Karl Marx and the Marxist School

Few figures in the history of economic thought have been the source of more controversy, ranging from complete scorn and vilification to sanctification and adulation, than Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883). Marx was a philosopher, profoundly deep social thinker, political economist, and working-class intellectual and revolutionary. Marx was a mighty thinker with a very fertile mind of immense prowess and intellectual stature upon whose work the Marxist School is founded. But Marx's impact is not limited to the School that bears his name, as many Schools of thought - friend and foe alike - owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the Old Moor, as Marx was affectionately called by his friends, ostensibly due to his dark complexion and coarse hair. Marx envisioned his approach as advancing Political Economy beyond what he called the "bourgeois horizon" that had confounded the Classical Political Economy of his predecessors, namely Adam Smith (1723-1790), David Ricardo (1772-1823), Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) to name some of the most important figures in that approach (MECW, Vol. 35, p. 14; Fowkes, p. 96). It is important also to understand that although Marx is most associated with theories of socialism and communism, in fact the overwhelming majority of his inquiries concerned only capitalism.