Essay on Karl Marx

29 Pages 7221 Words

er, left Bonn after a year and in
October 1836 enrolled at the University of Berlin to study law and
philosophy.

Marx's crucial experience at Berlin was his introduction to Hegel's
philosophy, regnant there, and his adherence to the Young
Hegelians. At first he felt a repugnance toward Hegel's doctrines;
when Marx fell sick it was partially, as he wrote his father, "from
intense vexation at having to make an idol of a view I detested." The
Hegelian pressure in the revolutionary student culture was powerful,
however, and Marx joined a society called the Doctor Club, whose
members were intensely involved in the new literary and
philosophical movement. Their chief figure was Bruno Bauer, a
young lecturer in theology, who was developing the idea that the
Christian Gospels were a record not of history but of human
fantasies arising from emotional needs and that Jesus had not been a
historical person. Marx enrolled in a course of lectures given by
Bauer on the prophet Isaiah. Bauer taught that a new social
catastrophe "more tremendous" than that of the advent of
Christianity was in the making. The Young Hegelians began moving
rapidly toward atheism and also talked vaguely of political action.

The Prussian government, fearful of the subversion latent in the
Young Hegelians, soon undertook to drive them from the
universities. Bauer was dismissed from his post in 1839. Marx's
"most intimate friend" of this period, Adolph Rutenberg, an older
journalist who had served a prison sentence for his political
radicalism, pressed for a deeper social involvement. By 1841 the
Young Hegelians had become left republicans. Marx's studies,
meanwhile, were lagging. Urged by his friends, he submitted a
doctoral dissertation to the university at Jena, which was known to
be lax in its academic requirements, and received his degree in April
1841. His thesis analyzed in a Hegelian fashion the difference
between the natural philos...