During the 1830s the divergent tendencies that had emerged within the Hegelian school during the 1820s became more obvious and more extreme. But disagreements among Hegelians concerning the relationship between the science of the absolute and the existing political and religious reality produced a division of the school into opposing factions only when they evolved into divergent interpretations of the very core of the Hegelian inheritance: the dialectical identity of finite and infinite, thought and being, subject and substance, in the selfactualizing, self-comprehending, concrete totality of absolute spirit. The publication of Strauss's Life of Jesus in 1835-6 marked the beginning of self-conscious disagreement on this latter, more fundamental issue, and it was Strauss himself, in response to the reception of his work by other Hegelians, who first divided the school into factions of Right, Center, and Left. The most dramatic and significant development in the history of Hegelianism during the 1830s was the shift from divergent interpretations of the relationship between theory and practice to conflicts over the meaning, and ultimately the validity, of Hegelian theory, the beginnings of what Marx later satirically described as the “putrescence of the absolute spirit.”

Rosenkranz was one of the first Hegelians to realize that the proliferation of opposing positions within Hegelianism was leading to a decomposition of Hegelianism itself. In 1840 he published a comic drama in which the problem of “succession” within the school, of finding a legitimate heir to Hegel's throne, was made the object of gentle satire and humorous caricature. Immediately after Hegel's death the inner circle of his disciples had denied that a problem of “succession” existed.