The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was a famous German philosopher, political economist and theorist, historian and revolutionary whose ideas laid the foundation of twentieth century communism and socialism. Most noted for his work "The Communist Manifesto", Marx's materialist analyses of the bourgeois capitalist society initiated a revolution that has had profound effects on the development of human civilization. The basic philosophical assumptions of Marx's approach, despite some of the later ideological and at times quasi-religious adaptations of his thought, are based upon fundamental notions of the European Enlightenment; human reason can successfully alleviate the problems of life. Marx published "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" in 1852. The "Eighteenth Brumaire" refers to November 9, 1799 in the French Revolutionary Calendar—the day Napoleon Bonaparte made himself dictator. In this piece, Marx traces how the clash of different public interests manifest themselves in the complex net of political struggles, and in particular the contradictory relationships between the external form of a struggle and its real social content.