From Hegel to Feuerbach: The Young Marx's Materialist Turn

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was born in Trier, in the Prussian Rhineland, to a family of Jewish lawyers who had converted to Lutheranism, and he studied law and then philosophy first at the University of Bonn and, from 1836, at the University of Berlin, where G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) had taught until his death and where his system still dominated the philosophy faculty. In Berlin, Marx joined the circle known as the Young Hegelians (Junghegelianer), a loose group including Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, and Max Stirner, who read Hegel's dialectic — the notion that history unfolds through the self-development of Spirit (Geist) toward absolute self-consciousness — not as a conservative apology for the Prussian state but as a revolutionary method applicable to religion, politics, and law. Marx completed his doctoral dissertation in 1841 at the University of Jena, comparing the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus, and his early journalism for the liberal Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne (1842–1843), which he briefly edited, brought him into direct conflict with Prussian press censorship and with concrete material questions, such as a Rhineland law criminalizing the traditional peasant gathering of fallen wood, that pushed him toward economic and social analysis before he had fully broken with Hegelian idealism.