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title: What I Take to Be Left Hegelianism

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2020-06-18T12:36:00+08:00

I take Left Hegelianism to be a philosophical tradition/position that

takes Hegel's philosophy, and radically orientates it to be

anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian.

An example of Left Hegelian literature or philosophical figures would be

Marx, Proudhon, and, say, Ludwig Feuerbach.

Wikipedia has quite a good paragraph that sums up the more-or-less

agreed position that all the Left Hegelians had:

The Young Hegelians drew on both Hegel's veneration of Reason and

Freedom (as the guiding forces of history) and his idea that the

'Spirit' overcame all that opposed reason and freedom. They felt

Hegel's apparent belief in the end of history conflicted with other

aspects of his thought and that, contrary to his later thought, the

dialectic was certainly not complete; this they felt was (painfully)

obvious given the irrationality of religious beliefs and the empirical

lack of freedoms---especially political and religious freedoms---in

existing Prussian society.