Karl Marx is an important Western European philosopher and social theorist. He is most widely known as the co-author, along with Freidrich Engels, of the Communist Manifesto and as the founder of scientific communism. The Communist Manifesto is a propaganda pamphlet, written as the party platform for the Congress of the Communist League, that has been generally acclaimed as stating the basic tenets of Communism which derived from Marx's own social and economic theories.

The basis of Marx's theories and those of the Communist Manifesto state that history can be viewed in terms of class struggles. In Marx's time, it was the struggle between the bourgeoisie, owners of social production factories and employers of wage-labor, and the proletariat, the wage-laborers, for power. The bourgeoisie ruled over the proletariat and kept them down. From this struggle, Marx came to hypothesize that "the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class."

Marx felt that in order for the proletariat to rise up and take control of the government, it would have to unite and form its own class to overthrow the government. Once this was accomplished, the proletariat would abolish the private property of the bourgeoisie, centralize all production under the proletariat state, and end class distinctions. Centralized property and government and the absence of classes became the basis of Communism.

When Marx introduced his ideas in the Manifesto, he met with early opposition. The Bourgeoisie naturally opposed Marx and his ideas right away, but his ideas were not widely accepted by the vast majority either. People questioned his rationale for such bold statements and whether his ideas could truly work.

Marx's ideas did not become popular for some time until they became the tenets of different forms of Communism. Stalin and Mao used Marx's ideas and elaborated on them to provide their own separate ideologies for Stalinism and Maoism, which were implemented in the former Soviet Union and China.

Adam Smith was a Western European philosopher who is generally known as the "father of modern economics." Smith acquired this title many years after he first published his classic treatise, The Wealth of Nations, which is accredited as being the first complete work on political economy. In this book, Smith wrote the first comprehensive description of the economic system known today as "capitalism."

In The Wealth of Nations, Smith presents a unified social theory for a free market economy where individuals accumulate wealth according to their own desires. He also conveys the necessity for free trade to be open to all nations and seperated from governmental control.

Smith also defines the nature of wealth as being all of the goods and services that all people consume. This definition states that labor is a source of value and how a nation is dependant on the products of its labor, or what it purchases with its products, directly influences how prosperous the nation becomes. Smith also defined the difference between the use and exchange of products. He believed that producers should not worry about the "use value" of their goods, but only be interested in exchanging the product of thier labor to obtain the things needed for sustenance.

Adam Smith did not receive immediate acknowledgement for his efforts. It actually took quite some time before people came to realize how important Smith's ideas were to modern economics. Many economists consider the date of publication in 1776 of The Wealth of Nations as a turning point in economics. Today, Smith is considered by many economic philosophers as being a catalyst for modern economic thought, with his early observations and his introduction of "capitalism."

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