Marx did not truly leave philosophy behind; he remained a philosopher whose project of liberation led him to increasingly empirical analyses of capitalist society and history. His central concerns are freedom, alienation, and critique, themes at the center of the tradition of German Idealism.
Life
Marx came from a Jewish family with rabbinical roots on both his paternal and maternal sides. His father, however, broke with his family and converted to Lutheranism. Karl, his eldest son, was baptized in 1824. After a year studying law at the university in Bonn, Marx transferred to the university in Berlin to study philosophy. He received his doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841, but because of his close association with the radical Young Hegelians, he was unable to secure an academic appointment. Instead of pursuing a career in philosophy, he began to work as a journalist, the only career in which he ever earned any income. Increasingly engaged in the radical politics of the day, in 1843 he moved to Paris, the political heart of Europe, where he did his first serious work in the relatively new field of political economy as well as continuing his critical work on Hegel.
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