In the West, when many of us in hear the word Communism, our minds likely flash to images ruthless dictators, like Stalin in the USSR and Mao in China. Or, we might think of the Cold War, where communism served as the philosophical and economic enemy of Western capitalism. But communism as it has been practiced over the last century actually emerged from the philosophies of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1800s. So what was the initial idea behind communism, and how did the initial ideology morph over time in the twentieth century? Professor Terrell Carver joins the podcast.