Political Science Resource Blog. International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology: Marx, Karl. This essay first appeared in the International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, edited by Jens Beckert and Milan Zafirovski (London and New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 434-437). It was posted as a Notablog entry on 4 January 2006. Comments welcome (post here). Few thinkers have had as much influenceon the social sciences as the German social theorist Karl Marx (1818–83). His stress upon dialectical analysis – in which society is treated as an historically evolving and systemically interrelated whole – has had a profound impact on political science, economics and sociology.
First and foremost, Marx’s corpus is a structure of interpretive analysis that seeks to explain the historical uniqueness of capitalism. Despite his criticisms of classical politicaleconomy, Marx learned much from the Scottish historical school, which included Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and John Millar – all of whom might be considered early economic sociologists(Meek 1954). Lenin, V. Karl Marx. History - Historic Figures: Karl Marx (1818 - 1883) Karl Marx. 1. Marx’s Life and Works Karl Marx was born in Trier, in the German Rhineland, in 1818. Although his family was Jewish they converted to Christianity so that his father could pursue his career as a lawyer in the face of Prussia’s anti-Jewish laws.
A precocious schoolchild, Marx studied law in Bonn and Berlin, and then wrote a PhD thesis in Philosophy, comparing the views of Democritus and Epicurus. The German Ideology, co-written with Engels in 1845, was also unpublished but this is where we see Marx beginning to develop his theory of history. The works so far mentioned amount only to a small fragment of Marx’s opus, which will eventually run to around 100 large volumes when his collected works are completed. 2. The intellectual climate within which the young Marx worked was dominated by the influence of Hegel, and the reaction to Hegel by a group known as the Young Hegelians, who rejected what they regarded as the conservative implications of Hegel’s work. 2.1 ‘On The Jewish Question’ Marxism and the Social Sciences. This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Maurice Dobb (1900-1976), the foremost Marxian economist of his generation in Britain.
Dobb was for many years a Reader in economics at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Trinity College. He assisted Piero Sraffa in editing David Ricardo’s Works, and was noted for his contributions to value theory, the theory of economic planning, and the analysis of Soviet economic development. (During the 1950s and ’60s he contributed to Monthly Review on four occasions, mostly on socialist economic planning.) His best known work, however, was Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946), an investigation into economic history that was to inspire the famous debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, beginning with Paul Sweezy’s review of the book in Science & Society and the resulting exchange.
—The Editors In the early and middle nineteenth century England and France were particularly influenced by two currents of opinion. Karl Marx. Karl Marx[note 1] (/mɑrks/;[4] German pronunciation: [ˈkaɐ̯l ˈmaɐ̯ks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought.[5][6][7][8] He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867–1894).
Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Trier in the Prussian Rhineland, Marx studied at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. After his studies he wrote for Rheinische Zeitung, a radical newspaper in Cologne, and began to work out the theory of the materialist conception of history. Early life[edit] Childhood and early education: 1818–1835[edit] Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx and Henrietta Pressburg (1788-1863).