1818–1883 · German philosopher, economist and journalist
Karl Marx was 25 and working as a journalist in Paris when he wrote this introduction, several years before The Communist Manifesto and two decades before Das Kapital. The book it introduces was never published in his lifetime; the introduction appeared on its own in a journal that folded after a single double issue. He was writing in a German intellectual scene where the opium comparison was already common currency — Novalis had used it in 1798, Heine in 1840, Bruno Bauer twice in the early 1840s. What Marx added was the sentence around it.