Not Televised So Much As Sponsored By Nike

I had a very stimulating conversation over dinner tonight with one of my favorite people regarding how best to combine successful living in a capitalist society with passionate idealism about making the world a better place.

Thinking about some of the points we both made (admittedly, he got a couple of zingers in there) led me to digging through a long neglected sheaf of papers from college to unearth a much-adored article, entitled "Karl Marx in Love: The Enlightenment, Romanticism and Hegelian Theory in the Young Marx," by Harold E. Mah, originally published in History of European Ideas, Vol. 7, No. 5, pp. 489-507, 1986.

It's a brief but utterly charming survey of Marx's early philosophical influences as they relate to events in his life, e.g.

The relationship between Marx and Jenny was in a state of constant turbulence. Each seemed to delight in expressing and then withdrawing one's love, in tormenting the other with one's own doubts...And entangled in this web was the sharer of the secret of their engagement, Heinrich Marx.

When his son's taste for Romantic poetry first developed while he was at the University of Bonn, Heinrich Marx tried to show a sympathetic interest...Heinrich suggested to Marx that the latter should not publish his poems until his talents had further matured. At the same time, the father encouraged this son to pursue something more practical and less self-indulgent, such as legal studies. Both parents also tried to wean Marx from his Bohemian style of manic activity, sleepless nights and alcoholic dissipation.

The father did not become seriously concerned about Marx's Romanticism until Marx had become engaged...

This continues for quite a while, until Marx has his infamous conversion to Hegelian theory. And, of course, later on he goes on to formulate his own brilliant theories on the nature of political economy in modern industrial societies.

My love for Marx's ideas (in their original form, minus the -ism) led me, along with a confluence of other factors, to work in the labor movement when I finished school. I can say with some certainty that nothing could have extinguished my own youthful idealism more quickly than my experiences over the next few years, but I am still on the path to self-discovery, much like Marx once upon a time.