The history of Hegel’s influence is complicated by conflicting elements within his own system. Until Feuerbach’s Thoughts regarding Death and Immortality (1830), the torch was carried by the ‘Old Hegelians’ who emphasized the Christian and conservative elements in his writings. After Feuerbach and especially the Life of Jesus (1835) of D. F. Strauss, the denial of personal religion became more prominent. In politics the ‘New Hegelians’, including the young Marx, found in Hegel’s dialectic the ammunition to assail the bourgeois, religious, monarchical social order, now revealed as only a moment in the forward development of history.

Hegelianism as a self-conscious philosophy was transported to Britain with the publication of The Secret of Hegel by J. H. Stirling in 1865 and, transmuted into absolute idealism, became part of the dominant academic philosophy in Britain until attacked by Russell and Moore in Cambridge, and writers such as J. Cook-Wilson and H. H. Prichard at Oxford, at the beginning of the 20th century.