Lecture
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
Tuesday 20.10.2026
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
Hegel and Some of the ‘Young Hegelians’ before Marx
Tuesday 20.10.2026
How to watch
This lecture starts on 20 October at 5:00pm (UK).
Summary
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and his dialectical philosophy, which suggested that history advances through the rational development of spirit (Geist) via structural contradictions and their resolutions, had a major impact on 19th-century European thought, yet his legacy quickly fragmented after his death. From this schism emerged the Young Hegelians (or Left Hegelians), a radical cohort of young thinkers that included Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Bruno Bauer, who sought to repurpose Hegelian idealism for revolutionary ends.
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite teaches Chinese History, Middle Eastern and Islamic history, and sometimes Jewish history, at New York University. He is author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Harvard, 2005); The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford, 2009); co-editor of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Culture, and Politics (Brandeis, 2013); The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept (Columbia University Press, 2017); and Time and Language: New Sinology and Chinese History (Hawaii University Press, 2023).