Iván Szelényi traces Karl Marx's intellectual formation for Yale's Foundations of Modern Social Theory course, from his years among the Young Hegelians alongside Bruno Bauer to his break with the idea that alienation is a matter of thought. Szelényi argues that for Marx, alienation is rooted in material conditions of production, not consciousness, and so can only be resolved by changing those conditions rather than by philosophical critique. The lecture covers Marx's early life, his marriage and career struggles that forced him across Europe, and the failure of the Paris Commune as a test case for his revolutionary predictions. It closes with a reading of the Paris Manuscripts, where Marx first develops his theory of alienated labor, setting up the following lecture's shift toward the mature concept of the capitalist mode of production.