Friedrich Wilhelm Schulz


Friedrich Wilhelm Schulz was a German officer, radical, and social democratic publisher in Hesse. His most famous works are Der Tod des Pfarrers Friedrich Ludwig Weidig as well as Die Bewegung der Produktion, which Karl Marx quoted extensively in his 1844 Manuscripts. Schulz was the first to describe the movement of society "as flowing from the contradiction between the forces of production and the mode of production," which would later form the basis of historical materialism. Marx continued to praise Schulz's work decades later when writing Das Kapital.

Life

He was a friend of Georg Büchner and an early follower of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Convicted as a demagogue, he escaped from prison in 1834 and emigrated from Germany to Switzerland, where he worked as freelance political writer. In the year 1848 he was elected to the Frankfurt National Assembly, in which he belonged to the left.

Selected works