The Young Hegelians And Karl Marx

The premis of this study is that Marx's world view was very much a product of its time, and as such, it can only be understood in relation to the intellectual climate in which it was conceived. In this text, the author examines the influential force of the Young Hegelian movement, and discusses the work of the leading Young Hegelians, including Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Stirner and Hess - and their influence on Marx.

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.

In this classic work, originally published in 1932, Hook set out to demonstrate to the radical and conservative philosophers and activists of the 1920s and 1930s that Marx was a systematic thinker who developed a sound set of philosophical principles.

The present work is aimed at filling a hiatus in the literature dealing with the Young Hegelians and the early thought of Karl Marx. Despite the prevalent view in the past few decades that Bruno Bauer played an important part in the radical activity of Hegel's young disciples in the eighteen forties in Germany, no comprehensive work has so far been published on the relations between Bauer and Marx. In 1927 Ernst Bar nikol promised to write a monograph on the subject, but he never did. For the purpose of this study I perused material in numerous library collections and I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of the following institutions: Tel Aviv University Library, the Library and Archive of the International Institute of Social History in Am sterdam, the Heidelberg University Library, the Library of Gottingen University, the Tiibingen University Library, Frankfurt University Library, the State Library at Marburg, the Manuscript Department of the State Archives in Berlin.

This book shows that the 1848 revolutions played a key role in the development of the political thought of the Young Hegelians, Arnold Ruge, Bruno Bauer, Moses Hess and Karl Marx. They all developed revolutionary ideas in the 1840s and hoped for revolutionary events as those that occurred in 1848, but their theories failed to predict the outcome of the revolution. By an empirical analysis this work clearly demonstrates that the Young Hegelians under study changed their theoretical outlooks as a direct result of the 1848 revolutions. It is argued that the mechanism for this change is intellectual disillusionment, that these intellectuals became disillusioned with the theories they had developed in the 1840s because they experienced the 1848 revolutions as an intellectual failure. The book examines the question of how intellectuals deal with their failure to predict the world, and how theory and the change of theory are related to actual historical events.