This book shows that the 1848 revolutions played a key role in the development of the political
thought of the Young Hegelians Arnold Ruge Bruno Bauer Moses Hess and Karl Marx. They all
developed revolutionary ideas in the 1840s and hoped for revolutionary events as those that
occurred in 1848 but their theories failed to predict the outcome of the revolution. By an
empirical analysis this work clearly demonstrates that the Young Hegelians under study changed
their theoretical outlooks as a direct result of the 1848 revolutions. It is argued that the
mechanism for this change is intellectual disillusionment that these intellectuals became
disillusioned with the theories they had developed in the 1840s because they experienced the
1848 revolutions as an intellectual failure. The book examines the question of how
intellectuals deal with their failure to predict the world and how theory and the change of
theory are related to actual historical events.
