Young Hegelians Research Articles

Crítica del pensamiento de Feuerbach por Marx y Engels a través de la reflexión sobre el texto de La Ideología Alemana

Abstract: Feuerbach is one of the representatives of the young Hegelian. In the book The German Ideology, Marx analyzed the state of German ideology at that time through the comparison between materialism and idealism, and criticized him. Marx criticized Feuerbach’s conception of “human nature”, the limitations of materialism, his understanding of “reality” and his understanding of historical relations, starting from real people and their production. This critique laid the foundation for the development of Marxist materialist historiography.

‘The intelligence of the people’: Marx’s early political thought and the young Hegelian concept of state

ABSTRACT This paper has two purposes: to provide a contextualised account of the Young Hegelian theory of the state, and to argue that Marx began working on the manuscript known as his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, not in the Summer of 1843, as most commentators assume, but at least as early as the Spring of 1842. The established narrative describes the Young Hegelians as ‘liberals’, and suggests that Marx ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ represents his rejection of their liberalism and turn towards a more radical democratic and revolutionary position. Conversely, I argue that the Young Hegelians (notably Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer) were never liberal (at least not by any standard definition of that term) but articulated a radical and revolutionary theory of the state from the outset – one that understood freedom, not as independence, but as political participation, and that characterised the modern state, not as the guarantor of private rights, but as the institutional framework in which all citizens could realise their public freedom. In this sense, Marx’s ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy Law’ does not represent a break with the Young Hegelians theory of state, but a contribution to it.

The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany by Adrian Daub

Reviewed by: The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany by Adrian Daub Joseph D. O'Neil Adrian Daub. The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 247 pp. + index. Adrian Daub's comprehensive reimagining of German literary and cultural history is a worthy follow-up to his 2012 Uncivil Unions, as if the off-kilter marriages and other unions had gone on to spawn equally out-of-sync offspring. Like the earlier book, The Dynastic Imagination revises a mostly canonical literary history by focusing on a master figure, this time the idea of ancestry, descent, inheritance, and lineage, in order to produce a new story. This story is told in terms of the uncanny recurrence of dynastic figures of kinship in spite of the revolutionary and Romantic critique of dynasty and its putative replacement in the nineteenth century by the bourgeois nuclear family. In this context, dynasty becomes a critical tool to overcome bourgeois strictures and the confines of "nuclearity," the opposite pole to the dynastic. Over eight chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue, Daub charts the fate of dynastic figures of thought in works by the usual German and Austrian suspects, from Goethe and Hegel through Stifter to Freud and George. His study also includes English and French authors—Mary Shelley, Émile Zola, Marcel Proust—Schelling and Young Hegelians, and Richard Wagner plus his dynasty. Goethe, for example, charts a pattern of regression, failed development, and generations out of sync vis-à-vis the Romantic generation he largely outlived, at least in terms of their creative energies. The reading of Hegel in the context of German feminism with its shifting relationship to the dynastic imagination before and after 1848 is perhaps the book's most novel contribution, as it brings Bettina von Arnim into conversation with Louise Dittmar and Henriette Goldschmidt across the year of revolutions, mapping the fates of Hegelianism in unexpected ways. While these early chapters revise our understanding of what the figure of dynasty means and does in the prenational period, Daub's virtuosic reading of Wagner includes the Ring cycle, the Wagner family and their physiognomy, Wagner's essays, Parsifal, Schopenhauer's views on marriage, and Wagner's son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, without failing to mention the Wagnerian nose. The following chapter on naturalism displays the comparative approach, which is one of the real strengths of this book. While his treatment of Mary Shelley's The Last Man in chapter 3 is sandwiched between readings of Schelling [End Page 185] and Goethe (Faust II) with abundant injections of Hegel, chapter 6 is almost exclusively French, with a reading of several parts of the vast Rougon-Macquart cycle that situates Germinal and the other stories of the two intertwined families firmly in Daub's dynastic paradigm. A pleasantly surprising change on first reading, it is, upon reflection, hard to imagine how the book could have been written without it. A brief coda on Proust ends this chapter with an exclamation mark, the queering of the dynastic imagination in "a lineage that does not follow necessity but rather constitutes itself in and through breaks from what's necessary and probable," as will be the case in decadence and early modernism for Wilde, Mann, Wedekind, et al. Proust reemerges in the final chapter as an interlocutor for the queer poetics of dynasty in Stefan George and his forms of poetic family and legacy. As with the elective Schicksal Daub expounds and advocates in his reading of the Hungarian-Jewish psychoanalyst Léopold Szondi—the coda to a chapter on Freud and the awful C. G. Jung—the queer turn affirms the power of lineages and forms of kinship that are created and affirmed over against naturalized and nationalized versions of identity and community. If "the dynasty represents a caput mortuum of modernity"—the residue of an alchemical experiment or a "terminal moraine," the land thrown up at the end of a glacier's path—it is at least a felicitous coincidence that, by analogy, so much meaning is packed into these brief chapter ends. Daub has a deft touch with language. The book is jargon...

‘In Nature's Good Old College’: Sexual Politics and the Long Shadow of Hegel

AbstractAlthough his positions on gender were neither particularly radical nor particularly representative of his age, Hegel proved counterintuitively central to early German philosophers elaborating openly feminist positions. The Young Hegelians' critique of religion offered a readymade way to critique traditional modes of grounding and vindicating gender roles. But it also, especially among more materialist thinkers like Ludwig Feuerbach, tended to rely on supposedly “natural” bases for gender inequality. This article traces a line of women thinkers beginning in Hegel's age, stretching through the immediate aftermath of Hegel's death, all the way to the fin-de-siècle, who sought to destabilize the very idea of nature that lay behind both Hegelian and Young Hegelian accounts. Thinkers like Bettina Brentano-von Arnim (1785–1859), Louise Dittmar (1807–1884), and Helene von Druskowitz (1856–1918) charted a path between Hegel himself, Hegel's critics, renewers, and overcomers, to arrive at strikingly modern position. In particular von Druskowitz, critic of Feuerbach and Comte, interlocutor to Nietzsche and Hartmann, ended up with a philosophical position on nature that was nearly identical to the most radical feminist proposals of the 1960s: the end of human nature, even if it meant the end of the species.

“The True Practice is Theory”: Edgar Bauer, Republicanism, and the Young Hegelians

ABSTRACT The recent past has witnessed a significant amount of new interest in the intellectual history of the Vormärz, or the period in German history immediately prior to the 1848 Revolutions, and especially in the theories of republicanism developed among those who are variously known as the Young, Left, or New Hegelians. At the same time, scholars have reopened the question of Marx’s relationship with republicanism and the republican conception of freedom. But one figure who has been conspicuously overlooked in this context was arguably the most radical and revolutionary republican of the period: Edgar Bauer. This paper fills a gap in the extant literature by providing a survey of Edgar Bauer’s work during the crucial years of 1841–1843. It shows that his position differed in important ways from that of his brother Bruno and explains the political stakes of his equally vehement attacks on the Christian state, on the one side, and its liberal opposition, on the other. It proposes that his position developed rapidly over the course of the three years in question, until he was finally arrested, put on trial, and imprisoned for insulting religious society, mocking the law, arousing dissatisfaction with the state, and offending the majesty of the king.

Dialectics and Drama: Nietzsche as a Young Hegelian and Maître à Penser

ABSTRACT In this article I argue that Nietzsche resorts to a typical, ambitious Young Hegelian dialectical grand narrative to dramatically frame Modernity, elevate his own critical theory to unmatchable heights and find for himself a superior, unique position as Critic and Destiny, having as his main enemy the philistines (common human beings), and that which politically corresponds to them: civil society and democracy. Nietzsche’s epochal narrative exhibits a classical dialectical progression from Error/Negation, through Escalation, to Crisis, then Negation of Negation (Inversion), and promised New Age, all of which entails the unwelcome consequences of self-aggrandizing exaggerations, determinism, negativism, binarism, otherworldliness, transhuman idealizations, and racial-caste-hierarchism that compromise the otherwise interesting side of his critical suggestions, once deflated, on culture and morality.

Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Marxian Critique of Theology

ABSTRACT Marcella Althaus-Reid offers a Marxian critique of the production of theology. This article offers analysis of three aspects of this critique: First, it describes how Althaus-Reid diagnoses the intertwined realities of capitalist economies, heterosexual patriarchy in societies, and hierarchical theologies. Second, it traces her use of ideology critique as she adapted Marx’s critique of the Young Hegelians as part of her own critique of Liberation Theologians. Third, it explains her account of the production, marketing, and consumption of theology in relation to her uses of economic metaphors derived from Marx. By isolating the Marxian influence on Althaus-Reid, the article develops an account of her critique as an undressing of theological method that echoes Marx’s critiques of political economy as an unveiling of hidden mechanisms that can be applied more broadly as well. Her critique is then related to how theology can be practiced in more self-aware ways.

Whither Transcendence? Immanence and Critique in The Self-Emptying Subject

This paper engages Alex Dubilet’s The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern and his account of immanence and kenosis as exhibited in his reading of Hegel’s concept of Entäußerung [externalization]. Specifically, I focus on the “problematic of desubjectivation” that centers Dubilet’s critique of transcendence and its relationship to subjection and subjectivity. I reconsider the relationship made between this problematic, the ethics of kenosis, and the concept of immanence so as to demonstrate the ways in which Dubilet attempts to depart from transcendence, subjectivity, and their concomitant ethics. In particular, I consider his reading of Hegel’s concept of Entäußerung and its similarities to the Young Hegelians’ understanding of this concept. My reading of Dubilet suggests that while he seeks to depart from transcendence, he reintroduces transcendence through the “problematic of desubjectivation” and its relationship to kenosis. In conclusion, I question the philosophical import of immanence in contemporary critical inquiry and why its conceptualization is often positioned in opposition to transcendence.

LOGIC OF LIFE AGAINST DOGMATICS OF RATIONALITY (FIN DE SIÈCLE OF GERMAN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY)

The problem of conceptual conflict of theory and practice is investigated on the example of the transformation of long-reigning rationalism under the influence of the "organic logic of life" (the basic concept of romantic philosophy). The formation of "non-classical" philosophical epistemology, an alternative to neo-Kantianism, Young Hegelianism and positivism, is considered in the context of the systemic crisis of scientific knowledge and the change of cultural paradigm at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The situation of changing the philosophical paradigm itself - the result of criticism of rationalism, as well as changes in the epistemological basis of the "science of sciences" - is described as a kind of fin de siècle (similar to the processes that took place in art and literature) in the history of German classical philosophy. The article proves that disputes (provoked by the Feirbach's criticism of Hegelian philosophy, as well as the polemics of Young Hegelians with positivists, initiated by Nietzsche and his imitators, and then continued by opponents and critics of Nietzscheanism) led to serious changes in the methodology and principles of philosophizing. Formed by these discussions a specific philosophical discourse (the struggle against dogmatism and the justification of the "philosophy of life" were the focus of attention of the Western European scientific community) was the beginning of the formation and rapid development of a new philosophical science based on "non-classical rationality". The article concludes about the continuity of development, not only repulsion, but also attraction in the relationship between the "former" and the newest philosophy: both paradigms imply the "truth of the world" and the appointment of man as an equal and equivalent objects (and subjects) of philosophical study.

Understanding Marx's Concept of Justice

Did Marx's critique of capitalism involve a concept of distributive justice? This question arose in a dispute that started in the 1970s, based on the argument by U. S. analytical Marxist Allen Wood. The dispute lasted for decades, and spread to China. But if we follow Marx's thinking, we see that this controversy already appeared then, in Marx's critique of capitalism. Marx's theory formed in response to the viewpoints of the Young Hegelians, the National Economists, and others. Some key points of the dispute can be clarified by tracking Marx's critical thought, from the standpoint of both its historical and its normative dimensions, juridical judgment and value judgment, the theoretical dimension and the dimension of reality. The research draws in particular on the text of the new MEGA.

A POLITICS WITHOUT COMPROMISE: THE YOUNG HEGELIANS AND POLITICS

This article aims at exploring how most of the Young Hegelians came toreject all forms of compromise. It will first show how Young Hegelianism itself wasborn from a process of radicalisation. Then, it will expound some of the theoreticaldevelopments that this process produced and explain why and how all forms ofcompromise came to be rejected. For Young Hegelians, a compromise is an antidialecticalposition. It consists in the adoption of a median posture, which does notcorrespond with a real mediation. It is a way of deflating conflicts and, moreprecisely, to avoid the oppositions at work in history being unveiled in their purity.

Interview with David McLellan July 2018

David McLellan, interviewed here, is a Fellow of Goldsmiths College, University of London and Emeritus Professor of Political Theory, University of Kent. Since the 1970s he has been one of the leading biographers, translators and commentators on Marx in the English-speaking world. He is the author of several books on Marx and Marxism, including The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx; Karl Marx: His Life and Thought; Karl Marx: Selected Writings; Marx before Marxism; and Marxism and Religion. He has also published a biography of Simone Weil, books on the political implications of Christianity, and a lengthy article on contract law and marriage. He lectures widely around the world on these topics, frequently in China, and in 2018 addressed a conference in Nairobi on religion and world peace. In this interview, or conversation, with Larry Ray and Iain Wilkinson, in July 2018, David discusses the origins of his interest in Marx, the development Marx’s thought and his critique of the Hegelians, Marx’s critical method, Marx and religion, Marx on Russia, the role of violence in social change, the relevance of Marx’s work today, and offers comments on some recent biographies. David has spent much of his intellectual career engaging with the meaning and legacy of Marxism and these reflections should generate reflection and debate on the significance of Marx and the possibilities of radical political change today.

Not a man of solid principles. The relevance of Edgar Bauer’s polemical portrait of Karl Marx in his 1843 novella Es leben feste Grundsätze!

The protagonist of Edgar Bauer’s 1843 novella Es leben feste Grundsätze! is a young intellectual named “Karl”. It can hardly be doubted that Bauer’s novella is a polemical character study of Karl Marx: the rather demeaning picture of “Herr Karl” belongs to the heat of controversy between Marx and die Freien, the Berlin Young Hegelians, after the end of their participation in the Rheinische Zeitung in late autumn 1842. So far, Bauer’s novella has never been used as a potential source to shed light on the deeper causes of animosity between Marx and die Freien.

Marx's critique of ideology for discourse analysis: from analysis of ideologies to social critique

ABSTRACTThe notion of ideology is related to social and material reality and especially to the processes of social reproduction. Therefore, the analysis of ideology seems to fall into the domain of discourse analysis. The analysis of language and practices of signification in social contexts constitutes the basic triangle of discourse analysis. However, the Marxist concept of ideology always refers to some kind of falsity, that ultimately enables the researcher to not only analyse but also to criticize ideologies. Ideologies are always in some way false, injust or inadequate. It is at this point that discourse analysts usually raise the most serious objections as they understand truth itself as a discursive product, resulting from powerful struggles of domination and exclusion. The present article explores in how far the Marxist notion can be used for the purpose of discourse analysis. It argues that even the notion of falsity as present in classical Marxism can be adapted for understanding and criticizing contemporary ideologies. I start by presenting some common understandings of ideology in the field of Discourse Studies (I). In a second step I will analyse elements of the notion of ideology in Marx's early writings, especially in the debate with the Young Hegelians (II) and ask what this means for empirical discourse analysis. I will then point towards elements of the critique of ideology in Marx mature ‘political economy’ that could be fruitful for Discourse Studies (III). Finally, I will try to reconcile a Marxist concept of ideology based ultimately on a notion of falsity with such discourse analytical approaches highly suspicious of the possibility of the existing ‘politics of truth’ (IV). We will see that, due to the relation between ideas and material organization in ideologies, the critique of ideologies becomes not only a critique of practices of justifications but turns into a genuine social critique.

石塚正英著『三月前期の急進主義-青年ヘーゲル派と義人同盟に関する社会思想史的研究-』

石塚正英著『三月前期の急進主義-青年ヘーゲル派と義人同盟に関する社会思想史的研究-』

Dandy Socialism

Abstract ‘It was a dark and stormy night...’ with these words Edward Bulwer-Lytton began his 1830 novel Paul Clifford. ‘Le 13 décembre 1838, par une soirée pluvieuse et froid’ are the words with which Eugène Sue begins his novel The Mysteries of Paris, its narrative following a ‘conceptual’ introductory address to the reader. There are many more features connecting these two popular literary pieces of the Romantic period. In-between, a new genre emerged – the melodramatic social(ist) novel – together with new means of communication, i.e. the novel feuilleton that was printed in daily newspapers. This subtle form of censorship suggests that a genre believed to be melodramatically mediocre had an excessive aestheticopolitical attractiveness. Eugène Sue was a star writer of nineteenth century bestsellers novels–feuilletons during the period between the two revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Afterwards he practically fell into oblivion and was barely mentioned in the company of ‘serious’ writers like Balzac and Hugo or Dickens and Thackeray, all of whom, however, took his allegedly mediocre melodramatic and popular narratives as cases to be followed. His temporary fame was confirmed by the response of Bruno Bauer’s group of young Hegelians, who found in Sue’s literary attractiveness a philosophical solution for all the mysteries and conflicts of the period. Marx’s criticism of their philosophical and political position in The Sacred Family includes a lengthy and thorough criticism of their ‘philosophical’ readings of the novel, of the novel itself, and of their and Sue’s understanding of the new bourgeois reality. Among other points, Sue’s alleged socialism is described with the help of a comparison between the police and the moral police. Can we, along with a re-establishment of the context of The Mysteries of Paris, leave behind the critique of ideology and the literary critique of popular and mass culture in order to bring back into the aesthetic field this melodramatic narrative of class society and to re-establish the politics of its aesthetics?

González Vicén y su análisis del concepto de “Revolución” en la década de los 80

Este ensayo trata de expresar el concepto de “revolución” de González Vicén a través de sus trabajos realizados durante los años 80. Para ello introduzco en primer lugar las ideas que sobre dicho concepto jurídico-político tenía ya en los años 30 y cómo se desarrolló hasta llegar a sus trabajos sobre Marx, Stein, Bayle y Kant. El interés por el concepto de “revolución”, manifestado ya en sus primeros artículos de prensa, tiene absoluta preeminencia en sus primeras investigaciones, a saber, su propia tesis doctoral y su libro de 1932, Teoría de la revolución. La idea fundamental por entonces sobre dicho concepto es que el orden jurídico y el Estado han de servir a la gente y no al revés. También se preocupará de deslindar este concepto jurídicopolítico de otros similares. En los años 60 resaltará que dicho concepto de “revolución” es como tal un concepto histórico, aproximándose así un poco a sus estudios sobre Marx. En estos, la dimensión o nota predominante del concepto de “revolución” va a ser la de “transformación” de la sociedad. Nuestro autor nos recuerda así las acotaciones y beligerantes críticas de Marx a Hegel, La Escuela Histórica e incluso a los jóvenes hegelianos. Por otro lado, González Vicén nos presenta al negativo de Marx, Stein, quien elaborará una teoría de la revolución pero con la firme intención de escamotear su necesidad en favor de un capitalismo más amable. En cuanto a Bayle, nuestro autor se refiere ante todo a sus actitudes como un modelo, en una época incluso anterior a la Revolución Francesa. Por último, la voz de Kant, transversal a toda la obra de González Vicén, tiene en el presente artículo también dicho carácter; pues, pese a lo denostado de la crítica kantiana al ideal de “derecho de resistencia” por motivos formales, hay en la obra del pensador alemán una continua referencia a la autonomía, la libertad y la emancipación que González Vicén también recoge en su vida personal y en su obra.

Israeli Sociology's Young Hegelian

In April 2014, the Center for Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) convened a conference titled “The Settler Colonial Paradigm: Debating Gershon Shafir's Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict on Its 25th Anniversary.” This essay emanates from the conference. I first chart the dialectical emergence of Shafir's thought out of Israeli sociology, and then gauge its impact on the growing presence of the settler-colonial framework in the study of Palestine/Israel. The analysis of Shafir's book shows how a powerful hegemony has produced its disavowal. The examination of Palestine/Israel as a settler-colonial situation past and present underscores the benefit of studying this topic comparatively and as part of a global phenomenon.

Empiricism, Science, and Philosophy in The German Ideology

Ever since the full text of The German Ideology appeared in 1932 it has been subject to persistent misreading due to the fact that the idiosyncratic nature of this work—as merely a rough, unedited, and unfinished draft as well as a fiercely polemical text—has been neglected. As a result, the majority of scholars have tended to claim that Marx and Engels in this work propose an empiricist or positivistic conception of human history and society. A critical reading that is sensitive to the peculiar nature of this text reveals that these common interpretations are wholly ungrounded and that, on the contrary, the authors develop their polemic against the Young Hegelians from an outlook that is deeply indebted to the Hegelian philosophical legacy (even though paradoxically the latter espouses an absolute idealistic viewpoint).

UNTIMELY HESITATIONS

Intellectual historians owe Nietzsche a debt for many things, not least for lending the quality of “untimeliness” a positive connotation. In the late 1990s, when Marxism was arguably at its nadir as an intellectual program, much less a political one, Warren Breckman published an insightful study of Marx's early thought and its genesis out of a series of disputes with the Young Hegelians concerning the state and its ambiguous relationship with theological conceptions of authority. The untimeliness of Breckman's intervention had much to recommend it. Taking his distance from the pallbearers, Breckman showed that a historical inquiry into the Marxist enterprise increased rather than diminished its contemporary relevance. In the wake of the eastern bloc's collapse, “civil society” had become the order of the day. Breckman showed that, far from being an innocuous panacea to the terror of state power, the concept had its own contested political history, one that Marx grappled with in ways whose resonance has only grown in the decade since Breckman's first book appeared.