Marx & Engels: Foundations

The most consequential friendship in modern thought

A course on the thought of Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels.

Course outline

1. Two Halves Meet — Paris, 1844. A philosopher with no factory and a factory-man with no philosophy — who first met and disliked each other — strike the alliance of a lifetime.
2. Turning Hegel Over — Brussels, 1845–46. Marx and Engels take the grandest philosophy of the age and stand it on its head: not ideas making history, but the material life of human beings making their ideas.
3. Alienation — Paris, 1844. In manuscripts he never published, the young Marx names the wound at the heart of modern labour: the worker builds the world and is made poorer, and less himself, by the building.
4. A Spectre Haunting Europe — 1848. With Europe about to ignite, Marx and Engels are handed the task of writing a creed for a revolution — and turn out the most famous pamphlet ever printed.
5. The Secret Hidden in Plain Sight — London, the British Museum. Marx asks where profit really comes from if every exchange is fair — and finds the answer in the one commodity that makes more than it costs.
6. The Survivor — 1883. Marx is dead. Engels spends his last decade reconstructing the unfinished Capital and striking out on his own — and the partnership's hidden question finally comes due: was he only the second…

Part of the Symposium course library.