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1.1.2 Marx and Young Hegelians
In the university, interests of Marx turned to philosophy, much to his father's dismay, and he joined the circle of students and young professors known as the " Young Hegelians", led by Bruno Bauer. Some members of this circle drew an analogy between post- Aristotelian philosophy and post-Hegelian philosophy. Another Young Hegelian, Max Stirner, applied Hegelian criticism and argued that stopping anywhere short of nihilistic egoism was mysticism. His views were not accepted by most of his colleagues, and Karl Marx responded in parts of Die Deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology).
Georg Hegel had just recently died in 1831, and during his lifetime was an extremely influential figure at the University and in German academia in general. The Hegelian establishment (known as the Right Hegelians ) in place at the University maintained that the series of historical dialectics had been completed, and that Prussian society as it existed was the culmination of all social development to date, with an extensive civil service system, good universities, industrialization, and high employment. The Young Hegelians with whom Marx was associated believed that there were still further dialectical changes to come, and that the Prussian society of the time was far from perfect as it still contained pockets of poverty, government censorship was in place, and non-Lutherans suffered from religious discrimination.
Marx was warned not to submit his doctoral dissertation at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, as it would certainly be poorly received there due to his reputation as a Young Hegelian radical. Marx instead submitted his dissertation, which compared the atomic theories of Democritus and Epicurus, to the University of Jena in 1840, where it was accepted.
1.2 Career
When his mentor Bauer was dismissed from the philosophy faculty in 1842, Marx abandoned philosophy for journalism and went on to edit the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical Cologne newspaper. After the newspaper was later shut in 1843, in part due to Marx's conflicts with government censors, Marx returned to philosophy, turned to political activism, and worked as a free-lance journalist. Marx soon moved, however, something he would have to do often as a result of his radical views.
Marx first moved to France, where he re-evaluated his relationship with Bauer and the Young Hegelians, and wrote On the Jewish Question , mostly a critique of current notions of civil rights and political emancipation. It was in Paris that he met and began working with his life-long collaborator Friedrich Engels, who called Marx's attention to the situation of the working class, and guided Marx's interest in economics. After he was forced to leave Paris for his writings, he and Engels moved to Brussels, Belgium.
There they co-wrote The German Ideology, a critique of the philosophy of Hegel and the Young Hegelians, and then Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy ( 1847), a critique of French socialist thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21, 1848, which was commissioned by the Communist League (formerly, the League of the Just), an organization of German émigrés whom Marx had met in London.
That year Europe experienced revolutionary upheaval; a working-class movement seized power from King Louis Philippe in France and invited Marx to return to Paris. When this government collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and restarted the Rheinische Zeitung, only to be swiftly expelled again. Marx's final move was to London. In 1852 Marx wrote his famous pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which he analyzed Napoleon III's takeover of France. From 1852 to 1861, while in London, Marx contributed to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune as European correspondent.
