How Did The Life Influence Karl Marx's Life

Kieran Nolan

BUS 101

Research Paper

Midterm

The Life and Influence of Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in the city of Trier, Germany. His father was a lawyer who came from a long line of Rabbis. (Karl Marx) To keep his job he had to change his faith to Protestantism. Karl Marx went to the University of Bonn to study law when he was 17 years old. While attending the university he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen. Her father, Baron von Westphalen, influenced Marx to Romantic literature and Saint-Simonian politics. Only a year later, Marx was moved by his father to the University of Berlin where he studied Hegelianism, where he was influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach and other Hegelians. He admired G.W.F. Hegel's beliefs in historical

The liberal group the Cologne Circle published a paper by Marx defending the freedom of the press in their newspaper The Rhenish Gazette (in 1842 he was made the editor of the paper). In Cologne Marx met Moses Hess, a radical who organized socialist meetings, which Marx attended. At these meetings Marx learned of the struggles of the German working-class. Based on the information he gathered from the members present at the meetings, Marx wrote an article on the poverty of the Mosel wine-farmers in which he was highly critical of the government. When the article was published in 1843, the Prussian authorities banned The Rhenish Gazette and threatened Marx with his arrest. Marx married his fiancé and they fled together to Paris. Here he took a position as editor of a political journal called Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (Franco-German Annals) that was designed to connect French socialism and radical Hegelianism. Although the journal only lived as long as one issue, it was a valuable opportunity for Marx. Through it he met his life-long friend Friedrich Engels, a contributor to the journal. Other prominent contributors included his old mentor from Berlin, Bruno Bauer, and the Russian anarchist Michael

He wrote a series of papers known as konomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844), however they were not published until the 1930s. The Manuscripts are influenced by Feuerbach and outline a humanist idea of communism. Marx contrasts capitalist society, and an alienated nature of labor, with communist society, in which human beings in cooperative production develop their nature freely. In 1844 Marx reviewed Bruno Bauer's book On the Jewish Question. More than a review, Marx used the article to critique the continued influence of religion over politics, and propose a revolutionary change to the structure of European