From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought

xii, 468 pp. "...describes the fall of confidence in nineteenth-century Europe in terms of the philosophies that attempted to explain it and, by doing so, gave it impetus. The author takes as his starting point the writings and the personalities of Goethe and Hegel, who envisioned a marriage of the real with the rational, and of religious faith with faith in progress. There follows an account of the fragmentation and downfall of Hegel's synthesis at the hands or Marx, Kierkegaard, and the Young Hegelians, culminating in Nietzche's complete rejection of faith and historical optimism. The second part of the volume is concerned with the paradoxes of the "Bourgeois-Christian" world, which was so constituted that man, caught between the demands of his private self and his role as a citizen, was unable truly to fulfill either. Tracing through the nineteenth century the diverse philosophical views of these paradoxes and their relationship to the nature of work and education and to the problem of Christianity, Professor Lowith has provided a clear and profound analysis of one of the most significant and far-reaching revolutions in the history of Western thought."