Genius of the Modern World

This is the 19th century...

..a pivotal, tumultuous age that witnessed

revolutions in industry, technology and politics...

..but also, crucially, in ideas - big, bold, dangerous ideas that

would bring the world as we know it kicking and screaming into being.

Three great thinkers led the way - Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche

and Sigmund Freud.

They lived in a time when old certainties were breaking down,

regimes were overthrown by mass uprisings,

science was undermining religious authority.

Their challenge was to figure out what makes us

human in a fast-evolving world.

Emigres, recluses, enemies of the state - these outsiders

challenged the existential crisis of their age head-on.

Little was out of bounds.

They had an absolute commitment to identify the forces

controlling our lives. Their weapon - the power of their minds.

Their search drove them to extremes, into poverty, into madness.

Yet their penetrating, often contentious, ways

of seeing the world still shape how we make sense of our lives today.

# Arise, ye starvelings, from your slumbers

# Arise, ye criminals, of want

# For reason in revolt now thunders

# And at last ends the age of cant... #

Of all the great historical figures buried in Highgate Cemetery,

there's one who continues to divide opinion like no other.

# The Internationale. #

For those who come here year in,

year out to mark the day of his death, Karl Marx is a keenly

intelligent analyst of capitalism, a prophet of human emancipation.

But for others, who've actually attacked this monument with

paints, with hacksaws, even with explosives,

he's a maligned progenitor of totalitarian regimes,

a man responsible for the death of millions.

Love him or loathe him, what you cannot dispute is that

Karl Marx dramatically transformed our world.

Within 70 years of his death, one third of the world's population

was ruled by governments claiming Marxism as their doctrine.

Ura!

CHEERING

Marxist ideology claimed to be liberating but led to dreadful

suffering and brought superpowers to the brink of Armageddon.

It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any

nuclear missile launched from Cuba as an attack by

the Soviet Union on the United States.

Communism was widely discredited,

precipitating its fall in the 1980s and '90s.

But economic crisis

and social unrest have put Marx's ideas back in the spotlight.

I want to start at the beginning, not to study Marx

with the hindsight of history,

but to try to understand what motivated him

in the context of his own times, to discover how a man,

whose life was plagued with insecurities, with failure,

with tragedy, would end up generating

one of the most influential ideologies in the human experience.

We tend to think of Marx as a rather imposing,

greybeard figure staring out sternly from Soviet propaganda,

but this early image of the young Marx - dashing, dapper, privileged -

offers a rather different story.

His birthplace, Trier, was an elegant Rhineland town,

now part of modern Germany.

Born in 1818 to upwardly mobile parents in this handsome building,

Marx's childhood was, on the face of it,

pretty idyllic and thoroughly bourgeois.

But one day, when Marx was just 15, his father, Heinrich,

met with a group of respected public figures here at Trier's Casino Club.

After too much to drink, some of them

began pounding the tables raucously

and singing songs that celebrated the virtues of the great revolution

that swept through neighbouring France.

A Prussian army officer witnessed the scene and reported back.

Two of Marx's schoolteachers, who were also in the room,

were promptly sacked.

Others were charged with subversion

and Marx's father was tarnished with the disgrace.

The casino was put under surveillance.

Because under the surface calm of the town there was tension.

Not long before Karl's birth, Trier had been under Napoleonic control,

which meant that people like Karl's father had got

a taste of the French revolutionary principles of

individual liberty and equality.

Under French law, Heinrich had been free to train as a lawyer,

but he was Jewish and, once the more autocratic Prussians

were in control, they imposed civil restrictions on all Jews.

Now, in order to keep practising his profession,

he had to convert to Christianity.

Marx was growing up in a period

when questions of political authority

and freedom of expression were highly contested,

when ruling classes across Europe feared their people would

rise up and overthrow them.

The struggle between the ideals of the French Revolution

and the intractable conservatives of the Prussian State would

inspire and motivate Marx.

And from an early age, it was pretty clear where his allegiance lay.

When he was 17, Marx was packed off down the Moselle River

to study law at Bonn University.

SHIP HORN BLARES

There was clearly something of the hell-raiser about the teenage Marx.

He quickly became co-president of the Trier Tavern Club -

basically a bunch of middle-class bad boys.

After one night of boozy brawling, Marx was banged up

in the local cells for a day, but there was more to come.

Student life was divided along class

and political lines to the point of conflict.

The liberal Trier Tavern boys attracted

the attention of a gang of aristocratic cadets.

Those cadets forced them to kneel down and swear their allegiance

to the Prussian aristocracy, and the confrontations escalated.

At one point,

Marx ended up in a dual with a sabre wound above his eye -

a scar which this young scrapper wore as a badge of honour.

Enough, it seems, was enough for Marx's father.

Heinrich transferred Karl to the more studious environment of Berlin University.

Yet even here, Marx found other distractions.

Marx met a group of Bohemian students and lecturers who loved

to discuss the philosophies of the day late into the night.

He grew a beard and joined the Young Hegelians,

A group obsessed with the theories of a university professor who'd recently died. Georg Hegel.

Marx describes his first encounter with Hegel

as one of a completely extraordinary moment.

He says that when he read Hegel

it was like the curtain had fallen from his eyes.

And what is it about Hegel?

What's particularly exciting about his ideas?

Berlin is awash with Hegelian ideas

but perhaps the most important idea of Hegel's that they are completely

captivated by is the idea of history as this gradual

unfolding of freedom and of reason.

And this gradual dialectic, as he called it,

was made manifest most magnificently in the French Revolution when,

of course, you had a literal

cracking open of freedom and of reason.

I suppose it is totally thrilling, this, isn't it?

Because you're being told that you're part of a big historical

story and that gives you a big historical

- and philosophical canvas to paint on. - That's right.

And I think that Marx does absolutely see himself

as kind of standing, as it were, towards the end

of history that had begun with the ancient philosophers,

who had talked about the way in which one's soul could only find...

..perfection if it was properly embedded in the community.

And do they think that Hegel's got it absolutely right?

Or is there a sense there's still work to do?

There is absolutely still work to do.

So they think that while Hegel had got, in his vision,

had got part of the way, that what they want to do is bring

a total revolution rather than just reform.

They were operating in a world where the nobility, the privileged,

the aristocracy were still very much in charge and they were

pushing up against a great kind of wall of privilege and tradition.

'Marx and the Young Hegelians believed that the single

'greatest obstacle to human progress was religion.'

So they set out to critique and to attack it.

Now, you've got to think how subversive this is.

Some said that the gospels of the New Testament

were just folktales, not divine historical truth.

That's really shocking.

Others suggested that God was an illusion

and that as humans we'd taken the best of our powers

and projected them onto a kind of fantastical fabricated being

who embodied our finest qualities.

The Young Hegelians believed that this existential separation,

brought about by religion, limited our human potential.

Only by abandoning its delusions could we truly flourish.

Of course, the group's iconoclastic -

many would say blasphemous - ideas had wider implications.

The relationship between Church and state

was tight to the point of total union.

Criticism of religion was tantamount to criticism of Prussia.

Marx had aspired to an academic career but the Prussian

authorities would not tolerate subversives in their universities.

So he had to find another platform for his ideas.

His outlet would be the hot, rapidly expanding business of journalism.

Marx thought that the written word had transformative power.

And he became editor of the Rhineland News, based in Cologne.

A mouthpiece for liberal entrepreneurs

pushing for constitutional reform.

He made an immediate impact.

Nicknamed "the Moor" because of his dark complexion

and thick mane of hair and beard, it seems he was impetuous,

passionate, with a boundless energy and self-confidence.

Although some did say he was vindictive

and an intellectual bully.

But whatever his shortcomings, his drive and acuity got the job done.

Under his tenure, circulation of the paper rose dramatically.

Marx's journalism took up the cause of his nouveau riche paymasters

and attacked the old political elite.

Here's a typical example of his lacerating style.

It's polemic, laced with a kind of withering sarcasm.

"The aristocracy cannot be given the form of law

"because they are formations of lawlessness.

"No-one's action ceases to be wrongful because it's his custom,

"just as the bandit son of a robber is not exonerated

"because banditry is a family idiosyncrasy."

It's clever, cutting stuff.

Marx gained notoriety through his thinly veiled attacks

on the Prussian ruling classes.

Journalism also stimulated a new interest at the other end of the social scale.