Biography

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, in the Rhineland region of Prussia, the son of a prosperous liberal lawyer. As the timeline alongside this section shows, his intellectual formation followed a fairly conventional path at first -- he studied law and then philosophy at Bonn, Berlin and Jena, coming under the influence of the Young Hegelian philosophers at Berlin -- before his life took a much more unsettled and political turn. After marrying Jenny von Westphalen and moving to Paris in 1843, Marx met Friedrich Engels, who would remain his closest collaborator and friend for the rest of his life; together they wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party for the International Working Men's Association. Marx's radical politics repeatedly got him expelled from the countries he lived in -- Germany, France and Austria -- until he finally settled permanently in England from 1849 onward, where he stayed until his death in 1883, producing his major works, including Capital, from exile. It is worth being precise about what kind of thinker Marx was: although he had studied philosophy, he was not a philosopher in the ivory-tower sense: he saw himself as a social thinker whose analysis of capitalist society was meant to serve a practical end -- exposing its weaknesses in order to help bring about its downfall and replace it with a more equal, non-exploitative society. This is the lens through w …