Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Prussia, to a middle-class Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism. He studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, where he encountered Hegel's dialectical method and the Young Hegelians. After completing his doctorate in 1841, he turned to journalism and radical politics, editing the Rheinische Zeitung until Prussian authorities shut it down. This early confrontation with censorship and political economy set the trajectory of his life's work.

Exiled successively from Germany, France, and Belgium, Marx settled in London in 1849, where he would spend the rest of his life. Working in poverty alongside his collaborator Friedrich Engels, he produced the foundational texts of what became Marxism: the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), The German Ideology (co-authored with Engels, 1846), The Communist Manifesto (1848), and his monumental critique of political economy, Capital (Das Kapital, Volume I, 1867). He was also a central figure in the International Workingmen's Association (the First International), writing key documents including the Inaugural Address (1864) and the Address on the Civil War in France (1871).

Marx's intellectual project fused Hegelian dialectics, classical British political economy (Smith, Ricardo), and French socialist thought into a systematic critique of capitalism. His materialist conception of history argued that the economic base — the relations and forces of production — shapes the legal, political, and ideological superstructure of society. He developed the theory of surplus value to explain how capital extracts unpaid labor from workers, producing profit and class conflict as structural features rather than accidents. His concept of alienation described how wage labor estranges workers from their activity, their product, each other, and their human potential.

Marx died in 1883, having not completed Volumes II and III of Capital (published posthumously by Engels). His influence on the twentieth century was enormous and contradictory: his ideas animated revolutionary movements on every continent, were institutionalized in state communist regimes he almost certainly would have criticized, and generated ongoing debates across economics, sociology, history, literary theory, and philosophy. He remains one of the most read, debated, and contested thinkers in modern intellectual history.