From the Realization of Philosophy to its Downfall: Modernity in Question in Marx and the Young Hegelians

Long neglected as a mere transitional moment from Hegel to Marx, the Young Hegelians have once again regained relevance in contemporary social and political theory. Already in the 1980s, Habermas deemed the Young Hegelians a prime example of modernity in philosophy and considered their relentless critical gestures to foreshadow contemporary (mostly continental) tendencies in philosophy, such as those anchored in deconstruction, negative dialectic and the end of grand narratives. Today, some forty years later, we have new reasons to take interest in and inspiration from the Young Hegelians. For they met their time (which, like ours, was one of crisis and turmoil) with the courage to make of philosophy something concrete.