Marx and Engels Recast Philosophy as the Critique of Capital
History is the history of class struggle, and philosophy's job is to change the world, not just interpret it
Quick facts
- Marx's dates
- 1818-1883
- Communist Manifesto published
- 1848 (with Friedrich Engels)
- Capital, Volume 1 published
- 1867
- Core theory
- Historical materialism
What happened
Karl Marx, born in 1818, and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, and Marx published the first volume of Capital (Das Kapital) in 1867, laying out a theory of historical materialism in which the primary direction of social explanation runs from a society's material conditions of production to its social forms and, in turn, to its forms of consciousness, reversing Hegel's idealist account of history as driven by the development of Spirit. Marx's analysis in Capital begins from the commodity and builds an account of capitalism in which workers experience alienated labor, work that could in principle be creative and fulfilling but is instead organized in ways that estrange workers from what they produce.
Why it matters
Marx's materialist reworking of Hegel's account of history, combined with his critique of capitalism as inherently exploitative, became one of the most consequential bodies of thought in modern history, directly shaping 20th-century political movements and revolutions on a scale matched by few other philosophers.
How we know
The Communist Manifesto and Capital survive in their original 19th-century editions and have been continuously translated, printed, and studied since publication; Marx and Engels's collaboration and the works' composition history are corroborated by their extensive surviving correspondence.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Karl Marx · Reputable sourceplato.stanford.edu · The domain "plato.stanford.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- HISTORY (A&E Networks). Karl Marx · Reputable sourcehistory.com · The domain "history.com" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Part of a timelineHistory of Western Philosophy28 events · From asking what water has to do with everything to arguing about what justice would look like behind a veil of ignoranceView all →