Karl Marx
Read this biographical article about Karl Marx. It also explains a number of his views and gives context to the birth of his ideas about the social impacts of capitalism.
Biography
Education
The adolescent Karl Marx
Karl Marx was home-schooled until the age of 13 when he entered Trier Gymnasium. Just before he left Marx wrote an essay, The Union of Believers With Christ, which showed him to be a person with a deep and sensitive faith in God. He then enrolled, at age 17, to study law at the University of Bonn.
Despite wanting to study philosophy and literature, his father disallowed it, believing Karl would be unable to support himself as a scholar. He joined the Trier Tavern Club and at one point served as its president but his grades suffered as a result. The next year, his father had him transfer to the rigorous Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. At that time, Marx wrote poems about life which Richard Wurmbrand suggested reveal him going through a spiritual crisis. An example of this is a verse from his play Oulanem
Hellish evaporations rise and fill my brains,
Until I will go mad and my heart will not change dramatically.
See this sword?
The King of darkness
sold it to me.
In a letter to his father, Marx describes the inner struggles he went through and why his interests turned to philosophy. He joined the circle of students and young professors known as the "Young Hegelians", student philosophers and journalists orbiting Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, in opposition to G.W.F. Hegel, their teacher. For many of them, the so-called left-Hegelians, Hegel's dialectical method, separated from its theological content, provided a powerful weapon for the critique of established religion and politics.
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; nevertheless, Stirner's book was the main reason Marx abandoned the Feuerbachian view and developed the basic concept of historical materialism.
In 1841, Marx earned a doctorate with the dissertation The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, but submitted it to the University of Jena, because his bad reputation as a Young Hegelian radical would hurt him in Berlin.