The Young Hegel

If we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence an exact knowledge of Hegel of both his greatness and his limitation is absolutely indispensable.- from the prefaceIf we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence an exact knowledge of Hegel of both his greatness and his limitation is absolutely indispensable.- from the preface.It is well known that Hegel exerted a major influence on the development of Marx''s thought. This circumstance led Lukcs one of the chief Marxist theoreticians of this century to embark on his exploration of Hegelian antecedents in the German intellectual tradition their concrete expression in the work of Hegel himself and later syntheses of seemingly contradictory modes of though. Four phases of Hegel''s intellectual development are examined: Hegel''s early republican phase the crisis in Hegel''s views on society and the earliest beginnings of his dialectical method rationale and defense of objective idealism and the breach with Schelling and The Phenomenology of Mind. Lukcs completed this study in 1938 but because of the imminent outbreak of war it was not published until the late 1940s. A revised German edition appeared in 1954 and it is this text that is the basis of this first English translation of the work.