Welcome to the3 Books To Knowseries, our idea is to help readers learn about fascinating topics through three essential and relevant books.
These carefully selected works can be fiction, non-fiction, historical documents or even biographies.
We will always select for you three great works to instigate your mind, this time the topic is:Communism
Communism is a political and socio-economic ideology that seeks the establishment of an egalitarian society. Its purpose is a society without social classes and stateless, through the common ownership of the means of production. Few political and economic theories were so influential in world history.
The Manifest of the Communist Party was written by Karl Marx during the great process of urban struggles of the Revolutions of 1848. It criticizes the capitalist mode of production and the type of society generated by it. Is a basic work for understanding the purpose and principles of scientific socialism.
A century earlier, the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau was interested in the origins of human inequality. In Discourse on the origin and basis of inequality among men, Rousseau argues that man has deviated from his natural state of freedom to please individualistic desires.
In Socialism: utopian and scientific, Friedrich Engels explains the differences between utopian socialism and scientific socialism. Through a materialist perspective of history he understands communism as a natural substitute for capitalism.
This is one of many books in the series 3 Books To Know. If you liked this book, look for the other titles in the series, we are sure you will like some of the topics.
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Karl Marx (5 May 1818 14 March 1883) studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum.
His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, and the three-volume Das Kapital. His political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory. Marx is typically cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science.
Friedrich Engels (28 November 1820 5 August 1895) developed what is now known as Marxist theory together with Karl Marx and in 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research in English cities. In 1848, Engels co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Marx and also authored and co-authored (primarily with Marx) many other works. Later, Engels supported Marx financially, allowing him to do research and write Das Kapital. After Marx’s death, Engels edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital. Additionally, Engels organised Marx’s notes on the Theories of Surplus Value, which he later published as the 'fourth volume’ of Capital. Engels died in London on 5 August 1895, at the age of 74 and following cremation his ashes were scattered off Beachy Head, near Eastbourne.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (28 June 1712 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic and educational thought.
His Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract are cornerstones in modern political and social thought. Rousseau’s sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) was important to the development of preromanticism and romanticism in fiction. His Emile, or On Education (1762) is an educational treatise on the place of the individual in society.
Rousseau befriended fellow philosophy writer Denis Diderot in 1742, and would later write about Diderot’s romantic troubles in his autobiography, Confessions. During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophers among members of the Jacobin Club. He was interred as a national hero in the Panthéon in Paris, in 1794, 16 years after his death.