to whom he remained devoted throughout his life. At the university he was influenced by the still
prevalent Hegelianism, as also by Feuerbach's revolt against Hegel towards materialism. He tried
journalism, but the Rheinische Zeitung, which he edited, was suppressed by the authorities for its
radicalism. After this, in 1843, he went to France to study Socialism. There he met Engels, who
was the manager of a factory in Manchester. Through him he came to know English labour
conditions and English economics. He thus acquired, before the revolutions of 1848, an unusually
international culture. So far as Western Europe was concerned, he showed no national bias. This
cannot be said of Eastern Europe, for he always despised the Slavs.
He took part in both the French and the German revolutions of 1848, but the reaction compelled
him to seek refuge in England in 1849. He spent the rest of his life, with a few brief intervals, in
London, troubled by poverty, illness, and the deaths of children, but nevertheless indefatigably
writing and amassing knowledge. The stimulus to his work was always the hope of the social
revolution, if not in his lifetime, then in some not very distant future.
Marx, like Bentham and James Mill, will have nothing to do with romanticism; it is always his
intention to be scientific. His economics is an outcome of British classical economics, changing
only the motive force. Classical economists, consciously or unconsciously, aimed at the welfare of
the capitalist, as opposed both to the landowner and to the wage-earner; Marx, on the contrary, set
to work to represent the interest of the wage-earner. He had in youth--as appears in the
Communist Manifesto of 1848--the fire and passion appropriate to a new revolutionary
movement, as liberalism had had in the time of Milton. But he was always anxious to appeal to
evidence, and never relied upon any extra-scientific intuition.
He called himself a materialist, but not of the eighteenth-century sort. His sort, which, under
Hegelian influence, he called "dialectical," differed in an important way from traditional
materialism, and was more akin to what is now called instrumentalism. The older materialism, he
said, mistakenly regarded sensation as passive, and thus attributed activity primarily to the object.
In Marx's view, all sensation or perception is an interaction between subject and object; the bare
object, apart from the activity of the percipient, is a mere raw material, which is transformed in the
process of becoming known.