Arnold Ruge

Arnold Ruge (1802–1880) was the publicistic engine of Left Hegelianism. As editor of the Hallische and later Deutsche Jahrbücher he created the organ in which the critical turn of the Hegelian school played itself out in public — and with it the place where philosophical differences became political ones.

Like the other Left Hegelians he took the historicity of all truth to be its core: what appears in Hegel as the absolute idea is the result of historical development and therefore open to change. The systematic limit of the whole tendency holds for him as well — criticism becomes an end in itself, and the constructive dimension of dialectic is lost.