The German Genius

was to exert most influence, even if that influence resulted from a reaction against him by radical writers who turned some of his ideas upside down.
    T HE H EGELIAN A FTERMATH
     
    To begin with, Hegel was regarded as a reassuring force. His account of history implied that what had evolved was for the best, confirming the institutions of society rather than seeking to change them in favor of something better.
    Hegel died in 1831. Beethoven and Schubert had died not long before, and Goethe was to die the following year. The world was changing. In parallel, there emerged in the late 1830s and early 1840s a group of German intellectuals who came to be known as the “Young Hegelians” and put forward the far more aggressive view that the real meaning of Hegel’s doctrines had either been overlooked or misconstrued, and that the implications were far more radical than most people wanted to believe.
    It is difficult for us now to think ourselves back into the mind-set of those times, but the truth is that, in the 1820s, Hegel’s philosophy had become supreme in Germany. It was strongly supported by the minister of culture, Karl Altenstein, and centered around the Berliner-Kritische Association, founded in 1827 as a home for the Hegelian periodical Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik . In 1832, the year after his death, an association was formed in Berlin of Hegel’s most intimate friends and pupils, which continued as the intellectual backbone of the school, to propagate Hegel’s teaching and prepare an authorized edition of his works. So powerful was his system that many believed Hegel’s philosophy was the ultimate one, the culmination of all philosophical thought, and that there was little else to do except work out the details Hegel hadn’t had time to pursue. Inevitably, however, differences among the Young Hegelians began to show themselves. 13
    In practice, several of these young radicals were the first to raise ideas that Marx was to consolidate into his own all-embracing theory. In 1835, for example, David Strauss (1808–74) published Das Leben Jesu ( The Life of Jesus ). Educated to begin with at Tübingen under the iconoclastic Old Testament scholar F. C. Bauer, Strauss transferred to Berlin to attend Hegel’s lectures shortly before his death. 14 Hegel seems never to have been very interested in the historicity of the Gospels, but Strauss thought they were the essence of Christianity, myths that reflected “the profound desires of the people.” 15 He understood the Gospels as “imaginations of facts” thrown up by the collective consciousness of a society at a specific (Hegelian) stage of development. This implied that the very idea of revelation and incarnation was but a phase on the way to something higher, better, freer. The effect of Strauss’s book was sensational—one review described Strauss as the “Ischariot of the day”—but in the context of Marx it had two consequences. 16 One, it helped confirm his loss of faith. Two, in the heavily censored society of the times, where political discussion was fraught with danger, biblical criticism allowed the development of philosophical/sociological thinking in relative safety.
    The other Young Hegelians whose more specific ideas Marx would adapt included August von Cieszkowski, who was the first to argue that “it was not enough to discover the laws of past history—men must use this knowledge to change the world” Lorenz von Stein, who first determined that industrialization meant a reduction in salaries for the proletariat who, for that reason, “can never possess private property” and Arnold Ruge, who stressed that man was defined by his social relations and that it was through work that he expressed himself. Many of these views had emerged through the discussions in the so-called Doktor Club in Berlin, from 1837 on, where an orthodoxy had also developed that Hegel’s real thought had been concealed while he was alive and that his philosophy, at one time felt to be reassuring, actually contained “revolutionary tendencies.” These figures were, however, all overshadowed by three others of greater significance: Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, and Friedrich Engels.
    T HE I MPORTANCE OF L UDWIG F EUERBACH
     
    Ludwig Feuerbach’s widely read and much-acclaimed Das Wesen des Christentums ( The Essence of Christianity ) was published in 1841 and carried on the transformation in the critical study of Christianity already begun by