ABSTRACT

Marx spent the early 1840s grappling with, and tryin g to transform , Hegel's dialectic and philosophy, seeking to convert it into something more graphic and material, not rejecting it entirely but using immanent critique to tease out the "rational kernel" within Hegel's "mystical shell."Twenty-odd years on, Marx still acknowledged his debt to the German idealist, openly avowing himself the pupil of that "mighty thinker, and

even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him . The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious mann er," Bythen , Marx knew that his inquisitive, expan sive mind would never be accepted into the stuffy German academy (a similar fate, of course, would await Walter Benjamin nearly a century later) , nor would his uncompromisingly polemical style, which often seemed to wallow in confrontation. He took up radical journalism instead, eking out a measly existence writing brilliant articles for the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne. He rallied against press censorship und er King Friedrich Wilhelm IV,

14 denounced new wood-theft legislation, and flirted with communism. He raised a few friends' eyebrows en route, who marveled at the young man's erudition: "Dr.