Pack Thinkers
Portrait of Karl Marx

Long 19th c. · 1818–1883

Who influenced Karl Marx?

Influences and legacy

Turned Hegel on his head: ideas follow material conditions, and history has a class struggle.

Karl Marx was influenced by Democritus, Epicurus, Adam Smith, Georg W. F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach, and went on to influence Mikhail Bakunin, Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor W. Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre and 8 others. That is 19 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.

Read on Wikipedia Portrait: John Jabez Edwin Mayall, Public domain See the whole map

Who was Karl Marx?

Born in Trier in Prussia, Marx took a doctorate in philosophy at Jena in 1841, turned to radical journalism and worked through Hegel and the Young Hegelians, whose ideas he went on to criticise. With Friedrich Engels he wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848); expelled from Germany after the revolutions of that year, he settled in London, where he wrote the Grundrisse and Das Kapital and led the First International.

His theory of historical materialism holds that societies develop through class conflict. Under capitalism that conflict sets the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, against the proletariat, who sell their labour for wages; he predicted capitalism's contradictions would lead to a classless, stateless society. Marxism went on to guide revolutions and states in the 20th century and to shape sociology and heterodox economics.

Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.

Who influenced Karl Marx?

5 direct influences on this map, earliest first.

Who did Karl Marx influence?

14 thinkers on this map draw directly on Karl Marx.

The line of teachers behind Karl Marx

The longest documented line of influence ending at Karl Marx runs 24 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.

  1. Thales of Miletus
  2. Anaximenes of Miletus
  3. Anaxagoras
  4. Socrates
  5. Antisthenes
  6. Diogenes of Sinope
  7. Crates of Thebes
  8. Zeno of Citium
  9. Seneca
  10. Tertullian
  11. Augustine of Hippo
  12. Anselm of Canterbury
  13. Peter Lombard
  14. Thomas Aquinas
  15. René Descartes
  16. Thomas Hobbes
  17. Baruch Spinoza
  18. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
  19. Christian Wolff
  20. Immanuel Kant
  21. Johann Gottlieb Fichte
  22. F. W. J. Schelling
  23. Georg W. F. Hegel
  24. Ludwig Feuerbach
  25. Karl Marx

Two steps away from Karl Marx

Indirect influences

The second generation

Contemporaries of Karl Marx

Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Karl Marx, with no direct line between them.

Karl Marx by the numbers

Direct influences
5
Direct followers
14 — #4 of 279 on this map
Thinkers upstream
92
Thinkers downstream
23
Wikipedia languages
215 — #1 of 47 among 19th-century philosophers
Card rarity
Legendary

Schools and lineages

Questions about Karl Marx

Who influenced Karl Marx?
Democritus, Epicurus, Adam Smith, Georg W. F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach.
Who did Karl Marx influence?
Mikhail Bakunin, Friedrich Engels, Georgi Plekhanov, Max Weber, György Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor W. Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser.
When did Karl Marx live?
1818–1883. The map files Karl Marx under the long 19th century.
How rare is the Karl Marx card?
Wikipedia carries an article on Karl Marx in 215 languages, which makes it a Legendary card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.

More 19th-century philosophers

All 279 thinkers