We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
Capital (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature)
Share Tweet
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About Capital
Product Description Capital by Karl Marx. With an Introduction by Mark G. Spencer, Brock University, Ontario, Canada. This edition includes both Volumes One and Two. Few writers have had a more demonstrable impact on the development of the modern world than has Karl Marx (1818-1883). Born in Trier into a middle-class Jewish family in 1818, by the time of his death in London in 1883, Marx claimed a growing international reputation. Of central importance then and later was his book Das Kapital, or, as it is known to English readers, simply Capital. Volume One of Capital was published in Paris in 1867. This was the only volume published during Marx s lifetime and the only to have come directly from his pen. Volume Two, published in 1884, was based on notes Marx left, but written by his friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). Readers from the nineteenth century to the present have been captivated by the unmistakable power and urgency of this classic of world literature. Marx s critique of the capitalist system is rife with big themes: his theory of surplus value , his discussion of the exploitation of the working class, and his forecast of class conflict on a grand scale. Marx wrote with purpose. As he famously put it, Philosophers have previously tried to explain the world, our task is to change it. About the Author Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a middle class family in Germany on 5 May 1818 and was the son of a successful lawyer. He would go on to become the most influential socialist thinker of the nineteenth century, and although he did not live to see his ideas carried out in his own lifetime his writings formed the basis for modern communism. At the age of seventeen Marx began studying law at the University of Bonn, and while there he met, and became engaged to, Jenny von Westphalen. Due to his poor grades, the following year Marx’s father sent him to the University of Berlin where he continued to study law for four years. Even at a young age, Marx engaged in political activities, and became a member of the Young Hegelian Movement, which included the theologians Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss. The group produced a radical critique of Christianity and opposed the Prussian political system. While at the University of Berlin he wrote his doctoral thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, which he finished in 1841. It was too controversial for the conservative professors at Berlin, so it was submitted to the more liberal University of Jena, who awarded him a PhD based on it. Marx moved into journalism, and in October 1842 became editor of the liberal newspaper Rheinische Zeitung until the Prussian Government forced its closure due to Marx’s articles, the final nail in the coffin for the newspaper being an article Marx wrote in which he strongly criticised the Russian Monarchy, who were then an ally of the Prussian Monarchy. Marx was never someone to let the thoughts of society stop him, even in his social life. He went on to marry Jenny in 1843, which broke three social taboos. Firstly it was a marriage of a daughter from noble background to a man of Jewish origin. Secondly, Marx was from a middle class family and Jenny was upper class, and finally, Marx was a younger man marrying an older woman. After moving to Paris in 1843, he began writing for other radical newspapers, and continued pursuing the socialist agenda, by editing the short lived Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher. This was intended to bridge French socialism and the German Hegelians which Marx had been involved with. Whilst in Paris, Marx also set down his communist views in a series of writings known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, written in 1844 but not published until the 1930s. He also befriended his life-long collaborator, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). Engels’ book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 convinced Marx that the working class would be the agent a
