Karl Marx was born in 1818 in the small German city of Trier in the Rhineland, then part of Prussia. He died in 1883 in London. His life thus spanned the better part of the nineteenth century, a time of rapid and profound economic, social, and political change in Western Europe and America. Philosophically, Marx can be seen as both the culmination of the tradition of German Idealism and its end. In this latter sense, and because most of his work consists of political, economic, and historical analysis, Marx has been taken as having moved beyond purely philosophical interests and investigations into the empirical realms of the social and historical sciences.

The primary goal of Marx's life and work, of course, was to facilitate the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system and to help give birth to the socialist society that he believed would inevitably follow...