Born to a middle-class Jewish family that later converted to Lutheranism, Marx trained in law and philosophy before turning to radical journalism and economics. With Friedrich Engels, he wrote the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, texts that inspired revolutions and regimes across the globe and made him one of history's most consequential thinkers.
Karl Marx entered the world on May 5, 1818, in the quiet Rhineland town of Trier, the son of a lawyer who converted the family from Judaism to Protestantism to navigate Prussian restrictions on Jewish professionals. Young Marx studied law at Bonn and Berlin but drifted toward Hegelian philosophy, journalism, and increasingly radical politics that made him unemployable and eventually stateless, expelled from Prussia, France, and Belgium in turn.
He settled in London in 1849 with his wife Jenny and a household often on the edge of poverty, dependent on Friedrich Engels's financial support and the deaths of several of his children from illness and malnutrition. In the reading room of the British Museum, he spent decades compiling the research behind Das Kapital, a monumental critique of capitalism's mechanics that he never finished; Engels edited the final volumes from Marx's notes after his death in 1883.
Marx's ideas, filtered and often distorted through Lenin, Mao, and countless revolutionary movements, shaped the political map of the 20th century more than almost any other body of thought, inspiring liberation movements and totalitarian states alike, a legacy he could scarcely have imagined from his cramped Soho lodgings.
Key people: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels