Karl Marx

Marx appears in Double Entry only as part of one of the book’s signature ironies: that Venetian double-entry bookkeeping, by guiding the British factories of the Industrial Revolution, “directly funded two of the great revolutionary thinkers of the nineteenth century.” The first is Charles Darwin, funded through his grandfather Josiah Wedgwood’s Etruria pottery works; the second is Marx, funded through the Engels family’s cotton mills of Manchester — i.e., the capital that supported Marx’s work was itself produced by the account-driven capitalist machinery he set out to critique.

Context: Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary socialist, author of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. He was financially supported for much of his life by Friedrich Engels, whose family owned textile mills in Manchester.

Where this appears

• Double Entry — cited as one of the two nineteenth-century revolutionaries funded by double-entry-guided British factories (Marx via the Engels’ Manchester cotton mills).