Marx and the Young Hegelians

Hegel's importance in the history of philosophy derives not so much from the content of his writing as from the enormous influence he exercised on thinkers who followed him. Of all those whom he influenced, the one who in his turn was most influential was Karl Marx, who described his own philosophical vocation as ‘turning Hegel upside-down'.  Marx was born in Trier, in 1818, to a liberal Protestant family of Jewish descent. He attended university first at Bonn and then at Berlin, where he studied the philosophy of Hegel under Bruno Bauer, the leader of a left-wing group known as the Young Hegelians. From Hegel and Bauer Marx learned to view history as a dialectical process. That is to say, history came in a succession of stages which followed one another, like the steps in a geometrical proof, in an order determined by fundamental logical or metaphysical principles. This was a vision which he retained throughout his life.  The Young Hegelians attached great importance to Hegel's concept of alienation, that is to say, treating as alien something with which by rights one should identify. Alienation is the state in which people view as exterior to themselves something which is truly an intrinsic element of their own being. What Hegel himself had in mind was that individuals, all of whom were manifestations of a single Spirit, saw each other as hostile rivals rather than as elements of a single unity. The Young Hegelians rejected the idea of the universal spirit, but retained the notion of alienation, locating it elsewhere in the system.