Young Hegelians

The Young Hegelians drew on his idea that the purpose and promise of history was the total negation of everything conducive to restricting freedom and reason; and they proceeded to mount radical critiques, first of religion and then of the Prussian political system.

And here the master’s claim was viewed as paradoxical, at best: the Prussian regime indeed provided extensive civil and social services, good universities, high employment and some industrialization, but it was ranked as rather backward politically compared with the more liberal constitutional monarchies of France and Britain.

It was the outcry caused by David Strauss' The Life of Jesus in 1835 which first made the 'Young Hegelians' aware of their existence as a distinct group, and it was their attitude to religion that distinguished the left and right from then onwards (August Cieszkowski is a possible exception to this rule).

Another nucleus of the Young Hegelian movement was the Doctor's Club in Berlin (later known as 'the Free'), a society of intellectuals founded in 1837 and led by Bruno Bauer who, by 1838, was writing the most anti-Christian pamphlets in Germany at the time.

In all these areas a central change was the adoption of certain ideas of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, especially the notion that the self-transcendence of the world by man was a possibility and duty, but one that could never be conclusively fulfilled.

While this thought was clearly inspired by the function of Lutheranism in contemporary Prussia, the Young Hegelians held the theory to be applicable to any state backed by any religion.

Moreover, the original teachings of Jesus, which were aimed at aiding the poor and downtrodden, had slowly been perverted and usurped by the establishment to manipulate and oppress the populaces of the world by promising them a reward in the afterlife if they refrained from rebellion against the powers that be in this life.

[5] Carl Nauwerck was a German orientalist, theologian and lecturer of Hegelian philosophy in Berlin who lost his teaching license along with Bruno Bauer in 1842.

[7] Max Stirner would occasionally socialize with the Young Hegelians, but held views much to the contrary of these thinkers, all of whom he consequently satirized and mocked in his nominalist magnum-opus Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum (The Unique and Its Property).

Marx (and Engels) considered religion as a component of the ideological superstructure of societies, and a pre-rational mode of thought, which nonetheless was wielded by ruling elites to obscure social relationships including the true basis of political power.

"[9] August Cieszkowski focused on Hegel's view of world history and reformed it to better accommodate Hegelian Philosophy itself by dividing it into Past, Present, and Future.

"[11] Die Freien (The Free Ones) was a 19th-century circle of Young Hegelians formed at the University of Berlin and gathering for informal discussion over a period of a few years.

Its leader was Bruno Bauer, a student who had attended Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's lectures and was then asked to defend the position of the Old Hegelians against the claims of David Strauss's Life of Jesus.

Marx would not accept that the state was the seat of universality and rationality, i.e. that it was inherently rational; and made it his goal to prove that the difference between civil society, which Hegel held to be the sphere where individual interest is pursued in conflict with the interests of others and the state, where such conflicts are transcended, was in fact misplaced, the goal of the proletariat being in fact to abolish such differences.

Bauer was dismissed from his teaching post in 1842, and Marx and other students were warned that they should not bother submitting their dissertations at the University of Berlin, as they would certainly be poorly received due to their reputations.

[citation needed] Dudley Knowles argues that the Young Hegelians secularised Hegel's idea of Geist (spirit), removing the religious link.