By reality and perfection I mean the same thing. - Benedictus de Spinoza

The superstitious know how to reproach people for their vices better than they know how to teach them virtues, and they strive, not to guide men by reason, but to restrain them by fear, so that they flee the evil rather than love virtues. Such people aim only to make others as wretched as they themselves are, so it is no wonder that they are generally burdensome and hateful to men.

Hegel is (unknowingly) an admirable 'theoretician' of ideology insofar as he is a 'theoretician' of Universal Recognition who unfortunately ends up in the ideology of Absolute Knowledge. Feuerbach is an astonishing 'theoretician' of the mirror connexion, who unfortunately ends up in the ideology of the Human Essence. To find the material with which to construct a theory of the guarantee, we must turn to Spinoza.

Kant is erroneously viewed as the founder of German philosophy, and an ingenious poet-philosopher, Heinrich Heine, has even drawn a parallel between the different phases of the French Revolution and those of German philosophy, putting next to each other as analogous phenomena Kant and Robespierre, Fichte and Napoleon, Schelling and the Restoration, Hegel and the July Revolution. But the true founder of German philosophy - if one wishes to name a personal representative for the spirit of the age [Zeitgeist] - is none other than [the thinker] whose world view lies equally at the foundation of French social philosophy - Spinoza; and as far as Heine's analogy goes, it is only Kant and Robespierre, i.e. the religious revolution, who are analogous phenomena.