This book grew out of a doctoral dissertation entitled “The Innocence of the Self: Cultural Disinheritance and Cultural Liberation in the Thought and Experience of the Young Germans and Young Hegelians,” which was completed under the direction of H. Stuart Hughes at Harvard University in 1973. In contrast to the usual pattern of development, the process of rethinking and revision has produced a book both shorter and narrower in scope than the original dissertation. My attempt to achieve a systematic comprehension of the evolution of experience and thought from the young Hegel to the radical Left Hegelians of the 1840s transformed what had been an introductory chapter into a full-scale historical study of the early phases of Hegelian ideology and the Hegelian school. This new focus on origins, on the ideological and experiential presuppositions of the radical stances of the 1840s, was obviously influenced by the historical disappointments and disillusionments experienced by members of my generation during the 1970s. What had begun as a sympathetic rehabilitation of Utopian hopes for a cultural revolution that would integrate the socially and psychically emancipated self into a nonrepressive community or “civilization without discontents” (and thus “actualize” the dreams of art and philosophy) gradually turned into a disabused investigation of the recurring, apparently intractable, dilemmas of human emancipation as conceived within the categories of the dialectical tradition. The present volume constitutes the first part of this redefined project.

During the 1830s the divergent tendencies that had emerged within the Hegelian school during the 1820s became more obvious and more extreme. But disagreements among Hegelians concerning the relationship between the science of the absolute and the existing political and religious reality produced a division of the school into opposing factions only when they evolved into divergent interpretations of the very core of the Hegelian inheritance: the dialectical identity of finite and infinite, thought and being, subject and substance, in the selfactualizing, self-comprehending, concrete totality of absolute spirit. The publication of Strauss's Life of Jesus in 1835-6 marked the beginning of self-conscious disagreement on this latter, more fundamental issue, and it was Strauss himself, in response to the reception of his work by other Hegelians, who first divided the school into factions of Right, Center, and Left. The most dramatic and significant development in the history of Hegelianism during the 1830s was the shift from divergent interpretations of the relationship between theory and practice to conflicts over the meaning, and ultimately the validity, of Hegelian theory, the beginnings of what Marx later satirically described as the “putrescence of the absolute spirit.”

Rosenkranz was one of the first Hegelians to realize that the proliferation of opposing positions within Hegelianism was leading to a decomposition of Hegelianism itself. In 1840 he published a comic drama in which the problem of “succession” within the school, of finding a legitimate heir to Hegel's throne, was made the object of gentle satire and humorous caricature. Immediately after Hegel's death the inner circle of his disciples had denied that a problem of “succession” existed.

Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity was published in the same year (1841) as the second volume of Strauss's Christian Faith and the first two volumes of Bauer's Critique of the Synoptic Gospels, and like these two contemporaneous studies its aim was to reveal Christian theology and religious consciousness as the psychological and historical culmination of human self-alienation. It was not surprising, therefore, that Feuerbach, Strauss, and Bauer were often grouped together by contemporary observers as a Left Hegelian atheistic trio. Feuerbach, however, resisted the identification of his standpoint with those of Strauss and Bauer. His own critique of Christian religion and culture, he insisted, went beyond their works in at least two significant respects.

The object of Bauer's and Strauss's criticism, Feuerbach claimed, was biblical and dogmatic theology, the “theoretical” objectifications of Christian religious experience; their analysis did not penetrate beyond historical forms to the religious experience expressed in those forms. “The main object of my inquiry”, he wrote, “is Christianity, is religion, as it is constituted in its immediacy by the objectification of the essence of man”. This differentiation, however, was misleading. Bauer and Strauss were also concerned with the religious experience embodied in Christian “representations” and also analyzed religious consciousness in terms of the objectification and self-alienation of “the essence of man”. The distinctiveness of Feuerbach's viewpoint lay in his conception of human essence, of man's “species being”.

Although the ideology of cultural renovation formulated by the Romantic generation at the turn of the century articulated a vision of the identity of the ideal and real, nature and mind, being and becoming, the absolute and the concrete determinations of nature and history, it could still be described as “abstract” or “ideal” in relation to the prevailing historical actuality of social and cultural fragmentation. This chapter focuses on the evolving relationship of the Romantic vision of absolute identity to the historical changes that occurred in Germany under the impact of Napoleonic conquest and occupation, the wars of liberation, and the consolidation of a post-Napoleonic order (the “Restoration”) after 1815. As individual members of the Romantic generation tried to connect their vision of eschatological fulfillment to the changing historical actuality after 1800, that vision itself underwent a process of revision and differentiation. In terms of the theme of this study the developments that culminated in the opposing cultural stances of Hegel and the Historical School during the 1820s are of particular significance. For purposes of historical perspective, however, these positions should be viewed within the broader spectrum of the various responses of the Romantic generation to historical developments after 1800.

Two general distinctions may help to clarify the differentiation in patterns of response.

In the fall of 1788, Hegel, who had just passed his eighteenth birthday, left his parental home in Stuttgart in order to begin a five-year program of theological study at the Protestant Seminary (Stift) in Tübingen. By going to Tübingen he was acting in conformity with the long-standing wishes of his father, and following the traditional avenue toward becoming a man of importance in his father's world. During the years at home and school in which the young Hegel was being prepared for his future vocation as a spiritual leader in the traditional culture of Old Württemberg (Altwürttemberg), however, this world was characterized by increasing political, social, and cultural tensions. Contrary to his father's hopes and expectations, Hegel's experience at Tübingen led not to a personal identification with the vocation that had been chosen for him, but to a radical disinheritance and commitment to liberation from the whole cultural world that had provided that vocation with meaning and importance. Hegel would later describe this crisis in terms of a universal revolution in man's cultural development, but the manner in which he perceived the general transformation was conditioned by the conceptual and experiential framework he brought to it from his own particular past in the ancien régime. When his father died in 1799, Hegel used his inheritance to finance the beginning of the academic career and philosophical vocation that defined his cultural identity for a new age.

In 1807, Hegel claimed that “the individual needs public acceptance to prove the truth of what is as yet his solitary concern; he needs to see how the conviction that is as yet particular becomes general.” When Hegel made this claim he was confident that his “particular” view of the nature and historical role of philosophy would become “general,” that his subjective conviction would attain the historical verification of public acceptance. “We must have the conviction,” he wrote, “that it is of the nature of truth to prevail when its time has come and that truth appears only when its time has come – and thus never appears too early, and never finds the public that is not ready for it.” The emergence of a Hegelian “movement” or “school” in the years after 1816 appeared to confirm Hegel's belief that his truth was more than a solitary, subjective conviction. It is obvious, however, that the historical verification of Hegel's viewpoint through public acceptance was severely limited in scope. Although his truth may have prevailed among a significant number of students and academics and a few public officials, primarily in Prussia, it certainly never became the “property of all.” Even within the confines of the Hegelian school, moreover, the appropriation of Hegel's truth took such a variety of forms that the identity of the individual and the universal, the subjective and the objective, often seemed very tenuous indeed.

In later years, Strauss looked back on the Life of Jesus as not only his most famous or notorious work but also his best book. Among all his writings, he felt, it was the one that could be described as a truly inspired work. “In his youthful survey of the state of knowledge in his discipline”, Strauss wrote, “the author, with the instinct of a person who is destined to lead the race one step forward, had come upon the crucial problem of his time, taken it into his innermost self, and thus provided it with the warmth and life that made it into a fertile seed for a new scholarly life”. The “crucial problem” was, of course, the relationship between faith and knowledge, religion and philosophy, between the world view of traditional Christianity appropriated in faith and expressed in symbolic or “representational” form and the world view of “modern consciousness” acquired through experience and reason and expressed in the form of philosophical knowledge. It was a problem that concerned the very foundations, the presuppositions, of human activity and cultural organization. During the three years following his departure for Berlin in November 1831, Strauss devoted all his intellectual energy to a simultaneous study of both sides of this problem, and in the summer of 1835 he presented his contemporaries with the two thick volumes that proposed a new model of reconciliation between the past and the present, between traditional Christian culture and modern consciousness.

Among the younger members of the Hegelian school during the 1830s it was Bruno Bauer whose scholarly interests and intellectual concerns most closely paralleled those of Strauss. Bauer, like Strauss, was a philosophical theologian and biblical scholar whose writings focused on the problem of defining the relationship between the historical truth, the representational form, and the universal, philosophically comprehensible, absolute content of the biblical revelation. Moreover, Bauer's successive attempts to construct a satisfactory resolution for this problem corresponded to the general stages in Strauss's development. Bauer began his intellectual career with the firm conviction that the Hegelian doctrine of the identity of content in the different forms of the religious Vorstellung and the philosophical Begriff provided a secure basis for the reconciliation of the orthodox Christian faith with modern philosophical consciousness. Between 1835 and 1838 he tried to revise and reconstruct the Hegelian identity of religion and philosophy in a manner that would take the historical criticism of the biblical writings into account. Like Strauss, however, Bauer abandoned this attempt to reconstruct the Hegelian identity in 1839-41 and asserted the absolute opposition of modern philosophical consciousness to both the form and the content of traditional Christian culture. Finally, Bauer, like Strauss, defined the model of cultural integration for the future, post-Christian era in totally immanent terms, not as the reconciliation of God and man in an actualized Kingdom of God on earth, but as the reconciliation of man with his universal human essence in a “state of humanity.”

“It is surely not difficult to see that our time is a time of birth and transition to a new period,” Hegel wrote in 1807. “Spirit has broken with the world as it has hitherto existed and with the old ways of thinking, and is about to let all this sink into the past; it is at work giving itself a new form.” When Hegel made this claim he had already differentiated his own conception of the “new form” of “spirit” from the cultural perspectives of other members of his generation and reduced their positions to limited “Moments” in the transition from the old to the new world. The unique aspects of Hegel's viewpoint that eventually led to the formation of a distinctive Hegelian school, however, only gradually emerged in the years between 1802 and 1807 as a particular variant of a more general intellectual transformation. The basic intellectual framework in which Hegel conceived the process of cultural revolution and the vocation of the intellectual was snared by the other prominent intellectuals of his generation – Schelling, Hölderlin, Schleiermacher, the Schlegels, the Humboldts, Novalis, Tieck, and Niebuhr – and this common framework was the product of the shared experience of an epochal break during the 1790s with “the world as it has hitherto existed, and with the old ways of thinking.”

This study is intended as a contribution to the contemporary understanding and inner appropriation of modern European cultural and intellectual history on two distinct, but intimately connected and overlapping, levels. It can be read, first of all, as a contribution to the early history of Hegelianism, as an attempt at a systematic description and comprehensive, contextual reconstruction of the historical genesis, appropriation, inner division, and first fundamental transformation of what was certainly one of the most significant and influential of the many competing Weltanschauungen, philosophical “faiths,” or cultural ideologies (British philosophic radicalism and French Saint- Simonianism are obvious parallel phenomena) that replaced traditional Christian or Jewish religion in the minds and hearts of many European intellectuals in the first half of the nineteenth century. But the thematic focus of this particular historical reconstruction of Hegelianism – the transition from “the actualization of the absolute” to the “self-actualization of man, ” from the incarnation of the transcendent in the immanent to the self-production of man's immanent essence in concrete historical existence – also connects this study to a more general problem that transcends the specific experiences and perspectives of academic schools and intellectual cliques in pre-1848 Germany and has constituted a major factor in the social and intellectual history of the western world for at least the last three centuries: the protracted, often agonizing, sometimes exhilarating, disintegration of the experienced vitality and viability of religious and metaphysical faith, of belief in the objective reality of a transcendent foundation of personal identity and communal integration.

During the summer and fall of 1841 the general principles of philosophical, dialectical humanism that had been developed in the critical writings of Strauss, Bauer, and Feuerbach between 1835 and 1841 were tenuously and temporarily consolidated into the collective ideology of a small but vociferous group of philosophic radicals – the Left Hegelian “movement” or “party.” Although this Left Hegelian movement has attracted an enormous amount of scholarly attention because of its significance in the early intellectual development of Marx and Engels, it was an ephemeral historical phenomenon. Not only for Marx and Engels, but also for thinkers like Bauer and Feuerbach, who have so often been fixated in, retrospectively defined by, their Left Hegelian stance, the Left Hegelian movement was a crucial but limited and passing historical Moment that came to an end in the spring of 1843 when the repressive censorship policy of the Prussian government forced the two major journalistic organs, and only significant organizational focal points of the movement – Ruge's Jahrbiicher and the Rheinische Zeitung – to cease publication. The revolutionary hope that had sustained and unified the Left Hegelian movement, despite internal tensions, throughout 1842 was revealed, by the actual course of historical events, as a self-deceiving illusion.