The course of Western philosophy has been profoundly altered by the philosophy of Hegel. The first of those who set about the transforming and revisioning of the world according to Hegel's dialectical theory were called "The Young Hegelians." Today, the most recognized names among them are Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but in their own age each of the Young Hegelians shared an equal notoriety. Each in turn, from Strauss with his reduction of the historical jesus (...) into a Messianic myth, to Stirner with his uncompromising egoism, shocked every cultural convention of their age. The aftershocks of their unrestrained criticism have forever altered the topography of our own. The Young Hegelians retrieves some of the central writings of that troubling generation. (shrink)

In the decade after the death of Hegel in 1833, a group of young philosophers sought to extend some of Hegel’s ideas to criticize contemporary thought and society. These were the so-called “Young Hegelians,” which included the young Karl Marx. With interest in Marx and Marxism on the wane, interest in the Young Hegelians has also subsided. That is unfortunate, since the Young Hegelians have much to teach us. This paper recounts the (...) Young Hegelians’ critique of religion, beginning with that of Ludwig Feuerbach in his seminal work, The Essence of Christianity. (shrink)

Young Hegel’s writings has been a source for many endeavours aiming at extracting edifying resources for contemporary ethical and political debate. In this paper, I focus on Hegel’s earliest writings – stemming from the periods of Stuttgart, Tubingen and Bern – in search for elements that can propel a conception of self. By endorsing an ethical and political stance of young Hegel’s writings, I oppose those who see in these writings concerning the essence of religion a mystical-pantheistic thesis. (...) Instead, I argue that Hegel is more concerned with a Republican view of religion, one that is very close to French political thought, such as Rousseau and Montesquieu. Just as much, the practical grounds for addressing ethical life and assessing Modernity’s capacity for the latter is rooted on a Hellenistic ideal. The Greek sources derive from young Hegel’s reading of the tragedies as comprising three notions: origin, simplicity and exteriority. I explore some features relating the notions of origin and simplicity as dating back to monastic life and the works of Winckelmann and Schiller. These elements are constantly intertwined in Hegel’s opposition to the rationalism of Enlightenment, mainly of Kant, as well as his adherence and reformulation of universal reason. Relying on these sources, I divide the paper into three sections: the enlightened self, the sensible self and the simple self. I conclude with the idea that Hegel envisaged a kind of sensible reason he often referred to by “heart”, by which he meant an originating and simple experience of the world through nature and the community that achieves universal practical reason by comprising socially shared perceptive, affective and imaginative resources at play at the moment of a putative moral action. (shrink)

McLellan has written a very helpful study to enable us to recreate the intellectual climate of Marx's youth. McLellan's emphasis is to present the thought of the Young Hegelians from their own perspectives. In this respect he reverses the typical approach of seeing the Young Hegelians through the eyes of Marx or later Marxism. The result is a much more balanced and informative study of the Young Hegelians and their influence on Marx's early speculations. (...) There is a general introduction in which McLellan sketches the general characteristics of the Young Hegelians and the development of their ideas. This is followed by chapters on Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, and Moses Hess. The total effect of this fine study is to show us how much Marx borrowed from his contemporary intellectuals and how he used ideas suggested by others in his own distinctive and forceful way.--R. J. B. (shrink)

This is the first major study of Marx and the Young Hegelians in twenty years. The book offers a new interpretation of Marx's early development, the political dimension of Young Hegelianism, and that movement's relationship to political and intellectual currents in early nineteenth-century Germany. Warren Breckman challenges the orthodox distinction drawn between the exclusively religious concerns of Hegelians in the 1830s and the sociopolitical preoccupations of the 1840s. He shows that there are inextricable connections between the (...) theological, political and social discourses of the Hegelians in the 1830s. The book draws together an account of major figures such as Feuerbach and Marx, with discussions of lesser-known but significant figures such as Eduard Gans, August Cieszkowski, Moses Hess, F. W. J. Schelling as well as such movements as French Saint-Simonianism and 'positive philosophy'. Wide-ranging in scope and synthetic in approach, this is an important book for historians of philosophy, theology, political theory and nineteenth-century ideas. (shrink)

This classic work by one of the most important philosophers and critics of our time charts the genesis and trajectory of the desiring subject from Hegel's formulation in _Phenomenology of Spirit_ to its appropriation by Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. Judith Butler plots the French reception of Hegel and the successive challenges waged against his metaphysics and view of the subject, all while revealing ambiguities within his position. The result is a sophisticated reconsideration of the post-Hegelian tradition that (...) has predominated in modern French thought, and her study remains a provocative and timely intervention in contemporary debates over the unconscious, the powers of subjection, and the subject. (shrink)

Hegelians and those scholars concerned with the history of idealism owe Lawrence Stepelevich a vote of thanks for this useful, clearly presented collection of texts from the Young Hegelian philosophers who extended Hegel’s philosophy according to their own lights in the first two decades following Hegel’s death. Hegel died in 1831. Stepelevich understands Young Hegelianism as an identifiable philosophical movement to have existed from 1830 to 1848. It begins with Feuerbach’s work, Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit of (...) 1830, and finds its last real expression in Karl Schmidt’s Das Verstandestum und das Individuum in 1846. In addition to selections from these two figures, the volume contains selections from the works of Strauss, von Cieszkowski, Bruno and Edgar Bauer, Ruge, Engels, Marx, Stirner, and Hess. Much of the work presented appears for the first time in English translation, and the volume itself is the first English language text devoted to the writings of this movement. Although most Hegelian scholars know German, and thus these texts are available to them in the original, it is a great advantage to have such texts available in competent translations. Hegel himself recognized this in his well-known letter to Voss of May 1805, where he compares translations into a people’s own language to a gift and expresses his wish to have philosophy speak German. (shrink)

A new interpretation of Marx’s early development and the political dimension of Young Hegelianism. Review p/c.

It is not just rhetoric to ask why we should still be reading the Young Hegelians today. In spite of their commitment to action, their influence on the politics of the times was marginal at best; and even as philosophers, the movement of thought which they represented was all but dead by 1848. Now that we read them at a distance of over a century, it is clear that for once at least the fate meted out by circumstances (...) was well deserved. The writings of the Young Hegelians appear painfully thin in insight and force of argument. This global judgment must of course be qualified. Protestant theology has not been the same since David Strauss, and Feuerbach’s conception of man stands as the first statement of modern scientific humanism. Still, the ideal of humanity that inspired either of them has none of the historical richness of Hegel’s “spirit”; in the case of Feuerbach there is also none of the scholarship that redeems at least some of Strauss’ work. The value of both men’s writings lay mostly in their iconoclastic nature. They cleared the air, though at the cost of grave oversimplifications, of the illusion that after Hegel things could quite ever be the same again - as if the speculative comprehension of the Christian faith that Hegel claimed to have achieved could have left that faith undisturbed. But now that the profane has become the commonplace, there is little to recommend them in our eyes; and now that we have also had plenty of opportunity to notice how quickly the spirit of revolution degenerates into faction and anarchy, there is even less to recommend the rest of the Young Hegelians. The later Marx stands out intellectually in comparison to them precisely because he succeeded in breaking free from their ideological hold. I sometimes wonder whether his figure has really been enhanced by the post-war attempt at reinterpreting Capital in the light of his supposed earlier “humanism.” Sidney Hook’s statement that the late Marx was a scientist, and that his theory is to be proven either right or wrong on strictly historical and empirical evidence, might be a bit far-fetched perhaps; it still is in my mind the best compliment that one can pay to Marx. (shrink)

Responding to a call for systematic contributions on the theory of society, the principle aim of this article is to recover and reconstruct the Young-Hegelian core of critical theory’s theory of the dialectical development of society and, on that basis, to project its creative research-based continuation by analysing its largely neglected key concept of possibility. The acknowledgement of the critical theory lineage’s naturalist, realist and especially idealist features leads this reconstruction to ascribe a central role to certain pivotal concepts (...) that deserve special attention – including nature, the construction of society, evolution, immanent–transcendence and the conceptual conditions or cognitive order of society. A side effect of this theoretical exposition is the exposure in the course of the argument of certain weaknesses often visible in the contemporary articulation of the theory of society in both critical theory and general social theory. Conceptual solutions to those deficiencies are simultaneously presented in a form appropriate to critical theory’s modal-based negative explanatory and positive disclosing critique. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Nietzsche resorts to a typical, ambitious Young Hegelian dialectical grand narrative to dramatically frame Modernity, elevate his own critical theory to unmatchable heights and find for himself a superior, unique position as Critic and Destiny, having as his main enemy the philistines (common human beings), and that which politically corresponds to them: civil society and democracy. Nietzsche’s epochal narrative exhibits a classical dialectical progression from Error/Negation, through Escalation, to Crisis, then Negation of Negation (...) (Inversion), and promised New Age, all of which entails the unwelcome consequences of self-aggrandizing exaggerations, determinism, negativism, binarism, otherworldliness, transhuman idealizations, and racial-caste-hierarchism that compromise the otherwise interesting side of his critical suggestions, once deflated, on culture and morality. (shrink)

In defining the Wise Man, the Man of absolute Knowledge, as perfectly self‐conscious – i. e., omniscient, at least potentially – Hegel nevertheless had the unheard‐of audacity to assert that he realized Wisdom in his own person.

Breckman’s intention, as his title suggests, is to trace the development—or, more tendentiously, the origin—of Marx’s thought through his relation to the Young Hegelians, the principle figures of the Prussian left just prior to Marx. Though Marx engaged in frequent acts of polemical distinction between himself and these earlier thinkers, Breckman suggests we have been too quick to take Marx at his own word and to locate the source of his theory in “his opposition to the private property (...) regime of capitalism and the doctrine that underpins classical political economy and liberal bourgeoisie society”. This source, Breckman suggests, would be better sought in Marx’s appropriation and development of the Young Hegelian’s religious debates with conservative critics of Hegel who defended a personalist conception of God. It is one of Breckman’s central and most convincing contentions that these religious debates over the nature of God must be read equally as political debates between a defense of monarchal sovereignty modeled on the personalist God and a leftist critique of this conception, which struggles to construct out of Hegel’s “World Spirit” a secularized conception of social unity that might establish the grounds for a noncoercive political form. (shrink)

This book, the first comprehensive study in English of Heidegger's philosophy of art, starts in the mid-1930s with Heidegger's discussion of the Greek temple and his Hegelian declaration that a great artwork gathers together an entire culture in affirmative celebration of its foundational 'truth', and that, by this criterion, art in modernity is 'dead'. His subsequent work on Hölderlin, whom he later identified as the decisive influence on his mature philosophy, led him into a passionate engagement with the art of (...) Rilke, Ce;zanne, Klee and Zen Buddhism, liberating him not only from the overly restrictive conception of art of the mid-1930s but also from the disastrous politics of the period. Drawing on material hitherto unknown in the anglophone world, Young establishes a new account of Heidegger's philosophy of art and shows that his famous essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art' is its beginning, not its end. (shrink)

This paper has two purposes: to provide a contextualised account of the Young Hegelian theory of the state, and to argue that Marx began working on the manuscript known as his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, not in the Summer of 1843, as most commentators assume, but at least as early as the Spring of 1842. The established narrative describes the Young Hegelians as ‘liberals’, and suggests that Marx ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ represents his (...) rejection of their liberalism and turn towards a more radical democratic and revolutionary position. Conversely, I argue that the Young Hegelians (notably Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer) were never liberal (at least not by any standard definition of that term) but articulated a radical and revolutionary theory of the state from the outset – one that understood freedom, not as independence, but as political participation, and that characterised the modern state, not as the guarantor of private rights, but as the institutional framework in which all citizens could realise their public freedom. In this sense, Marx’s ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy Law’ does not represent a break with the Young Hegelians theory of state, but a contribution to it. (shrink)

“If there existed a philosophy of history attached to words, it would find a worthy topic in the expression ‘personality’ and the changes its meaning has undergone.” Thus Adorno, in an essay bemoaning the decline of the term from Kantian high-mindedness into media spectacle. Kant writes: “The idea of the moral law alone, together with the respect that is inseparable from it... is personality itself.” Here the unique and inmost self is identified with im personal law; my self is intelligible, (...) yet as purely noumenal it cannot be represented theoretically, only respected, in practice. The paradox is appropriated by Hegelian ethics, where the determinate individual appears nevertheless as free, this person and yet all persons: “Personhood [diePersönlichkeit] is thus at the same time the sublime and the wholly ordinary.... The supreme achievement is to support this contradiction....” Adorno discerns quite another line of descent. This line stems from Goethe rather than Kant, and runs via Humboldt and the Romantics down to our own day. Instead of personhood as calling, it emphasizes personhood as determination or destiny ; a cultivation of self in its many-sidedness, for which the ancient Greeks provide the model. It was important for J. S. Mill, and for much North American thinking from Emerson onwards.Yet mainstream sociological theorists such as Durkheim or Weber tended to prefer the first path, stressing imposed duty rather than found opportunity; indeed Weber reserves special contempt for what he sees as the indulgent subjectivism of aesthetic ‘personality.’ Which line weighs more with us moderns, or perhaps more suits our situation, would be hard to decide at this point. But the term itself remains crucial—and crucially obscure! (shrink)

Max Stirner is generally considered a nihilist, anarchist, precursor to Nietzsche, existentialism and even post-structuralism. Few are the scholars who try to analyse his stands from within its Young Hegelian context without, however, taking all his references to Hegel and the Young Hegelians as expressions of his own alleged Hegelianism. This article argues in favour of a radically different reading of Stirner considering his magnum opus “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” as in part a carefully constructed parody (...) of Hegelianism deliberately exposing its outwornness as a system of thought. Stirner's alleged Hegelianism becomes intelligible when we consider it as a formal element in his criticism of Bauer's philosophy of self-consciousness. From within this framework it becomes quite clear what Stirner meant with such notions as “ownness” and “egoism”. They were part of his radical criticism of the implicit teleology of Hegelian dialectics as it found according to him its highmark in Bauer. In short, this article puts the literature on Stirner into question and tries for the first time in 30 years to dismantle Stirner's entire undertaking in “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” by considering it first and foremost a radical criticism of Hegelianism and eventually the whole of philosophy while fully engaged in the debates of his time. ☆ The author would like to thank Douglas Moggach for corresponding with me on the idea of the comic and for not sparing me his “critical criticism” in general. I'm also indebted to William Desmond and Lawrence Stepelevich for their comments on earlier drafts of this text. (shrink)

pp. 79–103 The idea of utility in Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments Rosen, F.

An article publicising the philosophical contributions of German writer Bettina Brentano-von Arnim (1785–1859).

This chapter discusses the developments of Young Hegelianism in Restoration Prussia, with a special focus on Max Stirner’s radical critique of Hegelian thinking. It presents an overview of the history of Hegelianism in the 1830s and 1840s, and addresses the theoretical issues raised by Stirner’s attack in 1844. It examines important aspects of Young Hegelianism, including ideas of a modernized civic humanism and emancipation, and traces the Young Hegelians’ reconfiguration of Hegel’s thought in order to eliminate (...) what they saw as its conservative or insufficiently critical elements. The refurbished republicanism of the Young Hegelians took up the new challenges of the industrial age that was dawning in Germany, with special attention to the social question and the intransigent conflicting interests that typified the emergent economic order. Stirner’s critique is framed by its anti-humanist repudiation of Left Hegelian emancipatory projects. (shrink)

This book is intended not only for scholars and students in humanities, history (esp. the history of ideas), Jewish studies, philosophy (esp. the history of philosophy), and Christian theology, but also for those concerned with the roots of anti-Semitism and with the need for toleration and intercultural pluralism. Modernity and the Final Aim of History: * Combines the development of German philosophy from the Enlightenment to Idealism, and from Idealism to the revolutionary turning-point of the mid-nineteenth century with the Jewish (...) question; * Shows the close entwining of anti-Jewish prejudices with awareness of the importance of Judaism in the formation of modern thought; * Points out the hopes, obstacles, compromises, and disappointments of Jewish emancipation right up to the appearance of racial anti-Semitism; * Traces the changes in the debate over Judaism from the theological perspective to the philosophical and from the philosophical to that of the economic and naturalistic; * Underlines the dangers to toleration that arise from seeing human history as directed towards a single aim; *Can be used in university courses and seminars, as well as in research groups. (shrink)

cs' mature theory of Hegelian Marxism has been criticized for the determinacy with which it predicts utopia as a possibility for the future. This paper instead examines Lukács' early, pre-Marxist thinking, which asserts utopia only as the grounding concept for a procedure of cultural criticism, and not as the outcome of any foreseeable process of social change. I attempt to evaluate this non-Marxist utopianism of the young Lukács by focusing in particular on 'The Foundering of Form Against Life: Søren (...) Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen', a 1910 essay in which Lukács criticizes Kierkegaard for failing to articulate any concept of utopia and for focusing instead on private 'faith' as a potential solution to the endemic problems of modernity, such as alienation and reification. Because young Lukács himself thus sets up Kierkegaard as a dystopian rival for his own utopian thought, I use a comparison between these two thinkers as a basis for speculation on the advantages and disadvantages of positing a normative concept of utopia as the basis for social criticism. Key Words: alienation • faith • reification • subjectivity • utopia. (shrink)

"If we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence, an exact knowledge of Hegel, of both his greatness and his limitation, is absolutely indispensable."- from the preface. It is well known that Hegel exerted a major influence on the development of Marx's thought. This circumstance led Lukacs, one of the chief Marxist theoreticians of this century, to embark on his exploration of Hegelian antecedents in (...) the German intellectual tradition, their concrete expression in the work of Hegel himself, and later syntheses of seemingly contradictory modes of though. Four phases of Hegel's intellectual development are examined: "Hegel's early republican phase," "the crisis in Hegel's views on society and the earliest beginnings of his dialectical method," "rationale and defense of objective idealism," and "the breach with Schelling and " The Phenomenology of Mind."" Lukacs completed this study in 1938, but because of the imminent outbreak of war, it was not published until the late 1940s. A revised German edition appeared in 1954, and it is this text that is the basis of this first English translation of the work.". (shrink)

The publication of Marx's early writings has given us a perspective on the early development of socialistic thought that provides a clearer view of its connection with current discussion in philosophy and sociology. The link is the phenomenon of alienation, with which the early Marx was much concerned. In this article the author marks the distinctiveness of the two main current approaches to the alienation phenomenon, the ontological and the sociological, and suggests that the tension between Hegelian ontology and empirical (...) sociology in. the early Marx's analysis of the phenomenon reflects the strength rather than the weakness of this analysis as a contribution to the understanding of the human position. (shrink)

The period leading up to the Revolutions of 1848 was a seminal moment in the history of political thought, demarcating the ideological currents and defining the problems of freedom and social cohesion which are among the key issues of modern politics. This 2006 anthology offers research on Hegel's followers in the 1830s and 1840s. With essays by philosophers, political scientists, and historians from Europe and North America, it pays special attention to questions of state power, the economy, poverty, and labour, (...) as well as to ideas on freedom. The book examines the political and social thought of Eduard Gans, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, Bruno and Edgar Bauer, the young Engels, and Marx. It places them in the context of Hegel's philosophy, the Enlightenment, Kant, the French Revolution, industrialization, and urban poverty. It also views Marx and Engels in relation to their contemporaries and interlocutors in the Hegelian school. (shrink)

"If we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence, an exact knowledge of Hegel, of both his greatness and his limitation, is absolutely indispensable."- from the preface. It is well known that Hegel exerted a major influence on the development of Marx's thought. This circumstance led Lukács, one of the chief Marxist theoreticians of this century, to embark on his exploration of Hegelian antecedents in (...) the German intellectual tradition, their concrete expression in the work of Hegel himself, and later syntheses of seemingly contradictory modes of though. Four phases of Hegel's intellectual development are examined: "Hegel's early republican phase," "the crisis in Hegel's views on society and the earliest beginnings of his dialectical method," "rationale and defense of objective idealism," and "the breach with Schelling and _ The Phenomenology of Mind_." Lukács completed this study in 1938, but because of the imminent outbreak of war, it was not published until the late 1940s. A revised German edition appeared in 1954, and it is this text that is the basis of this first English translation of the work. (shrink)

"If we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence, an exact knowledge of Hegel, of both his greatness and his limitation, is absolutely indispensable."- from the preface. It is well known that Hegel exerted a major influence on the development of Marx's thought. This circumstance led Lukács, one of the chief Marxist theoreticians of this century, to embark on his exploration of Hegelian antecedents in (...) the German intellectual tradition, their concrete expression in the work of Hegel himself, and later syntheses of seemingly contradictory modes of though. Four phases of Hegel's intellectual development are examined: "Hegel's early republican phase," "the crisis in Hegel's views on society and the earliest beginnings of his dialectical method," "rationale and defense of objective idealism," and "the breach with Schelling and The Phenomenology of Mind." Lukács completed this study in 1938, but because of the imminent outbreak of war, it was not published until the late 1940s. A revised German edition appeared in 1954, and it is this text that is the basis of this first English translation of the work. (shrink)

Kierkegaard is well known for his quick wit and sharp polemics against his opponents. One of his favorite targets was the poet, dramatist, and philosopher, Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791 – 1860). Perhaps the best-known element of his critique was Heiberg’s outspoken Hegelian campaign. Before Kierkegaard’s famous criticisms of Heiberg, he learned the craft of literary polemics by reading the lively discussions in the Danish journals of the time. In this article it is argued that the role of the journal Kjøbenhavnsposten (...) for Kierkegaard has never been appreciated. This journal was edited by Andreas Peter Liunge (1798 – 1879), who was a great adversary of Heiberg and his Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post. The article shows that the often satirical use of Hegel by Kjøbenhavnsposten to criticize Heiberg anticipates Kierkegaard’s strategy of critique with regard to Heiberg and other figures in the Danish Hegelian movement. (shrink)