Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self

by Warren Breckman

• ISBN13: 9780521624404
• ISBN10: 0521624401
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-11-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is the first major study of Marx and the Young Hegelians in twenty years. The book offers a new interpretation of Marx's early development, the political dimension of Young Hegelianism, and that movement's relationship to political and intellectual currents in early nineteenth-century Germany. Warren Breckman challenges the orthodox distinction drawn between the exclusively religious concerns of Hegelians in the 1830s and the sociopolitical preoccupations of the 1840s. He shows that there are inextricable connections between the theological, political and social discourses of the Hegelians in the 1830s. The book draws together an account of major figures such as Feuerbach and Marx, with discussions of lesser-known but significant figures such as Eduard Gans, August Cieszkowski, Moses Hess, F. W. J. Schelling as well as such movements as French Saint-Simonianism and 'positive philosophy'. Wide-ranging in scope and synthetic in approach, this is an important book for historians of philosophy, theology, political theory and nineteenth-century ideas.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(3)
Selfhood in Politics and Religion	4	(5)
The Controversy over Personality	9	(6)
Context and Meaning	15	(5)
At the End of Idealism: From ``Nihilism'' to ``Positive Philosophy''	20	(43)
The Pantheism Controversy	23	(4)
Religion and Self-Knowledge in Idealism	27	(5)
Hegel's Speculative Recovery of Theology	32	(9)
Pietism and Orthodoxy against Hegel	41	(8)
The Speculative Theists	49	(5)
Schelling's Positive Philosophy	54	(9)
The Transcendent Sovereign and the Political Theology of Restoration	63	(27)
Secularization and Political Discourse	64	(2)
Personalism and the Politics of Restoration	66	(5)
Hegel's Secularization of the Christian Idea	71	(9)
Anti-Hegelian Politics in the 1830s: Friedrich Julius Stahl and the Positive Philosophy of the State	80	(10)
Ludwig Feurbach and Christian Civil Society	90	(41)
Feuerbach's Early Hegelianism	91	(8)
Immortality and the Personal God	99	(10)
Feuerbach's Critique of Friedrich Julius Stahl	109	(10)
The End of the Religio-Philosophical Debate About Personality	119	(12)
The Social and Political Discourse of Personality, 1835-1840	131	(46)
The Strauss Controversy and the Defection of the Hegelian Right	133	(7)
Denunciation and the Radicaliazation of the Hegelian Left	140	(8)
Germans and the Social Question in the 1830s	148	(3)
The New Christianity of Saint-Simonianism	151	(7)
Saint-Simonianism in Germany	158	(6)
Eduard Gans and the Hegelianization of Saint-Simon	164	(13)
Pantheism, Social Question, and the Third Age	177	(44)
Pantheism and Social Prophesy	178	(6)
Cieszkowski: Sensuousness and Idealism	184	(3)
Heine's Democracy of Terrestrial Gods	187	(5)
The Spinozist Commuinism of Moses Hess	192	(4)
Was Feuerbach a Saint-Simonian?	196	(4)
Protestantism and Pathological Secularization	200	(4)
Overcoming Christian Civil Society	204	(10)
Feuerbach's Politics	214	(7)
Arnold Ruge: Radical Democracy and the Politics of Personhood, 1838-1843	221	(37)
Aesthetics and Republicanism	223	(4)
Prussian Loyalty and the Critical Spirit	227	(3)
Ruge's Critique of Personalism: From Romanticism to Hegel	230	(5)
The Private and the Public, the Christian and the Humanist	235	(11)
Ruge's Humanist Republicanism	246	(12)
Karl Marx: From Social Republicanism to Communism	258	(40)
Marx's Dissertation: Atomism and the Theological Intellect	259	(13)
From Atomism to Prussian Individualism: Marx's Philosophical Journalism	272	(7)
Toward Feuerbach and Socialism	279	(5)
Marx contra Hegel	284	(8)
From Theology to Liberalism and Back Again	292	(6)
Conclusion	298	(11)
Bibliography	309	(18)
Index	327