Student at the University of Berlin under Savigny and Gans
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The methodological turn that Marx was to accomplish in 1844 had its prehistory in his student years in Berlin (1836–1841). In the winter semester of 1836/37, Marx attended lectures on the Pandects with Friedrich Carl von Savigny and on criminal law with Eduard Gans (see Chapter 2.4) at the same time — the methodological confrontation between the Historical School of Law and Hegelian philosophy of law was part of his everyday lecture experience. In the summer semester of 1838 he also attended Gans’s lectures on Prussian common law, and from 1837 he belonged to the Doctors’ Club, the Berlin circle of progressive Hegelians in which Gans, too, moved.
In his lengthy letter to his father of November 10, 1837, Marx himself describes the methodological turning point that had taken shape in this constellation. He had tried, he writes, “to carry a philosophy of law through the whole field of law,” and had failed on the “opposition between what is actual and what ought to be,” an opposition “peculiar to idealism.” In place of this “metaphysics of law” came the demand to grasp “the reason of the thing itself” as “something inherently contradictory” — that is, not to confront reality from outside with ready-made concepts, but to find the concepts in the movement of the matter itself. This is the methodological birth of what Marx would develop six years later as the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and three decades later as the method of Capital. It stands in direct biographical connection with his lecture experience under Gans, who asserted the Hegelian method against Savigny’s “reduction of law to what is historically given” and who, in his lectures on natural law, formulated the methodological consequence: “to arrive at the grounds of the fact and to sublate them.”
This early training explains why Marx later barely mentions Gans in his published writings: Gans is not a cited source but an assimilated form of thought. What Marx takes away from these lectures is not a doctrine but a methodological stance — the movement of going beyond Hegel with Hegelian means. His first journalistic trial by fire puts this stance to the test in 1842: in the “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood” in the Rheinische Zeitung, he argues not in Savigny’s style of customary law but measures positive legal forms against their rationality and their social content. This is Hegelian-Gansian, without Marx naming Gans.