abstract:The Young Hegelians, or Left Hegelians, were a group of German intellectuals who in the decade or so after the death of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in 1831, wrote and responded to his ambiguous legacy. The Young Hegelians drew on his idea that the purpose and promise of history was the total negation of everything conducive to restriction of freedom and irrationality to mount radical critiques of first religion and then the Prussian political system.