Young Hegelians
청년헤겔파
The young German intellectuals who, from the late 1830s to the mid-1840s, turned Hegel's dialectics into a weapon against religion and the Prussian state. Also called the Left Hegelians, they were represented by Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Ruge and Stirner, and the young Marx and Engels belonged to their circle for a time. Repression and internal disputes broke them up after 1840, and Marx and Engels parted with them in The Holy Family and The German Ideology, working out historical materialism in the process.
In depth
Who were the Young Hegelians?
The Young Hegelians were not an organisation but a loose group. They are usually taken to include David Friedrich Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and his brother Edgar Bauer, Theodor Echtermeyer, Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess and Karl Friedrich Köppen, with Max Stirner and the young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels close to them for a time. The very name "Young Hegelians" was first used by Strauss for those who took his side in the dispute over The Life of Jesus; their opponents were the Old Hegelians, the Hegelian right (see Hegelian school).
Berlin was the centre. Until 1839 they met in a debating circle called the Doktorklub (Doctors' Club), which by about 1841 had turned into Die Freien ("the Free"), where Bruno and Edgar Bauer, Stirner, Köppen and others gathered in a wine bar and became notorious for extreme atheism and provocative behaviour. There were offshoots in Halle, Cologne and Königsberg. Their chief organ was the Hallische Jahrbücher founded by Ruge in 1838, renamed the Deutsche Jahrbücher in 1841 and banned in 1843; they were also deeply involved in the Rheinische Zeitung published in Cologne in 1842. In the Rheinische Zeitung, Engels judged, the Young Hegelian school revealed itself as "the philosophy of the rising radical bourgeoisie", using its philosophical cloak only to deceive the censor.
Why did they start from the critique of religion?
In pre-1848 Prussia strict censorship made open political argument impossible; religion, art and literature were the only fields where relatively free debate was possible. In Engels's words, "politics was at that time a very thorny field, and so the main fight was directed against religion." But in the Restoration era, when royal power was justified by analogy with the personal sovereignty of God, criticising the personal God was itself a political challenge.
Die Politik war aber damals ein sehr dorniges Gebiet, und so wandte sich der Hauptkampf gegen die Religion
The first shock was Strauss's Life of Jesus (1835). Against Strauss's view of the Gospel miracles as myths produced unconsciously by the community, Bruno Bauer argued that the evangelists had invented the stories themselves. Engels mocked how this quarrel, dressed up as "a struggle of 'self-consciousness' against 'substance'", was inflated into the question of which power moves world history. Finally Stirner arrived and outbid sovereign "self-consciousness" with his sovereign "Unique One".
What did Feuerbach change?
Fighting religion pushed the most determined Young Hegelians back towards English and French materialism. Yet in Hegel's system nature was only the "externalisation" of the Absolute Idea, a degradation of the Idea, and they floundered in this contradiction between materialism and their school's system. Then in 1841 came Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity. It blew the contradiction away at a stroke, Engels recalled: nature exists independently of all philosophy, and the higher beings outside humanity are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence. "Enthusiasm was general; we all became at once Feuerbachians."
Die Begeisterung war allgemein: Wir waren alle momentan Feuerbachianer.
Why did they break up?
The Young Hegelians were most active between 1840 and 1843, when their positions rapidly radicalised and politicised. Tolerated under the liberal culture minister Altenstein, they were shut out of academic careers after his death in 1840 and the accession of the conservative Frederick William IV. In March 1842 Bruno Bauer was dismissed from the University of Bonn, and the Rheinische Zeitung and the Deutsche Jahrbücher were suppressed by early 1843. Without lecterns or journals they became isolated intellectuals.
At the same time their disagreements grew. In October 1844 Stirner's The Ego and Its Own mocked Feuerbach and Bauer as inconsistent: not only God and the state but Feuerbach's "Man" too was a spook lording it over the individual. Meanwhile the Polish philosopher August Cieszkowski had argued as early as 1838 for a philosophy of action that would shape the future rather than interpret the past, coining the term praxis, and Moses Hess applied the concept of alienation to economics and won the young Engels for communism. By about 1845 the group had practically ceased to exist.
Why did Marx and Engels turn against them?
Marx and Engels recorded their break in two "settlements of accounts": first The Holy Family (March 1845), aimed at Bruno Bauer and his followers, then The German Ideology (written 1845–1846, unpublished in their lifetime), which also dealt with Feuerbach and Stirner. In between, the Theses on Feuerbach that Marx jotted in his notebook condensed the point of the break.
The critique of The German Ideology runs like this. Because the Young Hegelians believed that the chains binding people were ideas and concepts, products of consciousness, they could only make the moral demand that people change their consciousness; but that amounts to demanding that the existing world be interpreted differently, and thus recognised by means of another interpretation. "The Young Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly 'world-shattering' phrases, are the staunchest conservatives." They "oppose nothing but phrases to these phrases" and do not fight the real world at all. The book's preface parodied the Young Hegelian tone of liberating people from ideas: "the products of their brains have grown beyond their control."
Die junghegelschen Ideologen sind trotz ihrer angeblich "welterschütternden" Phrasen die größten Konservativen.
Instead, Marx and Engels held, one must start from the real relations in which people produce and reproduce their material life through labour. Feuerbach, unlike the rest, was a materialist, but he knew only sensuous contemplation, not real practical activity. Historical materialism was born in this dispute with the Young Hegelians. Their radical critique of religion and the state went as far as atheism and the demand for the abolition or withering away of the state, and Stirner became one of the sources of anarchism.