Marxism

Few sets of ideas are richer and more conflicted than those that have been put forward under the heading of Marxism. Marxism's founder, the German philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883), had a wide-ranging curiosity about many aspects of humankind and a stamina matching his curiosity. But as the American philosopher Sidney Hook pointed out in his article on Marxism in the 1973 edition of the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Marxism is more than simply "the ideas of Karl Marx" (vol. 3, p. 146); it also includes a vast array of thinking that took its point of departure from Marx. Indeed, Hook suggested that what Marx (and his friend, Friedrich Engels [1820–1895]) really meant is "by far not as significant as what they have been taken to mean" (p. 147). However, it seems clear that an understanding of both the original and the derived ideas is needed for an adequate understanding of Marxism.