Karl Heinrich Marx was born in Trier in 1818 to a family of converted Jewish lawyers. He studied philosophy at Bonn, Berlin and Jena, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Greek atomism, then turned to journalism — and was expelled from Germany, France, and Belgium in succession for the radicalism of his writing. With his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels he co-wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party in February 1848, days before the European revolutions of that year began. Settled in London in 1849, he spent the rest of his life in poverty and ill-health (and partly on Engels' subsidies), reading at the British Museum and working on — the first volume of which appeared in 1867. is the most ambitious analysis of how the industrial economy works ever attempted by one person, and the philosophical foundation of every communist regime that would rule a third of humanity in the twentieth century. Marx died of pleurisy in March 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London. He was sixty-four.
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Philosopher · Economist · Revolutionary
Karl Marx
1,818 CE – 1,883 CE
The German philosopher whose analysis of industrial capitalism — written from a desk in the British Museum — shaped the politics of the next century and a half.
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