Much more important for our purpose, but unfortunately much less explored, 15.24 is the relation of the Saint-Simonians to another connected German group, the Young Hegelians. The curious affinity which existed between the Hegelian and the Saint-Simonian ideas and which was strongly felt by the contemporaries will occupy us later. Here we are concerned only with the actual extent to which the younger Hegelian philosophers were directly affected by Saint-Simonian ideas, and how much therefore the decisive change which led to the separation of the Young Hegelians from the orthodox followers of the philosopher may have been partly due to that influence. Our actual knowledge on this poit is small, yet, as there existed close personal contacts between the Young Germans and the members of what later became the Young Hegelian group, and as some of the former as well as some of the authors of the German works on Saint-Simon were Hegelians,15.25there can be little doubt that in the group as a whole the interest in Saint-Simonism cannot have been much smaller than that among the Young Germans.
The period of German thought which is still so little explored and yet so crucial for the understanding of the later developments is the 1830s, during which it seems the seeds were sown which bore fruit only in the next decade.15.26 We meet here with the difficulty that after the Saint-Simonians had discredited themselves, people became most reluctant to acknowledge any indebtedness, especially as the Prussian censorship was likely to object to any reference to that dangerous group. As early as 1834, G. Kuehne, a Hegelian philosopher closely connected with the Young Germans, said of Saint-Simonism, ``the French counterpart of Hegelianism,'' that ``it will scarcely any longer be permissible to mention the name, yet the basic feature of this view of life, which in this particular form has become a caricature, will prove to have been completely embedded in social relations.''15.27 And when we remember that the men who were to play the decisive role in the revolt against orthodox Hegelianism and in the birth of German socialism, A. Ruge, L. Feuerbach, D. F. Strauss, Moses Hess, and K. Rodbertus, were all in their twenties when the rage for Saint-Simonism swept through Germany,15.28 it seems almost certain that they all imbibed Saint-Simonian doctrine at the time. Only of one of them, although the one from whom socialist doctrines are known to have spread more than from anybody else in the Germany of the time, Moses Hess, is it definitely known that he visited Paris in the early thirties,15.29 and the traces of Saint-Simonian and Fourierist doctrines can easily be seen in his first book of 1837. 15.30 In the case of some of the others, as particularly in that of the most influential of the Young Hegelians, Ludwig Feuerbach, in whom positivism and Hegelianism were so completely combined and who exercised great influence on Marx and Engels, we have no direct evidence of his having known the Saint-Simonian writings. It would be even more significant if this Hegelian, who in providing a positivist Weltanschauung for the next generations of German scientists was to play a role similar to that of Comte in France, had arrived at his view independently of the contemporary movements in that country. But it seems practically certain that he must have come to know them in the formative period of his thought. It is hard to believe that the young university lecturer in philosophy, who, in the summer of 1832, when Germany was reverberating with discussions of Saint-Simonism, spent months in Frankfurt reading to prepare himself for an intended visit to Paris,15.31 should, almost alone among men of his kind, have escaped their influence. It seems much more likely that, as in the case of others, it was precisely the fame of this school which attracted him to Paris. And although the intended visit did not take place, Feuerbach probably absorbed much of Saint-Simonian thought at that time and thus prepared himself to replace the Saint-Simonian influence among his younger contemporaries. If one reads his work with this probability in mind, it becomes difficult to believe that the obvious resemblances between his work and that of Comte are accidental.15.32
An important role in spreading French socialist thought in Germany during this period was also played by various members of the large colony of German journeymen in Paris, whose organizations became so important for the growth of the socialist movement and among whom for a time W. Weitling was the outstanding figure.15.33 He and numerous other travelers must have provided a continuous stream of information about the development of French doctrine, even before, in the beginning of the forties, Lorenz von Stein and Karl Grün went to Paris for a systematic study of French socialism. With the appearance of the two books15.34 Yet the belief that it was only through Stein and Grün (and later, perhaps, Thierry and Mignet) that Marx made his acquaintance with Saint-Simonian ideas and that he studied them firsthand only later in Paris, is probably mistaken. It seemed certain that he was directly affected by the early wave of Saint-Simonian enthusiasm when he was a boy of thirteen or fourteen. He himself told his friend, the Russian historian M. Kowalewski, how his paternal friend and later father-in-law, Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, had been infected by the general enthusiasm and had talked to the boy about the new ideas.15.36 The fact, often noted by German scholars,15.37 that many parts of Marx's doctrine, particularly the theory of the class struggle and certain aspects of this interpretation of history, bear a much closer resemblance to those of Saint-Simon than to those of Hegel, becomes even more interesting when we realize that the influence of Saint-Simon on Marx seems to have preceded that of Hegel.
Friedrich Engels, in whose separate writings Saint-Simonian elements are perhaps even more conspicuous than in those of Marx, was at one time closely associated with some of the members of the Young German movement, particularly Gutzkow, and later received his first introduction to socialist theory from M. Hess. 15.38The other leaders of German socialist thought are similarly indebted, how closely most of Rodbertus' doctries resemble those of the Saint-Simonians has often been noticed and , in view of the whole situation, there can be little doubt about the direct derivation.15.39Among the leading members of the active socialist movement in Germany, we know at least of W. Liebknecht that he steeped himself in Saint-Simonian doctrine when still very young,15.40 while Lassalle received most of it from his masters Lorenz von Stein and Louis Blanc.15.41