Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Marx writes this in the opening of his essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), composed in the aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848 and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of 2 December 1851, which ended the French Second Republic and paved the way for the Second Empire. Marx is analyzing how class forces, political institutions, and inherited ideological forms shaped events in France, and why revolutionary hopes were frustrated. The passage frames his method: political actors do act, but their agency is constrained by material and historical conditions they inherit rather than choose.

The sentence crystallizes Marx’s view of history as a product of human action conditioned by circumstance. People “make” history—there is agency, struggle, and decision—but not in a vacuum: they confront economic structures, state forms, and cultural traditions handed down from earlier generations. The “nightmare” metaphor emphasizes how inherited ideas and symbols can dominate political imagination, leading actors to repeat old scripts instead of grasping present realities. In the essay, this helps explain why French politics could be captured by a Bonapartist restoration: the living, burdened by the dead, misrecognize new class relations through the lens of older revolutionary and imperial traditions.

1) “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please…”
2) “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”