 For Bauer, the revolutions of 1848 were so closely connected with the Enlightenment, Kantian, and Hegelian projects that their failure sounded the death-knell of philosophy and its claims to rational individual autonomy. Bauer’s late critique assimilated Hegel with Spinoza and the metaphysics of substance, understood as the negation of form and subjectivity. Unlike his Vormärz position, he asserted in texts of 1852 and 1853 that Hegel had yielded to the influence of Spinoza, effacing individuality, and submerging concrete particulars under illusory, abstract logical categories. Bauer now described the Hegelian idea as being itself a transcendent illusion. Its inability to admit concrete particulars derived from the substantiality of the system itself. The result was that Hegel had discounted individuality in favour of conformity. While prior to 1848 Bauer proclaimed that Hegel had taught “the republic and the revolution,” he now decried the absolutist tendencies of the Hegelian system, whose oppressive unity paralleled the historical trend toward an all-encompassing political despotism. Bauer accused philosophy of contributing to an inexorable process of levelling and uniformity in the post-revolutionary state (Bauer, Russland und das Germanenthum, I, pp. 40–54). These criticisms anticipated Rudolph Haym’s polemic in Hegel und seine Zeit (1857).