Book Review

Methods/Theory

Following G. F. W. Hegel's death in 1831, the Hegelian movement, which had a strong presence in German academic institutions and intellectual life, splintered over the issue of religion. As students of Hegel sought to clarify ambiguities in his philosophy of religion, they became increasingly skeptical of his (sometimes) claimed reconciliation with Christianity. These so-called "Young Hegelians" arrived at the conclusion that Christianity was humanity's unrecognized projection of its own powers and faculties onto the alienated and abstract form of a domineering God. In past decades, intellectual historians—notably, John Toews in Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841 (1980)—examined the religious disputes of the 1830s in their specific theological and institutional contexts, while others (including myself) have examined more closely how dissenting Hegelians were then politically radicalized by intense political persecution in the 1840s. Warren Breckman's ambitious and sophisticated book seeks to bridge these two crucial decades in the development of Hegelian philosophy. Breckman argues that the path to Marxism in the 1840s was already marked out by the theological politics of the 1830s.	1
The author provides a compelling discussion of the 1830s that nicely complements Toews's account. Breckman considers how the issue of "personality" was central to both conservative theology and politics in restoration Germany. Theological critics attacked the putative "pantheism" of Hegelian philosophy because it undercut the belief in the idea of God as a singular personality, a notion that was directly tied to the political restoration's defense of the personalism of the state in the absolute power of the monarch and of civil society in the institution of private property. Breckman shows how conservative theorists, including Friedrich Stahl and the later Friedrich Schelling, elaborated an all-encompassing ideology of personalism as they gained influence in the Prussian state. In reaction to the attacks of conservative personalism, some Hegelians in the 1830s became more conservative, bending Hegelian philosophy to fit conservative theology and politics, but others, the "Young Hegelians," intensified their critique to include conservative Hegelians, until they ended up attacking Hegel himself for residual personalist belief. Breckman is particularly adroit in unearthing a specific political critique of personalism in overlooked sources, such as the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach in the early 1830s. Against political personalism,Young Hegelians in the 1830s also turned to sources of thinking about a social self, particularly to French Saint-Simonianism. The dissemination of antipersonalist and Saint-Simonian ideas, through such figures as Heinrich Heine, Moses Hess, August Cieszkowski, and Feuerbach into the late 1830s led, according to Breckman, to the ideas of Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx in the early to mid-1840s.	2
The author's overarching intention is to construct a continuity, a tradition, as it were, of antipersonalist and collectivist Young Hegelian thought, reaching from the young Feuerbach in the 1830s to the young Marx in the mid-1840s. But while the anlaysis of the 1830s is original, cogent, and convincing, the analysis of the 1840s, although often ingenious, also seems significantly underargued and rather skewed in its conclusions. Sometimes the problem is one of how to handle evidence. Breckman, for example, perceptively finds antipersonalist ideas in Marx's Notebooks to his doctoral dissertation on Epicurean and Democritean atomism (1841) and observes, rightly, that they contradict what Marx identifies in his dissertation as the "serenity" of Epicurean thought, which suggests some kind of reconciliation with existing reality. Breckman then assumes that his discovery proves Marx's membership in a continuous current of critical and radical antipersonalism, but he offers no explanation of why the references in the notebooks should be considered more important than Marx's final text, which entirely omits them, or of how the notebooks relate to the finished dissertation. The author moves too quickly from the possible presence of elements of a tradition of antipersonalism to the conclusion that they were determinative (as opposed to, say, residual, rhetorical, or inert) in Marx's thinking at the time. If Marx was already so radical why did he feel the need to write about serenity? This requires explanation.	. . .