merized workers that revolution was not only the sole answer to their difficulties but was indeed inevitable. The League, completely taken with Marx, commissioned him to write a statement of their collective principles, a statement that became The Communist Manifesto. After the conference, Marx returned to Brussels, carrying with him a declaration of socialism penned by two delegates, the lone copy of The Communist Journal, the publication of the London branch of the Communist League, and a statement of principles written by Engels. Although Marx followed Engel's principles very closely, the Manifesto is entirely of his own hand. Marx wrote furiously, but just barely made the deadline the League had set for him. The Manifesto was published in February 1848 and quickly published so as to fan the flames of revolution, which smoldered on the Continent. When revolution broke out in Germany in March 1848, Marx traveled to the Rhineland to put his theory into practice. When this revolution was suppressed, Marx fled to London and the Communist League disbanded, the Manifesto its only legacy to the world. The Manifesto has lived a long and illustrious life. While it was hardly noticed amongst the crowded field of pamphlets and treatises published in 1848, it has had a more profound effect on the intellectual and political history of the world than any single work in the past 150 years. It has inspired the communist political systems that ruled nearly half the world's population at its height and defined the chief ideological conflict of the second half of the twentieth century, altering even those countries which stood firmly against communism, e.g. Western European and American Welfare States. Intellectually, Marx's work has profoundly influenced nearly every field of study from the humanities to the social sciences to the natural sciences. It is hard to imagine an area of serious human inquiry that Marxism has not touched. But even in the eno...
