After his studies he travelled around Europe, visiting France, England and Italy before returning to Poland in 1840 and settling permanently in Wierzenica, near Poznań, in 1843.

He adopted a threefold division of human history from medieval millenarians such as Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135 – 1202) and mixed it with Hegelian categories and concepts.

[6] Cieszkowski's later works, Gott und Paligenesie (God and Palingenesis) (1842) and Ojcze Nasz (Our Father, 1848–1906, four volumes), reformulate his triad in much more explicitly religious terms.

On the other hand, Cieszkowski did incorporate an elaborate system of social reforms into his philosophy and was strongly influenced by the French socialist tradition, which was often overtly religious, and thus did not share the characteristic political conservatism of the "Right Hegelians".

Scholars David McLellan and Shlomo Avineri argue that Marx, who was a friend of and collaborator with Hess from a few years from 1841 onwards, owes various aspects of his thought on alienation and the nature of and transition to communist society to Cieszkowski, including that the dualism between consciousness and action would collapse in revolutionary praxis.

[9][10] (Cieszkowski was one of the earliest philosophers to use the term praxis as meaning "action oriented towards changing society" in his Prolegomena zur Historiosophie).