Spinoza and the Growing Divide between Radical Enlightenment and Socialism in the German-Jewish Intellectual World of the 1830s and 1840s

Abstract

Abstract This chapter focuses on the divergent roles of early nineteenth-century intellectual revolutionaries Ludwig Börne, Heinrich Heine, and Moses Hess. It attempts to identify common ground between them and, more specifically, the reasons for the growing gulfs driving them apart despite their common rejection of the existing political, social, and religious status quo in Europe. Spinoza, both his philosophy and inspiring image, was to some extent a common bond, especially between Heine and Hess, and to a degree also between both of these and the young Karl Marx. At the same time, however, the growing incursion of early forms of socialism into their thinking came to operate as a factor driving their trajectories apart. While Heine’s revolutionary outlook is shown to be integral to the Radical Enlightenment tradition, the ideological positions of the others were definitely not.