In November, 1917, the German sociologist Max Weber delivered a now-famous lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” before an assembly of students and faculty at the University of Munich. “The fate of our times,” he declared, “is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’” Weber intended this remark as a global characterization of a modern society in which the natural sciences and bureaucratic rationality had conspired to undermine confidence in religious values and traditional sources of meaning. But we may also take his words as a more general verdict on the condition of modern European thought at the dawn of the twentieth century, when intellectuals from across the continent looked upon the wreckage of the First World War as a turning point in civilization, as a violent end to the nineteenth century and a grim foretaste of the world to come. Weber himself remained in a posture of ambivalence: He feared that the higher ideals of the Enlightenment were “irretrievably lost” and that only the imperative of “economic compulsion” would prevail.

In 1837, David Friedrich Strauss intervened in the enormous controversy that had raged around his book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined since its appearance in 1835. The book was indeed provocative. Not only did Strauss deny the divinity of Jesus Christ as the incarnate son of God. He even left in doubt that Jesus, the man, had actually existed in history. The book shook the Hegelian School to its core, and, surveying the fractures that had emerged, Strauss identified a ‘left’, ‘right,’ and ‘center.’ The crucial dividing line rested on a matter of great concern to Hegel and his followers, namely the relationship between philosophy and Christian doctrine. “There are three possible answers to the question of whether and to what extent the idea of the unity of divine and human nature proved the gospel to be history,” wrote Strauss: “the concept proves either the entirety of the history, merely a part of it, or none of it. If each of these answers and directions were indeed represented by a branch of the Hegelian school, then, using the traditional analogy, the first direction, as standing closest to the long-established system, could be named the right, the third direction named the left, and the second named the center.” On the left, he placed only himself. That situation did not long endure. The radicalization of the Hegelian left proceeded so rapidly that, by 1841, Strauss had broken his ties with the Deutsche Jahrbücher, the main journal of the Hegelian left, no longer able to tolerate the criticisms and gibes of other leading figures such as Arnold Ruge, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Bruno Bauer.

It is something of a truism that each age must work through the legacy of its predecessors. In the case of the nineteenth century, this obvious statement gains poignancy when one considers the novel challenges and possibilities of the eighteenth century, which was, after all, the age of the Enlightenment. In its many guises and national variations, the Enlightenment asserted provocative and epoch-making claims about the role of reason, science, and criticism vis-à-vis the traditional authority of religion, state, and received knowledge. It drew new roadmaps for the conscious and reflexive reform of society and the betterment of people. At its core, it articulated a new emancipatory project – at once philosophical and political – chiefly oriented toward the ideal of individual autonomy. The cultural, social, and political configuration that shaped the Enlightenment came to something of an end in the closing decade of the eighteenth century, partly through processes of internal critique but also, spectacularly, through the political collapse of the Old Regime. In the changed circumstances of the early nineteenth century, the Enlightenment fragmented into a multitude of contests over the meaning of its legacy. What is the status of reason, and what is its proper relationship to other modes of knowledge? What of religion? What is the key discipline or cultural form that will, depending on one’s perspective and priority, advance, hinder, or deepen the impulses of enlightenment? What are the promises and perils of the project of emancipation, and how might it be continued, radicalized, or restrained? Are there limits to the pursuit of individual autonomy? What is the proper relation between the past and the future, tradition and innovation? None of these questions admitted definitive answers, but they fueled creative efforts, debate, and conflict across a great range of intellectual and cultural pursuits.

One of the many divisions between Hegel and his Romantic contemporaries was over the status of the symbolic. For the Romantics, the symbol is the perfect fusion of form and content. As F. W. J. Schelling wrote, the symbol is the “synthesis” of the particular and the general, in “which the general does not signify the particular nor does the particular signify the general, but in which the two are absolutely one.” The symbolic expressed the Romantics' paradoxical quest for the unity of the perfectly individual with the fully universal, their contradictory yearning for both the fullest possible presence of meaning and the inexpressible, unapproachable, and inscrutable. The symbol, to cite Schelling once again, creates an “inner bond uniting art and religion,” and further, the symbol establishes the philosophy of art “as the necessary goal of the philosopher, who in art views the inner essence of his own discipline as if in a magic and symbolic mirror.” Hegel, by contrast, judged the symbol to be inadequate for philosophy, preferring the linguistic sign as the privileged medium of the science of the concept. According to him, a symbol conveys its meaning through the presentation of some quality or qualities that it has in common with that meaning. By contrast, the specific virtue of the sign is precisely its arbitrariness. Because its capacity to convey meaning depends only on convention and agreement, the sign could be purged of the naturalness and intuitiveness that linger in the symbol.

Reporting on political literature in Germany for the Revue des deux mondes in 1844, the French writer René Taillandier complained of the Young Hegelians' “bizarre, half-theological, half-republican speech.” Taillandier's dyspeptic description applied particularly well to Arnold Ruge, who viewed himself as undertaking in politics the same kind of critique that Strauss and Feuerbach had pursued in theology. Indeed, as these figures had done in the domain of theology, Ruge set the political agenda of the short-lived Young Hegelian movement. From the death of Eduard Gans in 1839 until the suppression of the Deutsche Jahrbücher in 1843, Ruge was inarguably the most prominent progressive Hegelian political writer; but, unlike Gans, Ruge launched a fundamental assault on Hegel's political system. Again in contrast to Gans, the path of Ruge's thinking also led him away from the main tenets of liberalism. More forcefully and clearly than any other Left Hegelian prior to Marx, Ruge marked the departure of the radical Left from liberalism. However, because Ruge was a tireless champion of freedom of the press and representative government, many earlier scholars have chosen to label him a liberal, one of the leading figures of a German “bourgeoisie” struggling for emancipation. Assimilated to the German liberal tradition by this view, he has also thereby come to share in its great putative flaw, its trust in power and its willingness to identify freedom with the state. Ruge's idea of the “absolute state” and his support of Bismarck in the last years of his life would seem to place him in the vilified tradition of nineteenth-century German liberals who became idolators of the Machtstaat after the failure of the Revolution of 1848.