Roland Daniels (20 January 1819 – 29 August 1855) was a German physician, socialist, writer, and a friend of

Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...

. He is considered to be responsible for several of Marx's ideas on ecology including metabolic rift. He was incarcerated during the

Cologne Communist Trial The Cologne Communist Trial took place in 1852 in Cologne, Germany, and was conducted by the Prussian government against eleven members of the Communist League who were suspected of having participated in the 1848 uprising. The trial lasted from ...

which led to tuberculosis and premature death. Daniels was born in Engelsdorf near Cologne and trained as a physician. In 1844 he met Karl Marx in Paris and became deeply influenced, joining the Communist League in Cologne. He was arrested during the Cologne Communist Trial in June 1851 but was acquitted later. The incarceration however led to a tuberculosis infection from which he died. He was the author of a manuscript ''Mikrokosmos'' on anthropology in which he tried to connect Marx's dialectical materialism with natural science, particularly principles from contemporary ecology. Daniels was familiar with the work of Justus von Liebig and developed the concept of metabolism (Stoffwechsel) and examined how humans gathered and returned energy and material from the environment which he termed as "

social metabolism Social metabolism or socioeconomic metabolism is the set of flows of materials and energy that occur between nature and society, between different societies, and within societies. These human-controlled material and energy flows are a basic featu ...

References

1819 births 1855 deaths German communists 19th-century German philosophers {{Germany-philosopher-stub