Where was karl marx born
Karl Marx
German-born philosopher (–)
"Marx" redirects here. For other uses, see Marx (disambiguation) and Karl Marx (disambiguation).
Karl Marx[a] (German:[kaʁlˈmaʁks]; 5 May – 14 March ) was a German-born philosopher, political theorist, political economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist.
His best-known works are the pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels) and his three-volume Das Kapital (–); the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his intellectual endeavours. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.
Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, Marx studied at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena, and received a doctorate in philosophy from the latter in A Young Hegelian, he was influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and both critiqued and developed Hegel's ideas in works such as The German Ideology (written ) and the Grundrisse (written –).
While in Paris in , Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and met Engels, who became his closest friend and collaborator.
Karl marx sociology biography and history summary He wrote about the colonial justice system, in which "a form of torture has been used and this happens 'regularly' to extract confessions from the Arabs; naturally it is done like the English in India by the 'police'; the judge is supposed to know nothing at all about it. World War One Centenary. Retrieved 28 August Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.After moving to Brussels in , they were active in the Communist League, and in they wrote The Communist Manifesto, which expresses Marx's ideas and lays out a programme for revolution. Marx was expelled from Belgium and Germany, and in moved to London, where he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte () and Das Kapital.
From , Marx was involved in the International Workingmen's Association (First International), in which he fought the influence of anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (), Marx wrote on revolution, the state and the transition to communism. He died stateless in and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.
Marx's critiques of history, society and political economy hold that human societies develop through class conflict. In the capitalist mode of production, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour power in return for wages.[4] Employing his historical materialist approach, Marx predicted that capitalism produced internal tensions like previous socioeconomic systems and that these tensions would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as the socialist mode of production.
For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism—owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature—would eventuate the working class's development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers.[5] Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised proletarian revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.
Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures of the modern era, and his work has been both lauded and criticised.[7] Marxism has exerted major influence on socialist thought and political movements, with Marxist schools of thought such as Marxism–Leninism and its offshoots becoming the guiding ideologies of revolutionary governments that took power in many countries during the 20th century, known as communist states.
Karl marx sociology biography and history pdf He saw the men in positions of power as hypocrites and felt the current syllabus of teaching inadequate for dealing with modern society. Both Marx and Auguste Comte set out to develop scientifically justified ideologies in the wake of European secularisation and new developments in the philosophies of history and science. Brussels: — Marx strongly disagreed with this new political position and in was forced to withdraw as a writer for the Tribune.Marx's work in economics has had a strong influence on modern heterodox theories of labour and capital,[8][9][10] and he is often cited as one of the principal architects of modern sociology.[11][12]
Biography
Childhood and early education: –
Karl Marx was born on 5 May to Heinrich Marx and Henriette Pressburg.
He was born at Brückengasse in Trier, an ancient city then part of the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine.[15] Marx's family was originally non-religious Jewish but had converted formally to Christianity before his birth. His maternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied Trier's rabbis since , a role taken by his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx.[16] His father, as a child known as Herschel, was the first in the line to receive a secular education.
He became a lawyer with a comfortably upper middle class income and the family owned a number of Moselle vineyards, in addition to his income as an attorney. Prior to his son's birth and after the abrogation of Jewish emancipation in the Rhineland,[17] Herschel converted from Judaism to join the state Evangelical Church of Prussia, taking on the German forename Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel.[18]
Largely non-religious, Heinrich was a man of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Voltaire.
A classical liberal, he took part in agitation for a constitution and reforms in Prussia, which was then an absolute monarchy.[19] In , Heinrich Marx began working as an attorney and in moved his family to a ten-room property near the Porta Nigra.[20] His wife, Henriette Pressburg, was a Dutch Jew from a prosperous business family that later founded the company Philips Electronics.
Her sister Sophie Pressburg (–) married Lion Philips (–) and was the grandmother of both Gerard and Anton Philips and great-grandmother to Frits Philips. Lion Philips was a wealthy Dutch tobacco manufacturer and industrialist, upon whom Karl and Jenny Marx would later often come to rely for loans while they were exiled in London.[21]
Little is known of Marx's childhood.[22] The third of nine children, he became the eldest son when his brother Moritz died in [23] Marx and his surviving siblings, Sophie, Hermann, Henriette, Louise, Emilie, and Caroline, were baptised into the Lutheran Church on 28 August ,[24] and their mother in November [25] Marx was privately educated by his father until when he entered Trier High School (Gymnasium zu Trier[de]), whose headmaster, Hugo Wyttenbach, was a friend of his father.
By employing many liberal humanists as teachers, Wyttenbach incurred the anger of the local conservative government. Subsequently, police raided the school in and discovered that literature espousing political liberalism was being distributed among the students. Considering the distribution of such material a seditious act, the authorities instituted reforms and replaced several staff during Marx's attendance.[26]
In October at the age of 16, Marx travelled to the University of Bonn wishing to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law as a more practical field.[27] Due to a condition referred to as a "weak chest", Marx was excused from military duty when he turned While at the University at Bonn, Marx joined the Poets' Club, a group containing political radicals that were monitored by the police.[29] Marx also joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society (German: Landsmannschaft der Treveraner) where many ideas were discussed and at one point he served as the club's co-president.[30][31] Additionally, Marx was involved in certain disputes, some of which became serious: in August he took part in a duel with a member of the university's Borussian Korps.[32] Although his grades in the first term were good, they soon deteriorated, leading his father to force a transfer to the more serious and academic University of Berlin.[33]
Hegelianism and early journalism: –
Trierer students in front of the White Horse, among them, Karl Marx.
Karl Marx (detail)
A famous lithograph by David Levi Elkan, simply known as "Die Trierer", depicts several students, and among them, Karl Marx, in front of the White Horse in
Until , this was the earliest known depiction of Marx, even though he was only identified in by [Friedrich?] Schneider, a judicial council and senate president in Cologne.
However, because this depiction fits into Marx's description, it was accepted as being him since then.
Depictions of the young Marx by Hellmut Bach () and another drawing that is more idealistic by I. Grinshtein () was based upon this lithography; however they became more famous than the original depiction.
The copy preserved in the Stadtmuseum Simeonstift Trier has some lost portions from above (the written year , depictions of the brotherhood's activities etc.) because of ageing: this can be seen from earlier publications of the image.
Spending summer and autumn in Trier, Marx became more serious about his studies and his life.
He became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, an educated member of the petty nobility who had known Marx since childhood.
Karl marx sociology biography and history Indeed, many features of the Marxist view of the world had been worked out in great detail, but Marx needed to write down all of the details of his world view to further clarify the new critique of political economy in his own mind. For both Marx and Hegel, self-development begins with an experience of internal alienation stemming from this recognition, followed by a realisation that the actual self, as a subjective agent, renders its potential counterpart an object to be apprehended. In his evolutionary model of history, he argued that human history began with free, productive and creative activities that was over time coerced and dehumanised, a trend most apparent under capitalism. From , Marx complained a lot about boils: "These are very frequent with liver patients and may be due to the same causes".As she had broken off her engagement with a young aristocrat to be with Marx, their relationship was socially controversial owing to the differences between their religious and class origins, but Marx befriended her father Ludwig von Westphalen (a liberal aristocrat) and later dedicated his doctoral thesis to him.[35] Seven years after their engagement, on 19 June , they married in a Protestant church in Kreuznach.[36]
In October , Marx arrived in Berlin, matriculating in the university's faculty of law and renting a room in the Mittelstrasse.[37] During the first term, Marx attended lectures of Eduard Gans (who represented the progressive Hegelian standpoint, elaborated on rational development in history by emphasising particularly its libertarian aspects, and the importance of social question) and of Karl von Savigny (who represented the Historical School of Law).[38] Although studying law, he was fascinated by philosophy and looked for a way to combine the two, believing that "without philosophy nothing could be accomplished".[39] Marx became interested in the recently deceased German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose ideas were then widely debated among European philosophical circles.[40] During a convalescence in Stralau, he joined the Doctor's Club (Doktorklub), a student group which discussed Hegelian ideas, and through them became involved with a group of radical thinkers known as the Young Hegelians in They gathered around Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, with Marx developing a particularly close friendship with Adolf Rutenberg.
Like Marx, the Young Hegelians were critical of Hegel's metaphysical assumptions but adopted his dialectical method to criticise established society, politics and religion from a left-wing perspective.[41] Marx's father died in May , resulting in a diminished income for the family.[42] Marx had been emotionally close to his father and treasured his memory after his death.
By , Marx was writing both fiction and non-fiction, having completed a short novel, Scorpion and Felix; a drama, Oulanem; as well as a number of love poems dedicated to his wife.
None of this early work was published during his lifetime.[44] The love poems were published posthumously in the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Volume 1.[45] Marx soon abandoned fiction for other pursuits, including the study of both English and Italian, art history and the translation of Latin classics.[46] He began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Hegel's Philosophy of Religion in Marx was also engaged in writing his doctoral thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,[47] which he completed in It was described as "a daring and original piece of work in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy".[48] The essay was controversial, particularly among the conservative professors at the University of Berlin.
Marx decided instead to submit his thesis to the more liberal University of Jena, whose faculty awarded him his Ph.D. in April [49] As Marx and Bauer were both atheists, in March they began plans for a journal entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), but it never came to fruition.
In July, Marx and Bauer took a trip to Bonn from Berlin. There they scandalised their class by getting drunk, laughing in church and galloping through the streets on donkeys.[50]
Marx was considering an academic career, but this path was barred by the government's growing opposition to classical liberalism and the Young Hegelians.[51] Marx moved to Cologne in , where he became a journalist, writing for the radical newspaper Rheinische Zeitung (Rhineland News), expressing his early views on socialism and his developing interest in economics.
Marx criticised right-wing European governments as well as figures in the liberal and socialist movements, whom he thought ineffective or counter-productive.[52] The newspaper attracted the attention of the Prussian government censors, who checked every issue for seditious material before printing, which Marx lamented: "Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at, and if the police nose smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear".[53] After the Rheinische Zeitung published an article strongly criticising the Russian monarchy, Tsar Nicholas I requested it be banned and Prussia's government complied in [54]
Paris: –
In , Marx became co-editor of a new, radical left-wing Parisian newspaper, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Annals), then being set up by the German activist Arnold Ruge to bring together German and French radicals.[55] Therefore Marx and his wife moved to Paris in October Initially living with Ruge and his wife communally at 23 Rue Vaneau, they found the living conditions difficult, so moved out following the birth of their daughter Jenny in [56] Although intended to attract writers from both France and the German states, the Jahrbücher was dominated by the latter and the only non-German writer was the exiled Russian anarchist collectivistMikhail Bakunin.[57] Marx contributed two essays to the paper, "Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"[58] and "On the Jewish Question",[59] the latter introducing his belief that the proletariat were a revolutionary force and marking his embrace of communism.
Only one issue was published, but it was relatively successful, largely owing to the inclusion of Heinrich Heine's satirical odes on King Ludwig of Bavaria, leading the German states to ban it and seize imported copies (Ruge nevertheless refused to fund the publication of further issues and his friendship with Marx broke down).[61] After the paper's collapse, Marx began writing for the only uncensored German-language radical newspaper left, Vorwärts! (Forward!).
Based in Paris, the paper was connected to the League of the Just, a utopian socialist secret society of workers and artisans. Marx attended some of their meetings but did not join.[62] In Vorwärts!, Marx refined his views on socialism based upon Hegelian and Feuerbachian ideas of dialectical materialism, at the same time criticising liberals and other socialists operating in Europe.
On 28 August , Marx met the German socialist Friedrich Engels at the Café de la Régence, beginning a lifelong friendship.
Engels showed Marx his recently published The Condition of the Working Class in England in ,[65][66] convincing Marx that the working class would be the agent and instrument of the final revolution in history.[67] Soon, Marx and Engels were collaborating on a criticism of the philosophical ideas of Marx's former friend, Bruno Bauer.
This work was published in as The Holy Family.[70] Although critical of Bauer, Marx was increasingly influenced by the ideas of the Young Hegelians Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach, but eventually Marx and Engels abandoned Feuerbachian materialism as well.[71]
During the time that he lived at 38 Rue Vaneau in Paris (from October until January ),[72] Marx engaged in an intensive study of political economy (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill, etc.), the French socialists (especially Claude Henri St.
Simon and Charles Fourier) and the history of France. The study of, and critique, of political economy is a project that Marx would pursue for the rest of his life[76] and would result in his major economic work—the three-volume series called Das Kapital.[77]Marxism is based in large part on three influences: Hegel's dialectics, French utopian socialism and British political economy.
Together with his earlier study of Hegel's dialectics, the studying that Marx did during this time in Paris meant that all major components of "Marxism" were in place by the autumn of Marx was constantly being pulled away from his critique of political economy—not only by the usual daily demands of the time, but additionally by editing a radical newspaper and later by organising and directing the efforts of a political party during years of potentially revolutionary popular uprisings of the citizenry.
Still, Marx was always drawn back to his studies where he sought "to understand the inner workings of capitalism".
An outline of "Marxism" had definitely formed in the mind of Karl Marx by late Indeed, many features of the Marxist view of the world had been worked out in great detail, but Marx needed to write down all of the details of his world view to further clarify the new critique of political economy in his own mind.[79] Accordingly, Marx wrote The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.[80] These manuscripts covered numerous topics, detailing Marx's concept of alienated labour.[81] By the spring of , his continued study of political economy, capital and capitalism had led Marx to the belief that the new critique of political economy he was espousing—that of scientific socialism—needed to be built on the base of a thoroughly developed materialistic view of the world.
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of had been written between April and August , but soon Marx recognised that the Manuscripts had been influenced by some inconsistent ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach.
Accordingly, Marx recognised the need to break with Feuerbach's philosophy in favour of historical materialism, thus a year later (in April ) after moving from Paris to Brussels, Marx wrote his eleven "Theses on Feuerbach".[83] The "Theses on Feuerbach" are best known for Thesis 11, which states that "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it".[81][84] This work contains Marx's criticism of materialism (for being contemplative), idealism (for reducing practice to theory), and, overall, philosophy (for putting abstract reality above the physical world).[81] It thus introduced the first glimpse at Marx's historical materialism, an argument that the world is changed not by ideas but by actual, physical, material activity and practice.[81][85] In , after receiving a request from the Prussian king, the French government shut down Vorwärts!, with the interior minister, François Guizot, expelling Marx from France.
Brussels: –
Unable either to stay in France or to move to Germany, Marx decided to emigrate to Brussels in Belgium in February However, to stay in Belgium he had to pledge not to publish anything on the subject of contemporary politics.
In Brussels, Marx associated with other exiled socialists from across Europe, including Moses Hess, Karl Heinzen and Joseph Weydemeyer. In April , Engels moved from Barmen in Germany to Brussels to join Marx and the growing cadre of members of the League of the Just now seeking home in Brussels.[87] Later, Mary Burns, Engels' long-time companion, left Manchester, England to join Engels in Brussels.[88]
In mid-July , Marx and Engels left Brussels for England to visit the leaders of the Chartists, a working-class movement in Britain.
This was Marx's first trip to England and Engels was an ideal guide for the trip. Engels had already spent two years living in Manchester from November [89] to August [90] Not only did Engels already know the English language, but he had also developed a close relationship with many Chartist leaders.
Indeed, Engels was serving as a reporter for many Chartist and socialist English newspapers. Marx used the trip as an opportunity to examine the economic resources available for study in various libraries in London and Manchester.
In collaboration with Engels, Marx also set about writing a book which is often seen as his best treatment of the concept of historical materialism, The German Ideology.[93] In this work, Marx broke with Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and the rest of the Young Hegelians, while he also broke with Karl Grün and other "true socialists" whose philosophies were still based in part on "idealism".
In German Ideology, Marx and Engels finally completed their philosophy, which was based solely on materialism as the sole motor force in history.German Ideology is written in a humorously satirical form, but even this satirical form did not save the work from censorship. Like so many other early writings of his, German Ideology would not be published in Marx's lifetime and was published only in [81][95]
After completing German Ideology, Marx turned to a work that was intended to clarify his own position regarding "the theory and tactics" of a truly "revolutionary proletarian movement" operating from the standpoint of a truly "scientific materialist" philosophy.[97] This work was intended to draw a distinction between the utopian socialists and Marx's own scientific socialist philosophy.
Whereas the utopians believed that people must be persuaded one person at a time to join the socialist movement, the way a person must be persuaded to adopt any different belief, Marx knew that people would tend, on most occasions, to act in accordance with their own economic interests, thus appealing to an entire class (the working class in this case) with a broad appeal to the class's best material interest would be the best way to mobilise the broad mass of that class to make a revolution and change society.
This was the intent of the new book that Marx was planning, but to get the manuscript past the government censors he called the book The Poverty of Philosophy ()[98] and offered it as a response to the "petty-bourgeois philosophy" of the French anarchist socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as expressed in his book The Philosophy of Poverty ().
These books laid the foundation for Marx and Engels's most famous work, a political pamphlet that has since come to be commonly known as The Communist Manifesto.
While residing in Brussels in , Marx continued his association with the secret radical organisation League of the Just.
Karl marx sociology biography and history of philosophy: Retrieved 9 March The Cambridge Companion to Marx. Karl Marx [ a ]. First International and Das Kapital.
As noted above, Marx thought the League to be just the sort of radical organisation that was needed to spur the working class of Europe toward the mass movement that would bring about a working-class revolution.[] However, to organise the working class into a mass movement the League had to cease its "secret" or "underground" orientation and operate in the open as a political party.[] Members of the League eventually became persuaded in this regard.
Accordingly, in June the League was reorganised by its membership into a new open "above ground" political society that appealed directly to the working classes. This new open political society was called the Communist League. Both Marx and Engels participated in drawing up the programme and organisational principles of the new Communist League.[]
In late , Marx and Engels began writing what was to become their most famous work– a programme of action for the Communist League.
Biography and history c wright mills Archived from the original on 28 November It is the opium of the people. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. Ledbetter, James ed.Written jointly by Marx and Engels from December to January , The Communist Manifesto was first published on 21 February []The Communist Manifesto laid out the beliefs of the new Communist League. No longer a secret society, the Communist League wanted to make aims and intentions clear to the general public rather than hiding its beliefs as the League of the Just had been doing.
The opening lines of the pamphlet set forth the principal basis of Marxism: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles".[] It goes on to examine the antagonisms that Marx claimed were arising in the clashes of interest between the bourgeoisie (the wealthy capitalist class) and the proletariat (the industrial working class).
Proceeding on from this, the Manifesto presents the argument for why the Communist League, as opposed to other socialist and liberal political parties and groups at the time, was truly acting in the interests of the proletariat to overthrow capitalist society and to replace it with socialism.[]
Later that year, Europe experienced a series of protests, rebellions, and often violent upheavals that became known as the Revolutions of In France, a revolution led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the French Second Republic.
Marx was supportive of such activity and having recently received a substantial inheritance from his father (withheld by his uncle Lionel Philips since his father's death in ) of either 6,[] or 5, francs[] he allegedly used a third of it to arm Belgian workers who were planning revolutionary action.
Although the veracity of these allegations is disputed,[][] the Belgian Ministry of Justice accused Marx of it, subsequently arresting him and he was forced to flee back to France, where with a new republican government in power he believed that he would be safe.[]
Cologne: –
Temporarily settling down in Paris, Marx transferred the Communist League executive headquarters to the city and also set up a German Workers' Club with various German socialists living there.
Hoping to see the revolution spread to Germany, in Marx moved back to Cologne where he began issuing a handbill entitled the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany,[] in which he argued for only four of the ten points of the Communist Manifesto, believing that in Germany at that time the bourgeoisie must overthrow the feudal monarchy and aristocracy before the proletariat could overthrow the bourgeoisie.
On 1 June, Marx started the publication of a daily newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which he helped to finance through his recent inheritance from his father. Designed to put forward news from across Europe with his own Marxist interpretation of events, the newspaper featured Marx as a primary writer and the dominant editorial influence.
Despite contributions by fellow members of the Communist League, according to Friedrich Engels it remained "a simple dictatorship by Marx".[]
Whilst editor of the paper, Marx and the other revolutionary socialists were regularly harassed by the police and Marx was brought to trial on several occasions, facing various allegations including insulting the Chief Public Prosecutor, committing a press misdemeanor and inciting armed rebellion through tax boycotting,[][][] although each time he was acquitted.[][] Meanwhile, the democratic parliament in Prussia collapsed and the king, Frederick William IV, introduced a new cabinet of his reactionary supporters, who implemented counterrevolutionary measures to expunge left-wing and other revolutionary elements from the country.
Consequently, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was soon suppressed, and Marx was ordered to leave the country on 16 May [] Marx returned to Paris, which was then under the grip of both a reactionary counterrevolution and a cholera epidemic, and was soon expelled by the city authorities, who considered him a political threat.
With his wife Jenny expecting their fourth child and with Marx not able to move back to Germany or Belgium, in August he sought refuge in London.[]
Move to London and further writing: –
Marx moved to London in early June and would remain based in the city for the rest of his life. The headquarters of the Communist League also moved to London.
However, in the winter of –, a split within the ranks of the Communist League occurred when a faction within it led by August Willich and Karl Schapper began agitating for an immediate uprising. Willich and Schapper believed that once the Communist League had initiated the uprising, the entire working class from across Europe would rise "spontaneously" to join it, thus creating revolution across Europe.
Marx and Engels protested that such an unplanned uprising on the part of the Communist League was "adventuristic" and would be suicide for the Communist League. Such an uprising as that recommended by the Schapper/Willich group would easily be crushed by the police and the armed forces of the reactionary governments of Europe. Marx maintained that this would spell doom for the Communist League itself, arguing that changes in society are not achieved overnight through the efforts and will power of a handful of men.
They are instead brought about through a scientific analysis of economic conditions of society and by moving toward revolution through different stages of social development. In the present stage of development (circa