r dramatically embroiled him in controversy with the authorities, and in 1843 Marx was compelled to resign his editorial post, and soon afterward the Rheinische Zeitung was forced to discontinue publication (Berlin, 1996, pp. 12-15).
Marx then went to Paris where, as a result of his further studies in philosophy, history, and political science, he adopted communist beliefs. It must also be noted that his own views were influenced by socialist ideas very much in the air in the Paris at the middle of the last century. We now tend to think of Marx as having developed the tenets of modern socialism and communism entirely by himself (a result of the common tendency to assign a single known genius to the genesis of each idea and the concomitant reluctance to accept the idea that even genius is the product of a particular set of historical, cultural, economic and political circumstances û something that would have deeply aggravated Marx himself.)
In 1844, when Engels visited him in Paris, the two men found that they had independently arrived at identical views on the nature of revolutionary problems. They began a collaboration to elucidate systematically the theoretical principles of communism and to organize an international working-class movement dedicated to those principles. Marx himself was always adamant in sharing the credit for the political ideas he held with Engels and he would no doubt also be aggravated û and in fact saddened û by the fact that Engels is so rarely now given credit for the ideas that the two of them created together. For it was not simply the fact that the two of them had the same idea at the same time (although this was to some extent true and was a direct result at least in some measure of the political and economic conditions prevalent at the time in Europe) but rather that the ideas that now generally bear MarxÆs name alone would not have come about except through a sincere collaboration between the tw...