Marx, Engels, and the foundations of scientific socialism

Karl Marx was born in Trier, Prussia, in 1818, and died in London in 1883; Friedrich Engels was born in Barmen, Prussia, in 1820, and died in London in 1895. Marx studied philosophy at Bonn and Berlin, earning his doctorate in 1841, and edited the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, shut down by Prussian censorship in 1843. Engels, meanwhile, worked at his family's textile factory in Manchester, an experience he documented in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). The two met personally in Paris in 1844, beginning a lifelong collaboration in which they developed historical materialism as a method for analyzing society and history, and together they founded and led the Communist League in 1847.