Arnold Ruge (13 September 1802-31 December 1880) was a German philosopher and liberal political writer.
Biography[]
Arnold Ruge was born in Bergen auf Rugen, Swedish Pomerania in 1802, and he was well-educated and advocated for a free and united Germany. He was imprisoned at Kolberg from 1824 to 1830 for his involvement in left-wing student activism, after which he became a playwright and a member of the Young Hegelians, believing that history was a progressive advance towards the realization of freedom. Ruge went into exile in Paris in 1843 and co-edited the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher with Karl Marx, but he had little sympathy with Karl Marx's socialistic theories and soon left him. During the Revolutions of 1848, Ruge helped organize the extreme left in the Frankfurt parliament, and he was forced into exile in London in 1849, where he and Giuseppe Mazzini formed a "European Democratic Committee." He moved to Brighton in 1850 to live as a teacher and writer, and he supported Prussia's wars with Austria and France. He died in 1880.