this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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This is severely ADHD coded to me, which honestly tracks. It explains how he can write books so significant and meticulously detailed-- his hyperfocus.
I thought it was bipolar, since he spends periods wasting away and when he's active he disregards sleep, which sound like periods of depression and mania to me.
That thought crossed my mind too but we rarely hear anything about mood instability, more like periods of activity and inactivity. Bipolar periods often go for months at a time as well, unless presenting with cyclothemia (shorter shifts between moods iirc). His fighting in his younger days could also fit with issues with impulse control, though that could have just been the culture at the time.
Also his alcoholism.
Idk if it really counts as adequate evidence of mood instability for this purpose, but I think he was also said throughout his life to get furiously angry pretty readily, both in person and in letters and such.
Still, you make a good point, so I am content to say that my guess is substantially less likely than yours.
Young marx was more angry/aggressive, by the late 50s and 60s he mellowed out a lot
Do you have more information on that latter part?
It's just the sense i've gotten in my reading about him
A good series of snapshots of what Marx was like at different times in his life can be found in McLellan's collection: https://archive.org/details/mc-lellan.-karl-marx-interviews-and-recollections/page/n5/mode/2up People describing Marx in the 40s and earlier 50s have very different emphases than those talking about him later on
Two very good biographies are Mary Gabriel's "Love and Capital" and Liedman's "A World to Win," both show the shift pretty well, but don't rly draw attention to it iirc. Another good (and short) one showing the softer side of Marx, albeit one that falls a bit into (well researched) hagiography, is "The Marx he Knew" by Spargo.
Can also just generally see this in his writing, there's a big contrast between the satirical works of the mid 40s and the polemics around the 48 revolutions and aftermath; and his work on "Capital," economic lectures, newspaper articles and the like. According to Engels (preface to "The Housing Question"), in their division of labour, it fell to Engels to write popular and polemical works whereas Marx focused on "Capital" and political work.
Thanks for the elaboration. Engels also mentions that last bit in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, basically saying "Marx is to busy with Capital to fight Duehring, so I'll be handling it."
It sounds like depression to me, I'm depressed and this is literally how my life is organised. Sometimes I can't get things done for days on end, even household chores, but when I've got energy I spend it on getting my work done as tirelessly as I can manage.
Though a lot of neurodivergence and mental illness has overlap with each other, it's a spectrum of behaviours, and it's impossible to actually properly diagnose someone from 150 years ago.