BACKGROUND

Shortly after Hegel's death, the influence of his philosophy began to wane. Part of this process involved the division of Hegel's followers into what David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) called “right,” “center,” and “left ” Hegelians. Strauss himself may be regarded as the founder of the “left” Hegelian school with his book The Life of Jesus (1835). At first the battleground was theological. “Right ” Hegelians, such as H. F. W. Hinrichs (1794-1861) and Johann Erdmann (1805- 1892), employed Hegel's philosophy in defense of traditional Christianity, “center” Hegelians, such as Karl Rosenkranz (1805-1879) and Karl Ludwig Michelet (1801-1893), subjected religious dogma to Hegelian reinterpretation; and “left” Hegelians, such as Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), and Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), derived theologically radical (even atheistic and humanistic) conclusions from Hegelianism. Yet Strauss borrowed the terminology of “left” and “right” from French politics, and from the beginning the division was implicitly over social and political as well as theological issues. Left Hegelianism was explicitly linked to political radicalism and the communist worker's movement by Moses Hess (1812-1875) in The European Triarchy (1841).