Karl Marx (1818-1883) was both a powerful scholar and a passionate revolutionary. Born in Germany of an upper middle class family, He became a journalist, and his socialist writings would get him expelled from Germany and France. In 1848, he published The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels and was exiled to London, where he wrote the first volume of Das Kapital and lived the remainder of his life.
He entered the University of Bonn at the age of 17 to study law, transffered a year later to the University of Berlin to pursue his growing philosophic interest, and eventually took a doctor of philosophy degree from the university of Jena. The bulk of his intensive scholary writing was done in the Brittish Museum in London, where he had settled in 1849. His revolutionary zeal found expression in various stints as a journalist (his radical ideas having. Cost him the possibility of an academic appointment in a German University).
His writing of the Communist Manifesto (with his close friend and collaborator, Friedrick Engels) for the short lived Communist Leaque of 1848, and his activities with the international Workingmen's Association or ''First International'' bedinning in 1864. Marx suffered for the espousal of his ideas and his life was often hard, sometimes desperate. Indeed, had it not been for the moral and especially financial support of the more comfortably situated Engels it is difficult to see how he could have both survived and written what he did.
The combination of passionate radicalism and sober scholarship is most clearly demonstrated in his writings. A tract like the Communist Manifesto, for example, is filled with ringing denunciation of capitalism (a system of ''naked, shameless, direct brutal exploitation'' and summonses to the working classes for action (''Workers of the World Unite!''). On the other hand, in his monumental theoretical work, Capital, there are stretches of literally hundreds of pages devoted to the most painstakingly minute examination of the economic mechanisms of capitalist society. Marx was extremely well read and his writings include not only the presentation of his own ideas by an exhaustive critique of previous authorities and numerous empirical examples to demonstrate his theses.
Marx worked on his masterpiece for decades, but the task was massive that it was unfinished at his death, only one volume having appeared in his life's time. Marx died of pleurisy in London on March 14, 1883.