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Essay on Karl Marx Philosophy
Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, social scientist, and activist who developed the most powerful critique of free enterprise in contemporary times. Marx studied law, history, and philosophy at more than a few German universities and initially found work as a journalist. His critical political and economic writings soon earned him expulsion from Germany, nevertheless. He moved to Paris in 1843, where he met Friedrich Engels, with whom he formed a lifelong intellectual collaboration. Forced to move yet again, he settled in England.
At its broadest, Marx's work provided a powerful and, for many, compelling account of the development of modern society—one that derived its urgency from the massive transformative effects of industrial capitalism and the impoverishment of large sectors of the new working class. Marx rooted this critique in a materialist sociological and historical methodology, which carries his name and which helped shape the development of the social sciences and other humanistic fields. His theory incorporated aspects of the German idealist philosophical tradition, including Immanuel Kant 's notion of critique (in which science advanced partly by a thoroughgoing examination of the conditions of knowledge) and Georg Hegel 's approach to dialectical reason, in which human existence and knowledge are treated as essentially social and historical. (Bender, F. L)
Marx's early thought built on Hegel's philosophy of history and, especially, on his use of philosophy as a vehicle for social critique. Together with other “Young Hegelians,” Marx accepted Hegel's insistence that all reality was historical but did not adopt his profound conservatism. Influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx developed a critique of Hegel that incorporated Hegel's dialectical method, his emphasis on historical change, and his approach to totality—but that inverted Hegel's ontology. Where Hegel had treated Spirit (or Reason) as the basis of all reality, Marx insisted on practical..................
