The text we will be analysing is: A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction (the first two pages), written between the end of 1843 and January 1844. It was published in March of the same year in The French-German Annals.
When Marx talks about 'man', it is generally Feuerbach that he has in mind. The same can be said with reference to the sentences: "Man makes religion" and "criticism or religion", which are upheld by the young followers of Hegel, from Strauss to Moshe Hess, and from Feuerbach to Bruno Bauer. However, in these two pages Marx deals also with his immediate past and at the same time with the theories of these young scholars.
These accounts are therefore rendered simultaneously; the same applies to the statement: "Aber der Mensch das ist kein abstraktes, ausser der Welt hockendes Wesen. Der Mench, das ist die Welt des Menschen, Staat, Soziet/it" [But man is not an abstract being, hidden outside the world (who dwells hidden, squatting and kneeling outside the world). Man is Man's world, State and Society]. This is a criticism directed at Feuerbach's concept that Man is an abstract being, a concept which was used by Marx in the years immediately preceding this and which, in a discontinuous form, bring us to these first pages.
The final part of paragraph 7 has a similar meaning directed this time at Bruno Bauer: "The criticism of sky thus becomes the criticism of the earth, and the criticism of religion becomes the criticism of right, the criticism of theology becomes the criticism of politics". This is the philosophical itinerary which Marx had already followed and which leaves Bruno Bauer and the young followers of Hegel behind, although it is also the beginning of the way which will allow Marx to stop being a young follower of Hegel and become a Materialist. This is the moment (from the spring of 1843 to the summer of 1844) in which Marx and Engels, who were in contact with one another, developed their ideas from idealism to materialism and evolved them individually, from positions of radical democracy to Communism. This evolution meant an 'overcoming' in the Hegelian sense of