Continental · 1818–1883
Karl Marx
German philosopher, economist and revolutionary in London exile
Marx turned Hegel’s dialectic into historical materialism: the way a society produces its means of life shapes its politics and ideas, and capitalism’s class conflict points beyond it.
Life and thought
Karl Marx (1818–1883) was born in Trier, studied law and philosophy in Bonn and Berlin, where he joined the Young Hegelians, and became a radical journalist. Expelled from Paris, Brussels and Cologne in turn, he settled in London in 1849 and spent decades in the British Museum reading room, supported largely by Friedrich Engels, while living through poverty and the deaths of several of his children.
Marx kept Hegel’s idea that history moves through conflict but grounded it in material life: how people produce food, clothing and shelter, and who owns the means of production, shapes law, politics and ideas. In Capital he argued that profit comes from surplus value: workers sell their labour-power for a wage but produce more value than the wage, and the owner keeps the difference. Competition and crises, he predicted, would push capitalism towards its own overthrow. His work inspired socialist movements, revolutions and whole schools of social theory.