Biography of Karl Marx (1818 — 1883)

regime. The Marx family was very liberal and the Marx household hosted many visiting intellectuals and artists during Karl's early life.

Marx received good marks in gymnasium, the Prussian secondary education school. His senior thesis, which anticipated his later development of a social analysis of religion, was a treatise entitled "Religion: The Glue That Binds Society Together", for which he won a prize.

In 1833, Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn to study law. He joined the Trier Tavern Club and at one point served as its president; his grades suffered as he spent most of his time singing songs in beer halls. The next year, his father made him transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat in Berlin (now known as the Humboldt University).

In Berlin, Marx's interests turned to philosophy, much to his father's horror, and he joined the circle of students and young professors known as the "Young Hegelians", led by Bruno Bauer. The Young Hegelians with whom Marx was associated believed that there were still further dialectical changes to come, and that the Prussian society of the time was far from perfect as it still contained pockets of poverty, government censorship was in place, and non-Lutherans suffered from religious discrimination.

Marx was warned not to submit his doctoral dissertation at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat, because it would certainly be poorly received there due to his reputation as a Young Hegelian radical. Marx instead submitted his dissertation, which compared the atomic theories of Democritus and Epicurus, to the University of Jena in 1840, where it was accepted.

When his mentor Bruno Bauer was dismissed from the philosophy faculty in 1842, Marx abandoned philosophy for journalism and went on to edit the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical Cologne newspaper. After the newspaper was shut in 1843, in part due to Marx's conflicts with government censors, Marx returned to philosophy, turned to political activism, and worked as a freelance journalist. Marx soon moved, however, something he would do often as a result of his radical views.

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Marx first moved to France. It was in Paris that he met and began working with his life-long collaborator Friedrich Engels, who called Marx's attention to the situation of the working class and guided Marx's interest in economics. After he was forced to leave Paris for his writings, he and Engels moved to Brussels, Belgium. There they co-wrote The German Ideology, a critique of the philosophy of Hegel and the Young Hegelians. Marx next wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a critique of French socialist thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels" most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21,1848. It was commissioned by the Communist League, an organization of German immigrants whom Marx had met in London.

That year Europe experienced revolutionary upheaval. A workingclass movement took power from King Louis Philippe in France and invited Marx to return to Paris. When this government collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and restarted the Rheinische Zeitung, only to be swiftly expelled again. Marx's final move was to London. In 1852 Marx wrote his famous pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which he analyzed Napoleon Ill's takeover of France. From 1852 to 1861, while in London, Marx contributed to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune as its European correspondent.

Marx published the first volume of Capital in 1867. The remaining two volumes of Capital were never completed by Marx, but were reconstructed by Engels from extensive notes and drafts, and published after Marx's death.

Max was married. Marx's wife, Jenny von Westphalen, came from an aristocratic background. Her uncle was Lion Philips, father of the brothers Gerard and Anton who founded the famous Philips company in 1891. The Marxes had many children, several of whom died young — their daughter Eleanor (1855 — 1898), born in London, was also a committed socialist and helped to edit her father's works. Jenny Marx died in December 1881.

Throughout the London period of Marx's life, his family was generally impoverished and depended on generous contributions from

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