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Karl Marx

Karl Marx

:This article is about the German political philosopher Karl Marx, for other uses of Marx, see Marx (disambiguation) Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883 London, England) was an influential philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer of the International Workingmen's Association. While Marx addressed a wide range of issues, he is most famous for his analysis of history in terms of class struggles, summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle."

Biography

Early life

Karl Marx was born into a progressive and wealthy Jewish family in Trier, Prussia. His father Herschel, descending from a long line of rabbis, although harboring many deistic tendencies, converted to the Christian religion, joining the relatively liberal Lutheran denomination, in order to become a lawyer. The Marx household hosted many visiting intellectuals and artists during Karl's early life.

Education

In 1835 Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn to study law, where he joined the Trier Tavern Club and at one point served as its president; his grades suffered as a result. The following year, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. During his stead, Marx wrote much poetry and essays concerning life, using the theological language acquired from his liberal, deistic father, such as "the Deity." It was during this period that he absorbed the atheistic philosophy of the left-Hegelians.

Marx and the Young Hegelians

In Berlin, Marx's interests turned to philosophy, and he joined the circle of students and young professors known as the "Young Hegelians". For many of them, the so-called left-Hegelians, Hegel's dialectical method, separated from its theological content, provided a powerful weapon for the critique of established religion and politics. Some members of this circle drew an analogy between post-Aristotelian philosophy and post-Hegelian philosophy. Another Young Hegelian, Max Stirner, applied Hegelian criticism and argued that stopping anywhere short of nihilistic egoism was mysticism. His views were not accepted by most of his colleages; nevertheless, Stirner's book was the main reason Marx abandoned the Feuerbachian view and developed the basic concept of historical materialism.

Career

When his mentor, Bruno Bauer, was dismissed from Friedrich-Wilhelms' philosophy faculty in 1842, Marx abandoned philosophy for journalism and went on to edit the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical Cologne newspaper. After the newspaper was shut in 1843, in part due to Marx's conflicts with government censors, Marx returned to philosophy, turned to political activism, and made his living as a freelance journalist. Marx was soon forced to move, something he would do often as a result of his views. Marx first moved to France, where he re-evaluated his relationship with Bauer and the Young Hegelians, and wrote On the Jewish Question, mostly a critique of current notions of civil rights and political emancipation that also includes several offensive references to Judaism and Jewish culture. It was in Paris that he met and began working with his life-long close friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, a committed Communist, who kindled Marx's interest in the situation of the working class and guided Marx's interest in economics. After he was forced to leave Paris for his writings, Marx and Engels moved to Brussels, Belgium. There they co-wrote The German Ideology, a scathing criticism of the philosophy of Bruno Bauer, Hegel and the Young Hegelians. Marx next wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a critique of French socialist thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21, 1848, which was commissioned by the Communist League (formerly, the League of the Just), an organization of German émigrés whom Marx had converted in London. That year Europe experienced revolutionary upheaval; a working-class movement seized power from King Louis Philippe in France and invited Marx to return to Paris. When this government collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and restarted the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, only to be swiftly expelled again. In 1864 Marx organized the International Workingmen's Association, later called the First International, as a base for continued political activism. In his inaugural address, he purported to quote Gladstone's speech, to the effect that, "This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property." He repeated the citation in Volume 1 of Capital. The discrepancy between Marx's quote and the Hansard version of the speech (which was well-known) was soon employed in an attempt to discredit the International. Marx attempted to rebut the accusations of dishonesty, but the allegation continued to resurface. Marx later gave as his source the newspaper The Morning Star. Engels devoted a good deal of attention to the affair in the preface to the fourth edition of Capital — which, likewise, did not put the matter to rest. Engels claimed that it was not The Morning Star but The Times that Marx was following. Indeed, modern critics of Marx continue to invoke Marx's supposed misquotation as evidence of general dishonesty.

Family life

Karl Marx's engagement to Jenny von Westphalen, an aristocrat, was kept secret at first, and for several years was opposed by both the Marxes and Westphalens. Jenny and Karl had many children, several of whom died young. Their daughter Eleanor (1855-1898), who was born in London, was a committed socialist who helped edit her father's works.

Later life

Marx was generally impoverished during the later period of his life, depending on financial contributions from close friend and fellow author, Friedrich Engels, to help with his family's living expenses and debts. Following the death of his wife Jenny in 1881, Marx died in London in 1883, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London. The message carved on Marx's tombstone – a monument built in 1954 by the British Communist Party – is: "Workers of all lands, unite". Marx's original tomb was humbly adorned.

Influences on Marx's thought

Marx's thought was strongly influenced by:
- The dialectical historicism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel;
- The classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo;
- French socialist and sociological thought, in particular the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Marx believed that he could study history and society scientifically and discern tendencies of history and the resulting outcome of social conflicts. Some followers of Marx concluded, therefore, that a communist revolution is inevitable. However, Marx famously asserted that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it", and he clearly dedicated himself to trying to alter the world. Consequently, most followers of Marx are not fatalists, but activists who believe that revolutionaries must organize social change. social change Marx's view of history, which came to be called the materialist interpretation of history (and which was developed further as the philosophy of dialectical materialism) is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically, through a clash of opposing forces. Hegel believed that the direction of human history is characterized in the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was also a movement towards greater and greater rationality). Sometimes, Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps — episodal upheavals against the existing status quo. For example, Hegel strongly opposed the ancient institution of legal slavery that was practiced in the United States during his lifetime, and he envisioned a time when Christian nations would radically eliminate it from their civilization. While Marx accepted this broad conception of history, Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that it was necessary to set it upon its feet. (Hegel's philosophy remained and remains in direct opposition to Marxism on this key point.) Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which rejected Hegel's idealism was greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that God is really a creation of man and that the qualities people attribute to God are really qualities of humanity. Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the material world that is real and that our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of the world. Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx distinguished between appearances and reality. But he did not believe that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideologies prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly. The other important contribution to Marx's revision of Hegelianism was Engels' book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, which led Marx to conceive of the historical dialectic in terms of class conflict and to see the modern working class as the most progressive force for revolution.

Marx's philosophy

As the American Marx scholar Hal Draper remarked, there are few thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike. Indeed, shortly before his death, Marx himself said, in response to so-called 'marxists' who supported reform instead of revolution, something to the effect of "if that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist". Subsequently, the merger of Marxist thought with Leninism, forming the official state ideology (Marxism-Leninism) of the Soviet bloc, arguably departed further from Marx's own beliefs and analyses. However, following the 1989-91 collapse of the Soviet bloc there has been a return by non-Marxists to Marx's own writing, in particular for insights in his analysis of capitalism that are still relevant today. The notion of labour is fundamental in Marx's thought. Basically, Marx argued that it is human nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation "labour" and the capacity to transform nature labour power. For Marx, this is a natural capacity for a physical activity, but it is intimately tied to the human mind and human imagination: :A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 7, Pt. 1) Karl Marx inherits that Hegelian dialectic and, with it, a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant human nature. Sometimes Marxists express their views by contrasting “nature” with “history”. Sometimes they use the phrase “existence precedes consciousness”. The point, in either case, is that who a person is, is determined by where and when he is — social context takes precedence over innate behavior; or, in other words, one of the main features of human nature is adaptability. Marx did not believe that all people worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual. Instead, he argued that work is a social activity and that the conditions and forms under and through which people work are socially determined and change over time. Marx's analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means / forces of production, literally those things, such as land, natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the relations of production, in other words, the social and technical relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together these comprise the mode of production; Marx observed that within any given society the mode of production changes, and that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. In general, Marx believed that the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production (for example, we develop a new technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we develop laws to regulate that technology). For Marx this mismatch between (economic) base and (social) superstructure is a major source of social disruption and conflict. Marx understood the "social relations of production" to comprise not only relations among individuals, but between or among groups of people, or classes. As a scientist and materialist, Marx did not understand classes as purely subjective (in other words, groups of people who consciously identified with one another). He sought to define classes in terms of objective criteria, such as their access to resources. For Marx, different classes have divergent interests, which is another source of social disruption and conflict. Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labour-power. Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labour — one's capacity to transform the world — is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among people. Under capitalism, social relationships of production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including labor, that are bought and sold on the market. Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false consciousness, which is closely related to the understanding of ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which are presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded form some truth about political relations. For example, although the belief that the things people produce are actually more productive than the people who produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect the fact (according to Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own labour-power. Another example of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: :Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function as a way of expressing and coping with social inequality, thereby maintaining the status quo.

Critique of capitalism

Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity — when peasants became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land or tools necessary to produce. People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they are not selling the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor power they receive money, which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor power to live are "proletarians." The person who buys the labor power, generally someone who does own the land and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeois." (Marx considered this an objective description of capitalism, distinct from any one of a variety of ideological claims of or about capitalism). The proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists. Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists. Merchants buy goods in one place and sell them in another; more precisely, they buy things in one market and sell them in another. Since the laws of supply and demand operate within given markets, there is often a difference between the price of a commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then, practice arbitrage, and hope to capture the difference between these two markets. According to Marx, capitalists, on the other hand, take advantage of the difference between the labor market and the market for whatever commodity is produced by the capitalist. Marx observed that in practically every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices. Marx called the difference "surplus value" and argued that this surplus value had its source in surplus labour. The capitalist mode of production is capable of tremendous growth because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies. Marx considered the capitalist class to be the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly revolutionized the means of production. But Marx argued that capitalism was prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies, and less and less in labor. Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labor is the source of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate of profit falls below a certain point, the result would be a recession or depression in which certain sectors of the economy would collapse. Marx understood that during such a crisis the price of labor would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth of new sectors of the economy. Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of this process was necessarily the enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution would in general be required, because the ruling class would not give up power without violence. He theorized that to establish the socialist system, a dictatorship of the proletariat - a period where the needs of the working-class, not of capital, will be the common deciding factor - must be created on a temporary basis. As he wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program", "between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm]

Critique of bourgeois democracy and of anti-Semitism

Some scholars have presented an alternative reading of Marx, primarily based on his essay On the Jewish Question. Economist Tyler Cowen, historian Marvin Perry, and political scientist Joshua Muravchik have suggested that what they see as an intense hatred for the "Jewish Class" was part of Marx's belief that if he could convince his contemporaries and the public to hate Jewish capitalists, the public would eventually come to dislike non-Jewish capitalists as well. Most scholars reject this claim for two reasons: first, it is based on two short essays written in the 1840s, and ignores the bulk of Marx's analysis of capitalism written in the following years. Second, it distorts the argument of On the Jewish Question, in which Marx deconstructs liberal notions of emancipation. During the Enlightenment, philosophers and political theorists argued that religious authority had been oppressing human beings, and that religion must be separated from the functions of the state for people to be truly free. Following the French Revolution, many people were thus calling for the emancipation of the Jews. At the same time, many argued that Christianity is a more enlightened and advanced religion than Judaism. For example, Marx's former mentor, Bruno Bauer, allegedly argued that Christians need to be emancipated only once (from Christianity), and Jews need to be emancipated twice — first from Judaism (presumably, by converting to Christianity), then from religion altogether. Marx rejects Bauer's argument as a form of Christian ethnocentrism, if not anti-Semitic. Marx proceeds to turn Bauer's language, and the rhetoric of anti-Semites, upside down to make a more progressive argument. First, he points out that Bruno Bauer's argument is too parochial because it considers Christianity to be more evolved than Judaism, and because it narrowly defines the problem that requires emancipation to be religion. Marx instead argues that the issue is not religion, but capitalism. Pointing out that anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews are fundamentally anti-capitalist, Marx provides a theory of anti-Semitism by suggesting that anti-Semites scapegoat Jews for capitalism because too many non-Jews benefit from, or are invested in capitalism, to attack capitalism directly. Marx also uses this rhetoric ironically to develop his critique of bourgeois notions of emancipation. Marx points out that the bourgeois notion of freedom is predicated on choice (in politics, through elections; in the economy, through the market), but that this form of freedom is anti-social and alienating. Although Bauer and other liberals believe that emancipation means freedom to choose, Marx argues that this is at best a very narrow notion of freedom. Thus, what Bauer believes would be the emancipation of the Jews is for Marx actually alienation, not emancipation. After explaining that he is not referring to real Jews or to the Jewish religion, Marx appropriates this anti-Semitic rhetoric against itself (in a way that parallels his Hegelian argument that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction) by using "Judaism" ironically as a metaphor for capitalism. In this sense, Marx states, all Europeans are "Jewish". This is a pun on two levels. First, if the Jews must be emancipated, Marx is saying that all Europeans must be emancipated. Second, if by "Judaism" one really means "capitalism," then far from Jews needing to be emancipated from Christianity (as Bauer called for), Christians need to be emancipated from Judaism (meaning, bourgeois society). See: works by historian Hal Draper and David McLellan.

Marx's influence

See also: Marxism Marxism Marx and Engels' work covers a wide range of topics and presents a complex analysis of history and society in terms of class relations. Followers of Marx and Engels have drawn on this work to propose a political and economic philosophy dubbed Marxism. Nevertheless, there have been numerous debates among Marxists over how to interpret Marx's writings and how to apply his concepts to current events and conditions (and it is important to distinguish between "Marxism" and "what Marx believed"; for example, shortly before he died in 1883, Marx wrote a letter to the French workers' leader Jules Guesde, and to Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue, accusing them of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and of denying the value of reformist struggles; "if that is Marxism" — paraphrasing what Marx wrote — "then I am not a Marxist"). Essentially, people use the word "Marxist" to describe those who rely on Marx's conceptual language (e.g. mode of production, class, commodity fetishism) to understand capitalist and other societies, or to describe those who believe that a workers' revolution is the only means to a communist society. The clash between Marx's own theoretical framework and the umbrella term "Marxist" is often misconstrued, a prime example being the bias placed against studying Marx’s writings during the Cold War period in American academic institutions. Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others founded the "Second International" as a base for continued political activism. This organization collapsed in 1914, in part because some members turned to Edward Bernstein's "evolutionary" socialism, and in part because of divisions precipitated by World War I. World War I also led to the Russian Revolution and the consequent ascendance of Vladimir Lenin's leadership of the communist movement, embodied in the "Third International". Lenin claimed to be both the philosophical and political heir to Marx, and developed a political program, called Leninism or Bolshevism, which called for revolution organized and led by a centrally organized Communist Party. After Lenin's death, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, rose to a position of immense power in the Party and state apparatus. He argued that before a world-wide communist revolution would be possible, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had to dedicate itself to building communism in its own country. It was Stalin's Soviet Union and its policies that undermined the concept of Marxism in the Western world, where, for many years, especially during the Cold War period, it was popularly equated with the system in the USSR - which in turn was understood as a political totalitarianism disregarding civil rights. In 1929, Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union and in 1938 founded the competing "Fourth International." Some followers of Trotsky argued that Stalin had created a bureaucratic state rather than a socialist state. Marx believed that the communist revolution would take place in advanced industrial societies such as France, Germany and England, but Lenin argued that in the age of imperialism, and due to the "law of uneven development", where Russia had on the one hand, an antiquated agricultural society, but on the other hand, some of the most up-to-date industrial concerns, the "chain" might break at its weakest points, that is, in the so-called "backward" countries. In China Mao Zedong also claimed to be an heir to Marx, but argued that peasants and not just workers could play a leading role in a Communist revolution. This was a departure from Marx and Lenin's view of revolution, which maintained that the proletariat must have the leading role. Marxism-Leninism as espoused by Mao came to be internationally known as Maoism. Maoism In the 1920s and '30s, a group of dissident Marxists founded the Institute for Social Research in Germany, among them Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. As a group, these authors are often called the Frankfurt School. Their work is known as Critical Theory, a type of Marxist philosophy and cultural criticism heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, and Max Weber. The Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists, including Lenin and Bolshevism in several key ways. First, writing at the time of the ascendance of Stalinism and Fascism, they had grave doubts as to the traditional Marxist concept of proletarian class consciousness. Second, unlike earlier Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejected economic determinism. While highly influential, their work has been criticized by both orthodox Marxists and some Marxists involved in political practice for divorcing Marxist theory from practical struggle and turning Marxism into a purely academic enterprise. Other influential non-Bolshevik Marxists at that time include Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci, who along with the Frankfurt School are often known by the term Western Marxism. Henryk Grossman, who elaborated the mathematical basis of Marx's 'law of capitalist breakdown', was another affiliate of the Frankfurt School. Also prominent during this period was the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. In 1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded Monthly Review, a journal and press, to provide an outlet for Marxist thought in the United States independent of the Communist Party. In 1978, G. A. Cohen attempted to defend Marx's thought as a coherent and scientific theory of history by reconstructing it through the lens of analytic philosophy. This gave birth to Analytical Marxism, an academic movement which also included Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski and John Roemer. Bertell Ollman is another Anglophone champion of Marx within the academy. Marx was ranked #27 on Michael H. Hart's list of the most influential figures in history. In July 2005 Marx was the surprise winner of the 'Greatest Philosopher of All Time' poll by listeners of BBC Radio 4.[http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1530250,00.html]

Criticisms

Many proponents of capitalism have argued that capitalism is a more effective means of generating and redistributing wealth than socialism or communism, and that the gulf between rich and poor that concerned Marx and Engels was a temporary phenomenon. Some suggest that greed and the need to acquire capital is an inherent component of human behavior, and is not caused by the adoption of capitalism or any other specific economic system (although economic anthropologists have questioned this assertion) and that different economic systems reflect different social responses to this fact. The Austrian School of economics has criticized Marx's use of the labor theory of value. In addition, the political repression and economic problems of several historical socialist states have done much to destroy Marx's reputation in the Western world, particularly following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Marx has also been criticized from the Left. Evolutionary socialists and social democrats reject his claim that socialism can be accomplished only through class conflict and violent revolution. Others argue that class is not the most fundamental inequality in history and call attention to patriarchy or race. However, Marxists argue that these inequalities are linked to class and therefore will largely cease to exist after the formation of a classless society. Some today question the theoretical and historical validity of "class" as an analytic construct or as a political actor. In this line, some question Marx's reliance on 19th century notions that linked science with the idea of "progress" (see social evolution). Many observe that capitalism has changed much since Marx's time, and that class differences and relationships are much more complex — citing as one example the fact that much corporate stock in the United States is owned by workers through pension funds (Even though it is widely known that the top 1% of wage earners own more than 50% of the nation's publicly traded company stocks). Still others criticize Marx from the perspective of philosophy of science. Karl Popper has criticized Marx's theories as he believed they were not falsifiable, which he argued would render some particular aspects of Marx’s historical and socio-political arguments unscientific. Primarily, this stems from Marx's assertion that class revolt will be part of the process in overcoming capitalism. The argument goes that the critic says "this will not happen" to which the reply is "but it will." However it has been argued that such statements show a simplistic understanding or a deliberate misinterpretation, because the reply has no basis in what Marx actually said. A common critique of Marx points out that the increasing class antagonisms he predicted never actually developed in the Western world following industrialization. While socioeconomic gaps between the bourgeoisie and proletariat remained, industrialization in countries such as the United States and Great Britain also saw the rise of a middle class not inclined to violent revolution, and of a welfare state that helped contain any revolutionary tendencies among the working class. While the economic devastation of the Great Depression broadened the appeal of Marxism in the developed world, future government safeguards and economic recovery led to a decline in its influence. In contrast, Marxism remained extremely influential in feudal and industrially underdeveloped societies such as Czarist Russia, where the Bolshevik Revolution was successful. [http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.10009,filter.all/pub_detail.asp] Marxist political parties and movements have significantly declined since the fall of the Soviet Union. Critics argue that the Soviet Union's numerous internal failings and subsequent collapse were a direct result of the practical failings of Marxism, but modern-day Marxists, especially Trotskyists, respond to this by pointing out that the Soviet Union's political system did not actually resemble true socialism at all. Marx analyzed the world of his day and refused to draw up plans of how a future socialist society should be run saying he did not "write recipes...for cook-shops of the future." Outside Europe and the United States, communism has generally been superseded by anti-colonialist and nationalist struggles which sometimes appeal to Marx for theoretical support. In India, the southern province of Kerala was the first in the world to elect a coalition of communist parties (see Communist Party of India) to power at the state level, in 1957. In the eastern state of West Bengal a coalition of Communist parties led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has been democratically elected to power at the provincial level continuously since 1977. Contemporary supporters of Marx argue most generally that Marx was correct that human behavior reflects determinate historical and social conditions (and is therefore changing and can not be understood in terms of some universal "human nature"). More specifically, they argue his analysis of commodities is still useful and that alienation is still a problem.

References


- Stephen Jay Gould, [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_7_108/ai_55698600/pg_1 A Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral - E. Ray Lankester], Page 1, [http://www.findarticles.com/ Find Articles.com] (1999). (Marx's tomb)
- Daniel Little, The Scientific Marx, University of Minnesota Press (1986), trade paperback, 244 pages, ISBN 0816615055 (Marx's work considered as science)
- Duncan, Ronald, with Wilson, Colin, (editors) Marx Refuted, Bath, U.K.,(1987) ISBN 0906798-71-X
- David McLellen, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought
- Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution (4 volumes). Monthly Review Press.
- Boris Nicolaevski & Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter. Penguin books.
- Francis Wheen, Karl Marx, Fourth Estate (1999), ISBN 1857026373 (biography of Marx)
- Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment by Isaiah Berlin

See also


- Friedrich Engels
- Karl-Marx-House
- Marxism
- Class struggle
- historical materialism
- Das Kapital
- The Frankfurt School
- History of socialism
- Young Marx
- Mature Marx
- Marx Myths & Legends

External links

Bibliography and online texts


- Marx and Engels Internet Archive [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/]
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/ Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right] (1843)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/ On the Jewish Question] (1843)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/ Notes on James Mill] (1844)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844] (1844)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm Theses on Feuerbach] (1845)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ The German Ideology] [with Engels] (1845-46)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ The Poverty of Philosophy] (1846-47)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ Wage-Labour and Capital] (1847)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ Manifesto of the Communist Party] [with Engels] (1847-48)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte] (1852)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ Grundrisse] (1857-58)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] (1859)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/us-civil-war/index.htm Writings on the U.S. Civil War] [with Engels; compiled] (1861)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ Theories of Surplus Value, 3 volumes] (1862)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ Value, Price and Profit] (1865)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm Capital vol. 1] (1867)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ The Civil War in France] (1871)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ Critique of the Gotha Programme] (1875)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/01/wagner.htm Notes on Wagner] (1883)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/volume36/ Capital, vol. 2] [posthumously, by Engels] (1893)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ Capital, vol. 3] [posthumously, by Engels] (1894)
  - [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/letters/index.htm Letters] [with Engels; compiled] (1833-95)
  - Ethnological Notebooks — ISBN 9023209249 (1879-80)
-
- [http://www.sicetnon.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=PagEd&file=index&topic_id=2&page_id=77 "The Reality Behind Commodity Fetishism" (in English)] at [http://www.sicetnon.org/index.php Sic et Non (in German)]
- [http://libcom.org/library/karl-marx Libertarian Communist Library Karl Marx Archive]

Biographies


- Vladimir Lenin's [http://welshcommunists.co.uk/karl.htm Karl Marx Biography]
- Franz Mehring's [http://www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1918/marx/ch01.htm Karl Marx: The Story of His Life]
- Francis Wheen's [http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj85/morgan.htm The Man Behind the Mask]
- [http://www.tutor2u.net/newsmanager/templates/?a=812&z=58 Student-focused biography of Marx]

Portraits


- [http://www.iisg.nl/collections/marx/ Portraits of Karl Marx]

Encyclopedia entries


- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry]
- [http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/19xx/marx/ Ernest Mandel, Karl Marx (New Palgrave article)] Marx, Karl Marx, Karl
-
- Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Category:Humanists Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl ko:카를 마르크스 ms:Karl Marx zh-min-nan:Karl Marx ja:カール・マルクス simple:Karl Marx th:คาร์ล มาร์กซ

Marx (disambiguation)

Marx is a common German surname. It may refer to:
- Karl Marx, German political philosopher (1818–1883)
  - see also Marxism
- Eleanor Marx, politically active daughter of Karl Marx
- Wilhelm Marx, German politician and Chancellor (1863–1946)
- The Marx Brothers, comedy actors
  - Groucho (Julius Henry Marx, 1890–1977)
  - Chico (Leonard Marx, 1887–1961)
  - Harpo (Adolph Arthur Marx, 1888–1964)
  - Zeppo (Herbert Marx, 1901–1979)
  - Gummo (Milton Marx, 1892–1977)
- Louis Marx and Company, American toy manufacturer
- Joseph Marx, Austrian composer (1882–1964)
- Richard Marx, pop singer
- Maarten Marx, Dutch logician Places named Marx:
- Karl-Marx-Haus at Trier, where Karl Marx was born
- Karl-Marx-Stadt, temporary name of Chemnitz, Germany
- Karl-Marx-Allee, avenue in Berlin
- Karl-Marx-Hof, large residential building in Vienna, Austria
- Sankt Marx, a neighbourhood in Landstraße, Vienna, Austria, famous for slaughterhouses and for
  - St. Marx cemetery, where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was buried
- Marx (Russia), a town in Saratov Oblast

1818

1818 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar.

Events


- January 3 21:52 UTC - Venus occulted Jupiter. It was the last occultation of a planet by an other planet before November 22nd, 2065. Unfortunately no observation reports from this event visible in the Pacific area are known.
- February 12 - Chile gains its independence from Spain
- March 11 - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is published
- March 22 - Easter Sunday falls on its earliest possible date. The next time Easter will fall this early: 2285.
- April 4 - The U.S. Congress adopts the flag of the United States as having 13 red and white stripes and one star for each state (20 stars) with additional stars to be added whenever a new state is added to the Union.
- September 7 - Carl III of Sweden-Norway is crowned king of Norway, in Trondheim.
- October 20 - A convention between the U.S. and the United Kingdom establishes the northern boundary as the forty-ninth parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, also creating the Northwest Angle
- November 11 Establishment of Anglo-Chinese College
- December 3 - Illinois is admitted as the 21st U.S. state.
- December 24 - "Silent Night" composed by Franz Xaver Gruber and vicar Joseph Mohn when the church organs fail
- December 25 - The first performance of "Silent Night" (Church of St. Nikolaus in Oberndorf, Austria).
- Karl XIV Johan becomes King of Sweden.
- Anglo-Chinese College founded by Robert Morrison in Malacca.
- Lord Hastings, governor-general of India, gives approval to Sir Stamford Raffles to establish trading station at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula (modern-day Singapore)

Births


- April 8 - King Christian IX of Denmark (d. 1906)
- April 29 - Emperor Alexander II of Russia (d. 1881)
- May 5 - Karl Marx, German political philosopher (d. 1883)
- June 17 - Charles Gounod, French composer (d. 1893)
- July 30 - Emily Brontë, British novelist (d. 1848)
- September 27 - Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe, German chemist (d. 1884)
- October 8 - John Henninger Reagan, American Confederate politician (d. 1905)
- October 18 - Edward Ord, U.S. Army officer (d. 1883)
- November 9 (October 28 (O.S.)) - Ivan Turgenev, Russian writer (d. 1883)
- November 29 - George Brown, Canadian polititian (d. 1880)
- December 13 - Mary Todd Lincoln, First Lady of the United States (d. 1882)
- December 24 - James Prescott Joule, British physicist (d. 1889)
- Frederick Douglass, American abolitionist author and statesman (d. 1895)
- Angelo Secchi, Italian astronomer (d. 1878)

Deaths


- February 5 - Charles XIII/Charles II, King of Sweden and Norway (b.1748)
- February 15 - Friedrich Ludwig, Fürst zu Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, Prussian general (b. 1746)
- March 4 - Johann David Wyss, Swiss author (b. 1743)
- May 10 - Paul Revere, American patriot and silversmith (b. 1735)
- October 28 - Abigail Adams, First Lady of the United States (b. 1744)
- October 28 - Henry Jacques Guillaume Clarke, duc de Feltre, French marshal and politician (b. 1765)
- November 17 - Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, queen of George III of the United Kingdom (b. 1744) Category:1818 ko:1818년 ms:1818

Trier

Trier (French: Trèves, Spanish: Treveris, Italian: Treviri) is Germany's oldest city. It is situated on the western bank of the Moselle River in a valley between low vine-covered hills of ruddy sandstone. It is located in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate near the German border with Luxembourg. Trier had around 100,000 inhabitants at the end of 2002. There is also an important wine-growing-region nearby: Mosel-Saar-Ruwer.

History

Mosel-Saar-Ruwer] The Romans under Julius Caesar subdued the Celtic Treverans in 58 to 50 BC. When the Roman provinces in Germany were reorganised in 16 BC, Augustus decided that Trier, then called Augusta Treverorum, should become the regional capital. From 259 to 274 Trier was the capital of the break away Gallic Empire. Later for a few years (383 - 388) it was the capital of Magnus Maximus, who ruled most of the western Empire. Magnus Maximus Sacked by Attila in 451, it passed to the Franks in 463, to Lorraine in 843, to Germany in 870, and back to Lorraine in 895, and was finally united to Germany by Henry I the Fowler. The Archbishop of Trier was, as chancellor of Burgundy, one of the electors of the empire, a right which originated in the 12th or 13th century, and which continued until the French Revolution. The last elector removed to Koblenz in 1786; and Trier was the capital of the French department of Sarre from 1794 till 1814, after which time it belonged to Prussia.

Sights

Prussia Prussia] The city is well known for its well-preserved Roman buildings, among them the Porta Nigra, the best preserved Roman city gate north of the Alps, a complete amphitheatre, ruins of several Roman baths, and the huge Basilica, a basilica in the original Roman sense, being the 67m-length throne hall of Roman Emperor Constantine; it is today used as a Protestant church. church

Miscellaneous

Trier is the oldest seat of a Christian bishop in Germany. In the Middle Ages, the Archbishop of Trier was an important ecclesiastical prince, controlling land from the French border to the Rhine. He was also one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire. The Cathedral of Trier is home to the Holy Tunic, a garment that presumably goes back to the robe Christ was wearing. It is exhibited at irregual intervals, typically twice a century. Trier is also the birthplace of the influential philosopher Karl Marx. The Karl-Marx-Haus is the house where he was born. It was opened in 1947 and renovated in 1983. It is also the birthplace of Saint Ambrose, who later became the bishop of Milan and was named a Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church. Established in Trier is the University of Trier, founded 1483, closed 1796 and started again in 1970. Trier has been the base for the German round of the World Rally Championship since 2000, with the rally's presentation held next to the Porta Nigra.

External links


- [http://www.trier.de/ city website]
- [http://www.fes.de/marx/index_en.htm Karl-Marx-Haus birth house and museum]
- [http://www.tricon.homepage.t-online.de/index.htm History of Trier] Category:Cities in Germany Category:Towns in Rhineland-Palatinate ko:트리어 ja:トリーア simple:Trier



1883

1883 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar).

Events


- January 10 - A fire at the Newhall Hotel in Milwaukee kills 71
- January 16 - The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, establishing the United States Civil service, is passed
- January 19 - The first electric lighting system employing overhead wires begins service (Roselle, New Jersey) It was built by Thomas Edison.
- February 16 - Ladies Home Journal is published for the first time.
- February 23 - Alabama becomes the first U.S. state to enact an antitrust law.
- February 28 - The first vaudeville theater is opened, in Boston, Massachusetts.
- March - An Australian Catholic school, Star of the Sea College is founded in Elsternwick, Victoria (now known as Gardenstown) by the Irish Presentation Sisters.
- May 24 - Brooklyn Bridge is opened to traffic after 14 years of construction.
- May 30 - In New York City, a rumor that the Brooklyn Bridge was going to collapse causes a stampede which crushes twelve people.
- June 30 - First appearance of The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson as a serial in Young Folks; A Boys' and Girls' Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature
- July 3 - SS Daphne disaster in Glasgow leaves 124 dead.
- July 4 - Worlds first rodeo held in Pecos, TX.
- July 22 – Zulu king Cetshwayo barely escapes rebel attack with his life.
- August - King William's College is opened on the Isle of Man.
- August 12 - The last quagga dies at the Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam.
- August 26 - 28 - Krakatau volcano eruption (local time)- 163 villages destroyed, 36380 dead.
- September 15 - The Bombay Natural History Society is founded.
- September 29 - A consortium of flour mill operators in Minneapolis, Minnesota form the Minneapolis, Sault Ste. Marie and Atlantic Railway as a means to get their product to the Great Lakes ports but avoid the high tariffs of Chicago, Illinois.
- October 1 - Sydney Boys High School is founded in Sydney, Australia. It is the first boys public school in Australia.
- October 15 - The Supreme Court of the United States declares part of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to be unconstitutional since it allowed individuals and corporations to discriminate based on race.
- October 20 - Peru and Chile signed the Treaty of Ancón, by which the Tarapacá province was ceded to the latter, bringing an end to Peru's involvement in the War of the Pacific.
- October 30 - Two Clan na Gael dynamite bombs explode in the London underground, injuring several people. Next day Home Secretary Vernon Harcourt drafts 300 policemen to guard the underground and introduces the Explosives Bill. Public continues as before.
- November 3 - American Old West: Self-described "Black Bart the Po-8" gets away with his last stagecoach robbery, but leaves an incriminating clue that eventually leads to his capture.
- November 18 - US and Canadian railroads institute five standard continental time zones, ending the confusion of thousands of local times.
- November 28 - Whitman College is chartered as a four-year college in Walla Walla, Washington.

Unknown date


- Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch (German.bacteriologist) discovers the cholera bacillus.
- Antonio Gaudi begins to build Sagrada Familia cathedral.
- Fabian Society founded.
- Orient Express begins operation.

Births

January-June


- January 3 - Clement Attlee, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1967)
- January 6 - Khalil Gibran, Lebanese poet, painter, and novelist (d. 1931)
- January 10 - Francis X. Bushman, American actor (d. 1966)
- January 10 - Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi, Russian writer (d. 1945)
- January 21 - Olav Aukrust, Norwegian poet (d. 1929)
- February 15 - Sax Rohmer, English author (d. 1959)
- February 7 - Eubie Blake, American musician and composer (d. 1983)
- February 22 - Marguerite Clark, American silent film actress (d. 1940)
- February 23 - Karl Jaspers, German philosopher (d. 1969)
- February 23 - Victor Fleming, American film director (d. 1949)
- March 19 - Walter Haworth, British chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1950)
- March 19 - Joseph Stilwell, American soldier (d. 1946)
- April 1 - Lon Chaney, Sr., American actor (d. 1930)
- April 11 - Hozumi Shigeto, Japanese author (d. 1951)
- April 15 - Stanley Bruce, eighth Prime Minister of Australia (d. 1967)
- April 30 - Jaroslav Hašek, Czech writer (d. 1923)
- May 1 - Tom Moore, Irish actor (d. 1955)
- May 18 - Walter Gropius, German architect (d. 1969)
- May 20 - King Faisal I of Iraq (d. 1933)
- May 21 - Swan Glassey, inventor (d. 1962)
- May 23 - Douglas Fairbanks, American actor (d. 1939)
- May 31 - Lauri Kristian Relander, President of Finland (d. 1942)
- June 5 - John Maynard Keynes, English economist (d. 1946)
- June 7 - Sylvanus G. Morley, American scholar and World War I spy (d. 1948)
- June 21 - Lluís Companys i Jover, President of Catalonia (d. 1940)
- June 24 - Victor Franz Hess, Austrian-born physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1964)
- June 28 - Pierre Laval, Prime Minister of France (d. 1945)

July-December


- July 3 - Franz Kafka, Austrian writer (d. 1924)
- July 4 - Rube Goldberg, American cartoonist (d. 1970)
- July 29 - Porfirio Barba-Jacob, Colombian writer (d. 1942)
- July 29 - Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy (d. 1945)
- August 19 - Elsie Ferguson, American actress (d. 1961)
- August 23 - Jesse Pennington, English footballer (d. 1970)
- August 23 - Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright IV, American general (d. 1953)
- August 30 - Theo van Doesburg, Dutch artist, painter, architect, and poet (d. 1931)
- September 15 - Esteban Terradas i Illa, Catalan mathematician, scientist, and engineer (d. 1950)
- October 8 - Otto Heinrich Warburg, German phsyician and physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1970)
- October 26 - Paul Pilgrim, American athlete (d. 1958)
- November 4 - Nikolaos Plastiras, Greek general and politician (d. 1953)
- November 8 - Arnold Bax, English composer (d. 1953)
- November 11 - Ernest Ansermet, Swiss conductor (d. 1969)
- November 18 - Carl Vinson, U. S. Congressman (d. 1981)
- November 25 - Harvey Spencer Lewis, American Rosicrucian mystic (d. 1939)
- November 25 - Merrill C. Meigs, American newspaper publisher and aviation promoter (d. 1968)
- December 3 - Anton Webern, Austrian composer (d. 1945)
- December 13 - Belle da Costa Greene, librarian, bibliographer, archivist (d. 1950)
- December 16 ? Max Linder, French actor (d. 1925)
- December 22 - Edgar Varèse, French composer (d. 1965)
- December 25 - Maurice Utrillo, French artist and illustrator (d. 1955)

Unknown date


- Alberto Gerchunoff, Argentine writer (d. 1949)
- T. F. O'Rahilly, Irish academic
- Lothrop Stoddard, American eugenicist and racist (d. 1950)

Deaths


- January 10 - Samuel Mudd, American doctor to John Wilkes Booth (b. 1833)
- January 23 - Gustave Doré, French artist (b. 1832)
- January 24 - Friedrich von Flotow, German composer (b. 1812)
- February 13 - Richard Wagner, German composer (b. 1813)
- February 17 - Napoleon Coste, French guitarist and composer (b. 1806)
- March 14 - Karl Marx, German philosopher (b. 1818)
- April 30 - Edouard Manet, French painter (b. 1832)
- May 24 - Abdel Kadir, Algerian leader (b. 1808)
- May 26 - Edward Sabine, Irish astronomer (b. 1788)
- July 22 - Edward Ord, U.S. Army officer (b. 1818)
- September 3 - Ivan Turgenev, Russian writer (b. 1818)
- October 30 - Robert Volkmann, German composer (b. 1815)
- December 13 - Victor de Laprade, French poet and critic (b. 1812) Category:1883 ko:1883년 ms:1883 simple:1883 th:พ.ศ. 2426

England

:For an explanation of often-confusing terms like England, (Great) Britain and United Kingdom see British Isles (terminology). England is a nation and the largest and most populous constituent country of the United Kingdom accounting for more than 83% of the total UK population. It occupies most of the southern two-thirds of the island of Great Britain and shares land borders with fellow home nations Scotland, to the north, and Wales, to the west. Elsewhere, it is bordered by the sea. England is named after the Angles, one of a number of Germanic tribes believed to have originated in Angeln in Northern Germany, who settled in England in the 5th and 6th centuries. It has not had a distinct political identity since 1707, when Great Britain was established as a unified political entity; however, it has a legal identity separate from those of Scotland and Northern Ireland, as part of the entity "England and Wales;". England's largest city, London, is also the capital of the United Kingdom.

History

Main article: History of England England has been inhabited for at least 500,000 years, although the repeated Ice Ages made much of Britain uninhabitable for extended periods until as recently as 20,000 years ago. Stone Age hunter-gatherers eventually gave way to farmers and permanent settlements, with a spectacular and sophisticated megalithic civilisation arising in western England some 4,000 years ago. It was replaced around 1,500 years later by Celtic tribes migrating from Western and continental Europe, mainly from France. These tribes were known collectively as "Britons", a name bestowed by Phoenician traders — an indication of how, even at this early date, the island was part of a Europe-wide trading network. The Britons were significant players in continental politics and supported their allies in Gaul militarily during the Gallic Wars with the Roman Republic. This prompted the Romans to invade and subdue the island, first with Julius Caesar's raid in 55 BC, and then the Emperor Claudius' conquest in the following century. The whole southern part of the island — roughly corresponding to modern day England and Wales — became a prosperous part of the Roman Empire. It was finally abandoned early in the 5th century when a weakening Empire pulled back its legions to defend borders on the Continent. Unaided by the Roman army, Roman Britannia could not long resist the Germanic tribes who arrived in the 5th and 6th centuries, enveloping the majority of modern day England in a new culture and language and pushing Romano-British rule back into modern-day Wales and western extremities of England, notably Cornwall and Cumbria. Others emigrated across the channel to modern-day Brittany, thus giving it its name and language (Breton). But many of the Romano-British remained in and were assimilated into the newly "English" areas. The invaders fell into three main groups: the Jutes, the Saxons, and the Angles. As they became more civilised, recognisable states formed and began to merge with one another. (The most well-known state of affairs being the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy.) From time to time throughout this period, one Anglo-Saxon king, recognised as the "Bretwalda" by other rulers, had effective control of all or most of the English; so it is impossible to identify the precise moment when the Kingdom of England was unified. In some sense, real unity came as a response to the Danish Viking incursions which occupied the eastern half of "England" in the 8th century. Egbert, King of Wessex (d. 839) is often regarded as the first king of all the English, although the title "King of England" was first adopted, two generations later, by Alfred the Great (ruled 871–899). The principal legacy left behind in those territories from which the language of the Britons were displaced is that of toponyms. Many of the place-names in England and to a lesser extent Scotland are derived from celtic British names, including London, Dumbarton, York, Dorchester, Dover and Colchester. Several place-name elements are thought to be wholly or partly Brythonic in origin, particularly bre-, bal-, and -dun for hills, carr for a high rocky place, coomb for a small deep valley. Until recently it has been believed that those areas settled by the Anglo-Saxons were uninhabited at the time or the Britons had fled before them. However, genetic studies show that the British were not pushed out to the Celtic fringes – many tribes remained in what was to become England (see C. Capelli et al. A Y chromosome census of the British Isles. Current Biology 13, 979–984, (2003)). Capelli's findings strengthen the research of Steven Bassett of the University of Birmingham; his work during the 1990s suggests that much of the West Midlands was only very lightly colonised with Anglian and Saxon settlements.
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,—
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
The English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that 'he looks like an Englishman', and that 'it is a great pity that he should not be an Englishmen'.
Venetian ambassador to England
Early 16th century
Charlotte Augusta Sneyd
Italian Relations of England (p. 20)
Richard II] Richard II] In 1066, William the Conqueror and the Normans conquered the existing Kingdom of England and instituted an Anglo-Norman administration and nobility who, retaining proto-French as their language for the next three hundred years, ruled as custodians over English commoners. Although the language and racial distinctions faded rapidly during the middle ages, the class system born in the Norman/Saxon divide persisted longer — arguably with traces lasting to the modern day. While Old English continued to be spoken by common folk, Norman feudal lords significantly influenced the language with French words and customs being adopted over the succeeding centuries evolving to a Romance-Germanic hybrid of Middle English widely spoken in Chaucer's time. England came repeatedly into conflict with Wales and Scotland, at the time an independent principality and an independent kingdom respectively, as its rulers sought to expand Norman power across the entire island of Britain. The conquest of Wales was achieved in the 13th century, when it was annexed to England and gradually came to be a part of that kingdom for most legal purposes, although in the modern era it is more usually thought of as a separate nation (fielding, for example, its own athletic teams). Norman power in Scotland waxed and waned over the years, with the Scots managing to maintain a varying degree of independence despite repeated wars with the English. Although it was on the whole only a moderately successful power in military terms, England became one of the wealthiest states in medieval Europe, due chiefly to its dominance in the lucrative wool market. The failure of English territorial ambitions in continental Europe prompted the kingdom's rulers to look further afield, creating the foundations of the mercantile and colonial network that was to become the British Empire. The turmoil of the Reformation embroiled England in religious wars with Europe's Catholic powers, notably Spain, but the kingdom preserved its independence as much through luck as through the skill of charismatic rulers such as Elizabeth I. Elizabeth's successor, James I was already king of Scotland (as James VI); and this personal union of the two crowns into the crown of Great Brittaine was followed a century later by the Act of Union 1707, which formally unified England, Scotland and Wales into the Kingdom of Great Britain. This later became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1801 to 1927) and then the modern state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (1927 to present) For post-unification history, see history of the United Kingdom.

Politics

Main article: Politics of the United Kingdom, Government of England Since the promulgation of the 1284 Statute of Rhuddlan and the Laws in Wales Acts 1535-1542, Wales has shared a legal identity with England as the joint entity of England and Wales. The Act of Union with the Kingdom of Scotland in 1707 created the Kingdom of Great Britain, subsuming England, Wales and Scotland into a single political entity. Scotland, along with Northern Ireland, retain separate legal systems. The duchy of Cornwall also retains some unique rights. All of Great Britain has been ruled by the government of the United Kingdom since that date, although in 1999 the first elections to the newly created Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales left England as the only part of the Union with no devolved assembly or parliament. As all legislation for England is passed by Parliament at Westminster there are some complaints about the ability of non-English Members of Parliament to influence purely English affairs. This apparent anomaly has been highlighted by both English and non-English politicians, often those opposed to devolution, and has become popularly known as the West Lothian question. Administratively, England is something of an anomaly within the UK. Unlike the other three nations, it has no local parliament or government and its administrative affairs are dealt with by a combination of the UK government, the UK parliament and a number of England-specific quangos, such as English Heritage. There are calls from some for a devolved English Parliament and from others for the dissolution of the UK and an independent England. The current Labour government favoured the establishment of regional administration, claiming that England was too large to be governed as a sub-state entity. A referendum on this issue in North East England on 4 November 2004 decisively rejected the proposal. Some criticised the English regional proposals for not decentralising enough, saying that they amounted not to devolution, but to little more than local government reorganisation, with no real power being removed from central government. The English regions would not even have had the limited powers of the Welsh Assembly, much less the tax-varying and legislative powers of the Scottish Parliament. Rather, power was simply re-allocated within the region, with little new resource allocation and no real prospects of Assemblies being able to change the pattern of regional aid. Responsibility for regional transport was added to the proposals late in the process. This was perhaps crucial in the North East, where resentment at the Barnett Formula, which delivers greater regional aid to adjacent Scotland, was a significant impetus for the North East devolution campaign. There has also been a campaign for a Cornish assembly along Welsh lines by groups such as Mebyon Kernow, which recently collected 50,000 signatures in support. Some eurosceptics believe that the establishment of English regions as administrative entities is designed to undermine the concept of English nationhood and more easily fit England into a European federal model. Conventionally the national capital of England is London, although technically it would be more exact to call London the capital of "England and Wales" given England's lack of a distinctive political identity separate from the Principality. Winchester served as the country's first national capital until some time in the late 11th century after the Norman Conquest. The City of London became England's commercial capital, while the City of Westminster (where the Royal court was located) became the political capital. These roles have, broadly speaking, been maintained to the present day.

Subdivisions

Main article: Subdivisions of England Historically, the highest level of local government in England was the county. These divisions had emerged from a range of units of old, pre-unification England, whether they were Kingdoms, such as Essex and Sussex; Duchies, such as Yorkshire, Cornwall and Lancashire or simply tracts of land given to some noble, as is the case with Berkshire. Until 1867, they were subdivided into smaller divisions called hundreds. These counties all still exist in, or near to, their original form as the traditional counties. In many places, however, they have been heavily modified or abolished outright as administrative counties. This came about due to a number of factors. The fact that the counties were so small meant, and still means, that there was no regional government able to coordinate an overarching plan for the area. This was especially true in the metropolitan areas surrounding the cities, as the county lines were usually drawn up before the industrial revolution and the mass urbanisation of England. The solution was the creation of large metropolitan counties centred on cities. These were later broken up, with several other counties, into unitary authorities, unifying the county and district/borough levels of government. London is a special case, and is the one region which currently has a representative authority as well as a directly elected mayor. The 32 London boroughs and the Corporation of London remain the local form of government in the city. Other than Greater London, the official regions are:
- North East England
- North West England
- Yorkshire and the Humber
- West Midlands
- East Midlands
- East of England
- South West England
- South East England Outside London the regions have very little power and are not accountable to elected representatives; regional authority is placed in the hands of unelected assemblies. If, as now seems unlikely, regions opt to replace these bodies with elected assemblies, local government in England will remain as variable and, some might say, as confusing as ever

Geography

Main articles: Geography of the United Kingdom, Geography of England Geography of England England comprises the central and southern two-thirds of the island of Great Britain, plus offshore islands of which the largest is the Isle of Wight. It is bordered to the north by