The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Bonaparte Essay - 1539 Words

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was written by Karl Marx a few months after the December 1851 coup d’etat of Louis Bonaparte in France. In this short text, Marx further examined the revolution of 1848 and the series of political reversals which eventually led to the coup. Marx views the coup as a consequence of sharp intensifications of class antagonisms in modern bourgeois society, which is the central idea of the theory of revolutionary change presented in the Communist Manifesto. Therefore, his analysis in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte allows us to understand how his theory bears out in practice. However, in the latter text, Marx also made some adjustments to his theory. He went from a simple, bifurcate model consisting of only a dominating class and a dominated class to a more sophisticated understanding where he identifies the subgroups within the main groups, as well as the roles each of these factions played during the course of the revolution. I n this paper, I will explain the revolution theory proposed by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, and how the theory was applied and adjusted in the Eighteenth Brumaire to make concrete historical sense of the events happened during the years between 1848 to 1851. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx famously claimed that â€Å"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle (Marx, p.219).† For Marx, the engine of history is the productive power. In every society, thereShow MoreRelated A Tale of Four Novels1596 Words   |  7 Pagesbrutality and cruelness that mirrors that of their former oppressors. Dickens’s focus demonstrates the dark side of the French Revolution that is not touched upon in Karl Marx’s, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, written in 1852 just seven years before A Tale of Two Cities. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Marx focuses on the positive aspects of a proletariat dictatorship (Marx 141) which is contrasted by A Tale of Two Cities, expanding on Marx’s theory that there will alwaysRead More Karl Marxs Life and Work Essay1478 Words   |  6 PagesJewish blood that ran through the family ultimately impacted Karl’s fate. When Karl was six ye ars old, he adopted Christianity because at the time it was considered as an act of civilized progress. His father, a highly educated lawyer whom admired eighteenth century literature (of the French Enlightenment), was a â€Å"Prussian patriot† and a Jewish believer. Karl and his father held a personal relationship, to which they enjoyed a close friendship. His father did indeed influence him greatly, but KarlRead More Biography of Karl Marx Essay1255 Words   |  6 Pagesof their lives in London. In the beginning of their stay there, they lived in poverty and made due by receiving gifts from friends such as Engels. In Europe he wrote two of his famous writings, Thee class struggle in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Throughout the 1850’s he wrote for the New York Tribune, which brought home a slight amount of income. With this job and an inheritance to Jenny Marx the family worked its way out of poverty. The Civil War brought an end to his writingsRead Moremidterm paper 1 social theory2948 Words   |  12 Pagessociety, whereas Weber viewed the economy in part as an extension of religious belief. The following analyses will be informed by the classic texts of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. These include Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1988), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1963), and The German Ideology (1998); McGill 2 Durkheim’s Suicide (1951), The Rules of Sociological Method (1982), The Division of Labor in Society (1984), and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995); and Weber’s EconomyRead MoreSocial Classes : Comparative Sociology1751 Words   |  8 Pagesfunction of a state. Although each side of scholars have been arguing with each other on these matters, each side has proven correct in different circumstances. Marx s study of French in his book Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte explained the revolution of 1848 in France that led to Louis Bonaparte s coup d etat. And Weber s focus reflected the perspective of culture and politics that have proven to be extremely useful in understanding class. While I respect both sides equally. I believeRead More The Relation between State and Society According to Karl Marx2910 Words   |  12 PagesMarxs historical study, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, is the example used by Elster to create his class-balance theory of the state. In examining the rise to power of Louis Bonaparte, Marx claims that the state built itself up into an apparently independent force (5). This is because in the rise of the Bonapartist regime, there was a balance of power between the classes in France, with none being politically dominant. The state, in the form of Louis Bonaparte was then able to have aRead MoreCan the Subaltern Speak9113 Words   |  37 Pageshand, and within the theory of the Subject, on the other, must not be obliterated. Let us consider the play of vertreten (represent in the first sense) and darstellen (re-present in the second sense) in a famous passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where Marx touches on cla ss as a descriptive and transformative concept in a manner somewhat more complex than Althussers distinction between class instinct and class position would allow. Marxs contention here is that the descriptiveRead More Folly in William Shakespeares King Lear Essay2875 Words   |  12 PagesClarendon Press, 1996. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Laing, R. D. The Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon, 1967. Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1869. Nineteenth Century Europe: Liberalism and Its Critics. Eds. Jan Goldstein and John W. Boyer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. 242-266. Mercer, Peter. Tradgedy. A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms. Ed