Chapter 10 is dedicated to Friedrich Engels, who studied in Berlin at the beginning of the 1840s. The chapter explores Engels’ short monograph entitled Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. In this work he gives a critical evaluation of German philosophy and speaks with nostalgia of the important role of Hegel and Feuerbach for the development of his thought and that of his collaborator Karl Marx. Engels claims that the radical nature of Hegel’s philosophy lies in its dialectical methodology. While it might at first glance look like Hegel is attempting to glorify the actual, in fact his theory shows that everything that arises in history appears at a specific place and under specific circumstances, and in time everything grows old and decays, at which point it is replaced by something new that is better suited to the new situation. This is a recipe for criticism and revolution. It is argued that Marx and Engels also further develop Hegel’s idea of self-conscious and alienation into a theory of class consciousness.

Chapter 6 is dedicated to the work of the young Karl Marx. It begins with an analysis of Marx’s “Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” which reveals the influence of both Hegel and Feuerbach. Marx sees his own work as continuing the criticism of religion that Feuerbach explored and expanding it to the social-political sphere. A close reading is given of the different kinds of alienation that Marx identifies in the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” which use Hegel’s Phenomenology as the point of departure. An account is given of the polemic between Marx and his one-time friend Bruno Bauer, which is played out in The Holy Family, a work coauthored by Marx and Engels. Finally an analysis is provided of The German Ideology with its polemic with the Young Hegelians and its theory of alienation.

The Introduction presents the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and raises questions about the influence of his Berlin lectures in the 1820s. A remarkable generation came to learn from him, which included figures such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, David Friedrich Strauss, and Heinrich Heine. After his death a second generation of students came to Berlin and were inspired by his legacy. Among these were Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Søren Kierkegaard, Ivan Turgenev, and Mikhail Bakunin. All of these thinkers testify to the special intellectual atmosphere in Berlin that arose in connection with Hegel’s philosophy both during his lifetime and in the decades after his death. The present work takes as its point of departure the intellectual milieu at the University of Berlin, which was the fountain of inspiration that nourished the leading figures of the age. The introduction defines Hegel’s concepts of alienation and recognition, which are taken as the guiding themes for a study of philosophy in the nineteenth century. A handful of critical theses are sketched.

This chapter examines Marx’s involvement in French socialist thought and action. Contrary to the standard view, Marx’s ideas were widely available in France at this time through a series of translations that appeared from 1872. These translations presented a ‘French Marx’ that was subtly, but noticeably, different from the German original and other versions, and whose ideas were more finely attuned to French circumstances. The construction of this French Marx was overseen and encouraged by Marx himself, who in translation was often willing to sacrifice the ‘purity’ of his ideas in order to broaden their appeal. The chapter contrasts this with his rigidity in the First International – where most French socialists met Marx for the first time, and which forms the basis for most studies of French Marxism – and argues that historians must combine the two. In order to fully understand why ideas such as Marxism spread, we must supplement the social and organisational histories of international socialism with attentive studies of its ideas, its texts, and their dissemination.

This chapter reappraises the impact of Marx’s ideas in France before the mid-1880s; the years to which historians have traditionally dated the beginning of a potent Marxist influence on French socialism. A wider range of French socialists than the Guesdists (to whom the introduction to Marxism is traditionally attributed) made frequent use of Marxist concepts, while Marx was consistently evoked provocatively by French socialists to maintain their revolutionary credentials. Socialists in particular made use of the French Marx, building upon the translational differences to advance their own theories on matters like the right to work and the role of the state. French socialists saw Marx’s ideas as a useful language for working through pressing social problems rather than a fixed doctrine: in fact, ‘orthodox Marxism’ did not exist during this period. These more complicated interactions also reflected the complex and shifting structures of the revolutionary movement as a whole, and revolutionary thought cannot simply be folded into the social and organisational history of French socialism.