Term Papers on Karl Heinrich Marx

Term Paper Title	Karl Heinrich Marx
# of Words	1382
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	5.53

Karl Heinrich Marx

The philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx, was without a doubt the most influential socialist thinker to arise in the 19th century.  Even though throughout his lifetime he was largely ignored by scholars, his social, economic and political ideas were eventually accepted in the socialist movement after his death in 1883.

Karl Heinrich Marx was born in a middle-class home in Trier, which was then known as Prussia on the river Moselle in Germany on May 5, 1818.  He came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of his family and his father.  His father agreed to baptism as a Protestant so that he wouldn’t lose his job as one of the most respected lawyers in Trier.  At the age of seventeen, Marx enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn.  At Bonn he met and became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of Baron Von Westphalen , an important member of Trier society, and man responsible for interesting Marx in Romantic literature and Saint-Simonian politics. The following year Marx's father sent him to the more serious University of Berlin where he remained four years, at which time he abandoned his romanticism for the Hegelianism which ruled in Berlin at the time.
Marx became a member of the Young Hegelian movement. This group, which included the theologians Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss, produced a critique of Christianity and, the liberal opposition to the Prussian autocracy.  After finding the university career that he wanted, it was closed by the Prussian government.  Marx moved into journalism and, in October 1842, became editor, in Cologne, of the influential Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper backed up by industrialists.  Marx's articles, mainly those on economic questions, forced the Prussian government to close the paper. Marx then immigrated to France.

Arriving in Paris at the end of 1843, Marx quickly made contact with organized groups of émigré German workers and with various French socialists.  During his first few months in Paris, Marx became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts which were done in 1844.  These weren’t published until 1930.  Marx outlined a humanist conception of communism that was based on differences between the nature of labor under capitalism and a communist society.  It was also in Paris that Marx developed his lifelong partnership with Friedrich Engels which lived from 1820 to 1895.

Marx was kicked out of Paris at the end of 1844 with Engels, he then moved to Brussels where he lived for the next three years, he visited England where Engels' family had cotton spinning interests in Manchester.  While in Brussels Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated what came to be known as the materialist conception of history.  He then wrote a manuscript of which the basic idea was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions that determined their production."  Marx traced the history of the many modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present one (industrial capitalism) and its replacement by communism.
At the same time Marx wrote The German Ideology, and also joined the Communist League.  This was an organization of German émigré workers with its center in London of which Marx and Engels became the major theoreticians.  At a conference League in London at the end of 1847 Marx and Engels were selected to write a declaration of their position.  Right before The Communist Manifesto published the 1848 wave of revolutions broke out in Europe.
Early in 1848 Marx moved back to Paris with the revolution that broke out and onto Germany.  The Nee Rheinische Setting was the paper that supported a radical democratic line against the Prussian autocracy, and Marx devoted himself to its editorship since the Communist League had been disbanded.  Marx's paper was unspoken of and he sought refuge in London in May 1849 to begin the "long, sleepless night of exile" that was to l...

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