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301 14 Ruge and Marx: Democracy, Nationalism, and Revolution in Left Hegelian Debates Lucien Calvié Translated from the French by Douglas Moggach Despite a number of important recent publications in the field,1 studies of the Hegelian school continue to face formidable obstacles. The philosophical and political language of the Young Hegelians seems perhaps dated and certainly complex. It is precise and technical, but also difficult to render adequately in translation. Translations which might serve students or a broader reading public are indeed rare. The works of even the best known among the members of the Hegelian school, like Bruno Bauer, remain largely inaccessible. Germanists who are interested in the history of ideas in the nineteenth century, but who are intimidated by the gigantic scaffolding of the Hegelian system and its critical appendages, often consider Young Hegelian texts too abstract, too philosophical, while philosophers tend to view them as not philosophical enough, as too journalistic, or as too closely tied to a particular intellectual context. It is assuredly the case that this intellectual context, that of Germany and Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, is central to the works of many on the Hegelian Left, and in particular to those of Arnold Ruge. This historical rootedness should not be seen as a defect or a limitation . Reconstructing this intellectual and historical context is essential to understanding the relevance of the Hegelian Left to current political and theoretical debates. If we take the example of France, research on the Hegelian Left has appeared largely as a specialized subfield of work on either Hegel or Marx. There is considerable dynamism in both these adjacent fields. Numerous scholarly studies on Hegel have been produced,2 and translations of his works are frequent. These include recent retranslations3 which aim for greater fidelity to the original than the older, now canoni- 302 L U C I E N C A L V I É cal versions, such as Jean Hyppolite’s Phénoménologie de l’esprit.4 The once powerful field of Marxology had suffered a serious decline, but is now reemerging on new foundations after the dislocation of the Soviet system.5 This renewed impetus has not yet been fully extended to the Hegelian school. Perhaps there is reason to reconsider this situation. An occasion to do so is provided by the recent publication, in French translation, of two of Ruge’s texts of 1843 and 1844, “Toward an Entente Between the Germans and the French,” and “Patriotism.”6 This translation is part of a long-term project on the Left Hegelians in relation to the history of political ideas in Germany from 1789 to 1848, including, besides Hegel, the Rhineland “Jacobins,” Heine, Young Germany, and the early Marx. These texts help us to situate Ruge, and the Hegelian Left, in a German and European context of continuing actuality. The year 1989 marked the bicentenary, both festive and solemn, of the French Revolution. But it was also the beginning of the explosion, or implosion, of the Soviet system and its offshoots in central and southeastern Europe. It marked the end of the system issuing more or less directly from the 1917 Russian Revolution, which explicitly saw itself as a continuation , reproduction, and universal extension of the French Revolution . The collapse of the Soviet system had its European corollaries, of which the two most apparent were the rapid disappearance of the German Democratic Republic, and in the opposite direction, the slow and dramatic dismemberment of the socialist federation formerly made up of the peoples of what was Yugoslavia. These enormously important long-term developments draw our attention to two closely linked phenomena: on the one hand, the revival in Europe of the national, or nationalist, phenomenon, often incorrectly called ethnic, or also communitarian, with all its attendant imprecision and emotive charge; and on the other hand, the paradoxical situation of that intellectual, social, and political international force called, in a simplifying fashion, Marxism; that is, all the diverse theoretical and practical forms of Marxism-Leninism that had emerged since the Russian Revolution of 1917. This body of thought had, since the 1970s, fallen into growing discredit, while at the same time, faced with what is known as Western democracy, or liberal democracy (despite the contradiction— partial, at least—between democracy and liberalism), this discredit was accompanied by a more theoretically than politically motivated return to Marx, described by Raymond Aron in May 1968 as an “inexhaustible ”7 theorist and critic of economic, social, political, and...

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