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| A cartoon by Friedrich Engels of ragging party times at the Hippel Cafe in Berlin, home of the Young Hegelians |
In 1845 a young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, age 27 and 25 respectively, sat down to write one of their first joint works in what would prove to be the beginning of a life-long effort of collaboration. The two radicals were unable to find a publisher for their work, which would remain unprinted until the early 1930s; since then it has been understood as an important polemic against materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach which further deepened the method of historical materialism.
In writing The German Ideology, the young Marx and Engels no doubt believed (and, would later say) they were completing a work addressing an entire contemporary debate which was captivating a generation of German philosophy students. These thinkers, whose spirit had been inflamed by the jargon of Hegel’s dialectics, were struggling to turn from the nebulous world of the Spirit, to the world of everyday life with its political problems.
For those young Hegelians, Feuerbach therefore provided a sort of bridge; his theories presented a kind of intellectual passage-way built partly of older French Enlightenment thinking (which saw man as a product of nature, not disembodied Spirit) and retaining some of Hegel’s dialectics. It is not God who creates man, Feuerbach essentially wrote, but man who creates God.
