Hegel's alienation contains dialectical factors. Hegel, starting from idealism, regards absolute idea as the main body of alienation, which exists before the existence of nature and human society. Because the subject is a process of self-development under the power of its own internal contradictions, the absolute idea is first alienated into nature, then abandoned in development and returned to the absolute idea itself, which is a kind of spiritual alienation; Hegel's philosophy of history holds that the development of social history is regular. He is not satisfied with using people's consciousness to explain the historical viewpoint. He imagines that the motive force of historical development is human labor. However, when evaluating Hegel, Marx said, "Hegel regards human self-production as a process, objectification as non-objectification, and externalization and the sublation of this externalization; Therefore, he grasped the essence of labor and understood objective people, realistic people and therefore realistic people as the result of his own labor. " Due to the limitation of his class, he only saw the positive side of labor, but could not see the negative side of the suffering brought by labor under capitalist conditions. He abstracted the self-production process of transforming nature through labor into the self-production process of spirit, which is abstract labor.

In Marx's doctoral thesis, he was influenced by Hegel's idealistic view of alienation. Marx believed that in Epicurus, "because of mass, the atom obtained the existence that contradicted its concept." "Phenomenal world" is the product of "complete atoms alienated from their own concepts". Only in Epicurus can phenomena be understood as phenomena, that is, essential alienation, which itself reappears as alienation in its reality.

During the Rheinische Zeitung period, Marx began to contact with a large number of realistic social problems and needed to express his opinions on realistic legal and economic issues. However, Marx's own existing knowledge, especially Hegel's philosophical thought, cannot explain that "state and law are actually the embodiment of class interests and the product of material production and civil society" According to Hegel's view that the state and law are the embodiment of "rationality" and "freedom", the state and law should be the representatives of universal interests, but at that time, the Prussian government's "censorship order for books and newspapers" system stifled people's freedom of publication. In the Stealing Forest Law, the forest owners "gained the upper hand", but the state and the law became tools to serve the interests of the feudal landlord class, which was also a kind of alienation in Hegel's view. It is the reality of alienation that denies the rational nature of the state and the free nature of law, which is beyond Hegel's theoretical framework of alienation. During this period, Marx came into contact with Feuerbach's philosophy and began to be influenced by Feuerbach's humanistic materialism.