Marxist philosophy has been one of the most controversial subject of the last century. It has profoundly influenced the entire world, and the development of the current political relations. In this paper I am going to cover Marx's historical realism, how it was developed and its relevance. .
In 1836 Marx went to the University of Berlin to study philosophy. There he studied under, and was greatly influenced by Hegal. He joined a group of young men, the Doctors Club, who believed that the key to understanding human nature and history was in Hegal's approach to philosophy. Hegal believed that all of reality was God. God was in everything which means that God could also be found in culture and civilization. This idea broke from traditional theological views that God and the world were separate, and many of his young followers used his ideas to criticize the church. Hegal also believed, "History consists in the gradual self-realization of God in the sequence of time. What makes history knowledgeable is that its essence is Mind, and what produces history is the continuous struggle of Mind to realize itself in the perfect form" (Stumpf 365). This gives an idea about how history develops. History is a dialectic process moving in a pattern from thesis, to antithesis, and finishing with synthesis. Society starts out at its most basic form, and develops continually until it reaches it's perfect form, which assumes that eventually there will be no more development because everything will be perfect. .
Another person who greatly influenced Marx while he was at the university was Feuerbach. In 1841 he wrote "The Essence of Christianity." Feuerbach takes God out of Hegel's philosophy. He states ".the starting point for humanity must be real man living in the real, material world" (Giddens 3). Hegal sees the real world as coming from the divine, whereas Feuerbach sees the divine as an illusion of what is truly real.