The blend of Hegelianism and positivism which Feuerbach provided17.62 became characteristic of the thought of the whole group of German social theorists who appeared in the 1840s. Only one year after Feuerbach had broken away from Hegel because, as he later said, he had recognized that the absolute truth meant merely the absolute professor,17.63 the same year in which the last volume of Comte's Cours appeared and when, incidentally, the young Karl Marx sent his first work to the printers, namely, in 1842, another author, who was very influential and representative of the time, Lorenz von Stein, published his Socialism and Communism in France, which admittedly attempted a fusion of Hegelian and Saint-Simonian and therefore Comtian thought.17.64 It has often been noticed that in this work Stein anticipated much of the historical theories of Karl Marx.17.65 This fact becomes even more suggestive when we find that another man who was later discovered as a precursor of Karl Marx, the Frenchman Jules Lechevalier, was an old Saint-Simonian who had actually studied under Hegel in Berlin.17.66 He preceded Stein by ten years, but remained for some time an isolated figure in France. But in Germany Hegelian positivism, if I may so call it, became the dominant trend of thought. It was in this atmosphere that both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels formed their now famous theories of history, largely Hegeian in language but, I believe, much more indebted to Saint-Simon and Comte than is commonly realized.17.67 And it was those similarities which I have discussed which made it so easy for them to retain Hegelian language for the exposition of a theory which, as Marx himself said, in some respects turned Hegel upside down.
It is probably also more than an accident that it was almost at the same time, in 1841 and in 1843, that two men who were much nearer to a natural science approach to social study than they were to Hegel, Friedrich List17.68 and Wilhelm Roscher, 17.69 began the tradition of historicism in economics which became the model that the other social sciences soon eagerly followed. It was in those fifteen or twenty years following 184217.70 that the ideas developed and spread which gave Germany for the first time a leading position in the social sciences; and it was to some extent by way of reexport from Germany (though partly also from England through Mill and Buckle) that French historians and sociologists such as Taine 17.71 and Durkheim17.72 became familiar with the positivist tradition at the same time as with Hegelianism.
It was under the banner of this historicism made in Germany that in the second half of the nineteenth century the great attack on individualist social theory was conducted, that the very foundations of individualist and liberal society came to be questioned, and that both historical fatalism and ethical relativism became dominant traditions. And it was particularly under its influence that, from Marx to Sombart and Spengler, ``philosophies of history'' became the most influential expression of the attitude of the age to social problems.17.73 Its most characteristic expression, however, is probably the so-called sociology of knowledge, which to the present day in its two distinct yet closely similar branches still shows how the two strands of thought emanating from Comte and Hegel operate sometimes side by side and sometimes in combination.17.74 And, last but not least, most of modern socialism derives its theoretical foundation from that Alliance intellectuelle franco-allemande, as Celestin Bouglé has called it,17.75which was in the main an alliance of German Hegelianism and French positivism.
Let me conclude this historical sketch with one more remark. After 1859, as far as the social sciences are concerned, the influence of Darwin could do little more than confirm an already existing tendency. Darwinism may have assisted the introduction into the Anglo-Saxon world of ready-fashioned evolutionary theories. But if we examine such scientific ``revolutions'' as were attempted in the social sciences under the influence of Darwin, for example by Thorstein Veblen and his disciples, they appear in fact as little more than a revival of the ideas which German historicism had developed under the influence of Hegel and Comte. I suspect, though I have no proof, that on closer investigation even this American branch of historicism would prove to have more direct connections with the original source of these ideas.17.76