Reading group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno
I was just reading about Hegel and his situation with Napoleon. Hegel believed Napoleon was the World Soul, bringing in a new age. A lot of young Germans believed that. Hegel though he was watching the end of history. This is a fusion of esoteric wisdom and ancient apocalypticism. Instead of there being a second coming of Christ, it's Napoleon, advancing the principles of the French Revolution. Hegel eventually became disillusioned, but I was looking for whether he ever revised his philosophy to reflect the change. I don't think he did, and this isn't unusual for apocalypticists. If the vision isn't realized the way they thought, they often just put the date further into the future.
Hegel's experience with Napoleon wasn't an isolated thing. Across the world, from Russia to the USA, people were imagining that they were on the threshold of a new era, and if you think about it, they actually were. We could take Hegel's experience as an attempt to understand what was happening.
I think that with Marxism, the fever set in again, this time with the Proletariat animated by the World Soul to emancipate the world. It didn't happen the way they thought it would, but once again, people were thinking in terms of a massive shift in human life. In Russia, Marxists believed that even language would change as the new era emerged. There was a Russian poet who tried to write poetry in the "new" language. So I think the answer is yes: prior to disillusionment, German Marxists thought philosophy was basically done. The great metaphysical journey was finished.
Augustine is famous for taking the apocalypticism in Christianity and putting it in the category of myth: by myth, I don't mean something that's false exactly, just not to be taken entirely literally. I think with negative dialectics, Adorno was doing something similar.