The book was written in the French language to strike its target most closely and for the cutting pun of a title to be rendered most unmistakably. The book was regarded by the political circle around Marx organized as the Communist League as a key part of their contemporary program, delineating the views of the League from those espoused by Proudhon and his followers. Although prominently featuring the word "philosophy" in its title, The Poverty of Philosophy is essentially a book dealing with the subject of economics.

The Poverty of Philosophy is a book by Karl Marx published in Paris and Brussels in 1847, where he lived in exile from 1843 until 1849. It was originally written in French as an answer to the economic and philosophical arguments of French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon set forth in his 1846 book The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty. Marx read Proudhon's book late in 1846 and responded strongly and negatively, authoring a lengthy letter to his Russian correspondent P.V. Annenkov on December 28, 1846 with a detailed exposition of his views that became the core of his 1847 book. He began working on a book-length formal reply the following January, completing the work in the spring and going to press in April 1847.

Karl Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867–1894).