 From Hegel to Marx provided an analysis of the origins of Marxist theory through an account of Marx’s intellectual confrontation with each of the Young Hegelians who had sought to interpret the relevance of Hegel for developments in European society. Hook tried to show how Marx’s successive rethinking of the writings of David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Max Stirner, Moses Hess and Ludwig Feuerbach led to the emergence of his own “scientific theory of history.” Hook’s study did justice to the subtleties of the polemics that flourished among the Young Hegelians on diverse issues including the nature of emancipation in bourgeois society or the function of religion in relationship to class consciousness in European society. Further, by selecting these thinkers as the originating background for Marx rather than focusing upon Marx’s earlier philosophical manuscripts, Hook was able to provide evidence for the interpretation of Marx that indicated links with a pragmatic theory of knowledge and a nascent experimental social science. Accordingly, Hook could suggest that just as the pragmatists like Dewey had moved beyond the Hegelian tradition toward a naturalistic account of mind and of human self-consciousness, so Marxism had moved beyond the idealistic framework of Hegelian thought toward a materialistic and potentially scientific account of historical change as the process of dialectic.