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Step into the upheaval of the long nineteenth century in this History of Ideas Club recording 🎙️

“Industrialisation and Marx: The Making of Modern Society” explores a world transformed by unprecedented socio-economic change ⚙️. Breakthroughs in mechanical textiles, chemistry, iron production, and transport - most notably the steam engine 🚂 - drove rapid industrialisation, reshaping everyday life and pulling work out of the home and into expanding urban centres.

Cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, and Leeds became the beating heart of this new industrial world 🏭 - but not without profound social consequences.

At the centre of our discussion is Karl Marx, whose attempt to make sense of these transformations produced one of the most influential theories of history ever written 📚. Drawing on the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Marx reinterprets the dialectic as a material process - a history driven not by ideas alone, but by economic forces and class struggle ⚖️.

This was not a purely abstract concern. The realities of industrial life were captured vividly in literature, from Charles Dickens in England 🇬🇧 to Victor Hugo in France 🇫🇷, whose works echo many of Marx’s concerns about inequality, poverty, and social change.

In this session, we explore Marx’s theory of history in its original context - setting aside later interpretations to better understand what he was responding to, and what he was trying to explain 🔍.

This recording captures the spirit of the History of Ideas Club ⚡ - unpacking the intellectual and human consequences of industrialisation, and asking what it really meant to live through such a transformation.

Join us as we explore industrialisation and the making of modern society 🎧

#HistoryOfIdeas #Marx #IndustrialRevolution #Modernity