Francis Ween has pointed out that the Jewishness becoming a Lutheran, and a lot of anti-Semitism in Marx was very odd, but I don't have time to talk about that at the moment. Let's talk about when he went to Bonn University and his PhD in philosophy focused on atomism, so he was trained as a philosopher. Can you tell us why you think he did that and what relevance that might have? Well, he went to university to read law, as it happens, and his father was very keen that he should complete that course of study.

But he was distracted away to a philosophy, as all sensible people are, and eventually, as you say, wrote his PhD thesis on the difference between Epicurus and Democritus, the two of the great atomists of antiquity. And it's a very, very interesting thesis, by the way, because the whole opinion... Can you explain what atomism is? Yes, atomism is the ancient view that the universe is made of, ultimately, of indivisible particles whose combinations with one another in space and time give rise to all the phenomena that we see in the material universe. So it's a materialistic philosophy. It's a materialistic philosophy, which is very important for Marx later, and naturalistic, that's to say, believes that the universe operates according to natural laws. Now, the whole weight of opinion from classical antiquity until Marx's own day was that Epicurus had more or less plagiarized Democritus' ideas, and that where he had changed them, he had changed them for the worse. And Marx, being, as it were, a revolutionary in his marrow, wanted to turn this thesis on its head and show that, in fact, Epicurus had a much subtler and deeper understanding of these things than Democritus did. And it's a very, very interesting thesis. It's strongly argued, very detailed. It shows a wonderful grasp of ancient Greek, which was necessary to that study. And it cogently argues that Epicurus, in fact, had very much better grip on, for example, the concepts of time and on astronomy than Democritus did. And very interestingly, you get the notions of contradiction, of dialectic, and also even of alienation occurring in this PhD thesis that Marx wrote as a 20, 21, 22-year The big man in philosophy

in Marx's time as a young student, and he was taught by Bruno Bauer, who was a disciple of this big man, was Hegel at

Berlin University. What influence did Hegel

have on Marx? Well,

I think it was a huge one. Gareth, who is a great expert on Hegel here, is going to put us right in a minute, because you must remember that on his deathbed, Hegel said to his favorite pupil, no one has understood me except you, and not even you have got it right, and then he died, which has left us all in a bit of a dilemma. But, of course, the Hegelian ideas had, in fact, so steeped themselves into the philosophical debate in the Germany of the day that everybody thought in Hegelian or neo-Hegelian terms, either because they agreed or because they wanted to disagree. And this idea of a deterministic dialectical process of things, in the case of Hegel, of spirit with a capital S, later in the case of Marx, of the material conditions in which people find themselves, was so much an assumption, was so much taken for granted that it provides the very bones of Marx's own later view. So it was a tremendous influence. And, of course, he was part of the young Hegelian radical movement. I mean, this was an era of very, very active, tumultuous, radical politics and a rather repressive state so that, you very early on in his university career, Marx was exposed to all these cross-currents of ideas where philosophy and politics mixed. Can

you tell us briefly the spine of Hegelianism that Marx took on and why it shook him so much? We understood that when he was reading Hegel, he was disturbed, he had maybe something of a breakdown. Was this connected with the ideas that were coming in, or was it something else?

Well, I think the important thing for Marx and for most of his generation reading Hegel was the idea that reason had a history, that reason wasn't something just eternal, it was something which took different forms in different cultures in different times. And this is what he says in the letter he writes to his father, the one letter that really survives to his father, and of course typically it's writing because he really wants more money because he's overspent. He's also trying to justify, no doubt to his distressed father, why he's changing from law to philosophy. And in order to do that, he tries to explain why he gets so exhilarated by the reading of Hegel. And what he says is that Hegel is the first person to place the idea in reality. That's to say that it's not just philosophy on the page. It's actually beliefs and practices lived out in particular epochs. And that's what's going to change in the future. And that's why Hegel is the great philosopher for him. And I must say myself, I was disappointed not to see Hegel on the list, but I quite understand why, following Anthony's point. But beyond that, I think Hegel also sets up the problem which all these young philosophers of the 1830s and 40s then tried to solve. Hegel says he's trying to save Christianity in a way, and he says well what philosophy says, what my philosophy says is in concepts the same thing that religion says in picture painting and in anecdotal stories and the whole problem with the young Hegelians, the whole problem that the young Hegelians set out to solve is when Strauss says well actually if you look at the history of the Gospels or you try to look at the Gospels of history, it's not at all true that what the Gospels say in pictures and narratives is the same as what Hegel is saying in his philosophy. And in that sense, we have to modernize Christianity by getting rid of this archaic biography of Christ and concentrate on the ideas. And of course, the conservatives get really upset at that idea.

And inside the Hague, he's introduced the idea of the dialectic, which Hunter Greiling has interestingly said is emergent in his study, PhD in atomism, the idea of thesis and antithesis leading to a synthesis, which becomes the synthesis, which becomes the new thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and the movement forward of history in that way. In Hegel's case, towards, at absolute, towards Christianity, but the young group that Marx is around are anti the religious element, and they see it move. And he's reinforced by this Marx by Feuerbach, when he writes, he's published his thesis on Feuerbach, who is anti-religious. Can you briefly say what influenced, what he got from Feuerbach? Well,

Feuerbach is tremendously important in setting many of Marx's later approaches. First of all, Feuerbach is the first of the young Hegelians not just to criticise Christianity, but to criticise religion and to see Hegel as, in a way, just an accompaniment to religion rather than being, as it were, the transcendence of religion. And what Feuerbach says is that if you take Hegel's idea of the spirit, it's what the word implies, just spirit. But man is a sensuous being. That's to say his body and mind. And that means that man cannot get rid of his body, and because he can't get rid of his body, he is dependent on others. And from this, Feuerbach deduces what becomes very important for Marx too, that man is a communal being, that humanity is the unity, he says, of I and thou. And that leads to his criticism of Christianity, where he says that Christianity interposes between this unity this third figure called Christ. Christ is the mediator in human relations, and therefore what it creates, in effect, is a sort of individualistic attitude of each individual in which the individual is sovereign, what Luther said, that the individual directly relates to God. And that means he doesn't relate to his fellow Christians except through the mediation of the church.

And it's an interesting example later of the way that Marx can, through his journalistic skills, turn Feuerbach's anti-religious into a memorable phrase, religion being the opium of the people, which in a sense is a summary of what Feuerbach was doing. Francis Ween, at this stage, having said, some interpret the world, I want to change it, what action is he taking? Journalism is becoming important to him, isn't it? Well, yes, I mean, he stumbles into

it almost by accident. Originally, he wanted an academic career, but that was scuppered because Bruno Bauer, who was going to be his patron, was himself sacked from Bonn University for his attacks on religion. And he then, eventually, after a year of drifting when he got his doctorate, he ended up in Cologne, writing for a paper called the Rheinische Zeitung, a newly set-up paper, financed by local bankers, businessmen, people like that, who were agitating for political reform. I mean, no surprise to Marx there, about changes in the economic, in terms of production and so forth, leading to political changes or at least an old system that can no longer cope with the new rising bourgeoisie, a rather antiquated, ossified, absolutist state with censors and police spies and all the rest of it, and a vast creaking bureaucracy. And these people set up this paper to agitate for that. And quite a lot of the contributors were young Hegelians that Marx had come across in Berlin, and he himself started writing for it and was instantly, obviously, by far the most talented and brilliant of them. And it was a perfect moment for him because, of course, one of his criticisms of Feuerbach was that his materialism was, if you like, static. There was all theory, no practice. I mean, most famously in that line about philosophers merely interpreting the world. And Marx's problem was that although he thought it was important to root it in actual material conditions, he knew absolutely nothing about the actuality of the world around him. But being a journalist gave him that chance, as he said, to discover and write about real material conditions, whether it be pieces about the wine farmers in the Moselle or peasants being prosecuted for picking up firewood in private forests, which brought in all questions of private property. For the first time, he had to grapple with things like that, with all sorts of ideas that then emerge in his later work. And he starts doing that as a journalist in Cologne in 1842. There's a very fateful and important meeting with Engels in

Paris. We just have time to say they met, they got on. Engels was rich. His father had owned factories in Manchester. They got on intellectually. And together in 1848, the Euro revolutions, as Gareth said earlier, time of many manifestos, they put through, and in a way, the Communist Manifesto. What was converting? What did each give to the other of Engels and Marx? Yes,

it's tremendously interesting, this, because they met in... In fact, I think they met in Cologne very briefly without any sparks flying, but then they met again in Paris in 1844. And what's interesting about that is that in the period between 1842 and 1844, Marx was busy working out the philosophical basis, really, of his ideas. And this was something that only came to be appreciated very much later on in the 1920s and 30s when the work that he did at that time was published eventually. Up until about that time, the 1930s, people thought that the philosopher of the two was really Engels because in the 1870s and 80s, Engels had written a great deal of stuff that provided later Marxist communists with the philosophical basis of their views. It was Engels, for example, who invented the concept of dialectical materialism and so on. But there, in the early 1840s, Marx was working out the basis of his views, and he met Engels at that time. Engels reported later that they had spent something like 10 days, two weeks together in intense conversation and they found they agreed on so many things that there was a real meeting of minds there. And Engels also later said that he was conscious of the fact that he was in the presence of genius and that it was sort of incumbent on him in a way to do everything he could to serve that genius and further the cause that they shared together. So that was the beginning of this lifelong association between them in which Engels sort of bankrolled Marx and made it

possible for him to do some

of the great work that he did later on.