Sociological Theory
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
UMD


MAY 5, 1818 - MARCH 14, 1883


 

Marx, Heinrich (1777-1838):   Lawyer in Trier, Karl Marx's father.
Marx, Henriette (1787-1863):   Karl Marx's mother.
Marx, Henriette (1820-1856):   Karl Marx's sister.
Marx, Louise (1821-1893):   Karl Marx's sister.
Marx, Sophie (181-1883):   Karl Marx's sister.
Marx, Hermann (1819-1842):   Karl Marx's brother.
Marx, Eduard (1824-1837):  Karl Marx's brother.
Marx, Caroline (1824-1847):  Karl Marx's sister.

Marx, Jenny von Westphalen (1814-1881):   Karl Marx's wife.
Marx, Jenny (Jennychen) (1844-1883):   Karl and Jenny Marx's eldest daughter, married to Charles Longuet.
Marx, Laura (1845-l9ll):   Karl and Jenny Marx's daughter who married Paul Lafargue. (committed suicide together 1911)
Marx, Edgar (Musch) (1847-1855):  Karl and Jenny Marx's son who died of tuberculosis.
Marx, Heinrich Guido (Foxchen) (1849-1850):   Karl and Jenny Marx's son, died in infancy.
Marx, Franziska (1851-1852):  Karl and Jenny Marx's daughter, died in infancy.
Marx, Eleanor (Tussy) (1855-1898):  Karl Marx's youngest daughter. Lived with Edward Aveling 1884 (committed suicide in 1898) buried with Marx in about 1956

Helene Demuth, house keeper; son Freddy (Engels told Tussy just before he died that Freddy was not his son, but Karl's)

Karl was Born on May 5, 1818 , in Trier Prussia (Germany) in to a petty-bourgeois Jewish family
converted to Protestantism in 1824.
father was a lawyer.
graduated High School in Trier, entered the university at Bonn at age 17 later in Berlin
studied law, history and philosophy. Wrote poems, 300 page classification of legal concepts, a comic novel, a tragic play, and other things.
doctoral thesis 1841.

Joined young or "Left Hegelians" (with Bruno Bauer) who sought to draw atheistic and revolutionary conclusions from Hegel's philosophy.

Marx moved to Bonn, hoping to be a professor. But Ludwig Feuerbach deprived of his chair in 1832 and in 1841 the government forbade Professor Bruno Bauer to lecture at Bonn and Marx was blacklisted for his radical ideas

1842 radical paper called Rheinische Zeitung
in October 1842 Marx became editor-in-chief and moved from Bonn to Cologne.

government suppressed the paper January 1 1843. Marx was forced to resign the editorship, which suspended publication in March 1843.

In 1843, Marx married.. His wife came from a bourgeois family of the Prussian nobility, her elder brother being Prussia's Minister of the Interior during an extremely reactionary period - 1850-58.

Marx went to Paris in order to publish a radical journal abroad (1843),

September 1844, Frederick Engels came to Paris for a few days, and from that time on became Marx's closest friend.
Marx and Engels wrote - The German Ideology. (A response to Feuerbach's materialism, laying out the ground work for the materialistic conception of history.
Broke from Left Hegelian idealism with a critique against Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, leading to one of Marx's most famous quotes:

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

Marx's disagreement with Proudhon resulted in a trashing of Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty (or Philosophy of Misery), in his Poverty of Philosophy, (1847).

Prussian government pressured France to banish Marx in 1845
Marx moved to Brussels joining the Communist League with Engels in 1847
Marx and Engels were requested to write the league's manifesto, they drew up the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and German Ideology

In 1848 the world looked to be headed toward revolution
Marx was banished from Belgium, returned to Paris,
whence, after the March Revolution, then to Cologne, Germany, where Neue Rheinische Zeitung was published from June 1 1848 to May 19 1849, with Marx as editor-in-chief.
Marx was tried for his involvement in the revolution
he was acquitted on February 9, 1849,
banished from Germany (May 16, 1849).
back to Paris, again banished after the demonstration of June 13, 1849,
moved to London, where he lived until his death.

Marx's life was an extremely difficult economically, Engels constantly had to help financially

Following the downfall of the Paris Commune (1871) – of which Marx gave a clear-cut materialistic analysis of these events in The Civil War In France, 1871 – and the Bakunin cleavage in the International), the organization was moved to U.S.

Marx's health became undermined, it was never very good in his later years.
He continued work to complete Capital, collected a mass of new material and studied a number of languages (Russian, for instance; Marx was fully fluent in German, French, and English)

Marx's wife died on December 2, 1881, and on March 14, 1883, Marx passed away peacefully in his armchair. He lies buried next to his wife at Highgate Cemetery in London, along with Tussy and Helene Demuth.




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