15 Karl MarxAs a student in Bonn and Berlin, Marx was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Hegel.While Marx was impressed with the Hegelian professors under whom he studied, he ultimately found himself attracted to a group of students known as the “Young Hegelians” .Although Marx desired a career as an academic at the time, his political sympathies prevented him from receiving a position in the state-controlled university system.Instead, Marx turned to journalism where his radical politics attracted the attention of Prussian censors.The publication for which he worked was shut down for its politically incorrect commentary, and the frustrated Marx traveled to Paris.Paris in 1843 was an international center of social, political, and artistic activity and the gathering place of radicals and revolutionaries from all over Europe.In Paris Marx became involved with socialists and revolutionaries.Most significantly, though, it was in Paris that Marx met Friedrich Engels,the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer in England who had become a socialist after observing the deplorable condition of workers in his father’s factories.Together, Marx and Engels began to develop the ideas which became Revolutionary Proletarian Socialism, or, as it is better known, Communism.
