His wife came of a reactionary family of the Prussian nobility, her elder brother being Prussia’s Minister of the Interior during a most reactionary period - 1850-58.

In 1843, Marx married, at Kreuznach, a childhood friend he had become engaged to while still a student. Marx’s journalistic activities convinced him that he was insufficiently acquainted with political economy, and he zealously set out to study it. Of the major articles Marx contributed to Rheinische Zeitung, Engels notes, in addition to those indicated below (see Bibliography), an article on the condition of peasant winegrowers in the Moselle Valley.

Marx had to resign the editorship before that date, but his resignation did not save the paper, which suspended publication in March 1843. The newspaper’s revolutionary-democratic trend became more and more pronounced under Marx’s editorship, and the government first imposed double and triple censorship on the paper, and then on Janudecided to suppress it.

Marx and Bruno Bauer were invited to be the chief contributors, and in October 1842 Marx became editor-in-chief and moved from Bonn to Cologne. “We all became at once Feuerbachians.” At that time, some radical bourgeois in the Rhineland, who were in touch with the Left Hegelians, founded, in Cologne, an opposition paper called Rheinische Zeitung (The first issue appeared on January 1, 1842). “One must oneself have experienced the liberating effect” of these books, Engels subsequently wrote of these works of Feuerbach. The year 1843 saw the appearance of his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Feuerbach began to criticize theology, particularly after 1836, and turn to materialism, which in 1841 gained ascendancy in his philosophy ( The Essence of Christianity). Left Hegelian views were making rapid headway in Germany at the time. However, the reactionary policy of the government, which deprived Ludwig Feuerbach of his chair in 1832, refused to allow him to return to the university in 1836, and in 1841 forbade young Professor Bruno Bauer to lecture at Bonn, made Marx abandon the idea of an academic career. In Berlin, he belonged to the circle of “Left Hegelians”(Bruno Bauer and others) who sought to draw atheistic and revolutionary conclusion from Hegel’s philosophy.Īfter graduating, Marx moved to Bonn, hoping to become a professor. At the time Marx was a Hegelian idealist in his views. He concluded his university course in 1841, submitting a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Epicurus. After graduating from a Gymnasium in Trier, Marx entered the university, first at Bonn and later in Berlin, where he read law, majoring in history and philosophy. The family was well-to-do, cultured, but not revolutionary. His father was a lawyer, a Jew, who in 1824 adopted Protestantism. Marx, Karl, was born on (New Style), in the city of Trier (Rhenish Prussia). Lenin’s Karl Marx-A Brief Biographical Sketch with an Exposition of Marxism (Lenin Collected Works, Volume 21)Ī.

Engels socialism