused on his philosophy, there’s also Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (1973) by David McLellan. Get the ebook Buy now.
May 27, 2018 · May 27th 2018. To celebrate the bicentenary of Karl Marx’s birthday this month, we present a Marx reading list for general readers, scholars, and students interested in Marxism, German Philosophy, and the history of social and political thoughts, including Karl Marx’s classics texts.
كارل ماركس. 4.20 avg rating — 5 ratings. Karl Marx - Friedrich Engels Studienausgabe in 4 Bänden (1 book)
He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being 'The Communist Manifesto' and 'Das Kapital'. His theories about society, economics, and politics, collectively understood as Marxism, hold that human societies develop through class struggle and that this will ultimately lead to the establishment of a classless society.
