Karl Marx Essay example

Submitted By sbess95
Words: 2657
Pages: 11
Open Document
I Biography
Karl Marx was born in Prussia on May 5, 1818 at a young age he began exploring sociopolitical theories at university among the Young Hegelians. He became a journalist, and his socialist writings caused him to be expelled from Germany and France. In 1848, he published “The Communist Manifesto” with Friedrich Engels and was exiled to London, this is where he wrote the first volume of “Das Kapital” and lived the remainder of his life
Karl Heinrich Marx was one of nine children born to Heinrich and Henrietta Marx in Trier, Prussia. His father was a successful lawyer who revered Kant and Voltaire, and was a passionate activist for Prussian reform. Although both parents were Jewish with rabbinical ancestry, Karl’s father converted to Christianity in 1816 at the age of 35. This was likely a professional concession in response to an 1815 law banning Jews from high society. He was baptized a Lutheran, rather than a Catholic, which was the predominant faith in Trier, because he “equated Protestantism with intellectual freedom.” When he was 6, Karl was baptized along with the other children, but his mother waited until 1825, after her father died. Marx was an average student. He was educated at home until he was 12 and spent five years, from 1830 to 1835, at the Jesuit high school in Trier, at that time known as the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium. The school’s principal, a friend of Marx’s father, was a liberal and a Kantian and was respected by the people of Rhineland but suspect to authorities. The school was under surveillance and was raided in 1832. In October of 1835, Marx began studying at the University of Bonn. It had a lively and rebellious culture, and Marx enthusiastically took part in student life. In his two semesters there, he was imprisoned for drunkenness and disturbing the peace, incurred debts and participated in a duel. At the end of the year, Marx’s father insisted he enroll in the more serious University of Berlin.

In Berlin, he studied law and philosophy and was introduced to the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, who had been a professor at Berlin until his death in 1831. Marx was not initially enamored with Hegel, but he soon became involved with the Young Hegelians, a radical group of students including Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach, who criticized the political and religious establishments of the day.

In 1836, as he was becoming more politically zealous, Marx was secretly engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, a sought-after woman from a respected family in Trier who was four years his senior. This, along with his increasing radicalism, caused his father angst. In a series of letters, Marx’s father expressed concerns about what he saw as his son’s “demons,” and admonished him for not taking the responsibilities of marriage seriously enough, particularly when his wife-to-be came from a higher class.

Marx did not settle down. He received his doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841, but his radical politics prevented him from procuring a teaching position. He began to work as a journalist, and in 1842, he became the editor of “Rheinische Zeitung”, a liberal newspaper in Cologne. Just one year later, the government ordered the newspaper’s suppression, effective April 1, 1843. Marx resigned on March 18th. Three months later, in June, he finally married Jenny von Westphalen, and in October, they moved to Paris. Paris was the political heart of Europe in 1843. There, along with Arnold Ruge, Marx founded a political journal titled “Deutsch-Französische Jahrbucher” (German-French Annals). Only a single issue was published before philosophical differences between Marx and Ruge resulted in its demise, but in August of 1844, the journal brought Marx together with a contributor, Friedrich Engels, who would become his collaborator and lifelong friend. Together, the two began writing a criticism of the philosophy of Bruno Bauer, a Young Hegelian and former friend of Marx’s. The result of Marx and Engels’s
Show More

Related Documents: Karl Marx Essay example

karl marx Essay

Karl Marx is one of the most reputed philosophers of the 19th Century. Born in 1818 in a middle class family, Marx studied law in Bonn and Berlin and later plunged deeper into the ideas of Hegel and Feurbach (Wheen, 2007). It is after receiving his doctorate in philosophy in 1841 from the University of Jena that he moved with his family to Paris where he became a radical revolutionary communist and teamed up with Friedrich Engels, another radical philosopher of his time. They collectively authored…

Words 2411 - Pages 10

Summary Of Karl Marx

Summary of Chapters 6 and 7 Karl Marx is an influential individual in socialist theory. He felt that capitalism was set up in a way in which it would eventually fail. To study capitalist society, Marx used a method of simplification to study relationships of systems from a historical approach, called historical materialism. He believed the mode of production of a society was the most significant feature in shaping the social configuration. Karl Marx divided the mode of production into two parts…

Words 931 - Pages 4

Karl Marx Essay

PHI2600 7/24/2013 Question 2 Karl Marx What does Marx mean when he says that morality is essentially ideology? For Marx, every human situation have economic basis in it. Weather one realizes it or not, economics principles underlie and become to motives to one’s actions, Marx thinks it’s foolish for people who are not willing to admit to this morality principles that have been formulated by philosophers…

Words 423 - Pages 2

Karl Marx Essay

Karl MarxKarl Marx was an influencell economist during the 1800s. Marx has his own economic theory, called Marxism. Marx, a radical Communist ideas and philosophies played important roles int the forming of Communist nations during the twentieth century. Marx’s ideas would and have influenced the course of history. Even today, well past his death his philosophies and ideas are still talked about. Marx’s ideas are captured in his book the Communist manifesto. Communism is “a theory or system of…

Words 935 - Pages 4

Karl Marx Poverty

While Karl Marx has the right idea for assisting those who are in poverty, he has a detrimental and damaging process for solving the issue of poverty and the wrong idea of what the root cause is. Philosophers must not debate these processes, but act upon them. Philosophers are constantly debating the ideas of Marx, but never truly testing them in the real world. Socialism is an extreme action to the problems that need solving. Not everyone needs to live on the same level in order to keep the poor…

Words 968 - Pages 4

Biography Of Karl Marx

Karl Marx (May 5, 1818- March 14, 1883) Karl Marx is one of the more prominent sociologists in history. He was born in a wealthy middle class family in the Kingdom of Prussia. Karl was born into a Jewish family, but later converted into Christianity so his father can pursue a career in law. During that time, Prussia had strict anti-Jewish laws that barred them from advancement. He attended University of Bonn and University of Berlin, where he started gaining knowledge and eventually started with…

Words 590 - Pages 3

Karl Marx Essay

> Marx argued that his ideas are not dead. Explain why he thinks so. He provided some examples suggesting that his ideas are still applicable to the reality of the US. Provide at least one of these examples. Marx's theories about society, economics and politics, also known as Marxism, say that human societies progress through class struggle. Class struggle is a conflict between an ownership class that controls production and a deprived laboring class that does the labor for production. He called…

Words 379 - Pages 2

Marx: Karl Marx and Theses on Feuerbach Essay

KARL MARX THESES ON FEUERBACH http://www.marx2mao.com/M&E/TF45.html From Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy FOREIGN LANGUAGES PRESS, PEKING 1976 First Edition 1976 pp. 61-65. " . . . a translation . . . of the text of the German edition of 1888. . . ." Prepared © for the Internet by David J. Romagnolo, djr@cruzio.com (January 1998) page 61 KARL MARX: THESES ON FEUERBACH I The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism -- that of Feuerbach…

Words 839 - Pages 4

Karl Marx Essay

Karl Marx Notes on Reading: Class, Power, and Conflict Purpose of reading: offer a comprehensive introduction to current debates in class analysis. What it (attempts to) avoids: Obscure issue of class analysis by unhistorical accounts of stratification (the act or process or arranging persons into classes or social strata) Tendency of authors who have written from NON-MARXIST and/or ANTI-MARXIST position The tendency that either Marx or self-professed ‘Marxist’ have said all there is to (important)…

Words 324 - Pages 2

Karl Marx Vs Durkheim

Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim all lived in a revolutionary era for Capitalism and witnessed its growing as well as some of the problems they associated with its growth. Karl Marx argued that Capitalism created an environment where labor becomes a commodity, one that may exploit, and more likely, one that may be exploited. The division of labor, according to Marx, separated the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This relationship was hierarchal and depended on the passive acceptance from…

Words 261 - Pages 2