![]() For he took the Christian messianic, rather than atheistic, path to the new society. 2 It was also a similar insight into the German Social Democratic Party that prompted Robert Michels to abandon Marxism and develop his famous "iron law of oligarchy" - that all organizations, whether private, governmental, or Marxist parties, will inevitably end up being dominated by a power elite.Ĭieszkowski, however, was not destined to ride the wave of the future of revolutionary socialism. If not in theory, this dominance of Marxist movements and governments by a "new class" of intelligentsia has certainly been the history of Marxism in "praxis." This dominance by a new class has been noted and attacked from the beginnings of Marxism on to the present day: notably by the anarcho-communist Bakunin, and by the Polish revolutionary Jan Waclaw Machajski (1866–1926), during and after the 1890s. 1 Cieszkowski thus heralded and glorified a development that would at least be implicit in the Marxist movement (after all, the great Marxists, including Marx, Engels, and Lenin, were all bourgeois intellectuals rather than children of the proletariat). Trentowski, who had published his work in Prussian-occupied Poznan. In a work published in French in Paris in 1844, Cieszkowski also heralded the new class destined to become the leaders of the revolutionary society: the intelligentsia, a word that had recently been coined by a German-educated Pole, B. This final age of action would bring about, at long last, a blessed unity of thought and action, theory and praxis, spirit and matter, God and earth, and total "freedom." Along with Hegel and the mystics, Cieszkowski stressed that all past events, even those seemingly evil, were necessary to the ultimate and culminating salvation. For the term "practical action," Cieszkowski borrowed the Greek word praxis to summarize the new age, a term that would soon come to acquire virtually talismanic influence in Marxism. In short, the third, post-Hegelian age would be an age of practical action, in which the thought of both Christianity and of Hegel would be transcended and embodied into an act of will, a final revolution to overthrow and transcend existing institutions. ![]() Finally, the third and culminating age, the coming age, heralded by Count Cieszkowski, was to be the age of action. ![]() But Christianity, the age of thought, was also an era of intolerable duality, of man separated from God, of spirit separated from matter, and thought from action. The second age of mankind, the Christian era, stretching from the birth of Jesus to the death of the great Hegel, was the age of thought, of reflection, in which the "spirit" moved "toward itself," in the direction of abstraction and universality. The first age, the age of antiquity, was, for some reason, the age of emotion, the epoch of pure feeling, of no reflective thought, of elemental immediacy and unity with nature. Cieszkowski brought to Hegelianism a new dialectic of history, a new variant of the three ages of man. One of the first and most influential of the Left Hegelians was a Pole, Count August Cieszkowski (1814–94), who wrote in German and published in 1838 his Prolegomena to a Historiosophy. Disillusioned in the Prussian state, the Young Hegelians proclaimed the inevitable coming apocalyptic revolution to destroy and transcend that state, a revolution that would really bring about the end of history in the form of national, or world, communism. So reasoned groups of radical youth, who, during the last of the 1830s and 1840s in Germany and elsewhere, formed the movement of Young, or Left, Hegelians. But if it was not the final phase of history, then mightn't the dialectic of history be getting ready for yet another twist, another Aufhebung? So if Hegel himself was not the final culmination of history, then perhaps the Prussian state of Friedrich Wilhelm III was not the final stage of history either. Hegel was supposed to bring about the end of history, but now Hegel was dead, and history continued to march on. Hegel's death in 1831 inevitably ushered in a new and very different era in the history of Hegelianism.
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