


Marx and Engels saw in Feuerbach's emphasis on people and human needs a movement toward a materialistic interpretation of society. He held that an individual is the product of their environment and that the whole consciousness of a person is the result of the interaction of sensory organs and the external world.

Feuerbach proposed that people should interpret social and political thought as their foundation and their material needs. Ludwig Feuerbach was a German philosopher and anthropologist. Attendees included Max Stirner, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. See also: Marx's theory of alienation Die Freien by Friedrich Engels, a group of Young Hegelians formed at the University of Berlin. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from feudalism and by the prediction of the development of communism from capitalism. Those societies in turn became capitalist states and those states would be overthrown by the self-conscious portion of their working class, or proletariat, creating the conditions for socialism and ultimately a higher form of communism than that with which the whole process began. Slave states had developed into feudal societies. This notion is often understood as a simple historical narrative: primitive communism had developed into slave states. In this brief popularization of his ideas, Marx emphasized that social development sprang from the inherent contradictions within material life and the social superstructure. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. He summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: While Marx accepted this broad conception of history, Hegel was an idealist and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. For example, Hegel strongly opposed slavery in the United States during his lifetime and envisioned a time when Christian nations would radically eliminate it from their civilization. Sometimes, Hegel explained that this progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion, but at other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps-episodal upheavals against the existing status quo. Hegel believed that the direction of human history is characterized in the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was also a movement towards greater and greater rationality). Marx's view of history, which came to be called historical materialism, is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality and history should be viewed dialectically. They were often referred to as the Young Hegelians. This historically important left-wing group included Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Friedrich Engels and Marx himself. In politics, many of them became revolutionaries. The left-wing Hegelians eventually moved to an atheistic position. They emphasized the compatibility between Hegel's philosophy and Christianity they were orthodox. Theologically and politically, the right-wing Hegelians offered a conservative interpretation of his work. His followers soon divided into right-wing and left-wing Hegelians. His views were widely taught and his students were highly regarded.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel īy the time of his death, Hegel was the most prominent philosopher in Germany. Hegel's dialectical method, which was taken up by Karl Marx, was an extension of the method of reasoning by antinomies that Kant used. Kantian philosophy was the basis on which the structure of Marxism was built-particularly as it was developed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Immanuel Kant is believed to have had a greater influence than any other philosopher of modern times. Influences on Karl Marx are generally thought to have been derived from three main sources, namely German idealist philosophy, French socialism and English and Scottish political economy.
