THE PROBLEM OF CAPITALISM The Birth of Consumption As philosophers who inherited the goals of the Enlightenment, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed the main theme was freedom, freedom to become a full human being, creating oneself through free choices. They...
THE PROBLEM OF PROPERTY Engels and Ownership For centuries, philosophers had been trying to determine the origin of property. Almost without exception, from Rousseau to Hobbs, property was the equivalent to the apple in the Garden of Eden. Property was the cause of...
GERMAN ROMANTICISM AND THE SPIRITUAL PAINTINGS OF CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH As with Spain, the key to German Romanticism is the presence of Napoléon’s “liberating army” on German soil. While much of Germany was loyal to the French emperor, especially...
MODERN ALIENATION Marx and Capitalism Aware of Friedrich Schiller, Karl Marx was concerned with alienation and recognized the connection between the estrangement of human beings from themselves and from nature and the Industrial Revolution. Marx re-wrote Schiller’s...
MARX AND ENGELS Today it is fashionable in some quarters to dismiss Karl Marx because of his apparently “failed” theory of an inevitable revolution in which the lower classes, realizing their exploitation, would rebel against those who owned the means of production....
ROMANTICISM IN SPAIN GOYA AND WAR Spain had been left out of the Enlightenment and there were those who were hopeful when a man of the people, Napoléon, became the leader of France. However, when Napoléon crowned himself Emperor all hopes of a new democratic age were...
