Karl Marx

While studying in Berlin, Marx joined the "Young Hegelians," a group of radicals who used the dialectical methods of G.W.F. Hegel to challenge religion and politics. While Hegel believed history was the unfolding of "Spirit" or ideas, Marx eventually rejected this as "standing on its head." He argued that the way we produce the things we need to survive (food, shelter, tools) forms the real foundation of society.

This shift, known as historical materialism, suggests that the "superstructure" of a culture—its laws, religion, and government—is actually a reflection of its economic base. In Marx's view, you cannot understand a society's values without first understanding who owns the factories and who works the fields.

Marx’s most famous insight is that human history is defined by the conflict between those who own the "means of production" (the bourgeoisie) and those who must sell their labor to survive (the proletariat). In a capitalist system, the bourgeoisie profits by paying workers less than the full value of their labor—a gap Marx identified as "surplus value."

He didn't just see this as unfair; he saw it as unsustainable. He predicted that capitalism would produce internal "tensions"—such as recurring economic crises and the concentration of wealth—that would eventually force the working class to develop "class consciousness." This realization would lead the proletariat to seize power, abolish private property, and establish a classless, communist society.

Marx’s radicalism made him a man without a country. He was expelled from Prussia, France, and Belgium, eventually spending the final 34 years of his life in London. Throughout this period of poverty and statelessness, he relied heavily on Friedrich Engels, a wealthy factory heir who shared his revolutionary goals. Engels was more than a benefactor; he was a collaborator who co-authored The Communist Manifesto and edited the final volumes of Das Kapital after Marx’s death.

While in London, Marx lived a dual life. He spent his days in the British Museum Reading Room conducting an exhaustive autopsy of the capitalist system, and his nights involved in the "First International," an association of workers' parties. Despite his massive intellectual output, he was often in financial ruin, saved only by Engels’ constant checks and his own occasional work as a journalist.

Marx is rarely viewed neutrally; he is cited as one of the three principal architects of modern social science (alongside Durkheim and Weber), yet his name is inextricably linked to the 20th-century regimes that claimed his mantle. Marxism-Leninism became the guiding ideology for revolutions across the globe, leading to the formation of communist states that governed a third of the world's population at their peak.

Modern economists and sociologists still use Marx’s "conflict theory" to analyze inequality, globalization, and the relationship between labor and capital. Even for those who reject his solutions, Marx remains the essential critic of capitalism, correctly identifying its tendency toward boom-and-bust cycles and its power to turn every human relation into a financial transaction.