This book grew out of a doctoral dissertation entitled “The Innocence of the Self: Cultural Disinheritance and Cultural Liberation in the Thought and Experience of the Young Germans and Young Hegelians,” which was completed under the direction of H. Stuart Hughes at Harvard University in 1973. In contrast to the usual pattern of development, the process of rethinking and revision has produced a book both shorter and narrower in scope than the original dissertation. My attempt to achieve a systematic comprehension of the evolution of experience and thought from the young Hegel to the radical Left Hegelians of the 1840s transformed what had been an introductory chapter into a full-scale historical study of the early phases of Hegelian ideology and the Hegelian school. This new focus on origins, on the ideological and experiential presuppositions of the radical stances of the 1840s, was obviously influenced by the historical disappointments and disillusionments experienced by members of my generation during the 1970s. What had begun as a sympathetic rehabilitation of Utopian hopes for a cultural revolution that would integrate the socially and psychically emancipated self into a nonrepressive community or “civilization without discontents” (and thus “actualize” the dreams of art and philosophy) gradually turned into a disabused investigation of the recurring, apparently intractable, dilemmas of human emancipation as conceived within the categories of the dialectical tradition. The present volume constitutes the first part of this redefined project.