- Lived:
- 1818–1883 · Trier, Bonn, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, and — for over thirty years — London
- Tradition:
- German philosophy turned into political economy; historical materialism and the critique of capitalism
- The Big Idea:
- History is driven not by ideas but by how people produce their material life — and the conflicts built into each way of producing it, above all the conflict between classes.
- In their words:
- "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."
- If you remember one thing:
- A broke, stateless scholar in a London reading room wrote an analysis of capitalism so powerful that a century later a third of humanity was governed in his name — and he would have recognized almost none of it.