During the mid 19th century, the emergence of new belief systems originated from the Second Industrial Revolution. The new philosophies were in response to the woes that stem from an industrialized society and seek to better it by applying scientific methods. Among the many thinkers of this century was Karl Marx, the father of Communism. To this day, Marx is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers from the 19th century and has played a key role influencing the workers movement and the sociological theories of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5th, 1818 in Trier to Heinrich and Henriette Marx. Marx’s family enjoyed a certain middle-class prosperity , partly because Marx’s father was a respected lawyer and his mother was from a prominent family. Marx’s father, Heinrich, was a key influence for Karl; his father was well-acquainted with enlightenment philosophies and had cultivated deist views. Marx attended the University of Bonn in 1835, where he was heavily involved in the student life and rarely attended lectures. After Marx’s engagement to Jenny von Westphalen, he enrolled in the University of Berlin and became acquainted with G.W.F Hegel’s philosophy. The main goal of Hegel’s political philosophy was its attempt to construct a state based on the study of social and historical
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In the opening section of the Manifesto, Marx states that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” and goes on to lists examples of these classes: “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.” Marx goes on to provide historical evidence of class struggle in ancient Rome and Middle ages and states that the modern bourgeoisie class was created out of the “ruins of feudal