Hegelian School

What did Hegel's pupils do after his death?

While Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel taught at the University of Berlin from 1818, a circle of pupils in theology and philosophy gathered around him. When he died suddenly of cholera in 1831, they formed the "Society of Friends of the Deceased" and made publishing their master's collected works their first task. The edition included lectures Hegel had never published as books, on the philosophy of history and of religion, aesthetics and the history of philosophy, and so opened Hegel to a much wider public.

According to Engels, Hegel's triumph only grew after his death. "It was precisely from 1830 to 1840 that 'Hegelianism' reigned most exclusively", and Hegelian ideas soaked into every science, into popular literature and into the daily press. But this victory along the whole line, Engels added, was only the prelude to an internal struggle.

grade von 1830 bis 1840 herrschte die "Hegelei" am ausschließlichsten

How was "the actual is the rational" read?

In the preface to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820) Hegel wrote: "What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational." No philosophical proposition, said Engels, earned so much "the gratitude of narrow-minded governments and the wrath of equally narrow-minded liberals". On its face the sentence looked like "the sanctification of everything that exists", a philosophical blessing on despotism, the police state and censorship.

Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich;

und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig.

Engels read Hegel's "actual" not as merely existing but as necessary. In 1789 the French monarchy had lost its necessity and become irrational, so it had to be destroyed by the revolution; then the revolution, not the monarchy, was actual. Read this way, Hegel's proposition turns into its opposite through his own dialectics and resolves into the proposition: "All that exists deserves to perish." From the same sentence one side read a justification of the existing order, the other the necessity of its downfall. This is where the Hegelian school split.

Alles was besteht, ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht.

Why did the school split?

Engels found the cause of the split in Hegel's philosophy itself. Hegel's doctrine had ample room for very different practical positions, and the practical questions in Germany at the time were above all religion and politics. "Whoever placed the chief emphasis on the Hegelian system could be fairly conservative in both spheres; whoever regarded the dialectical method as the main thing could belong to the most extreme opposition, both in religion and politics." Hegel himself, for all his frequent revolutionary outbursts, leaned on the whole to the conservative side, which Engels put down to the fact that his system had cost him far more "hard labour of thought" than his method.

Wer das Hauptgewicht auf das System Hegels legte, konnte auf beiden Gebieten ziemlich konservativ sein; wer in der dialektischen Methode die Hauptsache sah, konnte religiös wie politisch zur äußersten Opposition gehören.

The spark came from religion. In The Life of Jesus (1835) David Friedrich Strauss read the miracle stories of the Gospels not as historical fact but as myths produced by the early Christian community, and claimed that this agreed with Hegel. Conservative Hegelians such as Philipp Marheineke, Carl Friedrich Göschel and Georg Andreas Gabler disputed this, and others, such as Karl Rosenkranz, tried to mediate.

Where did the right, centre and left come from?

In 1837, in the Streitschriften written in his own defence, Strauss sorted the Hegelians by their reaction to The Life of Jesus. Borrowing from the seating of the French parliament, he called those who held the Gospel narratives fully compatible with Hegel's philosophy the right, those who held only parts compatible the centre, and those who concluded that Hegel's philosophy and Christian dogma were fundamentally irreconcilable the left. The division was at first almost purely theological, but the names soon became the general way of describing the split of the Hegelian school into a conservative and a revolutionary wing.

The labels need care. No Hegelian of the time called himself a "Right Hegelian"; the term was a put-down coined by Strauss, a self-styled Left Hegelian. The right, also called the Old Hegelians, was closely tied to the University of Berlin, held many of its chairs of philosophy and theology, and tended to see the Prussian state as the summit of historical development. Their names are now largely forgotten, eclipsed by the fame of the left, the Young Hegelians, but they left their mark in theology. Recent research questions the left-right scheme itself.

How did the school end?

As Engels told it, the split in the school became more and more visible towards the end of the 1830s. When Frederick William IV, backed by Pietist orthodoxy and feudal reaction, came to the throne in 1840, the left could no longer avoid taking sides openly. The state stopped protecting Hegelian philosophy: in February 1841 the aged Schelling was brought to Berlin to "root out the dragon-seed of Hegelianism". The story of the left continues under Young Hegelians.

After the revolution of 1848, the Hegelianism that around 1840 had still dominated German philosophy gave way to other currents, which by about 1860 issued in the neo-Kantian return to Kant. In the afterword to the second edition of Capital (1873) Marx wrote that just when educated Germany was treating Hegel as Moses Mendelssohn had treated Spinoza in Lessing's day, "as a 'dead dog'", he openly avowed himself "the pupil of that mighty thinker".

Hegel zu behandeln, wie der brave Moses Mendelssohn zu Lessings Zeit den Spinoza behandelt hat, nämlich als "toten Hund".

Outside Germany the Hegelian school lived on longer. Distinct Hegelian schools arose in Scandinavia, Italy, Britain and the United States, and in Russia in the 1840s Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin and Nikolai Chernyshevsky found their way through Hegel.