Kierkegaard and Marx rejected Hegel for opposite reasons, individual versus social.

Evidence

Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel was the bourgeois alternative to that of Marx. Although both rejected Hegel’s identity theory because it lost sight of lived reality, Kierkegaard rested his case on the reality of individual existence, whereas for Marx existence was a social category. For Kierkegaard, the riddle of philosophy was ontological: the meaninglessness of human existence. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 173

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharply distinguishes the ontological vs. social ground of the dual rejection of Hegel’s identity theory.
• XREF: connects to: Hegel’s dismissal of the individual stems from liberal assumptions — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 11; Marx’s inversion of Hegel is oppositional, not a simple turn from idealism to materialism; Marx rejected Enlightenment progressivism by treating bourgeois society as class exploitation — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 262 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Marx’s inversion of Hegel is oppositional, not a simple turn from idealism to materialism #expands (0.85)
• Marx rejected Enlightenment progressivism by treating bourgeois society as class exploitation #expands (0.80) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 262
• Hegel and Kierkegaard together form the twin sources of existentialism #expands (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 460
• Adorno faulted Hegel for treating the bourgeois individual as an irreducible reality #expands (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 834