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This chapter puts forward a revisionary reading of Hegel's reception in Britain at the turn of the 19th century, in suggesting that the stance of the British Hegelians is very close to the sort of non-metaphysical or category theory interpretations that have been in vogue amongst contemporary commentators. It is shown that the British Hegelians arrived at this position as a way of responding to the hostile existentialist reaction to Hegel begun by F. W. J. Schelling in the 1840s, which led them to abandon the standard Neoplatonic reading of his idealism, and arrive at the sort of non-metaphysical account which is most fully developed by J. M. E. McTaggart in his interpretation of Hegel's Logic.

Thinkers unconnected to institutions were the most lively and creative thinkers in the US for much of the nineteenth century. These ‘amateurs’ were more willing to adopt untraditional, usually German, ideas; and they moved more quickly to modern, secular ideas. The most important of these thinkers were James Marsh of Vermont, who introduced Kantian ideas into America; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leading Transcendentalist; Connecticut minister Horace Bushnell, who followed Nathaniel William Taylor in remaking the theology of New England and leading it to figurative and metaphorical interpretations of the Bible; John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff of the Mercersburg Seminary in Pennsylvania, who meditated on an organicist Protestant theology; and The St Louis Hegelians.

Wagner, whose output from the 1840s on stands in the shadow of the Young Hegelians and the beginnings of aesthetic modernity, has played a role in the history of the modern and the postmodern that has still to be properly assessed. This role is full of paradoxes and subtle shifts and countershifts. This chapter explores Wagner's “strong” belief in the Young Hegelian version of the power of history, which was the driving force behind his Zurich writings and the initial conception of the Ring. It also examines the idea that, especially after his discovery of Schopenhauer, this belief went hand in hand with a “weak” modification of the notion of the new as a perpetual critical overcoming of tradition, which brought him closer to the subversive strategies of postmodern thought than he is usually thought to be.

This chapter explores how the emerging western European left engaged Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. In particular, it examines the Left Hegelians' critique of Romantic symbol theory as well as the process by which the Hegelian opposition, and finally Karl Marx, built their theory on a desymbolization, the reduction of the transcendent to the immanent and the secularization of social relations. To this end, the chapter considers the problem posed to the Young Hegelians by the insistence of Friedrich Schelling and his Romantic followers that the real is not only, or truly, the rational; how, then, is one to understand the irreducible otherness of the world to thought? It also discusses Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's attitude towards the Romantic concern for the symbolic intuition of divinity; Ludwig Feuerbach's return to symbolic or allegorical styles of thought within Young Hegelianism; and the Left Hegelians' critique of religion.

This chapter focuses on the scandal created among Left Hegelians when Pierre Leroux, one of the leading figures of the French left in the 1830s and 1840s, chose to embrace Friedrich Schelling. At the moment when the nascent German left was stridently campaigning against Romanticism, Leroux's socialism was candidly Romantic. At the time when German leftists excluded symbolic modes from their vision of emancipation, Leroux's political project rested on a symbolic sensibility. This chapter examines how Leroux's decision to embrace Schelling opens up a quite different perspective on the political valences of the symbolic. It also traces the fate of the symbolic from pre-Marxist Romantic socialism through Karl Marx and twentieth-century philosophical Marxism up to the threshold of the collapse of French Marxism. It suggests how, at the extreme edge of Marxism's hold on the imagination of French leftist intellectuals, we find a summons to the Romantic socialists of the early nineteenth century.

This chapter recounts Hegel’s acceptance of the professorial chair at the University of Heidelberg, the same offer that was previously declined by Spinoza. This event prompted Hegelians to declare that Hegel “replaced” Spinoza. Spinozists counter-argue that there exists an apparent difference between the two philosophers, invalidating the act of replacement. The philosophy of Hegel is instructed in a hierarchical manner, from the teacher down to the students; while Spinoza’s is transmitted to disciples in an egalitarian manner. The resulting comparative analysis of both philosophies seeks to understand the implications of such comparison, with discourses formally organized according to a principle of coherence, indicating the possibility of interpreting one through the other.