August Cieszkowski 1814 – 1894

Count August Cieszkowski was a Polish philosopher, economist, and political reformer and one of the most original of the Young Hegelians of the 1830s and 1840s. His Prolegomena to Historiosophy, published in Berlin in 1838, argued that Hegel's philosophy must be carried forward into a philosophy of action that takes the future, rather than only the past, as a proper object of philosophical-historical inquiry. His later Our Father, written across decades, sketched a messianic-Christian vision of universal reconciliation that shaped the broader Polish messianist tradition. He was a moderate liberal deputy in the Prussian parliament.