POLITICS,RELIGION,AND ART

Topics in Historical Philosophy

General Editors

David Kolb
John McCumber

Associate Editor

Anthony J. Steinbock

POLITICS,
RELIGION,
AND ART
Hegelian Debates

Edited by Douglas Moggach

Northwestern University Press

Evanston, Illinois

Northwestern University Press

www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright 2011 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2011. All rights
reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Politics, religion, and art : Hegelian debates / edited by Douglas Moggach.
p. cm. (Northwestern University topics in historical philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8101-2729-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 17701831. 2. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich, 17701831Influence. 3. Political sciencePhilosophy. 4. ReligionPhilosophy. 5. Aesthetics, Modern19th century. 6. ArtPhilosophy.
7. GermanyPolitics and government19th century. I. Moggach, Douglas.
B2948.P58 2011
193dc22
2010050769
o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481992.
Myriam Bienenstocks chapter, Between Hegel and Marx: Eduard Gans on the
Social Question, was originally published as Die soziale Frage im franzsischdeutschen Kulturaustausch: Gans, Marx und die deutsche Saint-Simon Rezeption, in
Eduard Gans (17971839). Politischer Professor zwischen Restauration und Vormrz, edited
by Reinhard Blnkner, Gerhard Ghler, and Norbert Waszek, Deutsch-Franzsische
Kulturbibliothek, vol. 15 (Leipzig: Universittsverlag, 2002), 15375. The work on
the English version of this essay was supported by the ANR/DFG research program
Ides sociales et idalisme. Rceptions de doctrines sociales franaises dans le champ
daction de lIdalisme allemand. This help is gratefully acknowledged.
Warren Breckmans chapter, Politics, Religion, and Personhood: The Left Hegelians and the Christian German State, was originally published as Les hgliens
de gauche et ltat chrtien germanique: Politique, religion et personnalit in
Revue franaise dhistoire des ides politiques 31 (2010): 5780.
Norbert Waszeks chapter, Hegelianism and the Theory of Political Opposition,
was originally published as Lmergence dune thorie de lopposition dans lcole
hglienne, in Revue franaise dhistoire des ides politiques 25, no. 1 (2007): 89107. The
work on the English version of this essay was supported by the ANR/DFG research
program Ides sociales et idalisme. Rceptions de doctrines sociales franaises dans
le champ daction de lIdalisme allemand. This help is gratefully acknowledged.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Part 1. Foundations
1
2

Reconguring Spirit
Douglas Moggach
Group Formation and Divisions in the Young
Hegelian School
Wolfgang Bunzel and Lars Lambrecht

27

Part 2. Religion, Politics, Freedom

3

The Metaphysical and Theological Commitments

of Idealism: Kant, Hegel, Hegelianism
Paul Redding

47

Hegels Philosophy of Religion and the Question

of Right and Left Hegelianism
Jon Stewart

66

Politics, Religion, and Personhood: The Left Hegelians

and the Christian German State
Warren Breckman

96

Hegelianism and the Politics of Contingency

Chris Thornhill

118

Part 3. Politics, Civil Society, Ethics

7
8

Hegelianism and the Theory of Political Opposition

Norbert Waszek

147

Between Hegel and Marx: Eduard Gans on the

Social Question
Myriam Bienenstock

164

Post-Kantian Perfectionism
Douglas Moggach

179

Part 4. Art and the Modern World

10
11

The Aesthetics of the Hegelian School

Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov

203

Karl Rosenkranz and the Aesthetics of the Ugly

Margaret A. Rose

231

Part 5. Appropriations and Critiques of Hegel

12
13
14

15

Some Political Implications of Feuerbachs Theory of Religion

Todd Gooch

257

Max Stirner and the End of Classical German Philosophy

Frederick Beiser

281

Ruge and Marx: Democracy, Nationalism, and Revolution

in Left Hegelian Debates
Lucien Calvi

301

Marx, German Idealism, and Constructivism

Tom Rockmore

321

Index

345

Contributors

357

Acknowledgments

This project was undertaken with the support of a Killam Research Fellowship, awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts, and with funding
from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
and the University of Ottawa Research Chair in Political Thought. Visiting Fellowships from Sidney Sussex and Kings Colleges, University of
Cambridge; the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge; and the
University of Sydney provided me with ideal working environments and
with stimulating intellectual contacts during the preparation of this text.
The manuscript was completed at the University of Sydney, where I now
hold an honorary professorship. Earlier versions of my own contributions
to the volume were delivered in Italian in the School of Historical and
Political Studies, University of Padua, and at the University of Urbino.
I am deeply grateful to the contributors to this volume for their
exemplary work, patience, and unflagging support. Among colleagues
in Australia, Europe, and North America, I wish in particular to thank
Claudio Cesa, with whom I have maintained a long-standing friendship.
Others who provided valuable critical input were Thomas Besch, Remo
Bodei, Paul Leduc Browne, Diego Bubbio, Widukind de Ridder, Giovanni
Fiaschi, Kieran Furlong, Moira Gatens, Stephen Gaukroger, Istvan Hont,
David Kolb, Melissa Lane, David Macarthur, Koula Mellos, Martin Ruehl,
Gareth Stedman Jones, Lawrence Stepelevich, and Massimiliano Tomba.
Thanks are due, too, to two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their careful scrutiny and criticisms; to John McCumber, Henry
Carrigan, Jenny Gavacs, Heather Antti, and the staff at Northwestern
University Press for their encouragement and aid; and to my research assistants, Charles Dumais, Fadi Abboudy, and Sascha Maicher. I also thank
indexer Janet Russell for her outstanding work.
My appreciation for my family is boundless. Alison, Iain, and Catriona have enthusiastically accompanied me on adventures abroad,
and have shown remarkable understanding and forbearance of my work
habits and frequent absences.
I dedicate this volume to the memory of my aunt, Helen Liota,
who, with her sisters, was my first and best teacher.
vii

POLITICS, RELIGION, AND ART

Part 1

Foundations

Reconguring Spirit
Douglas Moggach

The period from 1780 to 1850 witnessed an unprecedented explosion

of philosophical creativity in the German territories. In the thinking of
Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, and the Hegelian school, new theories of
freedom and emancipation, and new conceptions of culture, society, and
politics arose in rapid succession. These theories offer powerful diagnoses of modernity, and set the subsequent philosophical agenda.1 In this
process members of the Hegelian school, forming around Hegel in Berlin and most active in the 1830s and 1840s, are often depicted as mere
epigones whose writings are at best of historical interest. This volume
seeks to establish the importance of these early Hegelians as creative
contributors to foundational debates about modernity, state, and society:
as innovators in the fields of theology, aesthetics, and ethics, whose work
has been underestimated and requires reassessment. In the ideological
climate of the Cold War, it was customary to dismiss them as intermediaries between Hegel and Marx, notable only, perhaps, for their eccentricities and theatrical posturing, but insubstantial in themselves, and floating free of political context. We seek here a closer and more accurate
account of the origins and development of post-Hegelian thought, of its
internal relationships, and of its diverse forms. The retrieval of this body
of thought, and its restitution to its proper intellectual context, are of
theoretical and practical value. Its problems are, in germ, our own.

Context
German idealism, in the works of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, effected a
philosophical revolution in its new conceptions of reason and of reasons
legislative ability for morality and politics. The core of Hegels idealism
is the unity of thought and being, a unity brought about by the historical
realization of reason in the world. In his Philosophy of Right (182021)
Hegel had raised the speculative claim that the real is rational, and the
5

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rational is real;2 but this claim appeared ambiguous. The reality or effectiveness of reason might be taken to characterize a historical process, still
incomplete, or it might invest the existing order with rational legitimacy.
Do the prevailing forms of religion, politics, and society satisfy the standards of reason and freedom, and how are these standards themselves
to be understood and defended? Answers to these questions tended to
divide the Hegelian heritage. The Hegelian school was a loose association, whose shifting political landscape and lively internal polemics are
documented in this volume. United initially by a project of publishing
versions of Hegels Berlin courses in aesthetics, religion, history, and so
on, members of the school produced eighteen volumes of his lectures,
of varying editorial reliability, between 1832 and 1845.3 Rifts appeared
early among Hegels students over the interpretation of his philosophy
and its relation to politics, religion, and art.
Initially on theological grounds, David Friedrich Strauss (1808
1874) proposed a distinction in 1837 among Right, Center, and Left
Hegelianism, depending on whether faith and reason were taken to be
compatible: Right Hegelians defended orthodox Christianity on philosophical grounds, Left Hegelians reformulated Christian doctrines in
light of Hegels logic, and Center Hegelians wavered between both positions. These designations quickly assumed broader political meanings,
though individual positions represented in the school were far more diverse. The fragmentation of the school accelerated in the 1830s in response to harsh criticisms of Hegel voiced by conservatives, who accused
him of pantheism, or dissolving God into nature. Conservatives stressed
the transcendence of God, his separation from the world and humanity,
mediated by the person of Christ as the sole incarnation of the divine. In
parallel, as our authors show in this volume, a conservative political theology of personal monarchical rule, and of a mystical bond between king
and people (which precluded any mechanical constitutional document), aimed to repudiate demands for popular sovereignty. As a result
of these attacks, some of Hegels followers stressed their own orthodoxy
and their concurrence with existing political and religious authorities
(though even these accommodationists generally continued to advocate
reforms). Others adopted more radical conclusions. The Hegelians were
quickly at the center of political contestation in the period known as the
Vormrz, the prelude to the German Revolutions of March 1848.
Conservative attacks on Hegel came from various quarters, as indicated by our authors: like the diversity among Hegelians, Vormrz conservatism was no unified phenomenon, either. These attacks were in
part orchestrated by the crown prince of Prussia, who succeeded to the
throne as Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1840. He viewed Hegelianism, of all

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varieties, as undermining political order and religious observance, and

sought to purge Hegelian and reforming influences from the state and
the universities. In turn, the Hegelian Left condemned this new conservatism, an alliance of landed interests, anti-rationalist pietist theologians,
and Romantic philosophers,4 as a repudiation of Prussias eighteenthcentury heritage of reform, and more broadly of the achievements of
the European Enlightenment. The Hegelians critiques of traditionalism, irrationalism, and Romanticism all have their intellectual core in
these confrontations.
The primary task was to defend the Enlightenment, with its heritage of reason and emancipation from traditional relationships. But the
Enlightenment was still incomplete, leaving open the possibility of irrationalist counter-movements. Its own theoretical achievements required
further development, critique, and refinement. The perfection of the
Enlightenment program, and the extension of ideas of autonomy into
the state and the practices of citizenship, defined the political agenda of
progressive Hegelian thought. Hegel himself had synthesized Enlightenment sources in his own system; the task for his students was to think
them through again and to reformulate them, often challenging Hegels
own express conclusions.
Our Vormrz subjects engage with and reconfigure the deep conceptual structures of Hegels system. Foremost among these are ideas of
spirit, both absolute and objective. Objective spirit refers to the historically developing forms of living and experiencing freedom, as manifest
in social and political institutions, and in recognitions of different kinds
of personhood. Absolute spirit condenses these understandings in artistic depictions, religious representations, and philosophical systems. The
Hegelians of the Vormrz see spirit as an anthropological and historical
project, a process of emancipation and approximation to ever clearer
ideas of reason and freedom; a process that advances by contradiction
and struggle, and not without regressions, floundering, and failures. In
this humanist and historical reading, Hegels doctrine of absolute spirit,
the mutual relation of art, religion, and philosophy, reveals itself to be
in need of revision, or at least of restatement. Thus spirit must not be
seen to involve the activities of a transcendent power, of God acting
through us, but refers to immanent processes of individual and social
self-formation. The elements of transcendence which Hegel seems to retain must be cleared away; and the persistence of these elements in Hegel himself must be explained, whether by pragmatic accommodation
to the ruling powers, by the specific character of his idealism, or by the
nature of idealism itself. Further, the relations among the levels of absolute spirit must be rethought: is it the case, as Hegel asserted, that art,

8
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religion, and philosophy have the same content but merely a different
form, or are the oppositions among them sharper and more intractable?
Has Hegel correctly established the hierarchical ordering of these levels,
whereby religion is set above art because it appeals to representational
thought, and not to sensuous intuition? Among the Hegelians of the
Vormrz, the linkage between art and the forms of objective spirit (as
awareness and practice of freedom) is accorded great stress, and art itself
is seen as a proof of the effectiveness of reason in reshaping the material order. It is thus frequently elevated above religion in the hierarchy
of the absolute. In combat with the religiosity of the post-Napoleonic
Restoration, the Hegelians whom we study here tend to view religion as
a form of alienated spirit, or spirit unaware of its own activity; and they
question Hegels claims about religions identity of content with philosophy. These approaches strike us with their modernity, their foreshadowing of non-metaphysical readings of Hegel which are increasingly
prominent in the literature, though not always with the same expressly
political inflections.5 The thinking of the Hegelian school is not that of
shallow imitators, but reveals philosophical depth in its questioning and
responses.
In completing the Enlightenment project, exploring what is involved in the historical realization of reason, and rethinking the forms of
objective spirit, new ideas of freedom and community emerge. As Bruno
Bauer (18091882) presents the issue, the Hegelian heritage splits along
two axes, the Fichtean and the Spinozist, which Hegel himself had attempted to fuse.6 Those who pursue the Fichtean route, like Bauer himself, stress the principles of singularity and autonomy, developing the
dialectic of the will, which Hegel presents in the Philosophy of Right as
requiring the conscious, individual enactment of universal interests. This
is a doctrine of rational self-legislation, in contrast to arbitrary will or
divine command. For Bauer, universality is not a property merely distributed or shared unself-consciously among its many particular bearers, but
must be regarded by individuals as having normative status: it is taken
up or posited by them, and is directive of action. Autonomy is the principle of spontaneity or choice, disciplining itself under universal rules.
The alternate, Spinozist route from Hegel, followed by D. F. Strauss and
Ludwig Feuerbach (18041872), leads to the affirmation of universality as community or shared interests, while placing less emphasis on the
formal side, the element of individual willing. In Feuerbach and Karl
Marx (18181883), it leads to the idea of a collective species-being, damaged by particularistic and egoistic activities, but potentially retrievable
through changes in social relationships. Both the Fichtean and the Spinozist reading of Hegel stress the importance of universality, a general

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will which transcends immediate interests and desires. Both tendencies,

as distinct ways of determining the universal, are manifest in the Hegelian school, and thus further rifts appear in the textures of Hegelianism.
The differences which exist within this current point to an unresolved
tension between freedom and solidarity, whose immediate manifestation in the Vormrz is a split between republican and socialist tendencies.
This problem is more generally definitive of modernity itself, as Hegel
acknowledges when he describes the modern world as a culture of diremption.7 Among the Vormrz Hegelians it achieves a particularly acute
formulation.
In the attainment of universality and autonomy, political, religious,
and aesthetic motifs are intimately linked, as this volume illustrates.
For the Hegelians of the Vormrz, the realization of reason in history
required addressing persistent problems of alienation and lack of freedom in various aspects of modern life. The attack upon privilege and
hierarchy, the democratization of the state and the achievement of a
republic of self-consciousness based upon the recognition of universal
interests, animated the works of the leading Hegelian theorists, such as
Bruno Bauer and Arnold Ruge (18021880). Alienation and isolating
egoism in social life were addressed, in opposing directions, by Ludwig
Feuerbach, who stressed solidarity, and Max Stirner (18061856), who
stressed disengagement. Questions of the exhaustion or the fruitfulness of modern art, its ability or its incapacity to depict the richness and
depth of modern subjectivity, its enrollment as a servant of the regime
or of existing religious interests, and its possible emancipatory function
were also hotly debated among the Hegelians, as reflections on the possible end of art discussed in our contributions.
The fulfillment of the Enlightenment program of emancipation
also meant confronting unprecedented social and economic problems.
For those broadly on the Hegelian Left, the incomplete rationality of modern society assumed an especially acute form with the emergence of the
social question, the rise of capitalism and the appearance of new forms
of urban industrial poverty. Eduard Gans (17971839) initiated this
type of Hegelian social criticism, describing the concentration of economic power as the decisive problem impeding further progress in freedom. Gans revised Hegels account of poverty and political and social
exclusion as presented in the Philosophy of Right. He drew on elements
of French social thought, such as Saint-Simons ideas of association (a
precursor to modern trade unionism) to argue that the combined power
of wage-workers could offset the monopolistic bargaining position of
capital owners and lead to a more just distribution of wealth; yet he repudiated socialist ideas of collective property as inimical to freedom and

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individuality. He also developed Hegels state theory, stressing the need

for an institutional opposition to hold government in check.
Gans made ideas of opposition, struggle, and social exclusion central to Left Hegelian understandings of progress toward a more rational
society. Despite fundamental differences, which we explore here, Bauer,
Ruge, and the young Marx had this perspective in common. Recognition
of the social question and the problems of poverty made it necessary to
rethink the relations between the state and civil society, and among happiness, legality, and ethics, as these had been developed in German idealism. These questions reverberate through the essays in this volume.
The historical importance of the Hegelians lies in their diagnosis
of problems of freedom and alienation in modern life, including the
political meanings of religion and art, and questions of economic power
and exclusion. They put these questions firmly on the agenda for subsequent political and social thought and sketched a range of possible
alternatives, continuing the Hegelian quest to show reason active in the
world. In critical engagement with Hegels thought, and in debates with
religious and political adversaries in the 1830s and 1840s, members of
his school sharply posed questions of freedom, personality, and modernity whose urgency remains undiminished.

Objectives
The first objective which our authors pursue in this volume is to establish the dynamism and variety of post-Hegelian thinking in the Vormrz,
the period prior to the Revolutions of 1848. The examination we undertake here allows us to refine the conventional division of the Hegelian
school into Right, Left, and Center, showing how these categories
do not capture the complexity and diversity of positions represented.
We cannot merely dismiss these categories, which have strong political
resonance, as though they were unfounded or irrelevant; but we can
problematize them, seeing each faction as much more internally variegated, the boundaries between them as porous, and the place of individual figures as much more fluidly defined. We suggest instead finer
discriminations among members of the school. Thus we can consider
some of those usually assigned to the Hegelian right or center as being
intimately involved in debate and dialogue with their more critical and
politically engaged colleagues, and even making contributions to critical
thought themselves; Hotho and Rosenkranz so appear in this volume.
The complexity and range of issues debated in the Hegelian school re-

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sist easy categorization, and the Hegelian movement as a whole is in flux

throughout the Vormrz period. This volume attempts to give an account
of this complexity, drawing on archival and newly available sources, and
the collaborative efforts of scholars working in several languages and
disciplines.
The second objective is to provide a closer contextualization than
has previously been achieved of the theoretical and political debates that
animated the Hegelian school in the 1830s and 1840s. The variety of
theoretical and political positions represented in the school depends in
turn on diverse readings of Hegel (and Kant), and the investigation of
these is central to our enterprise. Untapped or newly discovered sources
allow us better access to the arguments which were current at the foundation of the school, and which were decisive for Hegels students. As
well as archival sources for Arnold Ruge,8 Bruno Bauer,9 and others,
these materials include new transcriptions of Hegels own lectures in
Heidelberg and Berlin,10 which make possible critical assessments of the
editorial work done by Hegels circle immediately after his death. The
lectures reveal the evolution of Hegels religious, aesthetic, and political
thought in ways which would have been accessible to his immediate
circle, but which until recently have remained unclear to investigators;
the current volume utilizes this material. The manuscript editions of Hegels work show the system not as definitively closed, but in development
and constant refinement through polemical interventions against other
theoretical currents (such as Romanticism, pietism, and various types of
subjectivism). We inquire how these foundational developments manifested themselves in the internal polemics among members of the Hegelian school itself, and in their relations with theoretical and political adversaries such as Restoration conservatism and Romanticism: variants of
conservatism (Stahl, Schelling, Gerlach, Gentz, etc.) find a place here
as primary targets of Hegels, and of Hegelian, critique. Romanticism,
viewed as a bulwark of the existing political order, with its irrationalities
and privileges, is subjected to stringent criticism for its denial of rational
autonomy; we trace the course of this polemic through the aesthetic and
political reflections of the Hegelian school. The temporal dimension
is also extended to consider the relation of Hegelian theorists to preKantian German natural law accounts, and their corresponding ideas
of the state and of happiness. Our authors incorporate new research
on regional variants of Hegelianism in Vormrz Germany and on its interactions with other critical cultural forces, like Young Germany, creating a much clearer picture of group affinities and rivalries. But the
debates are not confined to German lands. The broader European context, too, is invoked: the heritage of the French Revolution, the insights

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and deficiencies of French socialism, questions of industrialization and

urban poverty, the European-wide movement for popular sovereignty,
parliamentary government, and institutional reform. Attention to these
issues enables a closer and more concrete study of relations and rifts
within the school as its members respond to these influences.
To contextualize, however, is not to consign these figures to historical oblivion, but to better understand their engagement with philosophical and political issues of enduring importance, to grasp exactly
how these questions are posed, and to trace a number of distinct intellectual and political trajectories within a common theoretical framework.
Our third objective is to document the contributions and the relevance
of the Hegelian school to significant and enduring theoretical debates.
There are several areas in which such contributions can be identified.
1. We witness the continuation, deepening, and radicalization of
the Enlightenment, especially the German Enlightenment. The philosophical enlightenment in the tradition of Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant does
not, contrary to recent accounts, envisage a resacralization of power11
but, as it reaches its nineteenth-century culmination, advocates precisely
the opposite, in a repudiation of the theologically bolstered claims of
irresponsible rule. It raises a demand for the rational justification of
power and for the claims of freedom and the autonomous use of reason, resisting tutelary impositions, censorship, and stultifying orthodoxies. The battle is still engaged: its fundamentalist adversaries have not
vacated the public forum.
2. This deepening of Enlightenment impulses results from an appreciation and extension of the Kantian revolution. The Hegelian school
develops ideas of autonomy, spontaneity, and subjectivity into more concrete forms, with reference to history as the becoming of freedom. This
process of liberation is never secure, nor is its outcome guaranteed, but
it offers an ethical perspective in which to see our own acts as contributing to the progressive realization of reason. From this perspective, the
Hegelians conclude that it is possible to undermine the structures of
domination in the prevailing forms of state, and to measure the prospects and limits of emergent civil society. They offer criticisms of the
particularities of cult and private interest, and in general defend modified Kantian ideas of universality, though this concept is not univocal,
as our texts demonstrate. They examine different senses of personality,
criticizing those that were too closely tied to particularistic identities and
interests, and (with the exception of Stirner and a few others) stressing
the quest for common interests; or they redefine personality as a dialectical syllogism, subjecting given particularity to the critique of universal
principles in order to reach a self-conscious singularity. Spirit as freedom
is the central idea.

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3. Another zone of contention and innovation is the analysis of

modernity as a culture of diremption and stubbornly opposed interests,
but also as offering a new emancipatory potential, and new forms of
solidarity compatible with social differentiation and rights. Developing
the implications of Hegels idea of the free and infinite personality as
a uniquely modern achievement12 (even when repudiating conservative
personalist doctrines, discussed below), the Hegelians sketch a critique
of liberal ideas of rights and civil association and attempt, in an often
fragmentary way, to work out a republican account of rights as participatory rather than exclusionary claims. They recognize modern social
diversity and the division of labor, resisting the homogeneity frequently
associated with earlier republicanisms.13 They recognize, to an extent
debated among our authors themselves, the significance of the social
question, incipient urbanization, industrialization, and poverty, and they
examine the relations of civil society and the state from the perspective
of their contribution to the practice of freedom. Their views have implications over a wide range of recent debates on personal and group
identity and political culture.14
4. Our research connects with another important body of literature
on comparative republicanism,15 stressing international parallels and national specificities. The republican themes of self-mastery (of wider or
narrower application) and the resistance to domination are struck again
and again by the subjects of our investigation. Their Kantian and Hegelian concepts impart a particular coloration to this republican language,
relating virtue and freedom anew, criticizing arbitrary power as forms
of heteronomy, and assessing the institutions of political participation.16
The approaches we take here suggest new understandings of the Hegelian school, with its focus on the practice of autonomy, applying and
concretizing Kantian practical reason through a reconceived republican politics. They permit a new evaluation of the relevance of Hegelian
thought to contemporary issues in political philosophy: to the understanding of a specific, German republicanism, but also to debates about
current forms of liberalism and individualism, and ideas of modernity.

Contributions
The authors in this volume investigate how conflicting readings of Hegel arise among his students in the period of the Revolutions of 1848, in
response to specific problems in the structure of Hegelian philosophy.
They trace the evolution of these positions in polemical engagements
with other political and philosophical currents, and ask what results

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ensue from the application of these ideas to concrete social and political
issues. In answering these questions, our authors themselves exhibit the
diversity of approaches characteristic of recent scholarship. Both striking parallels and divergences emerge among our texts, attesting to the
openness and dynamism of the field and suggesting areas for further
research.
While this volume challenges conventional depictions of the split
between Right and Left Hegelians, it proposes new and suppler differentiations within the Hegelian movement. In their chapter on group
formation and divisions in the school, Wolfgang Bunzel and Lars Lambrecht argue that considerable ideological differences exist among its
members, and these grow more marked throughout the period culminating in the Revolutions of 1848. Bunzel and Lambrecht examine the
conceptual and geographic topography of the Hegelian school, tracing
its networks of personal communication, the formation (often fleeting)
of specific nuclei around journals and personalities, and the responses of
its members to local conditions. Thus, significant differences exist within
Prussia, which set the bastion of state power, Berlin, at odds with the periphery: especially with the old university town of Halle, and with remote
East Prussia, the home of Kant. The repercussions of these differences
continue to be felt in the debates among the Hegelians themselves. The
Prussian contingents of Hegelians are further differentiated from the
South Germans, who are closer to indigenous liberal traditions. Arnold
Ruge emerges as a central organizer and arbiter among the members
of these groups. His intellectual career in the Vormrz can be followed
through texts by Collenberg-Plotnikov and Calvi, and Ruge thus appears as one of the central figures in this volume. His journals, the Hallische Jahrbcher, later Deutsche Jahrbcher (183843), provided an important
public focus for the movement, although the founding of rival Hegelian
publications, addressing a similar audience, gradually eroded his dominant influence. Indicating the plurality of positions adopted in the Hegelian contentions of the Vormrz, Bunzel and Lambrecht argue that this
diversity was never integrated under a single set of concepts. Hegelianism represents not a homogeneous bloc but a multifaceted movement,
with a limited group coherence. The specificity of the Hegelian movement, especially of its politically engaged, critical components, lies in its
cultural and historical function, exerting an influence far beyond the
strictly philosophical domain. The goal it pursued through its publishing activity was to promote an active and critically aware public sphere,
engaging in a broad and open discussion of theological, aesthetic, and
political questions. An analogy might be suggested with the eighteenthcentury intellectual circles of Edinburgh and Glasgow, disseminating

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Enlightenment conceptions to a broader public.17 Though the phenomenon of critical Hegelianism was short-lived, the discussions it initiated
retain their relevance and interest, as this volume seeks to elucidate.
To establish the critical credentials of Hegelianism in its encounter with recalcitrant forms of anti-modernism, Hegels successors in the
Vormrz found it necessary to rethink the conceptual apparatus of the
system. This process involved reassessments of the nature of religion and
its place in the systematics of absolute spirit, the trinity of philosophy,
religion, and art, distinguished by their capacity to reveal the formative
power of reason at work in the world. Paul Redding, in his chapter entitled The Metaphysical and Theological Commitments of Idealism:
Kant, Hegel, Hegelianism, identifies this formative power as the central theme of idealist constructivism, an idea also developed by Tom
Rockmore in his contribution. Redding distinguishes two forms of this
idea, which he designates weak and strong transcendental idealism. PreKantian metaphysics considers the fundamental structures of a mindindependent world, whereas Kant directs us to attend to reasons constitutive activities themselves. Kants own account of metaphysics can,
however, be read either as skepticism about cognitive access to things
in themselves (weak TI, where, although idealistic about the forms of
cognition, the departure from the old metaphysical standpoint is less
marked, or perhaps not even attempted) or as a more robustly constructivist program (strong TI, a science of logic and rational activity where
the traditional objects of metaphysics, including the idea of God, are
seen as products of reason). Neither form of transcendental idealism is
to be equated with the idealism of Berkeley, which reduces matter to
perception, but which is a spiritual realism about God and the soul. Hegel develops a strong transcendental idealist program, while criticizing
the voluntarism and Augustinianism still latent in Kants account. Later
developments such as Feuerbachs revert in part to naturalism and the
older metaphysical tradition, treating human nature as a metaphysically
given essence. Hegel requires that we treat this essence idealistically and
historically. If Hegels is not an orthodox theism, his position cannot be
assimilated to atheism either because it retains an idea of God, not as
the existent being of traditional metaphysics, but in relation to the rational activities and norms of human communities. While admitting no
independent existents outside such activities, Hegels metaphysics does
not imply the nullity or dispensability of ideas, such as God (the idea of
universality), which are integral to these practices themselves. Hegels
thought thus remains a fruitful alternative to that of his followers.
As well as the underlying metaphysics, the manifest structure of
absolute spirit is also a matter of contention among Hegelians. Is Hegel

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correct to see religion as superior to art in manifesting the truth and

self-knowledge of spirit? Does it have the same content as philosophy
in the form of Vorstellung or representation, or does it express an antithetical attitude, that of alienation, which must be overcome through
philosophy and the fostering of new forms of ethical life? Jon Stewart, in
Hegels Philosophy of Religion and the Question of Right and Left
Hegelianism, examines the role of religion in the formation and polemics (both internal and external) of the Hegelian school, and questions
conventional demarcations among its members. The decisive debates include the problems of immortality, pantheism, the Trinity, and Christology. Linking to Breckmans and Thornhills arguments on personalism,
Stewart shows how the issue of immortality was addressed by both opponents and supporters of Hegel, and traces the distinct positions on the
question which emerged among the latter. To what extent is Hegelianism compatible with the idea of personal immortality? Does the concept
of spirit preclude this possibility, in favor of a collective or species-being?
Further debates turn on the existence of a personal, transcendent God:
does the Hegelian subordination of religion to philosophy reduce the
deity to a set of logical operations? The divinity of Christ himself is also
disputed, as merely paradigmatic of the collective ethical capabilities of
the human species, or as a unique manifestation in time. To his opponents, and to some of his followers, Hegels system appears as a revived
and revised Spinozism, a question which had greatly exercised the earlier
generation in response to Kant.18 In examining the complex elaborations
of these issues, Stewart challenges the traditional designations of Right,
Left, and Center Hegelianism introduced by David Friedrich Strauss in
1837 to describe these debates. Drawing on a wide range of sources,
Stewart reconstructs in detail the intellectual context in which the debates about religion and its political implications were conducted.
Two complementary chapters, by Warren Breckman and Chris
Thornhill, connect religious, political, and economic thematics in these
debates, showing the implications of views of religion, and of religious
concepts, for the understanding of political categories; and following the
mobilization of these concepts for purposes of legitimation or critique
of the Restoration order in the German territories, especially Prussia.
Both authors stress the common elements in the Left Hegelian construal
of the political issues of the day, through a critique of dominant ideas of
personality. Breckman presents a synthetic historical interpretation of
the Left Hegelian movement from the early work of Ludwig Feuerbach
(1830) through David Friedrich Strausss Life of Jesus (1835) and Feuerbach and Bruno Bauers major works of the early 1840s, to Karl Marxs
break with radical Hegelianism in the mid-1840s. Focusing on debates on

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personality, which combined political and religious motives, Breckman

explores both the deepening conflict with the Prussian state and the
fragmentation of the Hegelian school. Opposing the Enlightenments
tendency to transform religion into ethics, and repelled by Hegels alleged pantheism, conservative forces reasserted the orthodox doctrine
of Christ as a personal and unique incarnation of the divine. On the
basis of this doctrine, as Thornhill also contends, Restoration politics
sought justification in a political theology of incarnate power. As a response to the French Revolutions challenge to the embodied power of
the king, the intent was to resacralize the personal rule of the monarch,
and to repudiate popular sovereignty. Conversely, religious critique in the
Hegelian school began by attacking or reformulating the core Christian
dogma of the Incarnation; ultimately its criticisms encompassed the very
idea of a transcendent, personal God. On Breckmans reading, through
their critiques of personalism, Hegelian republicans attempted to conceptualize popular sovereignty as dispersed or disembodied power,
though they were not immune to the temptation to reinvest political
power in new forms of incarnation. The issue of personality also framed
debates on the question of private property, as conservatives sought to
establish a limited analogy between the personal sovereignty of the monarch and the dominion exercised by the property owner over goods (including the transmission of property over time through inheritance),
while many members of the Hegelian Left developed their critique of
personality into a critique of private property (or its effects) and of the
possessive individualism rampant in civil society, which was held to be in
need of fundamental transformation. Breckman concludes that the debate on personality, linking religious, political, and social motifs, allows
us to trace the political and intellectual history of the Hegelian school
in its most intense and creative period, and to witness the emergence of
many of the core issues of the thought and politics of the nineteenth
century, and beyond.
Chris Thornhills text, Hegelianism and the Politics of Contingency, also examines the implications of the Left Hegelian criticisms
of theological personalism, with particular attention to theories of law
and politics. He poses the question in a broad historical perspective,
the modern problem of the self-consciously contingent grounding a
political order, in conditions where traditional appeals to transcendence
are increasingly inadmissible, and he indicates the stages whereby this
problem gradually came to preoccupy political theorists. In this context
he examines the efforts of defenders of the Restoration to define the
personality of the state. Like Breckman, he stresses that the central theoretical challenge for the Hegelian Left was to respond to conservative

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efforts to personalize power, that is, to found its legitimacy in the states
monarchical personality, and he indicates variants in this approach, in
the historical school of law, early positivism, and especially in the works
of F. J. Stahl. He argues that the idea of legal personality was dependent
upon underlying theological convictions, since the personality and sovereignty of the state were conceived in analogy to the creative personality of God. As in Breckmans account, the personalization of power also
underwrites the view of individual proprietors in civil society; Thornhills
text differentiates types of conservative thought (e.g., Stahl vs. Gerlach),
depending on the degree to which these rights of private persons were
admitted. Personality in civil society is circumscribed and defined by
proprietary claims. Each conservative doctrine thus endorsed a political
order sanctioning (at most) restricted rights of possession, while largely
precluding constitutive or participatory rights and freedoms.
In contrast to personalism, many (but not all) Left Hegelians19
tended to stress collective rights and shared essence or species-being,
though the democratic implications of this position were not fully or consistently worked out; Breckman in particular detects a tendency among
the Hegelians to retreat from the full force of this insight and to reinvest
personality in various guises. A republican model of the legal person
is at least adumbrated, enjoying actively shared rights and commonly
structured freedoms. In this respect, Thornhill maintains, the Hegelians
looked beyond their own immediate intellectual milieu, anticipating the
democratic debates on legal personality among German legal theorists
in the imperial period and the Weimar Republic. Breckman and Thornhill offer differing assessments of the degree to which the debate on personalism shaped Marxs thought, and his idea of the social subject. The
question is the extent to which Marx retains a transformed idea of rights.
To what extent can we recognize persistent effects of Marxs Kantian inheritance? This is a persistent problem in the literature.20
The republicanism nurtured in the Hegelian school did not merely
involve the repudiation of conservative personalist politics, but sought
to offer positive prescriptions which could give substance to the idea of
popular sovereignty. Norbert Waszeks chapter presents the Hegelians
grappling with the concrete problem of modern political institutions.
While it is frequently conceded that Hegelian ideas contributed, during the 1830s and 1840s, to the emergence of theories of political opposition in Germany, it has also been maintained that Hegels political
philosophy itself lacks such a theory. After establishing the historical
context of European debates on an institutionalized opposition, and reviewing arguments in Hegels own texts, Waszek challenges the conclusion that the Hegelian system cannot readily accommodate a theory of

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opposition. Waszek then analyzes the crucial and insufficiently known

role of Eduard Gans in elaborating, on Hegelian principles, a theory of
political opposition, and he indicates Ganss impact on other members
of the school, notably Karl Rosenkranz and Arnold Ruge. Illustrating the
Hegelians concrete engagement with urgent political issues, this text
complements Waszeks ongoing research on Gans as an early diagnostician of the social question.21 In support of this interpretation, we might
recall Hegels contention in the Phenomenology that one of the hallmarks
of victory for a party (or an institution) is that it splits.22 Internal division,
far from being necessarily a manifestation of weakness, proves that this
party possesses its opposite as a moment of its own being, and not simply
as an external barrier. It thus manifests a higher degree of concreteness
and determinacy. So the presence of an opposition within a state would
be testimony to its greater rationality, its ability to sustain contradiction
within itself. A common theme in Hegelian polemics is the defense of
a rational political order against Restoration conservatism in all of its
manifestations (Hunting it down wherever it appears, as Ruge puts it,
targeting Romanticism).
Obstacles to emancipation are not exclusively political, however,
and members of the Hegelian school aimed at eradicating domination
in other vital spheres of activity. In her chapter, Myriam Bienenstock examines the emergence of the social question as an object of political debate, outlining the receptions of Saint-Simonian ideas in Germany during the Vormrz. Like Waszeks and Calvis chapters, and my own, she
contends that debates within the Hegelian school must be seen in this
broader European context. Her analysis focuses too on Eduard Gans,
emphasizing the originality of his position on this question, and contrasting it to that of Heinrich Heine. While resistant to the religious impulses
imparted to social theory by some French socialists around 1830, Gans
employs Saint-Simonian ideas to defend Hegels thought as a progressive
social philosophy. This casts the role of the state into even sharper relief;
the stress on social and economic issues does not imply that the state is
dispensable as a corrective and as a site for the practice of freedom. By
grasping the state as the focal point of modern freedom, Gans intends
to preserve the relations of right which he holds to be fundamental to
modern self-definition, and which are put at risk by ideas that would
dissolve the state into civil society. What is to be retained from the SaintSimonians is not their proposed solutions, but their deeper understanding of the problems of poverty; these problems could, however, be seen,
Gans adds, as an affront to right. Here is a specifically post-Kantian inflection. With it, Gans clearly goes beyond Hegels own position on poverty in the Philosophy of Right and anticipates later developments in the

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Hegelian school, which are also the subject of my chapter. Bienenstock

compares Gans and Marx in their responses to the social question, as
well as their relation to Hegel and their conflicting attitudes toward religion. She contends that Marxs position is closer to Heines and does not
derive directly from the influence of his teacher, Gans.
During the 1840s, in stressing the risks posed by the market to
political virtue and the practices of citizenship, the Left Hegelians seemingly revive an older republican theme. As much recent research has
shown, this idea had been subjected to fundamental revision in the debates of the eighteenth century, notably in Scotland and England. Do
the views of the Left Hegelians on the opposition of citizenship and accumulation of wealth simply mimic discredited republican positions? My
chapter argues that despite the appearance of anachronism, we witness a
fundamental innovation in the ethics of citizenship, based on an understanding of the diversity and conflict characteristic of modern society,
and of the social question posed within the Hegelian school by Gans.
The theoretical innovation consists in a specifically post-Kantian perfectionism, distinct from older German natural law traditions and preKantian perfectionist doctrines. The new perfectionism has as its end
not happiness but freedom, and inquires into the conditions in which
autonomy can be practiced. This critical examination entails rethinking the Kantian boundaries between welfare, right, and virtue: asking
how the ways that welfare is sought impinge on the possibility of right
for all, and how virtue can correct and reorient particularistic and selfregarding action, thus enabling modern practices of citizenship. The
Left Hegelians recognize the ineliminable fact of diversity and particular
interests spawned by the new division of labor, and offer an analysis of
the social question, the creation of unprecedented forms of urban poverty in the midst of abundance. Virtue and commerce are now opposed
on a new basis, where both terms are redefined. In this way republican
ideas of freedom are extended to economic as well as political questions,
delineating a specifically Hegelian republicanism in 1848. This position
reflects the emergent features of modern civil society, while critically appropriating themes from Kantian as well as Hegelian idealism.
If highly concrete in dealing with modern problems of poverty and
exclusion, Hegelian criticism also extended to forms of artistic and cultural production, engaging with the internal structure of absolute spirit,
and the place of art as exemplifying freedom in the modern world. In
sharpened polemics against Romanticism and Restoration conservatism,
Bruno Bauer, for example, proclaimed that art was closer than religion
to the pure self-determination of thought, and thus occupied a higher
systematic place, because art manifested the activity of thinking in an

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objective medium, whereas religion was a surrender to passivity and selfloss; religious belief thus upheld an alienated political order, and resisted efforts to realize reason and freedom in conscious and objective
forms.23 Other Hegelians, such as H. G. Hotho and Arnold Ruge, offered
differing appreciations of the role of art in Hegels philosophy and in
the modern world; of the relations between art and religion; and of the
meaning of Hegels contentious thesis of the end of art, the exhaustion
of arts capacity to depict complex modern subjectivity. The chapter by
Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov takes up these questions, drawing on
her own extensive work in the Hegel archives. After reviewing Hegels
aesthetics, its logic, and the relation it establishes between art, nature,
culture, and history, Collenberg-Plotnikov distinguishes two broad lines
in the reception of aesthetics within the school, typified by Hotho and
Ruge (together with his coauthor Theodor Echtermeyer). These stand
for the Old and the Young Hegelians respectively, the right and the left
of the Hegelian school, though many of its members resist classification,
or vary their stances in response to specific issues. Against Hegels logical determination of art, Hotho tends toward subjectivism and psychologism, and is prepared to make concessions to Romanticism: for example,
he weakens the force of Hegels thesis of the end of art, rendering it
as an attitude of resignation toward the banality of modern life. Meanwhile, Ruge takes up battle decisively against Romanticism, which he condemns for bolstering the power of the throne and the conservative elements. (While Ruge appears ready to brand all varieties of Romanticism
as mere nostalgia and irrationalism, this is clearly an unwarranted generalization; but it is to be understood as a politically conditioned riposte
to one type of Romantic thinking prominent in the Vormrz.) Whereas
Hotho subjectivizes art, Ruge sociologizes it. Collenberg-Plotnikov draws
implications for contemporary thinking about art and the ubiquitous
manipulation of images.
Collenberg-Plotnikov considers the earlier phases of aesthetic
thought in the Hegelian school, and Margaret A. Rose examines a significant, if often overlooked, contribution to the latter. Roses text, Karl
Rosenkranz and the Aesthetics of the Ugly, follows developments in
Hegelian aesthetics up to the period immediately after the failed Revolutions of 1848. Contextually, she shows the inapplicability of conventional labels to describe the work of a specific figure, a theme also addressed explicitly by Stewart in the present volume. Theoretically, she
traces the further elaboration of Hegelian aesthetics, both in integrating
the literary and pictorial arts of the mid-nineteenth century (including
the poetry of Hegels pupil Heinrich Heine) and also in anticipating
subsequent artistic trends, including a new appreciation of the signifi-

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cance of the ugly for art and for the depiction of modern life. The chapter focuses on Karl Rosenkranz, whom D. F. Strauss had described in
1837 as a member of the Hegelian Center rather than the Left or
Right. In an 1840 comedy entitled The Center of Speculation, Rosenkranz
parodied this categorization, and expressly repudiated the place which
Strauss had assigned to him. In his Aesthetics of the Ugly (sthetik des Hsslichen) of 1853, previously little studied in English, Rosenkranz defended
comedy itself as a liberating force. The text recalls Aristotles comments
on comedy in his Poetics, and extends Hegels own analyses. Confronting
the ugly, aesthetics takes up the opposite of beauty within itself, yielding
a more concrete and differentiated account of its own domain. Rosenkranz argued that caricature and other current forms of comedy not
only depict the ugly but also signal a liberation from it. While distancing himself from Heines more extreme and blasphemous expressions,
he proposed a theoretical vindication for the critical use of irony and
parody among radical Young Germans and Left Hegelians, writing in
conditions of Prussian censorship. Rosenkranzs aesthetic views can be
compared to those of Bauer and Ruge, although he remained critical of
the latter. The Aesthetics of the Ugly places Rosenkranz, at least temporarily, among the more radical Hegelians of his time. His assessment of the
ugly is relevant not only to the understanding of nineteenth-century art,
but to contemporary repudiations of classical standards of beauty.
Our contributions thus identify important Hegelian critiques of
politics, culture, and society. That the social question was a central theme
in Hegelian criticism is not an uncontested view, however, even among
contributors to this volume. Todd Gooch discusses the development of
Ludwig Feuerbachs religious critique in the 1830s and 1840s in the context of his polemical engagements with a series of adversaries, including
F. J. Stahl, Schelling, and Heinrich Leo. Goochs reconstruction also involves the influence of Jacobi and the pantheism controversy of a previous generation, and the religious movement known as the Awakening
(in contrast to the more secular and rationalist Enlightenment), which
rallied various anti-Hegelian elements. Gooch stresses the political dimensions of Feuerbachs critique, the attack on personalism, and the issue of hypostasis (or essence treated as an independent existent: here
the projection of the divine as a species-concept of the human), a question also addressed in Beisers chapter in this volume. Gooch takes issue, however, with Breckmans contention that the social question, as a
problem of economic exclusion and deprivation, was a defining feature
in these debates, or at least in Feuerbachs interventions in them. Gooch
considers this reading anachronistic, and argues that the kind of egoism
at stake in Feuerbachs criticisms is largely of religious derivation. Gooch

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finds in Feuerbach less a positive social vision than a critique of the religious consciousness and its political implications, a therapeutic rather
than prescriptive approach. The relation between the social question and
Hegelian criticism thus remains an issue open for further investigation.24
Frederick Beiser argues that Max Stirner deserves to be taken very
seriously as a philosopher, and that he in some ways represents the end
point of the German critical tradition since Kant. Stirner radicalizes the
Kantian critique of hypostasis, or the setting up of false universals; and he
criticizes Kant, Hegel, and his Hegelian contemporaries for retaining an
idea of universality which, he contends, constricts and oppresses the particular will, diverting it from its genuine satisfactions into subservience
to illusory ideals. In place of a universalistic ethic, he sets a particularist
program based on voluntarism, non-cognitivism, ethical egoism, and hedonism, recalling in some respects, as Beiser notes, Stoic self-sufficiency
or ataraxia, but more aggressive in the pursuit of pleasures, and devoid
of any idea of natural harmony. Beiser discusses Stirners arguments in
his major work, The Ego and Its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum), examining the concept of ownness as a variety of freedom, in which conscious self-interest and self-fashioning define an autonomous, or at least
spontaneous, stance toward the world and other subjects, anticipating
a posture that will later be struck by Nietzsche. Beiser also relates ownness to debates among Hegelians on property and the social question,
and discusses the polemics, with Marx and others, provoked by Stirners
work. The text concludes with a reflection on Stirners anarchism, noting its distinctive and problematic character.
Lucien Calvi offers a complementary perspective to Bienenstocks
on the encounter of Hegelianism with French social thought, and agrees
with our other contributors on the centrality of interactions between
religion and politics. He takes up the narrative of Arnold Ruges career,
begun in this volume by Collenberg-Plotnikov and by Bunzel and Lambrecht. The latter end their chapter on the eve of Ruges emigration, and
Calvi resumes the story with Ruge now in Paris, actively pursuing his organizational and journalistic work. Calvis text follows Ruges attempts
to build alliances with representatives of republicanism and socialism in
France, and documents the rifts that open among them over questions
of religion. Like Bienenstock, Calvi indicates contrasting appreciations
of religion and its potential role as a mobilizing or intrinsically conservative force, and shows how these views divided German and French
thinkers in the 1840s, hampering Ruges efforts to secure a common
front prior to 1848. Calvi then examines closely the causes of the split
between Ruge and Marx over the editorial and political direction of the
Deutsch-franzsische Jahrbcher, Ruges latest collaborative effort to replace

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the suppressed Deutsche Jahrbcher. In the polemics which opposed Marx

and Ruge, the differences between socialism and republicanism clearly
emerge, and each current attains a sharpened ideological profile, heralding subsequent contentions on the social question and the relation of
politics and economics, as well as on nationalism and internationalism.
Calvi underlines the contemporary resonance of these debates.
If our volume intends to break the mold of the transition from
Hegel to Marx in which much of the earlier work in this field was cast, it
is not by ignoring Marxs own contributions; he plays a role in several of
our chapters. Rather, we wish to see him as the social individual he is, in
debate with his precursors and contemporaries. In the final chapter in
this volume, Tom Rockmore proposes a rereading of Marx which places
him squarely within the tradition of German idealism. The essential link,
Rockmore argues, is to be found in the method of constructivism. He
defines this approach as a modern epistemological strategy, rooted in ancient mathematics, but assuming a number of distinct modern forms, for
example in Hobbes (and following him, Vico) and in Kant. Rockmore
contrasts epistemological constructivism primarily to representationalism and its associated metaphysical realism, the idea of a reality independent of mind to which ideas must correspond. Constructivism, in its
contention that we can only reliably claim to know what we construct, denies the givenness of such a reality; it thus constitutes a central unifying
theme in German idealism, from Kant to Marx, though with significantly
varying formulations. While Kant grasps the process of construction in
an essentially unhistorical manner, Fichte conceives knowledge with regard to human activity and practice, and Hegel follows him in applying
the constructivist idea to history. Marx in turn takes up and develops
this idea. Rockmore challenges traditional Marxist self-understandings
beginning with Engels, and situates Marx within post-Kantian German
idealism through his elaboration of a constructivist approach to society
and knowledge. Marxs central insight, derived from Fichte, is of finite
human beings actively forming and interpreting their world and its
constitutive relations. Rockmore concludes that Marxs abiding philosophical interest lies in this humanist and constructivist account of social
relations and their dynamics.
The volume thus seeks to demonstrate the concreteness, variety,
and currency of the thinking of the Hegelian school. The schools members reconfigure Hegels doctrine of spirit, rethinking its inner structures in ways that anticipate current developments in aesthetics, theology, and political thought. They propose readings of spirit which, for all
their differences, are non-metaphysical and intimately related to subjec-

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tive activity in the world. For them, spirit is not a transcendent force but
an immanent dynamic that is operative, in distinct ways, in the historical
process as one we construct. They renew the critical impetus of the Enlightenment and direct it against powerful adversaries, old and new. The
optimism of the members of the Hegelian school is tempered by a recognition of the modern culture of diremption and its dangers, but their
new thinking on politics, religion, and art stakes out positions both original and notable, and initiates debates which continue to agitate our contemporary world.
Notes
1. See, for example, Paul Redding, Analytical Philosophy and the Return of
Hegelian Thought (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
2. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood,
trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20.
3. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke: Vollstndige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden
des Verewigten, 18 vols. (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 183245). For recent
critical editions, see note 10 below.
4. The classic study is Erich Jordan, Die Entstehung der konservativen Partei und
die preussischen Agrarverhltnisse vor 1848 (Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1914).
5. See, for example, Katerina Deligiorgi, Hegel: New Directions (Chesham,
Eng.: Acumen, 2006); and, in the same volume, critical comments on nonmetaphysical readings by Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Substance, Subject, and Infinity: A Case Study of the Role of Logic in Hegels System, 6984.
6. Bruno Bauer, Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs, Wigands Vierteljahrschrift 3 (1845): 86146.
7. G. W. F. Hegel, Smtliche Werke, ed. H. Glockner, vol. 12, Vorlesungen ber
die sthetik (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1964), 88, 9091.
8. Calvi, and Bunzel and Lambrecht in this volume, draw heavily on archival sources on Ruge.
9. For example, Douglas Moggach and Winfried Schultze, Bruno Bauer:
ber die Prinzipien des Schnen: De pulchri principiis: Eine Preisschrift, mit einem Vorwort
von Volker Gerhardt (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996).
10. See G. W. F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Meiner, 1968 ).
11. See, for example, Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
12. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 20 and 260.
13. For example, Sarah Maza, The Social Imaginary of the Revolution:
The Third Estate, the National Guard, and the Absent Bourgeoisie, in The Age
of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 17501820, ed. Colin Jones and Dror
Wahrman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 10623.
14. For a first rough approximation, see Douglas Moggach, Republican-

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ism, Modernity, and Difference: Hegelian Perspectives, in Multiculturalism and

the Law: A Critical Debate, ed. Omid Payrow Shabani (Cardiff: University of Wales
Press, 2006), 185203.
15. Among this voluminous literature, see, for example, Martin van
Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2
vols. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Annabel Brett
and James Tully, eds., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
16. Frederick Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 12425, 16364.
17. These circles and their influence are referred to in my essay in this
book, Post-Kantian Perfectionism.
18. Paul W. Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and
Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
19. Thus, as mentioned above, while criticizing forms of personalism which
hypostatise a divine or absolute being, or describe it as a universal suspended
above the particulars, Bruno Bauers account stresses a distinct doctrine of personality based on Kantian self-determination.
20. See, for example, David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
21. Norbert Waszek, Eduard Gans on Poverty and the Constitutional Debate, in The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School, ed. Douglas Moggach (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2449.
22. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York:
Harper, 1967), 591.
23. Douglas Moggach, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (Cambridge,
Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
24. For more on this question, see, for example, Dieter Langewiesche,
Republik, konstitutionelle Monarchie und soziale Frage: Grundprobleme
der deutschen Revolution von 1848/49, Historische Zeitschrift 230, no. 3 (1980):
52947.

Group Formation and Divisions

in the Young Hegelian School
Wolfgang Bunzel and Lars Lambrecht
Translated from the German by Douglas Moggach

Beginnings and Phases of the Young

Hegelian Movement
Already at Hegels death in 1831 there existed a spectrum of politically
oriented distinctions among various tendencies in Hegelianism. These
differences came to a head in the latter half of the 1830s, with the appearance of a new generation of young intellectuals. After Arnold Ruge
delivered his striking repudiation of the old Hegelian principle in
his 1837 article Our Educated Critical Journalism (Unsere gelehrte
kritische Journalistik),1 and David Friedrich Strauss in his 1837 Polemics
(Streitschriften) distinguished a right, left, and center in respect to philosophical and theological attitudes toward religious dogmas,2 the conceptual and ideological basis was laid for the evolution and designation of
a distinct and independent formation within the Hegelian school. The
clearly visible external sign of this new faction was the establishment of a
journal, the Hallische Jahrbcher (after July 1841, the Deutsche Jahrbcher),
by Arnold Ruge and Theodor Echtermeyer. Originally conceived as a forum open to all representatives of an unorthodox Hegelianismdespite
its implicit opposition to Hegels own Berlin-based Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftliche Kritikthe journal developed in the first year of its existence
into an organ of literary combat.
The ground for this development was the so-called Leo controversy
(183839). In the course of this dispute, the conservative Halle historian
Heinrich Leo published a polemical attack, The Hegelings (Die Hegelingen,
1838), in which he vehemently assailed a number of Hegels students.
He accused the members of this Young Hegelian party3 of a complete
break with Christian doctrine, including the denial of a personal god;
they were thus guilty of barely disguised atheism. The terms that Leo
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made current were quickly taken up in the contemporary debates, and

came into common usage to designate the group of deviant followers of
Hegel who were critical of religion. The rapid spread of the terminology
was promoted by the fact that the accused immediately adopted these
denunciatory terms (Denunciationsbegriffe)4 as their own, and applied
them self-consciously to characterize their own position.
In consequence of the Leo controversy, which led to a detectable
lessening of the impact of the Young Hegelians, the objects of Leos attack drew together more closely, becoming a sociologically describable
faction.5 The external appearance of the Young Hegelians as a homogeneous group is, however, quite incorrect. Although most of the Left
Hegelians were of approximately the same age, and so can be considered as a generational group, indeed as the first youth movement in the
history of philosophy,6 there were nonetheless considerable differences
in age and experience between the eldest representatives (Arnold Ruge
was born in 1802) and the youngest (Edgar Bauer, born 1820). Moreover, the goals of the group changed considerably during its relatively
short existence. From the very beginning, there existed several regional
factions, with tense mutual relations. Despite the thoroughly justified
efforts of previous research to define Young Hegelianism through its
proximity to Hegelian philosophy,7 its function as the critical elaboration of Hegel, or its structure as a quasi-political party in the German
Vormrz, it must be insisted that the term Young Hegelian is essentially
a polemical concept, deployed in multiple and partly contradictory ways
in the ideological controversies of the 1830s and 1840s. Still, the pronouncedly journalistic character of the movement, as it expressed itself
in the founding of numerous journals and in collaboration in selected
publication venues, gave rise to a marked social network which can be
explained through the sociology of communication, illustrating the fluid
contours of the phenomenon of Young Hegelianism.
In retrospect we can distinguish five more or less distinct phases
of Young Hegelianism. In the first stage, the principal ideological premises were formulated, and the philosophical basis laid for the subsequent
movement. Heinrich Heine provided the central slogans in his book On
the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (Zur Geschichte der Religion
und Philosophie in Deutschland, 183334), as did David Friedrich Strauss in
his critical investigation The Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu, 1835); in a sense
Eduard Gans also contributed.8 In this early phase, from 1835 to 1837,
group structures had not yet emerged. Hence Heine and Gans could
play a founding role in the constitution of the Young Hegelian movement without belonging to the group itself. The content of the debates
in these early years was strongly marked by theological themes.

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The second stage essentially covers the year 1838, the first twelve
months of the existence of the Hallische Jahrbcher, which quickly became
the literary and organizational center of Young Hegelianism. Its oppositional character appeared clearly from the start: the announcement of
the journal not only publicly named as potential contributors some of
the Gttingen Seven who had been expelled from Hanover by King
Ernst August, but also identified as collaborators several former members of the Burschenschaften, among them Ruge himself, who had spent
long years in prison for their activities. Besides, from the beginning the
journal decisively took up the defense of David Friedrich Strauss. In relation to the so-called Cologne troubles (Klner Wirren, 183739),9 seen as
a power struggle between church and state, and in the Leo dispute, the
Young Hegelians intervened directly in the religious and political conflicts of the day as representatives of a decidedly engaged and current
philosophical perspective. They evinced a largely unshaken confidence
in the Prussian state, from which they expected not only protection and
support but also a clear recognition of freedom of thought and political
liberalism.
This attitude changed in the third stage of Young Hegelianism,
from early 1839 to mid-1841, during which time the Hallische Jahrbcher
experienced the high point of its effectiveness. When in 1839 a Prussian state councilor declared in his text On the Guarantees of Prussian Conditions (ber die Garantien der preussischen Zustnde) that Prussia needed
no constitution, Echtermeyer and Ruge expressed sharp opposition in
their article Karl Streckfuss and Prussianism (Karl Streckfuss und das
Preussenthum). With Friedrich Kppens book, Frederick the Great and
His Opponents (Friedrich der Grosse und seine Widersacher), published in mid1840, the effort to convince the leaders of the Prussian state to pursue
progressive policies reached its final peak. At the same time, the Enlightenment was identified as a root of Young Hegelianism, in addition
to the Reformation.10 In this context, Echtermeyer and Ruge together
wrote their important series of articles Protestantism and Romanticism:
Understanding the Times and their Contradictions (Der Protestantismus und die Romantik: Zur Verstndigung ber die Zeit und ihre Gegenstze)11 published between October 1839 and March 1840. When in
May 1840 the conciliatory Prussian minister of culture and religion Karl
von Altenstein died, and shortly thereafter Friedrich Wilhelm IV succeeded to the throne of Prussia, Hegelianism not only forfeited its role
as a philosophical tendency enjoying state protection, but the Left Hegelian school came into direct opposition to the Prussian state. Since the
Young Hegelians thus lost all prospects of university employment, they
were forced to earn their living as independent authors. Their discon-

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nected social status induced their further radicalization, as unattached

intellectuals, in the critique of church and state authorities. The related
social isolation and the competition on the market for intellectual products quickly led to splits within the movement. Although individual efforts were made to compensate for these divisions, the processes of ideological fragmentation accelerated, leading to the formation of ever new
groupings, and a few years later to the dissolution of the Young Hegelian
movement itself.
The transition from the third to the fourth phase was marked by the
transfer of the Jahrbcher from Halle to Dresden, in Saxony, under compulsion of the Prussian censorship. Echtermeyer withdrew from coeditorship, and the journal was renamed the Deutsche Jahrbcher. A consequence
of this reorganization was the restructuring of the team of collaborators.
While contributors like David Friedrich Strauss, Moriz Carriere, Eduard
Meyen, or Adolf Rutenberg withdrew or were eliminated, new collaborators joined, such as Bruno and Edgar Bauer, Moritz Fleischer, and Karl
Nauwerck. This change was accompanied by a process of ideological
radicalization, most clearly evidenced in the theses of Ludwig Feuerbach
and Bruno Bauer. A provisional end point of this development is represented by Edgar Bauers book, The Conflict of Criticism with Church and State
(Der Streit der Kritik mit Kirche und Staat, 1843), which, going beyond all
the demands of liberalism, advocates direct democracy. This stage ended
with the state ban on the Deutsche Jahrbcher and the Rheinische Zeitung,
which ceased publication in January and March of 1843, respectively.
The fifth and last stage of Young Hegelianism extended from
spring 1843 until approximately the end of 1844, and was characterized
by the geographical dispersal of the movement. One part of the group
(Arnold Ruge, Karl Marx) went into exile in France, and sought to pursue its literary work there. Authors remaining in Germany also persisted
in their efforts, but attempts to maintain a common front failed to find
significant spokesmen. The philosophical and ideological positions had
diverged so far in the meantime that the movement collapsed into a multitude of individual personalities. In literary, theoretical, and personal
terms, Marxs break with Ruge in late March 1844 represents the terminus in the development of the Young Hegelian school.

The Berlin Faction

Within the process of group formation sketched above, the Berlin faction of Young Hegelianism played a particular role. When the Hallische

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Jahrbcher began to appear, there did not yet exist in Berlin an independent grouping of Young Hegelians, and the few individuals who could be
counted in the Left contingent at this time passed unnoticed, given the
strong dominance of their orthodox colleagues. Since Ruge and Echtermeyer, for reasons of self-definition, wanted to distance themselves
from Hegels workplace, only a few contributions from Berlin authors
appeared in the first year of publication of their journal. But even in the
Prussian capital the first stirrings of Young Hegelian group formation
can be detected in this early phase. An important role was played here
by Eduard Meyen, a Berliner by birth. After he assumed the direction of
the Litterarische Zeitung, in early 1838, simultaneously with the founding
of the Hallische Jahrbcher, he transformed his paper into a publication
which was essentially indebted to Young Hegelian thinking. While up
till then, as was customary in review journals, new publications had been
presented neutrally, without ideological evaluation, Meyen permitted his
reviewers to address general philosophical and aesthetic issues of the
day, just as the Hallische Jahrbcher did. In this way the Litterarische Zeitung
became a gathering place for younger, mainly Berlin intellectuals associated with Hegelianism, including Ludwig Buhl, Moriz Carriere, Max
Duncker, and Theodor Mgge. This circle, consisting of authors, journalists, and philosophers, could not be further consolidated, however,
since Meyen had to give up his editorship after only a year.
Parallel to this was the wider grouping known as the Doktorklub,
a debating circle of younger academics from various faculties. Among
these were Bruno Bauer, a theology graduate; the geographer and historian Adolf Rutenberg (Bauers brother-in-law); Karl Friedrich Kppen,
a teacher of German and history; and the student of administration and
economics (Kameralwissenschaften) Karl Marx. What united these members, despite all their differences in worldview, was an interest in philosophical argument and a certain proximity to Hegel. Conspicuously, the
members of the Doktorklub at first made no efforts at joint publishing ventures. Some time elapsed before they discovered the Hallische Jahrbcher
as their journal; only Kppen appeared in it in the first year of its publication. Both of these groups, however, can be seen as the real core of
the heterogeneous Berlin fraction of Young Hegelianism.
The Leo controversy was the occasion that prompted discernibly
increased participation in Ruge and Echtermeyers journal by leftist
Berlin Hegelians. If in consequence of the dispute many of the early
contributors detached themselves from the Hallische Jahrbcher, the controversy also promoted an effective solidarity among the young generation of Hegelians. The two editors were compelled to compensate for
their losses in personnel, and purposefully sought out new contributors.

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It was noted that while up till then Berlin colleagues had been largely neglected, the Prussian capital undoubtedly possessed the largest reservoir
of academic intelligence in the Germanic realms. During a weeklong
trip to Berlin in late November 1838, which Ruge undertook primarily
to discuss with Altenstein and state councilor Johannes Schulze the endangered survival of his journal, he also made contact with those among
his younger colleagues whose literary position was clear enough to invite
a strengthening of ties.12 Among these was Eduard Meyen, who had just
defended the position of the Hallische Jahrbcher in a pamphlet against
Heinrich Leo. Since Ruge openly encouraged those he spoke with to
seek out and enroll their like-minded friends and acquaintances as contributors, several people came into contact with the central organ of
Young Hegelianism even though they had only loose connections with
the movement itself. An example is Moriz Carriere.13
For the young Berlin Hegel-adepts, and for Karl Nauwerck,14 a
sympathizer who maintained an independent ideological profile, participation in the Hallische Jahrbcher as a result of this regrouping of
contributors meant a lasting increase in prestige. Only now could they
have an appreciable literary effect, and be taken note of by the broader
public. This changed public status also contributed to a heightened
self-consciousness, which in turn promoted the formation of a specific,
regionally defined group identity. Thus Meyen, as the first among the
circle of Berlin Young Hegelians to contribute to the Hallische Jahrbcher,
felt called upon to bring to Ruges attention the position of the other,
educated Berlin, whereas Ruge always entertained distinct mental reservations about the Prussian capital.15 From this marginalized position
there gradually emerged a particular self-conception among the freethinking intellectuals resident there: we in the capital, as Meyen expressed it.16 He wrote to Ruge, for example, on January 14, 1840: I might
gently . . . express the wish that you do not leave entirely unattended our
Berlin culture, which strives to combine energy with urbanity.17
In 1839 and 1840 the two circles of Berlin Young Hegelians were
decimated: Carriere left the Meyen circle in spring 1839, setting off on a
scantily provisioned two-year voyage to Italy; and Bruno Bauer, already in
the process of moving from the right to the left faction, was transferred
in autumn 1839 to Bonn, where he taught as a Privatdozent. The consequent reduction in the number of members led to the gradual opening
and integration of the groups which had previously been largely separate. Contacts across the existing boundaries came to be established, and
both groups finally merged into a larger, if amorphous, association. This
fusion process began in 1840, with the arrival in Berlin of the Young
Hegelian Karl Riedel, who in 1838 and 1839 had edited in Nuremburg

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the Atheneum for Science, Art, and Life (Athenum fr Wissenschaft, Kunst und
Leben), a monthly for educated Germany, in collaboration with Georg
Friedrich Daumer. Already in summer 1840 Riedel had formulated the
idea of establishing in Berlin a successor publication with the same name,
and in the following months he began a close collaboration with Meyen.
Since the paper was to have a Young Hegelian orientation, but also to be
a Berlin weekly,18 with clearly local content, Riedel had to recruit suitable colleagues who knew the terrain and would be on-site. In preparing
for the founding of this periodical, the members of the Meyen circle and
the Doktorklub were also in touch. Thus in early 1841 Meyen was not only
frequently together19 with Rutenberg, but also made the acquaintance
of Riedels intimate friend Marx, and himself befriended Kppen.20 All
five were ultimately contributors to the Athenum.
This newspaper played an important role in the newly configured
group structure in the Prussian capital. Meyens letter of March 20, 1841,
gives a clear reference to this. Here he reported to his friend Wilhelm
Mller von Knigswinter: We have a literature club that meets every
evening in a cozy tavern. Everyone you know among our acquaintances
belongs: Eichler, Mgge, Buhl, etc., and then Riedel, Cornelius, Ferrand, Arthur Mller, Carriere, Friedrich Reinarz, Marx (from Trier),
Kppen, etc. We often stay at the tavern till late into the night. A centralization is gradually taking place, and the Athenum is providing a good
foothold.21 Although the Athenum was not intended to compete with
the Hallische Jahrbcher, but rather to hold the flanks in support of its
work, its founding was nonetheless a palpable expression of the changed
self-understanding of the Berlin Young Hegelians. They no longer saw
themselves as a regional offshoot of a center established in Halle or
later in Dresden, but rather as an independent formation, whose exposed position in the Prussian capital gave them a pioneering function
in the further development of the movement. The public appearance of
the group was marked by a celebration prepared for one of the leading
representatives of South German liberalism, the politician and journalist Karl Theodor Welcker, on September 28, 1841, in Berlin. The initiative for this event came from Theodor Mgge, Adolf Rutenberg, and
Friedrich Zabel; almost the entire circle of the Athenum newspaper took
part in the concluding feast: Ludwig Eichler, Eduard Flottwell, Eduard
Meyen, Karl Nauwerck, and Karl Riedel, as well as Bruno Bauer and Karl
Friedrich Kppen.
Ruge perceived the behavior of the Berlin Young Hegelians as arrogant, and decisively tried to maintain the hegemonic position of the
Jahrbcher. To the power shift within the Young Hegelian movement, he
reacted by dissociation:22 he ostentatiously refrained from participat-

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ing in the Athenum, and, with astonishing indolence, ignored Meyens

pleas for collaboration. Now he uncompromisingly excluded from the
Jahrbcher marginal figures in the movement, like Moriz Carriere, whom
he had formerly tolerated, and forbade the printing of their manuscripts.
This relentless attitude seemed initially successful, and, with the official
ban on the Athenum in late 1841, Ruges journal once again became the
one and only Young Hegelian periodical.
Since Ruge did nothing in the following period to reconnect with
the members of the Athenum group, disparaged their role, and in their
place offered virtually unhindered access to a series of new contributorsBruno Bauer, Robert Eduard Prutz, and Edgar Bauerhis former
collaborators, and many other moderate Young Hegelians, felt understandably deceived. The gradually increasing philosophical and political
radicalism of Ruges journal, accompanied by a certain ideological narrowing, gave strong impetus to further factionalization within the movement. David Friedrich Strauss broke off collaboration, and the members
of the Berlin group sought other opportunities to publish. New possibilities opened to them in early February 1842, when Adolf Rutenberg,
on the recommendation of his friend Marx, became editor of the newly
founded Rheinische Zeitung.23 In the eight months that he worked for this
newspaper, the former Athenum circle had free access to it, and used
it to articulate philosophical, aesthetic, and political convictions which
had increasingly little prospect of appearing in the (renamed) Deutsche
Jahrbcher. The publication of these articles evoked increased resistance
from the Prussian government, and already by October Rutenberg was
dismissed from his position. Since his successor, Marx, immediately and
rigorously limited access by the Berlin group to the Rheinische Zeitung,
Meyen and Rutenbergs associates found themselves again largely deprived of opportunities for publication. The attempt by the publisher
Klemann and Karl Nauwerck to resurrect the Athenum had already
failed in the spring of that year, as the authorities refused their consent.
The Bauer brothers did not initially belong to the Berlin circle that
had formed in 1840, since Bruno had been teaching at the University of
Bonn since autumn 1839, and could come only occasionally to the Prussian capital. Edgar Bauer was only twenty years old when the Athenum
was founded, and had not yet published. Bruno Bauer was still in contact with the members of the old Doktorklub, however, and Edgar in early
1841 initiated contacts with some of the Athenum intellectuals, including Riedel and Marx. Upon Bruno Bauers return to Berlin in March
1842, following his dismissal from the university, he found the situation
considerably changed. Of his old companions, only Rutenberg and
Kppen were still present, but they had joined the Meyen-Riedel circle.

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Nonetheless, undoubtedly facilitated by Edgar, he quickly made the acquaintance of the new group members. Because of the prominence he
had achieved in the meantime, it appeared that he was the real head
of the Berlin Young Hegelians. This appearance is deceptive, however.
Here we witness an increasing dichotomy, most notably if we observe the
provenance of the Jahrbcher contributors. While the Bauers, who had
not taken part in the Athenum, had unrestricted access to the Jahrbcher
by virtue of their radical worldview, Ruge appreciably limited the possibility of publication for most of the other members of the Berlin circle
(Nauwerck being the exception.) The growing presence of Bruno and
Edgar Bauer corresponds to the effacement of the other Berliners; and
since Bruno Bauer gradually gathered a horde of dependents around
him, we can speak of the emergence in the Prussian capital of a second,
independent grouping of Young Hegelians.
Simultaneously, a further process of change occurred within the
former Athenum circle. On June 5, 1842, Bruno Bauer reported to his
friend Karl Marx: The Literatenklub, which I attend frequently, and in
which the politicians have sundered and purged themselves from the
poets, has become thoroughly atheistic.24 As their public literary possibilities were restricted, members of this circle began to rely more heavily
on direct personal communication through regular meetings and discussions. They adopted bohemian manners, which shocked and repelled
observers, and the group came to attention mainly through its scandalous practices.25 At their meetings they seem to have discussed whether
or not to constitute themselves formally as an atheistic union, though it
is impossible to determine how seriously these discussions were meant,
or whether they were staged to spread false information, to irritate and
provoke their adversaries. Originally intended ironically, the name The
Free (Die Freien) was quickly naturalized by the group, as an expression
of their own self-understanding.
There are various views in the literature as to who properly belonged to Die Freien. It is certain, however, that the core of the Athenum
circle, consisting of Ludwig Buhl, Eduard Meyen, Theodor Mgge, and
Adolf Rutenberg, must be included, reinforced by Karl Friedrich Kppen, Max Stirner, Eduard Flottwell, Julius Leopold Klein, and, from 1843
on, Friedrich Sass. Bruno and Edgar Bauer doubtless had multiple contacts with this group, and occasionally expressed solidarity with its members, but, despite views to the contrary,26 they adopted a thoroughly independent position among Berlin intellectuals. (This is evidenced by the
fact that in the General Literary News [Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung], which
Bruno Bauer edited between December 1843 and October 1844, not a
single article by the Freien appeared.)27 Karl Nauwerck, too, often consid-

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ered a member,28 had scarcely anything to do with this grouping. Thus

in 1842 there were three factions of Young Hegelians in Berlin: first, the
Freien; second, the circle around Bruno Bauer (including Edgar Bauer,
Julius Faucher, Ernst Jungnitz, and Franz Szeliga Zychlin von Zychlinski); and third, those intellectuals who kept their distance from both
circles without founding a group of their own, such as Nauwerck.29
Ruges relations with members of the Freien had been tense for
some time, but in late autumn 1842 there occurred an open break. This
was occasioned by Ruges trip to Berlin, when he attended a meeting
of the Freien. Ruges purpose is clear from a letter to Moritz Fleischer,
dated December 12, 1842: Originally I had the very modest intention of
encouraging them to dissolve their society, so that they would not compromise the good cause and have occasion to blame themselves for it.30
Even though certain differences existed between Ruge and the Freien in
their assessments of philosophical problems and of the options for action in the existing political situation, the spectacular break was caused
less by contradictory ideological conceptions than by questions of style
or tactical considerations. The manners and appearance of the members
of this group discredited them so greatly in Ruges eyes that he denied
them any form of scientific credibility. Moral rigorism here encountered
self-dramatizing verbal radicalism. And what Ruge was still prepared to
tolerate, if indignantly, in the charismatic figure of Bruno Bauer, he condemned bitterly in Bauers less prominent colleagues.
A clear schism thereby opened in the Young Hegelian movement,
but in Ruges view this could be easily gotten over, since the Deutsche
Jahrbcher was able to bring together, for a short time, all of the most eminent protagonists: Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx. When,
however, a short while later a break occurred not only between Ruge and
Bauer, but also between Bauer and Marx, it became evident what deep
consequences ensued from excluding an entire circle of very active participants from the group. Ruge not only lost numerous highly motivated
and productive collaborators, but also forfeited a significant part of the
personal basis which had made his activities possible as the central organizational figure in Young Hegelianism. It was especially this second
self-amputation, after the withdrawal of the Wrttemberg contingent,
which, intended as a process of ideological clarification, finally led to the
demise of the Young Hegelian movement. Since ever fewer comrades
could bring their goals into accord with the demands of the leading
figures, the breakup of Young Hegelianism proceeded apace, until only
disconnected individuals31 were left to form new interest coalitions.
This creeping process of emaciation is especially visible in the
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the Deutsche Jahrbcher and the Rheinische Zeitung. Both Herweghs TwentyOne Sheets from Switzerland (Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz, 1843) and
Ruges and Marxs coedited German-French Annals (Deutsch-franzsische
Jahrbcher, 1844) had a mere handful of contributors.32 This was also
the case with the short-lived periodicals which the two Young Hegelian
groupings resident in Berlin mounted after the split with Ruge: the arguments in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (1844) and the Norddeutschen
Bltter (184445) were predominantly provided by the Bauer brothers
themselves;33 and Ludwig Buhls Berlin Monthly (Berliner Monatsschrift,
1844), as well as Eduard Meyens no longer available North German Review
(Norddeutsche Revue, 1844), contained only essays by the few members of
their own circle.34 The same is true of Karl Nauwercks Berlin Leaves (Berliner Bltter, 1844); in 1846 he made another attempt to found a political
monthly, but the state forbade it. By the mid-1840s, no more common
group activities can be detected, and even in Berlin, where Young Hegelianism endured the longest, the movement ebbed away.

Symbolic Topography
Additional complications arise in the already complex phenomenon of
group formation from the fact that the leading figures in Young Hegelianism began from early on to develop a symbolic frame of reference to
describe their own positions in the movement. Spatial demarcations were
preferred as ways of transferring ones own ideological location into a
more broadly understood system of signs. Thus the factual geographical
data of the Young Hegelian group structures were reconfigured as a symbolic topography. For example, the competition between the Hallische
Jahrbcher and the Berlin Annals of Scientific Criticism ( Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftliche Kritik) assumed a particular importance because the place
of editorship of the former had been selected by Echtermeyer and Ruge
for symbolic reasons. Halle had been an eminently important center of
the early Enlightenment, but also of the Reformation, and its university in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been the site
of bitter feuding between philosophy and theology. Ruge and Echtermeyer naturally had this prehistory in mind when they baptized their
journal the Hallische Jahrbcher. The contradiction to Berlin, expressed
implicitly in the title and articulated explicitly on numerous occasions,
derives from several sources. Although the University of Berlin, at least
in its foundational phase, figured as a product of the Prussian reform
era, and Hegels long period of activity there (181831) distinguished it

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sharply from other universities, its recent establishment meant that it was
largely lacking in traditions, compared with these institutions. Since Berlin was the capital of Prussia and the seat of the government, moreover,
doubts inevitably arose about the universitys independence, exposed as
it was to stronger political pressures.35 While Berlin can rightly be called
the center both in respect to political power in Prussia and also in its
orthodox exposition of Hegelian philosophy, the provincial University
of Halle belonged to the periphery. Precisely because of its marginal
location, Halle could be declared a kind of anti-center,36 where properly understood Hegelian philosophy had its home, a philosophy which
dared to think beyond the masters own prescriptions, and if necessary
even against him. Young Halle37 thus formed the competitive counterconcept to the old Berlin of conservative Hegel exegetes.
The initial, intra-Prussian dualism between Halle and Berlin,
which Ruge and Echtermeyer had constructed in order to position themselves, was soon transposed into a multipolar field of forces. This process
began with the actual or promised collaboration of several scholars from
Wrttemberg on the Hallische Jahrbcher: Ferdinand Christian Baur, David
Friedrich Strauss, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, and Eduard Zeller, as well
as Georg Friedrich Creuzer, Karl August Klpfel, Reinhold Kstlin, and
Friedrich Reiff. The most notable contributor in the first two years of
the journals existence was undoubtedly the theologian David Friedrich
Strauss, from Ludwigsburg. His theological position, especially as he developed it in his research on The Life of Jesus, can indeed be considered
the most radical statement of Left Hegelian views in this period. It
is quite apparent that besides Ruge and Echtermeyer, there existed in
southwestern Germany a grouping of Young Hegelians who can be rightfully seen as the spearhead of the movement in its early phase.38 The
editors of the Jahrbcher took account of this fact. After they and their
comrades were sharply attacked by orthodox Protestants in the 1838
39 Leo controversy, but found no backing from the Prussian authorities, Ruge and Echtermeyer expressed their distancing from Berlin by
fictitiously signing their article Karl Streckfuss und das Preussenthum
by a Wirtemberger [sic].39 They wanted to create the impression that
D. F. Strauss had written this article.40 In this way Ruge and Echtermeyer
staged a calculated shadow fight between two supposed camps in the
movement, one critical and one supportive of Prussia, the critique being
formulated from the observation post of a representative of the constitutional state of Wrttemberg. (Despite Friedrich Wilhelm IIIs promise in 1815, Prussia still did not have a constitution that would permit
the participation of the people in governmental activities.) Thus, while
maintaining the illusion of amity toward Prussia, the Hallische Jahrbcher
could exercise a cushioned form of dissidence.

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Wrttemberg as the embodiment of radical philosophical positions and as the homeland of constitutionalism and liberalism only temporarily occupied an important place on the symbolic map of Young
Hegelianism. With Strausss displacement by Ludwig Feuerbach as the incarnation of radical thinking in 1839, and his withdrawal from the circle
of contributors to Ruges journal in 1841, the corresponding regional
designation lost its signifying function. After Friedrich Wilhelm IVs accession to the throne (1840) it was replaced by a new orientation point,
East Prussia.41 This geographically most remote region was characterized not only by its long tradition of critical and enlightened thought,
most notably by Kants activities in Knigsberg, but also by the relatively
liberal legislation prevailing there,42 due primarily to the efforts of its
leading official, the Oberprsident Theodor von Schn.43 It was especially
the relatively mild hand of the censorship that allowed Prussias easternmost province to become a palladium of moderate freedom of expression, since publications and journals could appear there that would
have been banned in the rest of Prussia. It was no accident that the two
most widely discussed pamphlets to appear in the wake of Friedrich Wilhelm IVs accession, Four Questions, Answered by an East-Prussian (Vier Fragen, beantwortet von einem Ostpreussen, 1841) and Woher und wohin? (Whence
and Whither? 1842), were by East Prussian authors: the liberal Johann
Jacoby, and Theodor von Schn himself. The influential place in the philosophy faculty of the University of Knigsberg held by Hegels student
Karl Rosenkranz, a friend of Ruges, also awakened hopes of establishing
a new regional center there. These expectations quickly came to naught
as the Prussian government intensified its repression after 1841, leading
among other consequences to the forced removal of the Jahrbcher to the
Saxon city of Dresden.
This change of place, which drove Ruge out of Prussia forever, gave
new life and a previously unknown acuity to the conflict existing from
the very beginning between the location of editorship and Berlin.
If the editors of the Jahrbcher had already expressed frequent doubts
about the Prussian capital, it now became one of the main objects of
critique. We thoroughly despise this capital,44 Ruge states categorically
in a letter of February 24, 1841, to Christian Gottlieb Werner. Thus the
Berlin-based Young Hegelians found themselves in a precarious situation. They were exposed to repeated attacks from the government and
from colleagues opposed to Hegel, but they also had to respond to the
strong reservations that Ruge formulated as he observed the intellectual
scene in the capital.45 Instead of loyal allies in a struggle for a common
cause, they were regarded by the editors of the Jahrbcher as uncertain
coalition partners, even as ideological competitors, who might at any
time prove traitorous and pass into the enemy camp. Nonetheless Ruge

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was also reliant on collaboration from Berlin philosophers and writers,

who could obviously make the claim to represent the critical heritage
of Hegel in the Prussian capital. Ruges attitude to his Berlin colleagues
was thus marked by a fundamental ambivalence: he both needed and
mistrusted them.46 Ruge viewed the Bauer brothers as his most reliable
allies, but they were only briefly involved in the Jahrbcher. Paradoxically,
he even considered Nauwerck for the most part as a faithful comrade.
Toward Rutenberg and Meyen he was much more reserved and watchful, possibly because both temporarily supervised their own publication
ventures.
Especially informative of Ruges self-understanding in this connection is the fact that after he was forced to move to Dresden, he did not
provide his journal with a regional name, such as the Dresden or Saxon Annals, as might have been expected from past practice. Instead, he named
it the German Annals of Science and Art (Deutsche Jahrbcher fr Wissenschaft
und Kunst). Thus he subtly stressed his relation to Prussia anew, and
understood himself now as a Prussian exile, whose marginalized existence in neighboring Saxony allowed him to clarify more relentlessly
and more objectively the conditions prevailing in his native land. It was
the geographic disentanglement from Prussia, and the extraterritoriality of living and working in Dresden, that first made possible a credible
claim to pan-Germanic jurisdiction, expressed in the title of the Deutsche
Jahrbcher. The old, intra-Prussian contrast between center and periphery had no more hold because it was transferred into a new, more
complex topographical model in which Prussia itself appeared only as
a part of a larger whole, and consequently as its periphery. Loyal dissent turned gradually into open opposition, and the acceptance of exile.
Ruges move to Paris, occurring shortly thereafter, deprived all the former topographical categories of meaning. Through the shift from Prussian Halle to Saxon Dresden, and soon beyond the Germanic borders
to the French capital,47 the proclaimed center not only became literally eccentric, but the entire symbolic difference between center and
periphery dissolved, to be replaced by a new cardinal differentiation
among German intellectuals which, beginning with the July uprisings of
1830, prevailed until after the Revolutions of 1848: that between exile
and homeland.
Notes
1. Arnold Ruge (1837), Unsere gelehrte kritische Journalistik, Bltter fr
literarische Unterhaltung, no. 223 (August 11, 1837): 9057, no. 224 (August 12,
1837): 910.

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2. See David Friedrich Strauss, Streitschriften zur Vertheidigung meiner Schrift

ber das Leben Jesu und zur Charakteristik der gegenwrtigen Theologie, 3 vols. (Tbingen, 183738).
3. Heinrich Leo, Die Hegelingen: Actenstcke und Belege zu der s.g. Denunciation der ewigen Wahrheit, 2nd expanded ed. (Halle, 1839), 2.
4. Arnold Ruge, Arnold Ruge: Die Denunciation der Hallischen Jahrbcher, Hallische Jahrbcher, no. 179 ( June 27, 1838) and no. 180 ( June 28,
1838): 142540, 1428, and 1430.
5. See Wolfgang Essbach, Die Junghegelianer: Soziologie einer Intellektuellengruppe (Munich, 1988).
6. See Wolfgang Bunzel, Form- und Funktionswandel der Philosophie
im Vormrz: Sozial-, medien- und kommunikationsgeschichtliche Aspekte des
Junghegelianismus, in Entstehen des ffentlichenEine andere Politik, ed. Lars
Lambrecht (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2008).
7. See Lars Lambrecht, Arnold Ruge: Politisierung der sthetik? in Arnold Ruge (18021880): Beitrge zum 200. Geburtstag, ed. Lars Lambrecht and KarlEwald Tietz (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2002), 10123.
8. See Norbert Waszek, Eduard Gans (17971839): HegelianerJudeEuroper: Texte und Dokumente (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1991).
9. See Douglas Moggach, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 8687.
10. See Wolfgang Bunzel, Zurck in die Zukunft: Die Junghegelianer in
ihrem Verhltnis zur Aufklrung, in Der nahe Spiegel: Vormrz und Aufklrung, ed.
Wolfgang Bunzel, Norbert Otto Eke, and Florian Vassen (Bielefeld: Aisthesis,
2008).
11. See Wolfgang Bunzel, Der Geschichte in die Hnde arbeiten: Zur Romantikrezeption der Junghegelianer, in Bunzel, Stein, and Vasssen, Romantik
und Vormrz, 31338.
12. See Martin Hundt, Arnold Ruges Berlin-Reise vom November 1838.
In Brgerliche GesellschaftIdee und Wirklichkeit: Festschrift fr Manfred Hahn, ed.
Eva Schoeck-Quinteros, Hans Kloft, Franklin Kopitzsch, and Hans-Josef Steinberg (Berlin: Trafo, 2004), 3140.
13. See Wolfgang Bunzel, Muth und Opferkraft fr die Idee: Briefe Moriz
Carrieres an Arnold Ruge und Theodor Echtermeyer (1839/41), in Internationales Jahrbuch der Bettina-von-Arnim-Gesellschaft 89 (199697), 3973.
14. See Lars Lambrecht, Karl Nauwerck (18101871)Ein unbekannter
und vergessener Radikaldemokrat? in Mnner und Frauen der Revolution von
1848/49, ed. Helmut Bleiber and Walter Schmidt (Berlin: Fides, 2003), 43162.
15. Wolfgang Bunzel, Martin Hundt, and Lars Lambrecht, eds., Zentrum
und Peripherie: Arnold Ruges Korrespondenz mit Junghegelianern in Berlin (Frankfurt
am Main: Lang, 2006), 80.
16. Ibid., 82.
17. Ibid., 91.
18. Ibid., 105.
19. Ibid., 110.
20. Thus Kppen writes to Marx on June 3, 1841: Meyen is an excellent

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lad. He visits me every so often, and yesterday we went for a walk. If I ever chose
another friend of beauty [Schnheitsfreund], it would be nobody else but him.
Maybe hell be your successor. Karl Friedrich Kppen, Ausgewhlte Schriften in
zwei Bnden, Mit einer biographischen und werkanalytischen Einleitung, ed. Heinz Pepperle (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), 418.
21. Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 1 (1978), 341.
22. From the vantage point of an editor in need of manuscripts, who had
to deal with the conflicting claims of competing Hegelian factions, and who thus
felt himself authorized in his role of ideological controller, Ruge commented on
this situation in a letter to Adolf Stahr on September 8, 1841: Im in a bad situation. The whole Prussian staff is abandoning the Jahrbcher: Vatke, Schaller and
the like. This culture and, partly, this scholarship is a painful loss. So the sluicegates are open, and the Young Germans, the unphilosophical and so unfree, or
only occasionally free people are throwing themselves at the Jahrbcher. I expect
a time of the most violent crisis. Arnold Ruge, Briefwechsel und Tagebuchbltter aus
den Jahren 18251880, ed. Paul Nerrlich, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1886), 1:239.
23. See Wilhelm Klutentreter, Die Rheinische Zeitung von 1842/43 in der politischen und geistigen Bewegung des Vormrz, 2 vols. (Dortmund: Ruheus, 196667).
24. Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 3 (1980), 302.
25. See the chapter of the same name in Essbach, Die Junghegelianer, 29095.
26. Commonly both are counted, without further explanation, among
the Freien. See, for example, William J. Brazill, The Young Hegelians (New Haven,
Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1970), 80; Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 1
(1978), 429; Heinz Pepperle and Ingrid Pepperle, eds., Die Hegelsche Linke: Dokumente zu Philosophie und Politik im deutschen Vormrz (Leipzig: Reclam, 1985), 927.
This misunderstanding might arise from the inaccurate recollection of Ruges
brother Ludwig, who claimed at over forty years remove that the Bauer brothers were integral members of this group. Ruge, Briefwechsel, 1:286, footnote 1.
27. On the other hand, Ludwig Buhls Berliner Monatsschrift (1844) contained a contribution by Edgar Bauer, besides texts by himself, Meyen, Stirner,
and a few others. This shows that the mutual delimitation of the circle was asymmetrical.
28. So, for example, by Ludwig Rugesee Ruge, Briefwechsel, 1:286, footnote 1; Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 1 (1978), 433; Pepperle and Pepperle, Die Hegelsche
Linke, 927.
29. Essbach has also proposed a distinction among three Young Hegelian factions in Berlin: a core around Rutenberg, Nauwerck, and Meyen, who
represent a socially critical republican radicalism; a second core around Buhl,
Stirner, Jordan, Meyen, Kppen and E. Bauer, representing an anti-authoritarian
radicalism critical of all parties; and a third core . . . to which, besides Bruno
Bauer, Ernst Jungnitz, Julius Faucher, Szeliga, E. Bauer and Karl Schmidt belong. Essbach, Die Junghegelianer, 42. This division has the disadvantage, however,
of deriving primarily from ideological criteria, but largely concealing personal
affinities. Essbachs treatment of overlaps (Essbach, Die Junghegelianer, 42) obscures the operative boundaries among the particular groups and the persons
belonging to them.

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30. Ruge, Briefwechsel, 1:290.

31. So reports a police informer on June 15, 1844: The Freien in Berlin have now completely fallen out with one another. Meyen rages against the
Bauers, and they scorn him. Rutenberg has turned away from both parties.
Hans Adler, ed., Literarische Geheimberichte: Protokolle der Metternich-Agenten, 2 vols.
(Cologne: Leske, 197781), 2:36.
32. This is in general also true of Ruges edited compilation, Anekdota zur
neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publizistik (1843), which printed texts originally
destined for the Deutschen Jahrbcher but suppressed or mangled by the censors.
Interestingly, Rutenbergs article here, Zur Litteratur ber den Knigsberger
Verfassungsantrag, is the final text stemming from the Freien circle.
33. The contributors to these two journals, who were largely oriented
toward Bruno Bauers philosophical concepts, are famously caricatured as the
Charlottenburg Holy Family by Marx and Engels.
34. A whole series of Berlin Young Hegelians worked more or less undercover on publications appearing elsewhere, for example the Mannheimer Abendzeitung; see Adler, Literarische Geheimberichte, 2:28. This aspect of their publishing
activity still remains largely unexplored.
35. Thus, in a no longer preserved letter to Meyen in early summer 1839,
Ruge complains of the unpleasant proximity to the court that can be felt in
Berlin. See Bunzel, Hundt, and Lambrecht, Zentrum und Peripherie, 82.
36. In a letter to Altenstein on August 23, 1839, Ruge claims credit for lastingly reviving the reputation of Halle: Through the institution of the Jahrbcher
and the intellectual life it has awakened . . . Halle has become an intellectual
center [Mittelpunct]. Ruge, Briefwechsel, 1:174. This self-understanding is significantly reflected in Max Dunckers designation of Ruges workplace as Athens on
the Saale (Ruge, Briefwechsel, 1:117), a characterization that can only retrospectively be applied to the city of Halle.
37. Arnold Ruge to Karl Rosenkranz, October 20, 1837, in Ruge, Briefwechsel, 1:70.
38. The amalgamation of the Swabian intellectuals as Wrttembergers,
and the corresponding linkage of regional character and persons, date back to
Vischers essay Dr. Strauss und die Wrttemberger, which appeared in the Hallische Jahrbcher in 1838.
39. See Hallische Jahrbcher 2 (1839): 2089.
40. Pepperle and Pepperle, Die Hegelsche Linke, 891.
41. So Meyen emphatically insists in his letter to Ruge of February 23,
1841: Bridges must be built to East Prussia. Bunzel, Hundt, and Lambrecht,
Zentrum und Peripherie, 112. In his function as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung,
Rutenberg pursued this goal, trying very urgently to secure the collaboration
of Ludwig Walesrode and Johann Jacoby, for example. Edmund Silberner, ed.,
Johann Jacoby: Briefwechsel, 2 vols. (Hannover: Fackeltrager, 197478), 1:173.
42. In Meyens essay, Knigsberg in Preussen, he writes: Knigsberg,
geographically far removed in notoriously inhospitable surroundings . . . can
rightfully make a claim to become . . . a city of the first rank. Its location is isolated, but this isolation is an invigorating one . . . It was from Knigsberg . . . that

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the patriotic national upswing arose that led to Prussias rebirth, and we now
consistently witness the reemergence of this same free, faithful spirit. Berlin in
contrast seems more cosmopolitan, more diverse, richer, but also less decisive
and characterful. Athenum, no. 14 (April 10, 1841): 209.
43. In a letter to Christian Gottlieb Werner on February 24, 1841, Ruge
even described the East Prussian Oberprsident Schn as the political [David
Friedrich] Strauss. Ruge, Briefwechsel, 1:221.
44. Ruge, Briefwechsel, 1:221. In a letter to Robert Eduard Prutz on November 18, 1842, after one of his infrequent visits to the capital, Ruge expressed outrage at the general vileness and folly of Berlin life. Ruge, Briefwechsel, 1:286.
45. Ruge was of the view that the center had to orient itself toward the
periphery if it wanted to make intellectual progress. Thus he wrote to Karl
Nauwerck on June 7, 1842: Berlin, though, must imitate the provinces. Bunzel,
Hundt, and Lambrecht, Zentrum und Peripherie, 196.
46. On December 16 Moritz Fleischer, in a letter to Dagobert Oppenheim,
was still spreading the information that Ruge complains . . . that Berlin is now so
little represented [in the Deutsche Jahrbcher]. Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 1 (1978), 361.
47. See Martin Hundt, Junghegelianer in Paris, in Deutsch-franzsischer
Ideentransfer im Vormrz, ed. Bernd Fllner and Gerhard Hhn, Jahrbuch Forum
Vormrz Forschung 82002 (Bielefeld, Ger.: Aisthesis, 2003), 33451.

Part 2

Religion, Politics, Freedom

The Metaphysical and

Theological Commitments
of Idealism: Kant, Hegel,
Hegelianism
Paul Redding

It is sometimes said that changes in academic philosophy in the twentieth

century reflected a process in which a discipline that had been earlier
closely tied to institutional religion became increasingly laicized and secularized.1 In line with this idea, the idealist philosophy that had flowered
within British philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century can look
like the last and ill-fated attempt of a Victorian religious sensibility to
guard itself against a post-Darwinian God-less view of the world and ourselves.2 Such a view generally represents, I believe, the attitudes of many
contemporary philosophers to British philosophy prior to the transforming work of Russell and Moore of about one hundred years ago. Against
the luxuriant and mystical metaphysics of the idealists, fueled by religious
longing, the new philosophy, it is thought, affirmed the brute materiality of the world and its independence from mind, be it divine or human.
A similar development is commonly understood as carrying from
Hegel through the Young Hegelians to the mature Marx. Thus for
Feuerbach, for example, Hegels idealist doctrine that nature or reality
is posited by the idea was merely the rational expression of the theological doctrine that nature is created by God.3 Hegels philosophy had thus
provided a last place of refuge and . . . rational support of theology,
and escaping from this condition (more prison than refuge) required rejecting idealism and confronting the fact that the true relation of thinking and being is simply this. Being is subject and thinking a predicate but a
predicate such as contains the essence of its subject. Thinking comes from
being but being does not come from thinking. Being comes from itself
and through itself.4 But whereas Hegels thought came to be largely

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abandoned within the analytic philosophy that dominated institutional

Anglophone philosophy for much of the twentieth century, core Hegelian ideas were meant to be retained in the new historical version of
materialism. Thus the young Marx complaining that the chief defect
of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that
the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object
or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.5 It was just this active side that had in contradistinction to
materialism been developed abstractly by idealism.6 Marx nevertheless remained at one with Feuerbach as to the fundamentally theological
nature of Hegels idealism and of the consequent need to transform it
into its contrary. Hegel had considered the process of thought as itself
a self-sufficient subject which he named the idea, effectively regarding it as a demiurge which shapes the actual, and of which the actual
was only its outer appearance. But Marxs contrary stance was to take
the ideal as none other than the material (world) transplanted into and
translated within the human mind.7
This view shared by Feuerbach and Marx as to the opposed natures
of materialism and idealism would, I take it, be relatively unopposed
within much contemporary analytic philosophy. Between the materialist
and idealist stances it is usually assumed to be the latter that provides a
place for the God of (more or less) orthodox Christian belief.8 However,
such a view is usually premised upon an assumption about the nature of
idealism that is now widely contested within contemporary Hegel scholarship, an assumption that confuses Hegels idealism with a view that I will
call spiritual realism. A more accurate account of the basic commitments of the idealism that Hegel had taken over from Kant and transformed into his absolutized version may reveal a picture of the relation
of Hegels philosophy to religious thought that is not that captured in
the familiar pictures referred to above. And, if Hegels idealism itself had
not been so straightforwardly alignable with Christian theism, we might
expect that the variety of Hegelian positions after Hegel might not
be so easily arrayed along the familiar left-to-right, atheist-to-theist axis
as commonly assumed. Or so I shall will be suggesting in what follows.
Here we might start by briefly considering ambiguities in the attitude
to religious belief and practice of both Kant and Hegel themselves, ambiguities that also seemed reflected in their actual lives. From there we
will go on to examine the more general issue of the nature of an idealist
conception of God.

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Kant and Hegel on Religious Belief

and Practice
Kant is known, of course, as a critic of the project of pure reason, and
on one popular reading, this critique amounts to a type of metaphysical
skepticism: we can have no knowledge of things in themselves; all we
can know are appearances. As God was meant to be an exemplary supersensible thing in itself, Kants purported skepticism thus extended
to God, and such a skepticism can be thought of as bearing on religious
belief in opposed ways. On the one hand, as in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had attempted to undermine
all traditional proofs in the existence of God,9 and, perhaps more damagingly, to give a quasi-psychological account of the genesis of the very idea
of God.10 On the other hand, the very separation of knowable appearances from unknowable things in themselves had left a place for God, as
well as for the soul, unassailed by the considerations of modern science.
These places were to be filled out in Kants moral philosophy, and thus, in
the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant had famously claimed that while we
could find no rational grounds for a belief in God, it is nevertheless necessary for us to postulate both an existing God and an immortal soul.11
While this latter aspect of Kants attitude to religious belief may be
thought to give solace to the believer, exactly how we are to take this peculiar doctrine of the postulate is itself far from clear. It is not clear, for
example, that being self-conscious about the need to postulate God is
the same as having a belief (a theoretical attitude) in the existence of God.
Consider, moreover, what we know of Kants personal attitudes to religion. From Manfred Kuehns biography, we learn that at the time of his
death Kant was widely regarded with suspicion by the devout among his
fellow Knigsbergians. Kuehn records the observations of Kants funeral
made by Johann Georg Scheffner, Kants oldest surviving friend. You
will not believe the kind of tremor that shook my entire existence when
the first frozen clumps of earth were thrown on his coffin, Scheffner
wrote to a friend, . . . my head and heart still tremble. Kuehn speculates
on the deep causes of these reactions in Scheffner, a pious Christian:
Scheffner was only too much aware of Kants belief that there was nothing to be expected after death. Though in his philosophy he had held
out hope for eternal life and a future state, in his personal life he had
been cold to such ideas. Scheffner had often heard Kant scoff at prayer
and other religious practices. Organized religion filled him with ire. It
was clear to anyone who knew Kant personally that he had no faith in a
personal God. Having postulated God and Immortality, he himself did

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not believe in either. His considered opinion was that such beliefs were
just a matter of individual needs. Kant himself felt no such need.12

The situation is really no clearer in the case of Hegel. On the surface, Hegels attitude to religion seemed both clear and affirmative. In
his series of lectures on the philosophy of religion given at the University
of Berlin in 1827, for example, he claimed that the content of philosophy, its need and interest, is wholly in common with that of religion.
The object of religion, like that of philosophy, is the eternal truth, God
and nothing but God and the explication of God,13 and on the surface
this seems to be in obvious opposition to the efforts of Kant to separate
theoretical philosophy from religious belief. However, this is not as obvious as it first appears. While the content of philosophy for Hegel may be
the same as that of religion, God, to so describe that content is to do so
from the perspective of religion rather than philosophy. But from the
perspective of philosophy this content may indeed be unrecognizable to
those who relate to this content solely from the perspective of religion.
For Hegel, effectively extending Kants account of the role of symbolism and analogy in religion, religions make present, in a type of picturing or narrative form, a content that philosophy presents conceptually,
and Hegel is unambiguous about which of these forms of presentation
is the most adequate from an epistemic point of view. In short, philosophy can give an account of the truths that religions encode, and it can
give an account of the limitations that inhere within the form in which
they encode them. On the other hand, religion can tell us nothing further about the truths that philosophy conveys, nor can it convey any real
sense of the limitations of philosophical presentation. Thus Hegel was
resolutely opposed, for example, to the efforts of the Romantic philosopher F. D. E. Schleiermacher to show that religion conveyed a sense of
the utter dependence of the thinker on existence conceived as a whole,
or God. For Hegel, this assumption simply testified to an inadequate approach to philosophy and an inadequate grasp of the nature of conceptual thought, not to the limitations of conceptual thought, per se.
Furthermore, Hegels personal relations to religion were themselves
ambiguous. In his own early theological writings he was critical of orthodox Christianity and clearly attracted to the aesthetic paganism that
had gripped German high culture in the wake of Winckelmanns classicist retrieval of ancient aesthetics in the mid-eighteenth century and the
popularization of Spinozist pantheism in the 1780s.14 By the time of the
mature philosophy he professed from the chair in philosophy at the University of Berlin in the 1820s, his attitude to Christianity, the consummate religion, had undoubtedly become more positive. However, exactly

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what it implied for the question of belief remains controversial. As the respectable, middle-class family man that he had become in Berlin, Hegel
outwardly led the life of a Lutheran, but this image seemed out of step
with what he taught about religion in the lecture hall. Thus, it is said that
reading her husbands posthumously published lectures on the philosophy of religion had caused the devout and pious widow, Marie Hegel,
extreme distress.15
Indeed, the unorthodox nature of Hegels attitude to Christianity
had attracted attention from the time of his arrival at Berlin in 1818.
Only a few years after his appointment, Hegel had started to attract accusations of pantheism and, a little later, atheism from more orthodox
thinkers. Even to his closest associates, Hegels mature attitudes to religious belief would seem to have been far from clear. When the smoldering issue of the implication of his philosophy for religion erupted after
his death, both Left Hegelians like Ludwig Feuerbach, who saw the
truth of Hegels God as no more than an anthropological projection of
the human spirit, and their right opponents, for whom Hegels philosophy was nothing less than a full-blooded form of theism, could claim to
represent the essential character of Hegelian thought.

Idealism, Metaphysics, and God

From the evidence of the views of Kant and Hegel, then, it would seem
that the assumption that idealism as opposed to philosophical naturalism was straightforwardly accommodating to religious belief is questionable at least. Why, then, has it been assumed for so long that idealism
flourished in the nineteenth century because of its ability to accommodate orthodox religion? And what might we actually say about the attitude to religion from within idealism? Here we cannot avoid looking
at the issue of idealist metaphysics in general, for the assumption that
idealism is particularly accommodating to Christian theism clearly flows
from assumptions about its metaphysics. However, I suggest, here we immediately encounter confusion and misapprehension about the commitments of idealism, especially within Anglophone philosophy, because
of the tendency to model idealism on the approach of one philosopher
in particular, George Berkeley, bishop of Cloyne.
The idea of Berkeley as providing a prototype of idealism may be a
conception most prominent in English-speaking philosophy, but clearly
we cannot hold Anglophones entirely responsible. Kants transcendental idealism was, on its first appearance, linked by its German critics to

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the philosophy of Berkeley, and Kant himself, in the Refutation of Idealism added to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, held
Berkeley as a central representative of the idealism that he was there
refuting. Becoming clear about the proclivities of idealist philosophies
of religion demands that we get clear on what idealism as a philosophy is
and what its metaphysical commitments are, and in the first instance this
requires bringing out the deep differences separating idealism from the
philosophy that Berkeley referred to as immaterialism.
In a letter to J. S. Beck on December 4, 1792, Kant helpfully clarified the relation of his idealism to Berkeleys philosophy. Countering the
claim of those who had identified his critical idealism with the philosophy of Berkeley, Kant explains: For I speak of ideality in reference to
the form of representation while they construe it as ideality with respect
to the matter, i.e., ideality of the object and its existence itself.16 By appealing to the distinction between form and matter (a very un-Berkeleian
distinction), Kant, we might say, describes his philosophy as involving a
reversal of Berkeleys idealism. As a material idealistan idealist about
matterBerkeley had reduced matter to ideas subjectively conceived,
and so reduced matter to mind, and importantly and ultimately, to the
mind of God. While Berkeley called himself an immaterialist, the nonprivative description given by a later editor, Alexander Frazer, is perhaps
more appropriate: Berkeley was basically a type of realist, a spiritual
realist.17 That is, Berkeley affirmed as ultimately real immaterial spirit in
both its finite and infinite varieties, the soul and God.
Such an affirmation of the existence of an immaterial divine being
was hardly surprising for an early eighteenth-century philosopher, let
alone a bishop. Spiritual realism had been the default position in early
modern philosophy, even among natural philosophers such as Newton,
who believed that God had preexisted the material world and created it
ex nihilo at some particular time.18 While affirming the material world,
Newton, like other theists, nevertheless made it, with respect to both its
existence and its properties, ontologically dependent on spiritGod.
Berkeley was simply more radical in his portrayal of this relation. God did
not need to have created something beyond spirit, something that we erroneously, on Berkeleys view, conceive of as matter, in order for everything that we experience as existing to exist. Moreover, Berkeley did this
on the basis of principles firmly rooted in that part of his philosophy
that was particularly anathema to the later self-describing idealistshis
empiricism. Neither space nor time is able to be perceived, and so according to Berkeley, we have no reason to believe in their reality. For
his part, Newton had required something like the idea of God as a spaceoccupying immaterial being for the metaphysical foundations of his own

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natural philosophy, because he needed a counter for the widespread

non-realist attitude to the space and time that were among the primitives
of his theory.
According to this non-realist or nullibilist view of space, for example, which goes back at least to Aristotle, space is itself nothing, it is
just what is left, as it were, when some thing is removed: it is nothing
rather than something. But Newton required space itself to be real and
independent of material things in space and, moreover, to have determinate properties. Seeming to follow the ideas of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More,19 he thus made space and time themselves attributes
of a nonmaterial, infinitely extended God. But to Berkeley, the thesis
that God was extended in space and time was a dangerous concession to
materialism.
Kants transcendental idealism had itself originated against the
background of such disputes about the nature of space and time. Like
Berkeley, Kant rejected the independent reality of space and time on
the basis that neither space nor time per se could be experienced. But
in contrast to Berkeley, and more like Newton, Kant acknowledged that
space and time had determinate forms: space was three-dimensional,
and time unidirectional. How, then, could nothing have such properties? Kants solution was to be an idealist about these formal propertiesthey were a function of the way that the mind represents external
things in sensory experience. Here Kant built on Leibniz, who too had
regarded space and time as idealities rather than realities with per se
existence.20 From this starting point that was, in different ways, contrary
to the interpretations of space and time of both Berkeley and Newton,
Kant drew significantly different conclusions to doctrines that they had
in common. Like Berkeley, he did not believe in the reality of space and
time, but did not question the reality of that which seemed to exist in
them. Like Newton, he believed in the reality of material substances, but
denied the reality of the space and time they appeared to be in. Moreover, as a formal idealist, Kant could be an idealist about those things
about which Berkeley and Newton were both realistscrucially, he could
be an idealist about the soul and God, the objects which, together with
the world considered as a totality, constituted the traditional objects of
metaphysica specialis.21 And he could be an idealist, here, because he was
an idealist about that from which the ideas of these objects were generated, the formal aspects of our own cognitive apparatus.
The very form-content distinction that had allowed Kant to differentiate his views from Berkeleys in fact signals another more general
sense in which his outlook differs from that of Berkeley. As his use of such
a distinction suggests, Kants philosophical formation had been funda-

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mentally an Aristotelian one,22 and behind Aristotles distinction stood

Platos doctrine of forms or ideas. These general Aristotelian and Platonic features that were present in Kants work were even more developed
in Hegel,23 but in contrast, Berkeley clearly belonged within a tradition
that was rigorously opposed to this stancethe nominalist tradition.24
The combination of Platonist and Aristotelian features in Kants
philosophy that were heightened in Hegel suggests that a far more appropriate starting point for understanding their forms of idealism is the
philosophy of Leibniz rather than Berkeley. Leibniz had constructed his
monadology on a Platonic and Aristotelian basis and had also, opposing Newton, insisted on the ideality of spatiotemporal form. Moreover,
Leibniz had been attracted to just those elements of Aristotelian substantial forms of which Berkeley was the radical critic, and had been
intensely critical of the other side of the nominalism of thinkers like
Ockham and Hobbestheir voluntarism. Voluntarism, in which Gods
omnipotence had been stressed, had originated as a distinct theological
position in the later medieval period that was antagonistic to forms of
Christian Platonism and Aristotelianism.25 To think that human reason
could, without divine aid, cognize ideas or essencesrational structures
to which even Gods thinking had to adheremanifested the sin of pride,
and heretically imposed limits on Gods omnipotence. Thus Ockham,
for example, had declared that God himself could be held to no rational
laws other than the law of noncontradiction.
Berkeleys voluntarism was apparent in his positing of two different
ontological kinds: Thing or being is the most general name of all, comprehends under it two kinds entirely distinct and heterogeneous, and
which have nothing in common but the name, to wit, spirits and ideas,
and the fundamental distinction between these two types of thing is that
the former are active, indivisible substances: the latter are inert, fleeting, dependent beings, which subsist not by themselves, but are supported by, or
exist in minds or spiritual substances.26 This identification of spirit with
activity had been expressed forcefully in Berkeleys earlier notebooks in
terms of an identification of the spirit with the will: The Spirit the Acting thingthat which is Soul and God is the Will alone. The Ideas are
effects, impotent things.27

The Ambiguities of Kants Formal Idealism

Once Kants relations to Berkeley have been clarified, and his idealism
distinguished from spiritual realism, the question of the issue of God for
idealism becomes increasingly puzzling. The question, What is it to be

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an idealist (rather than a realist) about God? cannot be answered, I

suggest, without becoming clearer about the metaphysical consequences
of Kants idealistic turn. These consequences were explored after Kant
by the German idealists, and in particular by Hegel.
There is no doubt that there are many apparent contradictions that
plague the Critique of Pure Reason, and one of them concerns Kants differing attitudes to the possibility of metaphysical knowledge itself. The parts
of the first Critique that speak most directly to the modern philosophical
reader are those apparently epistemological parts in which Kant attempts
to give an account of the conditions of our knowledge. All we can know
are things grasped relative to our finite mode of knowing, and this rules
out a knowledge of things as they are independent of us, things in themselves. I will call this metaphysically skeptical stance Weak Transcendental Idealism (Weak TI). On this interpretation, transcendental
idealism has particular theological implications, because metaphysical
skepticism, as we have seen, allows a place for God as an unknowable
thing in itself. But Weak TI is not the only way in which the basic direction of Kants transcendental turn can be, and was, interpreted.
In Kants first Critique we occasionally glimpse a conception of idealist metaphysics that seems in stark contrast with the skeptical pessimistic approach. For example, in the Preface to the first edition, Kant
says of metaphysics that it is the only one of all the sciences that may
promise that little but unified effort . . . will complete it. . . . Nothing
here can escape us, because what reason brings forth entirely out of itself cannot be hidden, but is brought to light by reason itself as soon
as reasons common principle has been discovered.28 This clearly reflects an approach to metaphysics that is anything but skeptical. Scientific
metaphysics is possible and completable, and here nothing can escape
reason because in metaphysics reason is concerned entirely with its own
products. I will call the stance suggested by this passage Strong Transcendental Idealism (or Strong TI), and the passage itself brings out the
source of the apparent contradiction concerning the having of metaphysical knowledge: metaphysics means something different in both
cases.29 In Weak TI, metaphysics means what philosophers had traditionally taken it to mean: a knowledge of how the world ultimately and really
is, independently of the way in which we know it in sensory experience.
But Strong TI urges us to think of metaphysics in a different way: metaphysics should be thought of as the science of what reason produces out
of its own activity. From this point of view, traditional pre-scientific
metaphysicians had an erroneous conception of their own activity. This
seems to be the frame of mind reflected, for example, in Kants claim to
understand Plato, surely the paradigm of a metaphysician, better than he
understood himself.30

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Kants ambiguity about the status of metaphysics is central, I believe, for correctly understanding Hegels relation to Kant. In short, it
might be said that Hegel pursues the project of Strong TI and is critical
of those aspects of Kant representing Weak TI. Moreover, Hegel attempts
to diagnose the source of the ambiguity in Kant: Kant had reduced reason to the workings of subjective finite consciousness. But rather than
imply the existence of some infinite divine consciousness along the lines
of Berkeleys or Newtons God, Hegel appealed to a type of rationality
embodied in historically evolving communities as that which could not be
reduced to the operations of a type of isolated Cartesian mind. Moreover, Hegel saw this subjectivist aspect of Kants philosophy of which he
was critical as closely connected with Kants idea of Godeffectively,
the orthodox Christian idea of God. And while, contra Kant, Hegel insisted that we can know God, the Strong TI behind this claim produced
a conception of God, and of the mode of that Gods existence, that was
far from an orthodox Christian one. And if it is the case that the idea of
God is generated out of reasons own operations, why should its content
be denied to rational subjects?

From Morals to Metaphysics: Hegels

Critique of the Kantian Idea of God
As is commonly pointed out, in his earliest writings Hegel had employed
the type of fundamentally moral interpretation of the nature of religious content found in Kants writings on religion,31 but by the early
1800s he had started to articulate his dissatisfaction with Kants particular
understanding of morality and the weakly transcendental idealist metaphysics that he saw as accompanying it. Here we see the influence of an
otherwise sympathetic critic of Kants moral philosophy who had given
early expression to Hegels worries: Friedrich Schiller, who had aired his
concerns about the antagonistic relation within Kants moral philosophy
between rational duty on the one hand and sentiment and inclination in
works such as On Grace and Dignity (1793) and On the Aesthetic Education
of Man (179495).
Schiller had argued that reason and morality as conceived by Kant
may not just be indifferent to the individual corporeal human being but
may be antagonistic. Appealing to the actual life led by subjects, both individually and collectively, and with clear reference to the course of revolutionary events unfolding in France, Schiller warned of the dangers of the
external imposition of a static, formalistic conception of reason upon a

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living body. Kant may have wanted to keep his philosophy free from the
content of prevailing religious belief, but as commentators such as John
Rawls, Frederick Beiser, and Richard Bernstein have pointed out, his
moral philosophy especially bears the stamp of a Christian, and in particular an Augustinian, approach to morality.32 What Kant shared with
Augustine, the exclusive focus on the human will in matters of morality,
was expressed clearly at the start of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of
Morals: It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed
even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except
a good will.33
It is perhaps to overstate the case to say, as some commentators
do, that Augustine invented the concept of the will, but this at least captures the extent of Augustines departure from the moral thought of the
Greeks. This departure was first and foremost established at the level of
theology. Albrecht Dihle has pointed out, for example, that even within
the monotheistic pagan theology of later antiquity, God, while having
the desire to create and govern the universe . . . does not create ex nihilo. He moulds what was without shape, he animates what was without
life, he brings to reality what was merely a potential. And, above all, he
does not transcend the order which embraces himself as well as his creatures.34 But the biblical cosmology that Augustine was to attempt to synthesize with Platonic thought was completely different. Augustines God
of the Old Testament was a transcendent God who created the world in
an act of will, and in Augustines version, did so on the basis of ideas in
the divine mind. Moreover, the Old Testament God within whom Augustine located Platos ideas was a God whose will was expressed in the
form of laws, as in the story of the Decalogue, and again, as Remi Brague
has pointed out, such an idea of divine law as issuing from some act of
divine legislation was a notion almost foreign to both Greek philosophy
and Greek religion.35
I want to suggest that it was this Augustinian, peculiarly voluntaristic version of Platonism implicit within Kants thought that would have
aroused the ire of Swabians like Schiller and Hegel. As Lawrence Dickey
has pointed out, a common feature of the form of Protestantism of the
Duchy of Wrttemberg within which Schiller and Hegel were raised was
a Pelagian, anti-Augustinian outlook that was generally in line with the
outlook of the German Aufklrung.36 This tradition, it is commonly said,
tended toward anti-authoritarian and practically oriented, eschatological alternatives to orthodox Lutheranism. In contrast to the orthodoxy,
in which Augustines kingdom of God was located in an otherworldly
beyond, in the Swabian variant it was regarded as achievable on earth.37
The form of Christian Neoplatonism on which this tradition drew, with

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its idea of the world as permeated by the processes of nous, had encouraged political philosophies that fed republican movements as in the
English Civil War.38 In contrast, the more orthodox Augustinian theology, in which order was seen as imposed on mere brute matter, was often
invoked to counter the self-organizing conceptions of community found
among the republicans.
These Swabian versions of Lutheran thought, apparently influenced by the German mystical theologies of late medieval figures like
Meister Eckhart and early modern ones like Nicholas of Cusa and Jacob Bhme, are said to have been heavily Neoplatonist in character, and
often skirted close to the type of heresy that was in the early eighteenth
century to gain the description pantheism. Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, an influential eighteenth-century preacher active in the Duchy of
Wrttemberg, had described God as the purest activity, in which he is
that which acts, the activity itself, and that which is acted.39 There was
no gap between God and nature, claimed Oetinger; God was the vital
center of every creature, life itself.40 For thinkers coming from such a
background, there was much to be objected to in Kants approach to the
topics of reason and God.
In Kants Critique of Pure Reason we find a revealing comment which
sheds light on his very different understanding of Plato. In his account
of Platos ideas in treating the ideals of pure reason, he attributes to
Plato the notion of a divine mind within which the ideas exist. An
ideal, Kant says, was to Plato, an idea in the divine understanding.41 But
as the editors of a recent English edition of Kants Critique of Pure Reason point out, the idea of a divine mind as container of the ideas did
not originate until the syncretistic Platonism from the period of the
Middle Academy and was later adopted by Platonists as diverse as Philo
of Alexandria, Plotinus and Saint Augustine, and became fundamental
to later Christian interpretations of Platonism.42 Moreover, even with
Plotinus and Proclus, it is contestable that the one that is the object of
pagan Neoplatonic philosophy and theology can be equated with what
we normally regarded as a mind.43 It had been the tension between Augustines voluntaristic idea of God as creator of the world ex nihilo and
the Neoplatonic conception of the emanation of the world that had returned in the form of the disputes between the voluntarism of medieval
nominalists such as Ockham and Neoplatonic opponents of voluntarism
such as Meister Eckhart. Remnants of these same disputes, I suggest,
emerged in the context of the reception of Kants idealist reshaping of
philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century, when Platonist ideas
underwent a revival in the German states.
In his early essay Faith and Knowledge from 1802, we find He-

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gel explicitly critical of this combination of theological voluntarism and

Weak TI in Kant. At the outset of the essay he notes that recently the
opposition of faith and knowledge had been transferred into the field
of philosophy itself.44 What Hegel was claiming was that Kants unknowable thing-in-itself was the result of an incorporation into philosophy of
the God of faith, unknowable to reason. Reason, Hegel goes on, having in this way become mere intellect, acknowledges its own nothingness
by placing that which is better than it in a faith outside and above itself, as
a beyond. This is what has happened in the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and
Fichte. Philosophy has made itself the handmaid of a faith once more.45
This is a criticism of Kant that is clearly intended to be in the spirit
of Kants attempt to liberate philosophy from the givens of religion, even
if it turns this spirit against the letter of Kants transcendental idealism.
Thus, a few lines earlier Hegel had claimed that Reason had already
gone to seed in and for itself when it envisaged religion merely as something positive and not idealistically.46 Presumably, this is a trap to which
Kant had fallen prey. In his treatment of religion Kant had merely assumed the voluntarists assumptions about the nature of God, assumptions that were then reflected philosophically in the transcendence and
unknowability of such a thing in itself. Furthermore, the clear suggestion seems to be that in this Kant was being unfaithful to his own idealismthe Strong TI at the heart of Kants transcendental turn.
These brief comments at the outset of Hegels philosophical career, I believe, present in a highly condensed way an attitude to Kants
critical philosophy that was to persist throughout his subsequent writings. From his early theological writings, Hegel had been critical of the
positivity of orthodox Christianity, and had criticized such religions
by appealing to natural vlkisch religions, such as those of the ancient
Greeks, where acceptance of the gods somehow fitted naturally with
everyday experience and was not in need of the artificial enforcement of
an externally imposed dogma. But any such type of ahistorical advocacy
of the norms of ancient society could not withstand the growing awareness of the distinctively modern reality that emerged from the aesthetic writings of Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel. Hegel came to believe
that there was something about the Christian God of modernity that reflected a distinctly modern experience, just as the longing of Romantic
poesy reflected that experience. But in this Hegel did not simply become
reconciled to a transcendent Christian God, as had Friedrich Schlegel,
for example, who while starting as a pantheist converted to Catholicism.
Rather, Hegels enlightened criticism of positivity remained. And since
the transcendental skepticism at the heart of Kants Weak TI was itself a
reflection of this same positivity, Hegel was critical of that dimension of

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Kants philosophy. But what was left when one eliminated the unknowable thing-in-itself from Kants philosophy was still meant to be taken in
the spirit of critical philosophy.
I have suggested that from the perspective of Strong TI, the objects
of metaphysics are no longer hidden to reason because they are products of reason. If this truly reflects Hegels attitude to metaphysics, then
it must imply that God is similarly, for him, an entity that exists not in
itself, and so potentially hidden from human cognition, but exists necessarily in relation to the rational capacities in which finite humans share.
God prototypically has the form of being in and for itself, and for Hegel such for-selfness requires being for another. To exist as God, God
requires finite human minds who acknowledge such a God.47
Does this mean that the left or atheist Hegelians were correct,
and that Hegel was basically an atheist and humanist for whom God was
simply an ideal projection? This position, it would seem, could only be
half right. For Hegel there could be no independently existing God of traditional theism, and so this description captures Hegels critique of theological realism. But it could not, I suggest, capture the full extent of his
idealism. Thus an account such as Feuerbachs erroneously presupposes a
human essence from which the idea of God could be a projection, but for
Hegel, the human essence was itself to be treated idealistically rather
than realistically. Moreover, appeals to atheism will miss the mark if
the idea of God to which one denies existence is itself regarded as the
source of the problem. For an idealist it is not the existence of God that
is crucial but the idea of God operative in ones cognitive economy. Hegel could not be an orthodox humanist or an atheist for the same reason
that he could not be an orthodox theist. His thought, it would seem, fits
into neither traditional category.
In Hegels idealist metaphysics of spirit, the existence of individuals as free and rational beings is dependent on their mutual recognition
of each other as free and rational beings.48 Considered in abstraction
from such practices, the historical development of which he charts in the
Phenomenology of Spirit, we are just members of another animal species,
mere elements of external nature. Moreover, implicit in our recognition of each other as free and rational beings is an implicit recognition
of the norms of freedom and rationality to which we hold ourselves and
each other. Such norms cannot be considered as merely equivalent to
descriptive generalizations about what we do in our practices, and this
is where God is located in Hegels account. To the extent that I affirm
my own reality as a being subject to norms, I am justified in affirming
the separable reality of God as the representable locus of these norms.
However, metaphysicallymeant in the conventional sense of what is

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there independently of our sense-based understandingthere is nothing

outside these practices that could correspond to these identities which
we affirm: no I, no you, no we, and, finally, no God. But this does
not signal, as it would for naturalists, that there are no such things at all.49
In the strongly transcendental idealist sense, metaphysics is not about
what is there anyway, but rather what reason brings forth entirely out
of itself, and these entities are to be considered elements within those
human practices in which we can recognize rationality.50
Reason, having a fundamentally normative status, is something to
which we may (or may fail to) commit ourselves, and when we do, for
Hegel, God is a name for that to which we are committing ourselves.
Like Proclus, Hegel might be said to have a Platonic theology, but it is a
form of Platonism in which, as in Aristotle, there is no separable realm of
forms. But in contrast to Aristotle, Hegels theology insists on the incarnation of God in man, symbolized in the divinity of Jesus. Thus Hegel might be said to have been a Christian Aristotelianized Platonist, but
his is a form of Christianity in which, in line with the thesis of Strong
TI, there is no transcendent place for the God of Augustine. And
from the point of view of most orthodox Christian thought in the nineteenth century (and since), this will hardly be recognizable as a form of
Christianity, indeed, as a form of religious thought at all.
In the play of claims and counterclaims about the essence of Hegels philosophy as made by his critical appropriators after his death,
many would seem to still be based on presuppositions that had already
been subject to Hegels radical critique. I have questioned only one, the
assumption seemingly shared by many left and right followers alike, that
a theistic religious commitment has a natural link to the idealist dimension of Hegels thought. In exploring the various attempts by members
of the Hegelian school after Hegels death to apply his ideas to the rapidly changing historical situation, we should perhaps keep in mind an
additional potential contributor, Hegel himself, speaking on his own account. This may still be a Hegel not entirely reducible to any of the Hegels recognized by his diverse followers.
Notes
1. For example, Gilbert Ryle, Introduction, in The Revolution in Philosophy,
ed. A. J. Ayer (London: Macmillan, 1956), 111.
2. For an explicit account, see David Stove, Idealism: A Victorian HorrorStory (Part One), in The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
3. Ludwig Feuerbach, Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philos-

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ophy, in The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich (Atlantic

Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1983), 167.
4. Ibid.
5. Karl Marx, Concerning Feuerbach, first thesis, in Early Writings, intro.
Lucio Colletti, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth,
Eng.: Penguin Books, 1975), 421.
6. Ibid.
7. Karl Marx, Afterword to the second edition of Das Kapital, vol. 1, in
Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels-Werke, vol. 23 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968), 27 (my translation).
8. In light of what we see below, it is significant that Marx in the quotation
above refers to the Platonic demiurge and not the Christian God in explicating
Hegels idealism.
9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Transcendental Dialectic, bk. 2, chap. 3, The Ideal of Pure Reason.
10. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A583/B611n.
11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5:12425 (pagination for
Kants works other than the Critique of Pure Reason will be given by volume and
page numbers from Kants Gesammelte Schriften [Berlin: Preussische Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 1900 ], which are included in the margins of the translations.
12. Manfred Khn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 23.
13. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition,
The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988), 78. Similarly, Hegel says in his lectures on aesthetics that philosophy
has no other object but God and so is essentially rational theology (Hegels Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox [Oxford: Clarendon, 1975], 1:149).
Philosophy, along with art and religion, belongs to what he refers to as Absolute Spirit, and these three realms having this same contentGoddiffer
only in the forms in which they bring home to consciousness their object, the
Absolute.
14. There has been dispute over the degree to which his early theological
writings were anti-Christian. That Hegels early views were based in a criticism
of Christianity that appealed to the social life of the classical polis was forcefully
put forward by Georg Lukcs in The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relation Between Dialectics and Economics, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1975).
The anti-Christian impulse of the early writings is challenged by more recent
scholarship, however, which stresses the role of Hegels unorthodox form of
Swabian Christian belief. See especially Lawrence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 17701807 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The relevance of Hegels early understanding of Christianity
will be returned to below.
15. Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 577.

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16. Immanuel Kant, Correspondence, ed. and trans. A. Zweig (Cambridge,

Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 445.
17. See Alexander Campbell Frazer, Berkeley and Spiritual Realism (London:
Constable, 1908).
18. For a general account of the theological dimension of much early modern natural philosophy, see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986). On Newtons theology, see, for example, James E. Force,
Newtons God of Dominion: The Unity of Newtons Theological, Scientific and
Political Thought, in Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newtons
Theology, ed. James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer,
1990).
19. On Mores influence on Newton, see, for example, Alexandre Koyr,
From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1957), 15968; Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space
in Physics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), 4047 and 108
12; and Edward Grant, Much Ado About Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from
the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 1981), 24445 and 25254.
20. Kant paraphrases critical idealism here as the principle of ideality of
space and time (Kant, Correspondence, 445), but the point could be equally made
with respect to the conceptual form of objects.
21. Kants criticisms of the conception of the soul as a type of immaterial
substance are found in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason in the Transcendental
Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason.
22. See, for example, Giorgio Tonelli, Conditions in Knigsberg and the
Making of Kants Philosophy, in Bewusst sein: Gerhard Funke zu eigen, ed. Alexius J.
Bucher et al. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1975).
23. On the Platonistic context of German idealism from the late eighteenth century, see Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron, Platon et lidalisme allemand (1770
1830) (Paris: Beauchesne, 1979); Werner Beierwaltes, Platonismus und Idealismus
(Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004); and Burkhard Mojsisch and
Orrin F. Summerell, eds., Platonismus im Idealismus: Die platonische Tradition in der
klassischen deutschen Philosophie (Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2003).
24. In fact, Berkeley was perhaps one of the most extreme nominalists
to have ever written. On the nominalist dimension to his approach, see, for example, Tom Stoneham, Berkeleys World: An Examination of the Three Dialogues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
25. A good account of the significance of the medieval voluntarist tradition for later philosophy is provided by Michael Allen Gillespie in Nihilism Before
Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and The Theological Origins
of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
26. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,
ed. Jonathan Dancy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 89.
27. George Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A. A.
Luce and T. E. Jessop (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 194857), 1:87. Berke-

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ley seems later to have tempered this earlier strong identification of spirit and
will with one in which understanding plays an equal role; however, this issue
remains unresolved in his philosophy.
28. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Axx.
29. Sebastian Gardner in Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (London:
Routledge, 1999) points out this ambiguity of Kants use of metaphysics and
draws from it a distinction between analytic and idealist ways of interpreting
the first Critique, with similarities to the distinction between what I call weak
and strong TI (22 and 3033). I have developed this further in Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche (London: Routledge, 2009).
30. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A314/B370.
31. See, for example, Nicholas Walker, Hegel and the Gospel According
to Immanuel, in Hegel: New Directions, ed. Katerina Deligiorgi (Chesham, Eng.:
Acumen, 2006).
32. John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 294; Frederick C. Beiser, Moral Faith and the
Highest Good, in The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, ed.
Paul Guyer (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 594; and Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil: Kant at War with Himself, in Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Maria Pia Lara (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001), 78.
33. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary
Gregor, intro. Christine M. Korsgaard (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 4:393. Jerome Schneewind describes Kants moral philosophy as
combining aspects of voluntarist and anti-voluntarist traditions, with the notion
that equates the good with that which is willed by a will governed by the moral
law as a clearly voluntarist inheritance. In his early attempts at theodicy Kant
worked with the voluntarist idea that to be good is simply to be what God wills.
He gave up on the thought that God creates all possibilities; but he never abandoned the account of goodness inchoately expressed in the early fragments. In
the mature theory this point emerges in Kants identification of practical reason with a free will governed by the moral law. J. B. Schneewind, The Invention
of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 512.
34. Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 4.
35. Rmi Brague, The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea, trans.
Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007). Thus Brague
claims that for the Greeks, the gods are not the source of law. A god never issues
a commandment (22). There was an exception, however, in Plato, especially in
The Laws, in Collected Dialogues Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 2627.
36. Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit.
37. Thus Dickey points out: This tradition . . . took ethical and eschatological elements from widely divergent sources in the history of Christian thought
and formed from them an anthropology of fallen and restored man that allowed

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forindeed, demandedmans participation in civil life as well as in his own

salvation. The thrust of the tradition was to show that through ethical activism
man could transform the world in accordance with Gods wishes and, by so doing,
make significant progress not only toward transcending his own fallen nature,
but toward establishing the Kingdom of God on earth as well. Ibid., 12.
38. Thus radical republican sects during the English Civil War had typically been attracted to these theologies. Indeed, the writings of Jacob Bhme
were translated quickly into English and read widely within radical republican
communities. See Serge Hutin, Les disciples anglais de Jacob Boehme aux XVII et
XVIIIe sicles (Paris: ditions deNol, 1960). A good account of the theological
dimensions of the opposing sides of the English Civil War is given in Margaret C.
Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans, 2nd rev.
ed. (Lafayette, La.: Cornerstone Books, 2006).
39. From Oetingers Versuch einer Auflsung der 177 Fragen aus Jakob
Boehme (1777), quoted in F. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism During the Eighteenth Century (Leiden, Neth.: E. J. Brill, 1973), 11213.
40. Stoeffler, German Pietism, 114.
41. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A568/B596.
42. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, editorial notes, 746n86. It is notable that
Platos craftsman god of the Timaeus neither possesses the ideas in the mind
nor is an omnipotent creatorlike all craftsmen, this god is limited by the given
materials he has to work with. Neither is Platos god an object of worship, but
one of emulation.
43. This is argued, for example, by Miles Burnyeat, Idealism and Greek
Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed, Philosophical Review 91
(1982): 340.
44. G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 55.
45. Ibid., 56.
46. Ibid., 55 (emphasis added).
47. The notion that in some sense God was as dependent on his creatures
as they were on him was present in the sermons of Meister Eckhart, a thinker
for whom Hegel had a high regard, and had been associated with the heresies
of the free spirit movement in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. See, for
example, Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300
1500) (New York: Crossroad, 2005), chap. 2, Mysticism and Heresy: The Problem of the Free Spirit.
48. I have argued for this in Hegels Hermeneutics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).
49. We might think of such entities as having the same sort of ontology as,
say, human rights. It does not make sense to think that something exists entirely
independently of the practices in which we ascribe rights to others and ourselves,
and would survive our ceasing such practices of ascription. Rights in this sense
are idealities but not fictions.
50. In more Platonic terms, one might say practices which participate in
reason itself.

Hegels Philosophy of Religion

and the Question of Right
and Left Hegelianism
Jon Stewart

The labels traditionally used to characterize the Hegelian schools of the

1830s and 40s have long contributed to an oversimplification and distortion of this period in the history of ideas. By dividing schools into
Right and Left (and sometimes Center) Hegelians, and by distinguishing members of these schools from another group of thinkers designated as Hegel critics, intellectual historians have provided a scheme
by which the entire period can be neatly ordered and understood. While
these broad categories are very familiar, the primary texts of many of the
figures involved remain unexplored.
These categories, which have long been used to describe philosophical and religious thought in the nineteenth century, may have lulled
scholars into complacency, and discouraged more exacting research into
the period. Many important figures of the day are no longer studied:
among them, I. H. Fichte, F. C. Baur, C. H. Weisse, Philipp Marheineke,
Friedrich Gschel, and J. E. Erdmann. One reason for their obscurity, I
submit, is the incorrect belief that they were simply interchangeable examples of the categories to which they have been assigned. This prejudice has led to a failure to grasp their theoretical importance, and their
relevance for current philosophical and religious thinking. These thinkers were in fact quite heterogeneous, and offer numerous insights that
remain pertinent to issues such as secularism, materialism, relativism,
and subjectivism. In confronting the difficult interpretative questions regarding Hegels philosophy of religion, they effectively anticipated the
main issues of the discussion in philosophical theology over the next
150 years. Thus, a return to them can be a fruitful investment for one
seeking insight into the subsequent development of theology and the
philosophy of religion. But this return, if it is to be meaningful, must

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be accompanied by a reevaluation of the basic categories used to understand the period.

Although it can be argued that divisions in the Hegelian school
were already taking shape in Hegels own lifetime, the designations of
Right, Left, and Center Hegelianism were introduced subsequently.1
These terms appeared in a polemical treatise by the theologian David
Friedrich Strauss (18081874) in which he attempted to defend his controversial work, The Life of Jesus,2 against its critics.3 They have since been
adopted more or less uncritically by later historians of ideas, and only
recently have scholars begun to call them into question.
Strauss employed the terms to distinguish different responses to
the question of Christology. He explains:
There are three possible answers to the question of whether and to
what extent the idea of the unity of divine and human nature proved
the gospel to be history: the concept proves either the entirety of the
history, merely a part of it, or none of it. If each of these answers and
directions were indeed represented by a branch of the Hegelian school,
then, using the traditional analogy, the first direction, as standing closest to the long-established system, could be named the right, the third
direction named the left, and the second named the centre.4

Given their extensive subsequent use, what is striking here is that these
distinctions were originally applied to a single, very specific issue.
Subsequently, however, they were extended to other debates and
used to summarize much broader tendencies. Right Hegelianism was
taken to be the view that Hegels philosophy was consistent with orthodox Christian doctrines, such as the immortality of the soul, the personhood of God, and the divinity of Christ, and indeed that it provided them
a philosophical anchoring. By contrast, Left Hegelianism was taken to be
the claim that Hegels philosophy undermined or demystified Christianity by showing it to be an inadequate form of knowing. While this later
formulation of the distinction is clearly related to Strausss, it is considerably broader and vaguer.

Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion

In the years immediately following Hegels death, the main points of
contention involved the interpretation of his philosophy of religion.

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Even during Hegels own lifetime, his philosophy was attacked for being
inconsistent with Christianity. These initial debates were originally carried out on a rather limited textual basis since, prior to the publication
of his posthumous Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion in 1832, there were
only scattered treatments of religion and religious topics in his published works.
Hegel received a theological education at the Tbingen Seminary,
and shortly after his graduation he wrote several essays on religion, which
were only discovered and published at the beginning of the twentieth
century.5 These include his pieces The Positivity of the Christian Religion and The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate. After he had settled in
Jena, Hegel wrote an important article entitled Faith and Knowledge,
which was published in 1802 in the journal that he edited together with
F. W. J. Schelling, the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie.6 This work offers a
critique of the philosophy of religion of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte. Hegels first systematic account of religion appears in the Religion chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), in which he quickly runs through
Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Egyptian polytheism, Greek polytheism, and
finally Christianity. Here he gives a historical-conceptual account of the
development of these religions in a way that anticipates his later Lectures
on the Philosophy of Religion. When Hegel came to treat Absolute Spirit
in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817, 2nd ed. 1827, 3rd
ed. 1830) he included a brief section on religion,7 which together with
art and philosophy constitute the highest triad of the system. However,
his very cursory account treats only Christianity and not the other historical forms of religion, which had been explored in the Phenomenology.
When Hegel came to Berlin in 1818, he had written comparatively
little about religion and published even less. During his years in Berlin he lectured on the philosophy of religion four times, in 1821, 1824,
1827, and 1831, in addition to giving a course in 1829 on the proofs of
the existence of God.8 It was during these years, and presumably in part
due to these lectures that his philosophy of religion first came under
critical examination. There were critics and admirers both inside and
outside the lecture hall.9
In response to his critics, Hegel authored book reviews in the Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftliche Kritik. One of these, published in 1829,10 was a
review of his student Carl Friederich Gschels work.11 Gschel (1784
1861) was one of Hegels most ardent defenders, and Hegel was very positively disposed toward this work and its portrayal of the unity of Christianity and speculative philosophy. In the third edition of the Encyclopaedia
(1830) he refers to it again, recommending it to his readers.12 Hegel also
wrote a review of five different works critical of various aspects of his

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own philosophy,13 especially his philosophy of religion; as well as an 1827

book review of Wilhelm von Humboldts discussion of the BhagavadGita.14 Humboldts text was based on lectures he gave at the Royal Academy of Science in 1825 and 1826, which were subsequently published
as a monograph. Hegel uses this text as an occasion to discuss Indian
polytheism, which he treats in some detail in his Lectures on the Philosophy
of Religion under the title The Religion of Imagination or Fantasy. This
review thus constitutes a useful supplement to Hegels account of Eastern religions in his lectures.
A major event in the reception of Hegels philosophy of religion
occurred in 1832, only months after his death, when Philipp Marheineke (17801846) published his two-volume edition of Hegels Lectures
on the Philosophy of Religion15 in the collected edition of Hegels works.16
This presented an enormous amount of new material that provided
fodder for all sides of the debates. This edition of Hegels lectures was
critically reviewed by a number of scholars: Christian Hermann Weisse
(18011866),17 Immanuel Hermann Fichte (17971879),18 Franz Anton
Staudenmaier (18001856),19 and Karl Rosenkranz (18051879).20
Interpretations of Hegels views on key issues differed widely even
in his lifetime and were only exacerbated by the publication of his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, which was not a text by his own hand
but a compilation of student notes. Marheinekes edition was regarded
as questionable by many, since his views were rather conservative, and
he was suspected of manipulating the text to make Hegel appear more
dogmatically palatable. There were also charges of inconsistency and
ambiguity, which needed to be addressed. It was thus decided to issue
a second revised edition of these lectures in 1840.21 Marheinekes preface diplomatically justifies the quick revision by claiming that he had
been unable to carry out the work on the original edition adequately
since he was under serious time pressure to produce the text soon after
Hegels death.22 A more plausible explanation is the criticism he had
been exposed to, and the rifts in the Hegel school that were beginning
to form at the time. In his preface Marheineke defends himself against
the charge of manipulating the text or being a heavy-handed editor.23
The revised version incorporated new lecture notes, including some of
Hegels own, which had been neglected in the first edition, but this new
material merely aggravated the problems of continuity and consistency,
seemingly offering support for diverse interpretations.
The ensuing debate centered on three main issues: the immortality
of the soul, the personhood of God, and the divinity of Christ. These will
be explored separately here, though these issues were closely related,24
and there is a great deal of overlap among authors and texts. While the

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main lines of these discussions will be presented, the primary material is

so extensive that the account remains far from exhaustive.

The Immortality Debate

Among the principal charges against Hegels system was that it failed to
admit the immortality of the soul.25 While Kant had been reproached
for claiming that this doctrine could not be rationally demonstrated but
instead had to be presupposed as a postulate, Hegel was criticized for
avoiding the issue entirely. His conception of immortality, it was argued,
concerned only the development of a collective world Spirit, and had
nothing to do with individual immortality. Further, the denial of the doctrine of immortality was regarded as a denial of the doctrine of divine
justice, which seemed to require an afterlife to be realized. Such a view
placed Hegels philosophy at odds with orthodox Christianity, despite his
own protests of consistency. The suspicion was that, finding the doctrine
of immortality implausible, Hegel discreetly tried to avoid the issue.
Hegels silence about the issue of immortality caused particular
problems for Hegelian theologians, who were attempting to work out a
speculative Christian dogmatics. One such theologian was Marheineke
himself, who treated this issue in 1827.26 Marheineke argues his case
for the blessed immortal state through Hegels speculative logic. Our
natural finite existence necessarily implies an infinite one; our transitory
natural being necessarily implies an enduring one, which resists change
and guarantees identity through it. The true form of immortality, consistent with the Christian view, lies in Spirit.27 Marheineke is critical of
the popular conceptions of immortality based on the senses, arguing
that such conceptions grasp only the finite and the particular; but he
is also critical of the Kantian doctrine of immortality as a mere postulate that cannot be known.28 As he sees it, Kants view is based on purely
abstract thinking and has no contact with the particular. The speculative conception unites these two: Marheineke argues that immortality is
known in Christianity in the same way that God is known through revelation. In Christ the universal is united with the particular, the divine with
the human. It is here that the true conception of immortality must be
sought.29 He goes on to develop a Christian account of the raising of the
dead and the last judgment.
The first attacks on Hegel for failing to put forth a doctrine of immortality took place during the last years of his life. In 1828 Karl Ernst
Schubarth (17961861) and K. A. Carganico (about whom nothing is

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known) published a monograph on Hegels Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in which they argued that Hegel failed to mention this
key doctrine since it did not accord with the immanent nature of his system.30 Hegel responded in the aforementioned joint book review of five
different works critical of his philosophy.31 He writes:
Since he does not find the mentioned doctrine [immortality] in the
philosophy, which he intends to analyze [Hegels]for the author
[Schubarth] in this philosophy Spirit is not raised above all the categories, which include ceasing-to-be, destruction, death, etc., despite
other just as explicit determinations.32

Although Hegel indignantly dismisses Schubarths accusation, he fails to

offer an alternate position which might allay the original suspicion. He
simply implies, without elaboration, that a doctrine of immortality is to
be found in the correct understanding of the concept of Spirit.
One of Hegels students, Ludwig Feuerbach (18041872), anonymously published Thoughts on Death and Immortality in 1830.33 In it he
argued that immortality should be understood not as the continued
existence of the consciousness of individuals but rather as the collective
historical memory of humanity in which individuals are preserved. His
stated goal was not to eliminate the doctrine of immortality, but to clarify
its proper meaning. While this work is still read today, at the time it exercised only a limited influence, though costing Feuerbach his university
post. It is less concerned with explaining Hegels views than in advancing
an independent position.
In 1831, in a widely disseminated work,34 Karl Heinrich Ernst Paulus defended the doctrine of immortality from a Christian perspective;
and Bernhard Heinrich Blasche attempted to refute various traditional
conceptions of immortality.35 These works, like Feuerbachs, have little
to say about Hegels philosophy as such, and, in any case, the textual basis available at the time was still too limited to adjudicate the issue. With
Marheinekes 1832 edition of Hegels Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion,
the situation changed. It was here that one might expect a fully developed doctrine of immortality, if indeed Hegel had one.
The debate proper was initiated by two works by Friedrich Richter (18071856), both published in 1833. In The Doctrine of Final Things
(Die Lehre von den letzten Dingen)36 Richter groups the various traditional
arguments for immortality as either anthropological, cosmological,
historical-philosophical, or theological, and argues that each is inadequate. His next work, The New Doctrine of Immortality (Die neue Unsterblichkeitslehre)37 created a sensation with its claim that the Christian doctrine

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of immortality was an outmoded prejudice or superstition maintained by

egoists, who lacked a proper sense of religious resignation. Richter particularly provoked some Hegelians by claiming that the inherent nature
of Hegels thought precluded any doctrine of immortality. Richter did
not consider this perceived absence to be a detriment, and generally regarded himself as a proponent of Hegels philosophy.
Richters The Doctrine of Final Things was criticized by the Leipzig
theologian Christian Hermann Weisse (18011866) in the Jahrbcher fr
wissenschaftliche Kritik in September 1833.38 Weisse notes that although
Richter claims to be a Hegelian, his views departed from those of other
Hegelians on numerous points.39 Weisse argues that Hegels philosophy
correctly criticizes an abstract conception of the beyond and provides
the basis for a doctrine of immortality: Everything, as one sees, depends
on grasping the idea of the spiritual Absolute not in empty abstraction
but in a living, even absolutely spiritual intuition, and knowing that this
idea is not foreign and external to the forms in which it is developed, but
rather immediate and completely one and the same with them.40 However, at the end of the review Weisse leaves it as a future task and thus
fails to develop the matter further.
This review was criticized by theologians who suspected that Weisse
tacitly agreed with Richter, and that the denial of the belief in personal
immortality was a secret closely kept by the Hegelian school. According
to this interpretation, Weisses main criticism was that Richter had indiscreetly divulged this position. Weisse responded in 1834, attempting
more explicitly to distance himself from Richter.41 The tone of this work
is far more defensive than his previous review. Weisse expresses his belief
in immortality, but argues that it should be understood in terms of absolute Spirit rather than psychology or anthropology.42 He finds evidence
for it particularly in the realm of aesthetics.43 When one beholds something beautiful, one gains a sense of the immortal and enduring element that transcends the empirical particular. It is this immortal element
which enables us to perceive beauty and gain a sense of the immortal
forces of the human spirit that exist behind the empirical phenomena.
Aesthetic consciousness thus leads to an awareness of what is immortal in
the human spirit. This argument from aesthetics is repeated in the other
spheres of absolute Spirit. For example, ones ethical actions evidence
an intuition of something higher and enduring beyond ones other
simple deeds. There is an immortal justice or morality which we strive to
achieve, and our awareness of it is a proof that we participate in it.
Hegels apologist Gschel reviewed Richters work in the Jahrbcher
fr wissenschaftliche Kritik in January 1834, criticizing it as a distortion of
Hegels thought.44 Encouraged by Hegels own positive reception of his

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Aphorisms, Gschel was convinced that Hegels philosophy was consistent

with orthodox Christian doctrines, and that one could find in his texts
clear evidence of a theory of personal immortality. The question is how
Hegels philosophy can conceive the eternal existence of the individual
in a speculative manner without slipping into a nonspeculative understanding of it as a temporal form of the bad infinity, or endless series.
The second article in Gschel ends with quotations,45 primarily from the
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, which are intended to demonstrate
the presence of the doctrine of immortality in Hegels thought.
The next intervention in this debate was Immanuel Hermann
Fichtes The Idea of Personality and the Continued Existence of the Individual
(Die Idee der Persnlichkeit und der individuellen Fortdauer), which also appeared in 1834.46 Fichte makes it clear that this work is an attack on
Gschels Hegel apologia. Rather than analyze individual textual passages in Hegel that can be interpreted as a doctrine of immortality, as
Gschel does, Fichte argues that Hegels philosophy as an abstract theoretical structure is in principle unsuited for such a doctrine, which lies
beyond the grasp of human reason. For Fichte, Hegels failure to incorporate the doctrine within his system is an inherent necessity rather than
a simple omission.
Fichte then gives his own arguments for personal immortality.
Chief among them is that all objects in nature have their own unique
predisposition and cannot perish until this predisposition is actualized
or fulfilled. Thus, human beings cannot completely cease to exist with
physical death since they have yet to perfect their natural predisposition.
Moreover, we have a natural a priori conception of immortality as the
necessary opposite of the finite and perishable things that appear to our
experience. Finitude and perishability only make sense as the opposites
of infinity and imperishability, which they necessarily presuppose. Here,
somewhat ironically, Fichte uses the Hegelian dialectic to argue for the
conceptual necessity of immortality.
Another exchange involving the question of immortality took place
between Karl Rosenkranz and Carl Friedrich Bachmann (17851855).
Bachmann initially criticized Hegel in his 1833 On Hegels System (ber
Hegels System).47 Bachmann revives the charge that Hegels system has no
room for personal immortality since only the Idea is immortal. He castigates Hegel for not being forthright about his presumed position: One
would only have expected that Hegel would have had the courage to
express himself openly about this problem and admit that he denied immortality.48 Rosenkranz responded to Bachmann in an open letter.49 He
cites Gschels argument that there is such a doctrine in Hegels works,
based on the theory of subjectivity.50 He develops an extended criticism

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of the friend of his youth, Richter, whose charges were the original occasion for these debates. Bachmanns 1835 rejoinder, entitled Anti-Hegel,
notes Rosenkranzs failure to enter into a discussion of the actual question at issue.51 He condemns Rosenkranzs appeal to the authority of
Gschel, and states his agreement with the younger Fichtes refutation
of Gschels views in The Idea of Personality (Die Idee der Persnlichkeit).52
Gschels purported reconstruction of Hegels position is rather, he argues, a radical departure from the Hegelian system.
In response to the charges raised by the younger Fichte, Gschel
published in 1835 his On the Proofs for the Immortality of the Human Soul
(Von den Beweisen fr die Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele).53 This work
presents some traditional proofs for the immortality of the soul and
then proceeds to explore the proofs offered by Hegels speculative philosophy. Gschel points out an analogy between the three traditional
proofs for the existence of Godthe cosmological, the teleological, and
the ontologicaland the traditional proofs for the immortality of the
soul. Each proof works by inferring from something given, that is, the
existence of the world, the purposefulness of the world, or the concept
of the most perfect being, to the desired conclusion, that is, the existence of God. The proofs for the immortality of the soul function in
the same manner. The cosmological proof of immortality starts with the
immediate existence of the indivisible soul and infers to its immortality.
Likewise the teleological proof takes as its point of departure the purposefulness of human action and infers to the immortality of the soul in
order to achieve or realize this purposefulness. Finally, the ontological
proof notes that humans have a concept of the indestructibility of the
soul, from which it infers (rather dubiously) that it must exist. The task
of contemporary philosophy is then to grasp these proofs in a speculative manner. This entails recognizing that the first proof is based on the
self-consciousness of the human soul (and its indivisibility), the second on
the consciousness of God (and His purposefulness), and finally the third,
which unites the first and the second, on the self-conscious consciousness of
God. Thus, we have a speculative development which leads to the concept of immortality, indeed, to a proof of it. Gschel denies that he is
distorting Hegel or attributing to him views unsupported by his texts.
Kasimir Conradi (17841849) followed in 1837 in a work which
attempts to construct a new theory of immortality based on Hegelian
premises.54 Here one sees a shift in defensive strategy. While Gschel
was determined to demonstrate a textual basis for immortality in Hegel, Conradi recognized that one must rather construct such a theory in
his name. The object was to answer Fichtes charges that Hegels philosophy, because of its secular character, was incapable of producing such
a theory.

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In Denmark an important article on this debate was published in

1837 by Sren Kierkegaards teacher Poul Martin Mller (17941838),
entitled Thoughts on the Possibility of Proofs of Human Immortality,
with Reference to the Most Recent Literature Belonging Thereto.55 It
has been claimed that Mller, who had previously been an advocate of
Hegels philosophy, makes his definitive break with Hegel in this work.
He gives a detailed account of the discussions taking place in Germany,
and comes down squarely on the side of the critics. He regards Gschels
attempt to find a doctrine of immortality in Hegels texts as wholly implausible: No informed Hegelian could possibly believe that such a
church spire could fittingly be placed upon the Hegelian edifice without
subjecting it to a thorough transformation.56 Interestingly, Kierkegaard
himself had little to say about the issue of immortality and seems not to
have a detailed doctrine of it.57
Carl Ludwig Michelet (18011893) continued in the spirit of Conradi in a series of lectures delivered at the University of Berlin in 1840,
and published in 1841.58 Michelet treats the issues of the personhood
of God and the immortality of the soul as intimately related. He argues
that human beings, as finite, necessarily participate in the divine, the
infinite, and this participation implies a form of immortality. While Michelet makes his Hegelian affiliation clear, he presents the argument as
his own and has little to say about Hegels beliefs or writings. This debate
would continue to rage for many years.

The Pantheism Debate, or the Question

of a Personal God
Another point of critical discussion was the nature of the divine in Hegels system. Like the issue of immortality, the question of a personal
God was a sensitive one. The elder Fichte had been dismissed from his
position in Jena in 1799 for holding the purportedly atheistic view that
the divine was nothing more than an abstract moral order of the world.
He had, it was claimed, reduced the self-conscious, loving God to a moral
principle. Since Hegel associated the divine with the concept of Spirit
and the Spirit of humanity developing in history, it was asserted that
his view amounted to pantheism.59 If God is merely the abstract moving
principle in history, and not the distinct, self-conscious entity of Christian orthodoxy, then every historical event and action is a manifestation
of the divine.
Hegels interpretation of the Trinity as a reflection of the three
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the individualwas similarly criticized for being at odds with the traditional view of God as a genuinely personal divinity. Hegels view was seen
as reducing the divine to a mere structure or movement of thought, and
concerns were voiced that it could open the door for more radical claims
that God is simply a projection of the human imagination with no basis
in an objective reality.
This was already an issue during Hegels lifetime. In 1823 the theologian Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck (17991877), Hegels colleague in Berlin, published The Doctrine of Sin and the Redeemer (Die Lehre
von der Snde und vom Vershner).60 This work takes the form of a dialogue
between two interlocutors about different theological issues. At the end
of the book there appear a series of appendixes which go into more detail about individual issues. In the second of these, Tholuck addresses
the question of pantheism. While he does not mention Hegel by name,
he alludes to his target when he writes, It is the newest direction of philosophy that an idealist pantheism is the only true philosophy.61
Hegel attempted to refute the charge in the second, revised edition of the Encyclopaedia in 1827. His preface contains a long footnote in
which Tholuck is singled out for criticism.62 Hegel returns to this issue
later in the work:
The mitigation of the reproach of Atheism into that of Pantheism has
its ground therefore in the superficial idea to which this mildness has
attenuated and emptied God. As the popular idea clings to its abstract
universality, from which all divine quality is excluded, all definiteness
is reduced to the non-divine, the secularity of things, thus remains in
fixed undisturbed substantiality. On such a presupposition, even after
philosophy has maintained Gods absolute universality and the consequent untruth of the being of external things, the hearer still clings
to his belief that secular things retain their being, and form all that is
definite in the divine universality. He thus changes that universality into
what he calls the pantheistic: Everything is(empirical things, without
distinction, whether higher or lower in the scale, are)all possess substantiality; and sothus he understands philosophyeach and every
secular thing is God. It is only his own stupidity, and the falsifications
due to such misconception, which generate the illusion and the allegation of such pantheism.63

Hegel thus argues that the charge of pantheism is based on a fundamental misconception of the nature of the divine, which results in part from
nineteenth-century Romanticisms retreat into subjectivism. He argues
that even what he regards as the crudest form of polytheism, Hinduism,

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is not a genuine pantheism that sees the divine in everything. Even it sees
the divine only in good or grand things. In a polemical footnote, he dismisses Tholucks capacity to investigate religion philosophically.64
Despite Hegels defense, the charge persisted. An anonymous work
entitled On the Hegelian Doctrine, or: Absolute Knowing and Modern Pantheism
(Ueber die Hegelsche Lehre, oder: Absolutes Wissen und moderner Pantheismus)
was published in 1829.65 Johann Eduard Erdmann identifies the author
of this work as one Hlsemann,66 otherwise unknown. The charge of
pantheism is only issued at the end of the work, when the author compares Hegels philosophy with Spinozas pantheism67 and makes clear his
opposition to Hegel,68 who is alleged to undermine Christianity and devalue the Christian God. Hegel responded to this polemically in his joint
review.69 Almost line by line Hegel responds to errors and absurdities in
the work, apparently not taking the charge of pantheism very seriously,
as it is never worked out meaningfully in the text he is criticizing.70
I. H. Fichte was one of Hegels main critics on this point. A text of
1832 declares his opposition to the un-Christian nature of Hegels philosophy.71 He views Hegels recent death as a turning point in philosophy,
a shift from pantheism to a true Christian philosophy. To underscore the
contrast to pantheism, Fichte designated his position speculative theism. Fichtes stated goal is to restore a personal God to philosophy, and
in his later writing he continues to criticize Hegels conception of the
divine as an ongoing process.72
Christian Hermann Weisse, while closer to Hegel, also wished to
avoid pantheistic errors.73 In 1833 Weisse published his The Idea of the Divinity (Die Idee der Gottheit),74 intended as part of an independent system
of philosophy of religion, based, however, on Hegels speculative methodology. The book contains three parts, on different conceptions of the
divine: (1) the ontological concept or pantheism, (2) the cosmological
concept or deism, and (3) the teleological concept. The discussion of
pantheism75 is intended to demonstrate the personhood of God, but far
from being critical of Hegel, it often borrows from his works, particularly
his Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God.
C. F. Bachmann also takes up this issue,76 criticizing Hegels doctrine of the Trinity as an empty formalism that has nothing to do with the
view presented in the New Testament.77 Rosenkranzs counterattack78 accused Bachmann of failing to understand Hegels speculative philosophy
and of remaining stuck at a previous stage of philosophical development,
under the influence of Jacobis deism. In Anti-Hegel, Bachmann violently
rejected the charge of being a deist.79 He insists that he is a theist who
believes in the personhood of God and claims that his sole goal is to
combat Hegels conception of the deity as a mere concept. As he sees it,

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Hegels view leads to the absurd result that the apostles failed to conceive
the divine adequately since they did not understand it speculatively.80
In 1834 Carl August Eschenmayer (17681852) made the provocative suggestion that Hegel denies Christs claim to be the truth and placed
his own philosophy higher than the Christian revelation.81 Hegel wishes
to regard the appearance of the divine on the earth as an act of the
human development of reason.82 Eschenmayer proposes to test Hegels
claim that his philosophy contains the Christian principle of the Gospels and demonstrates it conceptually. The work proceeds by critically
analyzing individual passages from Hegels texts in detail. Eschenmayer
emphatically rejects Hegels concept of God, arguing, for example, God
is not an idea, which a philosopher can set up in his circle of speculation.83 On the contrary, the God of the Bible is not a concept or an idea,
but a self-conscious being. He claims, The eternal God can never be
captured in a process. 84 The biblical deity is eternal and not in a process
of development in the way Hegels speculative Idea develops through
history. Hence Hegels philosophy is inconsistent with Christianity.
A Tbingen theologian, Ferdinand Christian Baur (17921860),
joined the fray with his Christian Ghosts (Die christliche Gnosis) of 1835.85
This work contends that Hegel has been misrepresented by his critics,
and defends him against the charge of pantheism. It is the nature of
the divine to reveal itself and to come to consciousness in finite human
consciousness. But critics who assume that this leads to the belief that no
divine consciousness can exist independently of human consciousness
misunderstand the doctrine of immanence.86 Baur writes, What is the
fiercely criticized and often misinterpreted assertion that God, as Spirit,
is only for Spirit, if not the indisputable claim that God sees himself in all
spirits, that the collectivity of finite spirits is the self-conscious reflection
of the divine being opened up to them and reflected in them, that God
in this sense is everything in everything? This alone is the true concept
of the immanence of God in the world.87
In his 1837 work The Philosophy of Our Age (Die Philosophie unserer
Zeit), Julius Schaller (18071868), a Privatdozent in philosophy at Halle,
offers a defense of Hegel against a number of criticisms, especially of
pantheism, and insists that his conception of the divine is consistent with
the Christian God.88 He surveys different accounts of the doctrine of personalityincluding that of I. H. Fichteand tries to demonstrate the
comparative strength of Hegels position. He attempts to refute two recurring criticisms: (1) that conceiving of God as the development of the
self-consciousness of humanity through history precludes conceiving of
Him as an independent being, and (2) that the person of God amounts
simply to the consciousness and knowledge of Him in the minds of

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human beings, and that God is thus immanent to human consciousness

and not a transcendent entity.89 Schaller defends Hegel by explaining
the logic of opposites upon which Hegels conception of the divine is
based. God is only a creator since He created the world and thus stands
in opposition to it. Similarly, God is only a person in opposition to other
self-conscious agents, that is, human beings.
In 1838 Michelet gives a brief overview of these debates.90 He
agrees with Schaller and Gschel that Hegels system does include a personal deity, but believes this has been misunderstood as requiring a transcendent being. It refers instead to the principle of personality itself. He
writes:
Hegels true doctrine of the personhood of God is not that God is one
person among other persons; and likewise he is not merely universal
substance. He is the eternal movement of the universal constantly making itself into a subject, which only in the subject comes to objectivity
and true existence, and thus sublates the subject in its abstract beingfor-itself. God is thus, according to Hegel, not a person but rather personhood itself.91

Michelet thus seems to agree with Baur, whom he quotes directly, that
the proper Hegelian conception is that of an immanent deity. He is
therefore critical of the Hegelians who posit a supernatural God in a
transcendent realm.
Carl Philipp Fischers (18071885) The Idea of Divinity (Die Idee der
Gottheit), published in 1839, takes Hegels philosophy of immanence to
exclude the possibility of any independent external God.92 Hegels pantheism, the author argues, consists in the unity of God and the world:
That the substance of God and the world is one and the same and
that therefore God as a self-knowing spiritual substance is world spirit
thought in its truth, while self-conscious individuals are not selfgrounded and closed subjects, and thus eternal spirits, but rather
accidental and thus disappearing figures of the One and the universal substanceHegelian pantheism asserts this just like Spinozist
pantheism, albeit in the former the subjective version of the absolute
predominates and in the latter the objective version.93

He continues, As long as the essence of God and the world are thought
to be identical, the personhood of God, the absolute unity of his inner
being, will and spirit cannot be grasped.94 Although he accuses Hegel of
pantheism, the author is positively inclined toward his speculative meth-

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odology and employs it in his own theistic philosophy, which attempts to

maintain the unity and personhood of God.
Michelet takes up this issue again in his aforementioned Lectures
on the Personality of God (Vorlesungen ber die Persnlichkeit Gottes, 1841),
presenting the doctrine of the divine personality, and surveying objections to it.95 He argues that in order to maintain the personhood of
God, one must conceive the divine as being a dynamic process. A purely
static transcendent deity resembles an object rather than a conscious
entity.96 He sketches the development of Spirit toward freedom in order
to argue that, when correctly understood, this constitutes a developing,
self-conscious being.97 This culminates in Christianity, where individuals
recognize themselves in the divinity incarnate and thus develop a new
consciousness of the divine. In his defense of this doctrine, Michelet
rejects the anthropomorphic conceptions of God, which he believes lie
behind the criticisms. Further, he tries to make a case for a Christian
doctrine of continuous creation that would bring it in line with Hegels
conception of a developing deity.98
A final work worthy of note is Bruno Bauers anonymous Trumpet
of the Last Judgment (Posaune des jngsten Gerichts), of 1841.99 This work is
difficult to classify since it does not fall cleanly into any one of the debates we are tracing. It is written ironically from the perspective of a reactionary pietist, outraged by Hegels philosophy of religion. (As has been
noted,100 the irony of this is profound, since Bauer himself had collaborated with Marheineke in editing the second edition of Hegels Lectures
on the Philosophy of Religion.) Bauers intent was to discredit the uninformed criticisms of Hegel from the pietist camp by presenting a caricature of their position. The work contains a criticism of Hegels concept
of world spirit,101 which can be seen as continuous with the criticisms we
have been following concerning Hegels conception of the divine.

The Debate About Christology

Related to the question of the personhood of God, the issue of the person of Christ also became a key point of contention.102 Hegels accounts
of Christ in The Positivity of the Christian Religion and The Spirit of
Christianity and Its Fate were not known at the time. The debates concerned primarily his statements about Jesus in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. According to one interpretation, Hegel viewed Christ as
a representative of the highest ethical standpoint that human beings can
attain. Thus, Jesus represented in some sense the divinity in humanity

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as a whole. But this conception seems to undermine the view that Christ
was himself uniquely divine. Again, the concern was that a key point in
orthodox dogmatics was being replaced with a secular view.
The debate about Christology centered on the work of David
Friedrich Strauss. The publication of his The Life of Jesus in two volumes
in 183536103 signaled the beginning of a major controversy that cost
him his job and defined his life forever after. This work applied a criticalhistorical method to the Gospels in order to examine their accounts of
Christ. In his analysis Strauss concludes again and again that the miracles attributed to Christ were merely the fabrications of believers after
the fact. These stories about the life and works of Christ are merely the
shared folklore of the religious community at an early stage of the Christian religion. Such beliefs are time-bound products of the age and circumstances in which they were born. Thus, to understand them, one
must first understand the historical development of the religion.
Strauss regarded his work as a combination of critical-historical
biblical exegesis and speculative philosophy. First, he took seriously the
immanentism attributed to Hegel, which precluded the possibility of
any supernatural dimension required for miracles. Second, the critical
method was used to identify and eliminate the mythical elements of
Christianity so that only its metaphysical or philosophical truth remains.
This approach was then thought to be in line with Hegels claim that
philosophical knowing is higher than religious knowing and encompasses it. Third, Strauss shared Hegels belief that the goal of philosophy
was to reconcile and overcome alienation. Christs message of the unity
of the human and the divine thus superseded the Judaic conception of
God as absolutely other. For Strauss, this unity and reconciliation were
conceived not in terms of a single person, Christ, but in terms of all humanity. Unfortunately, he writes, the believers have reintroduced this
alienation by confining the reconciliation to a single person. The goal
now is to overcome alienation by grasping God and humanity as complementary dialectical concepts. Gods essence is defined in contrast to humanity, and humanity in contrast to God. Although Strausss goal was to
demonstrate the truth of Christianity, it was perceived as an attempt to
undermine the authority of the scriptures and the religious belief based
on them. It was criticized both by defenders of Hegel who wanted to uphold orthodoxy, and thus took the book to be a radical departure from
Hegels conservative intentions with respect to the divinity of Christ,
and by orthodox Hegel critics, who saw it as confirming their suspicions
of the dangerously secular consequences of Hegels philosophy. In the
following years, Strauss issued revised editions of the book to meet the
many criticisms raised against it.

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Strausss teacher, the aforementioned Ferdinand Christian Baur,

argues in his Christian Ghosts (Die christliche Gnosis) that, according to Hegel, Christ is not himself uniquely divine but that there is a unity of divine and human at the level of humanity generally.104 Baur claims, For
faith the appearance of the God-man, the becoming-human of God, His
birth in the flesh, may well be a historical fact, but at the standpoint
of speculative thinking the becoming-human of God is no individual,
unique, historical fact but rather an eternal determination of the essence of God.105 Baur explains that the reconciliation brought about
by Christ is not a temporal event. Rather God eternally reconciles himself with himself, and the resurrection and raising of Christ is nothing
other than the eternal return of Spirit to itself and to its truth. Christ as
human being, as God-man, is the human being in his universality, not as
in a particular individual but rather as the universal individual.106 Baur
thus seems to argue that there is a higher and deeper meaning to what
are normally taken to be the historical events surrounding the life of
Jesus. This deeper meaning concerns the universal truth that these historical events represent. This work focuses on Hegels texts and does not
engage in polemics for or against Strausss position.
In 1835 the Tbingen theologian Johann Christian Friedrich Steudel (17791837) defended the supernatural nature of Christ in opposition to Strausss claims.107 By appealing to the inner conviction of the
believer of its truth regardless of the historical record, he effectively
reduced the supernatural nature of Christ to the subjective conviction
of the individual believer. Gottlieb Christoph Adolf von Harless (1806
1879) presents a detailed overview of the debates surrounding Strausss
work,108 after which the author moralistically dismisses Strausss work in
favor of supernaturalism. One of Strausss former instructors in Tbingen, Carl August Eschenmayer, vehemently denounced The Life of Jesus.109
He portrays Strauss as a modern Judas, who betrayed Christianity and
willfully profaned the doctrine of the revelation. This work vividly shows
the kind of passions that Strausss book evoked.
Christoph Benjamin Klaibers (17961836) posthumously published work110 argues against Strausss methodology, claiming that by
considering Christs life and works episodically, Strauss has lost sight
of the broader picture of Christ as a whole. Klaiber defends the miracles and supernatural elements of Christ, which are possible since God,
as the fundamental ground (Urgrund) of the world and of nature, can
perform miraculous acts which contradict natural laws. Klaiber regards
Strauss as an inevitable product of the Hegelian system, which undermines the credibility of the Gospels.111 Examining Strausss methodology
in an 1837 work, Tholuck too criticizes his conclusions, and repeats his

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attack on Hegels purported pantheism.112 He attempts to defend the

historical veracity of the Gospels by analyzing the biblical texts in detail.
The theologian Johann Peter Lange (18021884) offers a compromise solution to the conflict.113 Lange employs the speculative method
to mediate between the mythological standpoint and the historical one.
Neither history nor mythology, the Gospels represent a higher position
which contains all previous mythology. They bring together the many diverse mythological elements found in paganism and other religions and
express them in a higher form. Wilhelm Hoffmann (18061873)114 also
argues for a supernaturalist position and defends miracles, while simultaneously claiming to be sympathetic to speculative philosophy. He too
represents a conciliatory position, wanting to use speculative methods to
understand the nature and significance of Christ. He argues that if the
unity of the human and the divine is conceived to be in the spirit of humanity generally, it cannot be realized in any given person and remains
an abstract idea without reality.
In the Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftliche Kritik of 1837 Bruno Bauer
published a joint review of ten different works that criticized The Life of
Jesus (including several of those noted above).115 Bauer makes no obvious attempt either to defend or criticize Strauss. He objectively examines
each of the works in question, noting strengths and weaknesses, but is
dismissive of what he takes to be naive supernaturalist criticisms.
In 1837 Strauss responded to his critics in his In Defense of My Life
of Jesus Against the Hegelians (Streitschriften),116 the work in which he coins
the terms Right and Left Hegelianism. Since he had been criticized
by those Hegelians who wished to see Hegels philosophy as consistent
with Christianity, Strauss begins with an account of his relation to Hegels
philosophy. He explains that Hegels distinction between representation
and concept was his point of departure. Applied to biblical studies, this
meant that Hegels goal was to separate truth from myth by purging the
biblical texts of their purely representational elements to reveal their
conceptual core. Strauss argues that his purported Hegelian critics have
betrayed the basic principle of Hegels philosophy: reaching the truth by
means of critical reflection and mediation. The stage of immediacy or
immediate faith must be overcome just as sense certainty is overcome in
the Phenomenology of Spirit.117 Strauss further argues that his conception
of the unity of the divine and the human in humanity is in fact Hegels
position.118 He grants that this unity is made possible by Christ who represents the historical occasion which brought this truth to consciousness,
but the unity itself is universal.
Gschel responded to Strauss in 1838,119 in a work apparently written at the behest of the Prussian minister of education, Karl von Alten-

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stein, who wished to curb the influence of the perceived secularizing

Hegelians.120 The text is divided into three chapters. In the first of these,
God, Christ and Man, Gschel defends Hegels philosophy against
the criticisms raised in response to the works of Hegelians like Richter
and Strauss. Their texts have brought Hegels philosophy into disrepute
by seeming to confirm the suspicions of many outside observers, who
were convinced that Hegels philosophy led to atheism and secularism.
Gschels goal is to correct this impression. He is thus not primarily interested in criticizing Strauss, but rather in defending Hegel against critics who take Strausss position to be Hegels or, at least, its natural consequence. He tries to answer the charge that Hegels understanding of the
orthodox doctrines of the Trinity, revelation, justification, original sin,
and the God-man is un-Christian and merely adapts religious language
to its own purposes. When he comes to treating Strausss views, Gschel
is particularly keen to refute the claim that Christ is simply a symbol for
the unity of the divine and human in all humanity.121 This, the central issue of the first chapter of the book, is given a detailed treatment, which
includes an overview of the medieval debates about universals.
This debate generated a tremendous amount of literature, which
we can only give an inkling of here. Most importantly, it was specifically
in the context of this discussion that the distinction between Right and
Left Hegelianism arose. However, it remains to be seen how adequate
these distinctions are for capturing the content of these debates.

Reections on the Traditional Designations

Although the labels Hegelian and Hegel critic or Right Hegelian
and Left Hegelian have been applied across the board by subsequent
historians of philosophy, the actual character and nature of these debates were too differentiated and heterogeneous to be adequately described by them, as our discussion indicates.
The distinction between Right and Left Hegelianism is far from
adequate to capture the main lines of the debate on immortality. According to the reductionist use of Strausss categories, Feuerbach and
Richter would figure among the Left Hegelians; however, their positions
differ radically. While Richter argues that Hegel has no doctrine of immortality and on this point his philosophy should be conceived as critical
of Christianity, Feuerbach seems indifferent to Hegels own view on the
matter. Moreover, instead of repudiating belief in immortality, as one
might expect of a Left Hegelian, Feuerbach claims to be giving a correct
interpretation of it.

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According to the traditional view, Marheineke, Weisse, Gschel,

Rosenkranz, Conradi, and Michelet belong to the Right Hegelian camp;
however, here as well there are significant differences. While Marheineke and Michelet argue for a Christian account of immortality, they are
not particularly interested in attributing this view to Hegel. By contrast,
their purported fellow Right Hegelians Weisse, Rosenkranz, and Gschel
argue explicitly that Hegel does in fact have a doctrine of immortality, or
at least the basis for one, and that it is consistent with orthodox Christian
doctrine. Conradi also proves to be problematic to categorize according
to the traditional scheme, since he agrees with the Left Hegelians that
there is no doctrine of immortality in Hegels texts; however, he looks like
a so-called Right Hegelian with his claim that one can reconstruct a doctrine on Hegels behalf based on the general principles of his thought.
Finally, according to the traditional division, the Hegel critics would
represent an entirely separate group distinct from either the Right or
the Left school. However, here a closer look reveals that the critics, Schubarth, I. H. Fichte, Bachmann, and Mller, in fact are in agreement with
those on the Hegelian Left who hold that Hegel has no doctrine of immortality. The difference lies not in their interpretation of this question but rather in their assessment of the omission. While so-called Left
Hegelians regarded it as an intellectual advance, these Hegel critics regarded it as problematic. But the categorical lines are blurred, since on
the key issue thought to define ones affiliation, that is, whether or not
Hegel held such a view, (some) Hegelians and critics are in agreement.
In the discussion about pantheism too, the simple categories of
right and left are inadequate to capture the complexity of the issue. One
oddity about this discussion is the absence of the Left Hegelians. While
in the previous debate the Left Hegelians could claim that Hegel had
no doctrine of immortality and regard this as a good thing, here no one
typically associated with the Left seems to have been interested in affirming that Hegel was a pantheist and embracing this doctrine. Thus, the
debate was carried out more or less wholly by the Rright Hegelians,
who insisted that Hegel in fact had a personal God, and the Hegel critics, who denied this and charged him with pantheism. Here again one
can see that the traditional categories do not map evenly onto each of
the discussions.
While Michelet is generally regarded as a Right Hegelian, it is far
from clear how his reinterpretation of the personhood of God as personhood itself can be reconciled with orthodox Christian dogma. The
position he propounds appears dangerously close to the view being so
violently attacked as pantheistic. The charge of dissemblance or inauthenticity that Hegel was often confronted with on this issue might well
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affirmation that Hegel was a pantheist and a positive assessment of this

position. However, this would in effect amount to the missing Left Hegelian position in the debate, corresponding to the Left Hegelian position
in the debate about immortality. Thus, the categorization of the Right
Hegelian Michelet is rendered highly problematic.
Moreover, many of the books and articles in this discussion were
not primarily interested in adjudicating the issue of whether or not Hegel had a conception of a personal deity. Rather, they represent original contributions to a general philosophical and theological discussion
about this issue. The discussion cannot rightly be deemed as one limited to something within the Hegelian school since, often, no attempt is
made to criticize or defend Hegels position on the issue. In short, the
general discussion is larger than its Hegelian dimension.
With respect to the debate about Christology, the decisive question for Strauss was whether or not one needed to invoke the divinity
of Christ to demonstrate the truth of the gospel history. His own denial
of this placed him on the side of the Left Hegelians. However, once
the designations of Left and Right came to be applied on the basis
of whether one believed that Hegels philosophy could be squared with
Christianity, things became more complex. While Strauss wanted to deny
the unique divinity of Christ by denying the supernatural, he did not intend to question Christianity per se and indeed believed he was contributing to a better comprehension of it, which would help to overcome the
alienation caused by misunderstanding. Thus, while his original distinction may have made sense in its specific context, the manner in which his
terminology came to be employed blurred and distorted the issues.
The labels used to characterize this period have obscured the actual
content of the debates that took place and contributed to the misconception that they dealt with little other than Hegels own orthodoxy or its
lack. However, this view then blinds one to the fact that these discussions
touched on fundamental issues about philosophy and religion which
have continued uninterrupted to our own day. Since the distinction of
Right and Left Hegelian has long since ceased to be used to describe
the discussions taking place in these fields, the mistaken impression can
arise that what is at issue are entirely new and different discussions and
that some radical break has taken place. However, the discussions about
key Christian dogmas that followed in the wake of Hegels philosophy
anticipate many of the central issues of subsequent Christian thinking.
The Hegelian debates from the 1830s and 40s served as a crucible for a
variety of issues that remain relevant for philosophical theology.
To cite just the best-known examples: (1) the work of Strauss and
others in this period was the forerunner of numerous later attempts at

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demythologizing Christianity, including those of Bultmann and Gogarten. One can also mention Strausss importance as the founder of the
field of modern critical Bible studies and his immeasurable influence on
the studies of the life of Christ that followed in the second half of the
century and into the twentieth century: Renan, Harnack, Loisy, Wrede,
Schweitzer, and others. (2) Hegel himself was the forerunner of later attempts at a historical-cultural understanding of Christianity in the works
of Dilthey, Nietzsche, Troeltsch, and others. (3) Feuerbach and Marx
can be regarded as founders of the now flourishing fields of psychology
and sociology of religion. (4) Less well known but no less interesting is
the constellation of problems surrounding relativism, historicism, subjectivism, nihilism, and alienation. These are issues that are traditionally associated with the twentieth century and existentialism, but a closer
look reveals that all of these issues were already being debated in the
1830s and 40s in the context of the disputes over the heritage of Hegels philosophy. Thus, to understand theology in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, it is necessary to have a fundamental grasp of the
arguments surrounding Hegels philosophy of religion in the first half
of the nineteenth century.
As is clear from the current booming interest in Kierkegaards philosophy of religion and his criticism of Hegel, these issues continue to
have a resonance in the field today. With the reflections presented here,
it is possible to understand Kierkegaards objections in the context in
which they were originally conceived. In this context it becomes clear
that Kierkegaard was merely one voice in the debates that followed in the
wake of Hegels death. The direction toward a religious faith based on the
individual subject, which seems attractive to so many thinkers nowadays,
was the result of a critical encounter with the discussions of Hegels proponents and critics. Kierkegaard saw that the critical challenges issued
to Christianity by critical Bible studies and by scientific methods could
not be met on their own terms. He saw clearly how Christian apologists
continually fought losing battles by trying to combat these challenges
with the use of the same methodology as the critics. He thus realized
that if Christianity was going to survive this onslaught, it must retreat
into a sphere that is immune from all criticism from scientistic reason.
Motivated by this intuition, he developed his conception of Christianity
based on the unique individual and subjective thinking. Paradoxically,
however, he ended up closer to the radicals who seemed to want to tear
down religion since he took away from the apologists many of their most
prized tools and, further, issued an unforgiving criticism of the church
and cultural Christianity. The fundamental structure of the problem
that he was confronted with is still with us today: the demands of science

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can only be appeased by a subjectivist conception of religion. Thus, if

we in our times are to understand fully the nature and implications of
this direction issuing from Kierkegaard, it is necessary that we revisit the
Hegelian debates that took place in the nineteenth century.

Notes
1. For an account of the development of the German schools of Hegelianism, see the following: William J. Brazill, The Young Hegelians (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1970); Jacques DHondt, Hegel et hglianisme (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1982); George Lasson, Was heisst Hegelianismus? (Berlin:
Reuther & Reichard, 1916); John Edward Toews, Hegelianism: The Path Toward
Dialectical Humanism, 18051841 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press,
1980); Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical
Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press,
1999); David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1970); Ingrid Pepperle, Junghegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie
und Kunsttheorie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1978); and Douglas Moggach, ed.,
The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
2. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, 2 vols. (Tbingen: Osiander,
183536). In English as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, ed. Peter C. Hodgson,
trans. George Eliot (Ramsey, N.J.: Sigler, 1994).
3. David Friedrich Strauss, Streitschriften zur Vertheidigung meiner Schrift ber
das Leben Jesu und zur Charakteristik der gegenwrtigen Theologie (Tbingen: Osiander, 1837), 95126. In English as In Defense of My Life of Jesus Against the Hegelians,
trans. Marilyn Chapin Massey (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1983), 3866.
For a further account of these distinctions, see John Edward Toews, Right, Centre, and Left: The Division of the Hegelian Schools in the 1830s, in Hegelianism,
20354.
4. Strauss, Streitschriften, 95; Strauss, Defense, 38 (translation modified).
5. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegels theologische Jugendschriften (1907), ed. Herman
Nohl, reprint (Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1966). In English as Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox and Richard Kroner (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1975).
6. G. W. F. Hegel, Glauben und Wissen oder die Reflexionsphilosophie
der Subjektivitt, in der Vollstndigkeit ihrer Formen, als Kantische, Jacobische
und Fichtesche Philosophie, Kritisches Journal der Philosophie 2 (1802): 1188.
Reprinted in Vermischte Schriften, 2 vols., ed. Friedrich Frster and Ludwig Boumann, vols. 1617 (183435) of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Werke: Vollstndige
Ausgabe, 18 vols., ed. Ludwig Boumann et al. (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot,
183245), 16:3157. Also in G. W. F. Hegel, Smtliche Werke: Jubilumsausgabe in 20
Bnden, ed. Hermann Glockner (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1928
41), 1:277433. (Henceforth cited in abbreviated form as Jub.) In English as Faith

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and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1977).
7. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical
Writings, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1990) 46571; Hegel, Jub.,
6:3057; Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic: Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences (hereafter EL), trans. T. F. Gerats, W. A. Suchting, H. S. Harris, 564
71; Hegel, Jub., 10:45358.
8. See G. W. F. Hegel, bersicht ber Hegels Berliner Vorlesungen, in
the edition of Hegels Berliner Schriften: 18181831, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1956), 74349.
9. Rudolf Haym reports that in his lectures Hegel offended a Catholic auditor, who first raised a formal complaint against him and then, when Hegel addressed the issue in the next class, stormed out of the lecture hall together with
a group of students. R. Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit (Berlin: Gaertner, 1857), 509ff.
See also Hegel, Berliner Schriften: 18181831, 57275.
10. G. W. F. Hegel, Ueber: Aphorismen ber Nichtwissen und absolutes Wissen im Verhltnisse zur christlichen GlaubenserkenntnissEin Beitrag zum Verstndnisse
der Philosophie unserer Zeit. Von Carl Friederich G . . . . l. Berlin, bei E. Franklin,
1829, Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftliche Kritik, 1829, nos. 99102, pp. 789816; and
nos. 1056, pp. 83335. Reprinted in Hegel, Vermischte Schriften, vols. 1617 in
Hegels Werke, 17:11148. Also in Hegel, Jub., 20:276313. In English as Review of
K.F. Gschels Aphorisms, parts 1 and 2, trans. Clark Butler, Clio 17 (1988): 369
93; part 3, trans. Clark Butler, Clio 18 (1989): 37985. Reprinted in Miscellaneous
Writings of G. W. F. Hegel, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 2002), 40129.
11. Carl Friederich G. . . . . l, Aphorismen ber Nichtwissen und absolutes Wissen im Verhltnisse zur christlichen GlaubenserkenntnissEin Beitrag zum Verstndnisse
der Philosophie unserer Zeit (Berlin, 1829).
12. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, 3rd ed. (Heidelberg: Osswald, 1830), 564, p. 576 (Hegel, Philosophy of
Mind, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971],
564, p. 576; Hegel, Jub., 10:454): To know what God as spirit isto apprehend
this accurately and distinctly in thoughtsrequires careful and thorough speculation. It includes, in its forefront, the propositions: God is God only so far as he
knows himself: his self-knowledge is, further, a self-consciousness in man and
mans knowledge of God, which proceeds to mans self-knowledge in God. See
the profound elucidation of these propositions in the work from which they are
taken: Aphorisms on Knowing and Not-Knowing, etc., by C.F. G . . . l. Berlin 1829.
13. G. W. F. Hegel, 1. ber die Hegelsche Lehre, oder: absolutes Wissen und
moderner Pantheismus. (Leipzig 1829). bei Chr. E. Kollmann. S. 236. 2. ber Philosophie berhaupt und Hegels Enzyklopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften insbesondere. Ein Beitrag zur Beurtheilung der letztern. Von Dr. K.E. Schubarth und Dr. L.A.
Carganico. Berlin 1829. in der Enslinschen Buchhandlung. S. 222. 3. Ueber den
gegenwrtigen Standpunct der philosophischen Wissenschaft, in besonderer Beziehung auf
das System Hegels. Von E.H. Weisse, Prof. an der Universitt zu Leipzig. Leipzig
1829. Verlag von Joh. Ambr. Barth. S. 228. 4. Briefe gegen die Hegelsche Encyklopdie

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der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Erstes Heft, vom Standpuncte der Encyklopdie und
der Philosophie. Berlin 1929. bei John. Chr. Fr. Enslin. S. 94. 5. Ueber Seyn, Nichts
und Werden. Einige Zweifel an der Lehre des Hrn. Prof. Hegel. Berlin, Posen und Bromberg, bei E.S. Mittler 1829. S. 24, Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftliche Kritik, 1829, first
article ( July), vol. 2, nos. 10, 11, pp. 7788, nos. 13, 14, pp. 97109; second article
(August), vol. 2, nos. 37, 38, 39, pp. 293308, no. 40, pp. 31318; third article
(December), nos. 117, 118, 119, 120, pp. 93660. Hegel only managed to treat
two of the five works in this review.
14. G. W. F. Hegel, ber die unter dem Namen Bhagavad-Gita bekannte Episode
des Mahabharata. Von Wilhelm von Humboldt. Berlin, 1826, Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftliche Kritik, 1827, first article ( January), nos. 7, 8, pp. 5163; second article
(October 1827), nos. 18188, pp. 144192.
15. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Religion: Nebst einer
Schrift ber die Beweise vom Daseyn Gottes, 2 vols., ed. Philipp Marheineke, vols. 11
12 (1832) in Hegels Werke. English editions: G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols., trans. E. B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson (New York:
Humanities, 1972). G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols., ed.
Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart with the
assistance of H. S. Harris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 198487).
16. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Werke: Vollstndige Ausgabe, 18 vols., ed.
Ludwig Boumann et al. (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 183245).
17. C. H. Weisse, ber die eigentliche Grenze des Pantheismus und des
philosophischen Theismus, Religise Zeitschrift fr das katholische Deutschland,
1833, vol. 1, pp. 3151, pp. 14353, pp. 22739; vol. 2, pp. 99119, pp. 24469.
18. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Hegels Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der
Religion, nebst einer Schrift ber die Beweise vom Daseyn Gottes, herausgegeben von
Dr. Ph. Marheinecke. 2 Bnde. Berlin 1832 . . . , Heidelberger Jahrbcher der Literatur, 1833, vol. 26, nos. 5557, 6263, p. 880, pp. 88196, pp. 897907, pp. 978
92, pp. 9931008, pp. 100910.
19. F. A. Staudenmaier, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Vorlesungen ber
die Philosophie der Religion. Nebst einer Schrift ber die Beweise vom Daseyn Gottes. Herausgegeben von D. Philipp Marheineke. Erster Band XVI u. 376 S. Zweiter Band
483 S. Berlin 1832 bei Duncker u. Humblot, Jahrbcher fr Theologie und christliche
Philosophie, vol. 1, no. 1 (1834): 97158.
20. Karl Rosenkranz, G. W. F. Hegels Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Religion. Nebst einer Schrift ber die Beweise vom Daseyn Gottes. Herausgegeben von Dr.
Philipp Marheineke. Band I. XVI u. 376 S. Band II 483 S. (Auch als eilfter und
zwlfter Band von Hegels smmtlichen Werken.) Berlin bei Duncker und Humblot 1832, Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftliche Kritik, first article, nos. 7173 (April
1833): 56281; second article, nos. 8182 (May 1833): 64155.
21. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Religion, 2 vols., ed.
Philipp Marheineke, vols. 1112 in Hegels Werke, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Duncker und
Humblot, 1840 [1832]).
22. Hegel, Philosophie der Religion, 2nd ed., vi. (Hegel, Jub., 15:8).
23. Hegel, Philosophie der Religion, 2nd ed., vi. (Hegel, Jub., 15:8).
24. A good example of this is Michelets Vorlesungen ber die Persnlichkeit

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Gottes und Unsterblichkeit der Seele oder die ewige Persnlichkeit des Geistes (Berlin:
Ferdinand Dmmler, 1841), which combines two of the main points of contention.
25. For this debate, see Carl Ludwig Michelet, Geschichte der letzten Systeme
der Philosophie in Deutschland von Kant bis Hegel, 2 vols. (Berlin: Duncker und
Humblot, 183738), 2:63845; Wilhelm Sthler, Zur Unsterblichkeitsproblematik in
Hegels Nachfolge (Mnster: Universitas-Verlag, 1928); Gerald Frankenhuser, Die
Auffassung von Tod und Unsterblichkeit in der klassischen deutschen Philosophie in Immanuel Kant bis Ludwig Feuerbach (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1991);
Walter Jaeschke, Persnlichkeit Gottes und Unsterblichkeit der Seele, in his
Hegel Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Schule (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2003), 51015; Johann
Eduard Erdmann, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, 2 vols. (Berlin: Verlag
von Wilhelm Hertz, 1866), 2:65054.
26. Philipp Marheineke, Die Grundlehren der christlichen Dogmatik als Wissenschaft, Second, Completely Reworked Edition (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot,
1827), 592601, pp. 38187.
27. Ibid., 594, p. 382.
28. Ibid., 599, pp. 38586.
29. Ibid., 600, p. 386.
30. K. E. Schubarth and K. A. Carganico, Ueber Philosophie berhaupt, und
Hegels Encyclopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften insbesondere: Ein Beitrag zur
Beurtheilung der letztern (Berlin: Enslin, 1829), 142ff.
31. Hegel, 1. ber die Hegelsche Lehre.
32. Ibid., third article, p. 959.
33. [Ludwig Feuerbach], Gedanken ber Tod und Unsterblichkeit aus den Papieren eines Denkers, nebst einem Anhang theologisch-satyrischer Xenien, herausgegeben
von einem seiner Freunde (Nuremberg: J. A. Stein, 1830). In English as Ludwig
Feuerbach, Thoughts on Death and Immortality: From the Papers of a Thinker, Along
with an Appendix of Theological-Satirical Epigrams, trans. James A. Massey (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980).
34. C. H. E. Paulus, Ueber die Unsterblichkeit des Menschen und den Zustand des
Lebens nach dem Tode, auf den Grund der Vernunft und gttlicher Offenbarung, 2nd
supplemented and improved ed. (Reutlingen: Joh. Conr. Mcken, 1831).
35. B. H. Blasche, Philosophische Unsterblichkeitslehre, oder: Wie offenbart sich
das ewige Leben? (Erfurt and Gotha: Flinzer, 1831).
36. Friedrich Richter, Die Lehre von den letzten Dingen: Eine wissenschaftliche
Kritik, aus dem Standpunct der Religion unternommen: Erster Band, welcher die Kritik der
Lehre vom Tode, von der Unsterblichkeit und von den Mittelzustnden enthlt (Breslau:
In Joh. Friedr. Korn des lteren Buchhandlung, 1833). (See also Zweiter Band: Die
letzten Dinge in objectiver Rcksicht oder die Lehre vom jngsten Tage [Berlin: Richter,
1844].)
37. Friedrich Richter, Die neue Unsterblichkeitslehre: Gesprch einer Abendgesellschaft, als Supplement zu Wielands Euthanasia (Breslau: Georg Friedrich Aderholz,
1833).
38. C. H. Weisse, Die Lehre von den letzten Dingen. Eine wissenschaftliche Kritik,
aus dem Standpunct der Religion unternommen, von Dr. Friedrich Richter von Magde-

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burg. Erster Band. Breslau, 1833. XV. 245 S. gr. 8, Jahrbucher fr wissenschaftliche
Kritik, nos. 4142 (September 1833): 32127, 32934.
39. Ibid., 323.
40. Ibid., 334.
41. C. H. Weisse, Die philosophische Geheimlehre von der Unsterblichkeit des
menschlichen Individuums (Dresden: Ch. F. Grimmer, 1834). Weisse reprints his
previous book review of Richters Die Lehre von den letzten Dingen in an appendix
to this work, pp. 6280.
42. Weisse, Die philosophische, 36ff.
43. Ibid., 46ff.
44. C. Fr. Gschel, Die neue Unsterblichkeitslehre. Gesprch einer Abendgesellschaft, als Supplement zu Wielands Euthanasia. Herausgg. von Dr. Friedr. Richter,
von Magdeburg. Breslau bei Georg Friedrich Aderholz 1833. 79 S. kl. 8, Jahrbucher fr wissenschaftliche Kritik, first article, January 1834, nos. 13, pp. 14,
pp. 916, pp. 1722; second article, nos. 1719, pp. 13135, pp. 13847.
45. Gschel, Die neue Unsterblichkeitslehre, 13944.
46. I. H. Fichte, Die Idee der Persnlichkeit und der individuellen Fortdauer (Elberfeld: Bschler, 1834).
47. Carl Friedrich Bachmann, Ueber Hegels System und die Nothwendigkeit einer
nochmaligen Umgestaltung der Philosophy (Leipzig: Fr. Chr. Wilh. Vogel, 1833).
48. Ibid., 309.
49. Karl Rosenkranz, Hegel: Sendschreiben an den Hofrath und Professor der
Philosophie Herrn Dr. Carl Friedrich Bachmann in Jena (Knigsberg: August Wilhelm
Unzer, 1834).
50. Ibid., 12830.
51. Carl Friedrich Bachmann, Anti-Hegel: Antwort an Herrn Professor Rosenkranz in Knigsberg auf dessen Sendschreiben, nebst Bemerkungen zu der Recension meiner
Schrift ber Hegels System in den Berliner Jahrbcher von Herrn Professor Hinrichs in Halle:
Ein unentbehrliches Actenstck zu dem Process gegen die Hegelsche Schule ( Jena: Crker,
1835), 137, 166ff. Here the Bemerkungen zu der Recension meiner Schrift ber Hegels
System appear at the end of the text in an independent section, pp. 17398.
52. Bachmann, Anti-Hegel, 167.
53. Carl Friedrich Gschel, Von den Beweisen fr die Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele im Lichte der spekulativen Philosophie, Eine Ostergabe (Berlin: Duncker
und Humblot, 1835).
54. Kasimir Conradi, Unsterblichkeit und ewiges Leben: Versuch einer Entwickelung des Unsterblichkeitsbegriffs der menschlichen Seele (Mainz: Kupferberg, 1837).
55. Poul Martin Mller, Tanker over Muligheden af Beviser for Menneskets Uddelighed, med Hensyn til den nyeste derhen hrende Literatur,
Maanedskrift for Litteratur 17 (1837): 172, 42253. Reprinted in Mllers Efterladte
Skrifter, 3 vols. (Copenhagen, 183943), 2:158272. In French as Rflexions sur
la possibilit de prouver limmortalit de lhomme en rapport avec la littrature
rcent sur le sujet, in Lectures philosophiques de Sren Kierkegaard: Kierkegaard chez
ses contemporains danois, ed. and trans. Henri-Bernard Vergote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), 149213. See also Carl Henrik Koch, Den danske ide-

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alisme 18001880 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004), 25864; Jrgen K. Bukdahl,

Poul Martin Mllers opgr med nihilismen, Dansk Udsyn 45 (1965): 26690.
56. Mller, Tanker, 450.
57. Sren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte and
Albert B. Anderson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13941,
15154; Sren Kierkegaard, Sren Kierkegaards Skrifter, 55 vols., ed. Niels Jrgen
Cappelrn et al. (Copenhagen: Gad, 1997 ), 4:43943, 45153. Sren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 2 vols., trans. Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1:16588;
Kierkegaard, Sren Kierkegaards Skrifter, 7:15373. Sren Kierkegaard, Christian
Discourses: The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, trans. Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 20213;
Kierkegaard, Sren Kierkegaards Skrifter, 10:21121. See also Gregor Malantschuk,
The Problems of the Self and Immortality, in his Kierkegaards Way to the Truth,
trans. Mary Michelsen (Montreal: Inter Editions, 1987), 7996.
58. Michelet, Vorlesungen ber die Persnlichkeit.
59. For this debate, see Arthur Drews, Die deutsche Spekulation seit Kant mit
besonderer Rcksicht auf das Wesen des Absoluten und die Persnlichkeit Gottes, 2 vols.
2nd ed. (Leipzig: Gustav Fock, 1895); Michelet, Geschichte der letzten Systeme der Philosophie, 2:64548; Jaeschke, Hegel Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Schule, 50512; Theodor
Dieter, Die Frage der Persnlichkeit Gottes (Tbingen: Schnrlen, 1917); Wilhelm
Sthler, Ueber die Frage nach der Persnlichkeit des Absoluten, Zur Unsterblichkertsproblematik in Hegels Nachfolge (Mnster: Unwersitats, Vertag, 1928), 1718.
60. A[ugust] Tholuck, Die Lehre von der Snde und vom Vershner, oder Die wahre
Weihe des Zweiflers, 3rd ed. (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1830 [1823]), 193.
61. Ibid., 234.
62. Hegel, Encyclopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Xin; Hegel, EL, 8n;
Hegel, Jub., 8:12n.
63. Hegel, Encyclopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 573, p. 521; Hegel, Phil. of Mind, 573, p. 305; Hegel, Jub., 10:462 (translation modified).
64. Hegel, Encyclopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 573, p. 528n;
Hegel, Phil. of Mind, 573, p. 310n; Hegel, Jub., 10:468n.
65. Anon., Ueber die Hegelsche Lehre, oder: absolutes Wissen und moderner Pantheismus (Leipzig: Christian Ernst Kollmann, 1829).
66. Erdmann, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, 2:622, 332.1.
67. Anon, Ueber die Hegelsche Lehre, 182ff.
68. Ibid., 197ff.
69. Hegel, 1. ber die Hegelsche Lehre.
70. Ibid., 316ff.
71. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Ueber Gegensatz, Wendepunkt und Ziel heutiger Philosophie (Heidelberg, 1832).
72. I. H. Fichte, Die Idee der Persnlichkeit und der individuellen Fortdauer (Elberfeld: Bschler, 1834), 35ff.
73. C. H. Weisse, Ueber das Verhltniss des Publicums zur Philosophie in dem Zeitpuncte von Hegels Abscheiden (1832), 3441.

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74. C. H. Weisse, Die Idee der Gottheit: Eine philosophische Abhandlung: Als wissenschaftliche Grundlegung zur Philosophie der Religion (Dresden: Ch. F. Grimmer,
1833).
75. Ibid., 12138, 196233.
76. Bachmann, Ueber Hegels System, 28283.
77. Ibid., 297310.
78. Rosenkranz, Hegel: Sendschreiben, 12324.
79. Bachmann, Anti-Hegel, 16162.
80. Ibid., 162.
81. C. A. Eschenmayer, Die Hegelsche Religions-Philosophie verglichen mit dem
christlichen Princip (Tbingen: Heinrich Laupp, 1834).
82. Ibid., iv.
83. Ibid., 152, p. 125.
84. Ibid., 152, p. 126.
85. Ferdinand Christian Baur, Die christliche Gnosis oder die christliche
Religions-Philosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwiklung (Tbingen: C.F. Osiander,
1835), 700ff.
86. Ibid., 7045.
87. Ibid., 706.
88. Julius Schaller, Die Philosophie unserer Zeit: Zur Apologie und Erluterung
des Hegelschen Systems (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1837), 268323.
89. Ibid., 293ff.
90. Michelet, Geschichte der letzten Systeme der Philosophie, 2:64548.
91. Ibid., 2:646.
92. Carl Phil. Fischer, Die Idee der Gottheit: Ein Versuch, den Theismus speculativ
zu begrnden und zu entwickeln (Stuttgart: S.G. Liesching, 1839).
93. Ibid., x.
94. Ibid., xxi.
95. Michelet, Vorlesungen ber die Persnlichkeit Gottes und Unsterblichkeit der
Seele oder die ewige Persnlichkeit des Geistes.
96. Ibid., 22324.
97. Ibid., 248ff.
98. Ibid., 272ff.
99. [Bruno Bauer], Die Posaune des jngsten Gerichtes ber Hegel den Atheisten
und Antichristen: Ein Ultimatum (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1841). For an account of
this text, see Douglas Moggach, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 99118.
100. Moggach, Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer, 100.
101. [Bauer], Die Posaune, 6770.
102. See Michelet, Geschichte der letzten Systeme der Philosophie, 2:64859; Erdmann, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, 2:65460; Toews, Hegelianism, 165
75, 25587; Brazill, Young Hegelians, 95132.
103. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu.
104. Baur, Die christliche Gnosis, 707ff.
105. Ibid., 715.
106. Ibid.

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107. J. Chr. F. Steudel, Vorlufig zu Beherzigendes bei Wrdigung der Frage ber
die historische oder mythische Grundlage des Lebens Jesu, wie die kanonischen Evangelien
dieses darstellen u.s.w. (Tbingen: Fues, 1835).
108. G. C. Adolph Harless, Die kritische Bearbeitung des Leben Jesu von Dr. Dav.
Friedr. Strauss nach ihrem wissenschaftlichen Werthe beleuchtet (Erlangen: C. Heyder,
1835).
109. Carl A. Eschenmayer, Der Ischariotismus unserer Tage: Eine Zugabe zu dem
jngst erscheinen Werke: Das Leben Jesu, von Strauss (Tbingen: Fues, 1835).
110. Christoph Benj. Klaiber, Bemerkungen ber das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet von Dr. Fr. Strauss (Stuttgart: Beck & Frnkel, 1836).
111. Ibid., 7088.
112. A. Tholuck, Die Glaubwrdigkeit der evangelischen Geschichte, zugleich eine
Kritik des Lebens Jesu von Strauss, fr theologische und nicht theologische Leser dargestellt
(Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1836), 78.
113. Johann Peter Lange, Ueber den geschichtlichen Charakter der kanonischen
Evangelien, insbesondere der Kindheitsgeschichte Jesu mit Beziehung auf das Leben Jesu
von Strauss (Duisburg, 1836).
114. Wilhelm Hoffmann, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet von Dr. D. F. Strauss:
Geprft fr Theologen und Nichttheologen (Stuttgart: P. Balz, 1836).
115. Bruno Bauer, review of writings on Strauss by Steudel, Klaiber, Hoffmann, Lange, Harless, Sack, Baader, and Eschenmayer, in Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftliche Kritik (1837), no. 41, pp. 32128; no. 42, pp. 32936; no. 43, pp. 337
43. (As was customary, the title of the review was simply the titles of the books
under examination.)
116. Strauss, Streitschriften, 95126; Strauss, Defense, 3866.
117. Strauss, Streitschriften, 6768; Strauss, Defense, 1314.
118. Strauss, Streitschriften, 76ff.; Strauss, Defense, 21ff.
119. Carl Friedrich Gschel, Beitrge zur spekulativen Philosophie von Gott und
dem Menschen und von dem Gott-Menschen: Mit Rchtsicht auf Dr. D.F. Strauss Christologie (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1838).
120. See Walter Jaeschke, Urmenschheit und Monarchie: Eine politische
Christologie der Hegelschen Rechten, Hegel-Studien 14 (1979): 73107; 83ff.
121. Gschel, Beitrge zur spekulativen Philosophie, 53ff.

Politics, Religion, and

Personhood: The Left Hegelians
and the Christian German State
Warren Breckman

The radical disincorporation, or literally, disembodiment of power

counts among the most basic features of modern democracy. All earlier
conceptions of power had demanded that power be invested inalienably in some body, some person or corporate assembly of persons. So,
for example, the absolutist theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries equated the body politic with the monarch. In a literal sense,
Leviathan embodies his subjects, gives them form, as the famous frontispiece of Thomas Hobbess 1651 work makes strikingly clear; or, in
the words of Louis XIV, Letat cest moi. Undoubtedly, the Sun Kings
phrase was not meant to signify absolute arbitrariness, because the royal
I incarnated the monarch as individual and the monarchy as institution, the kings two bodies, to use Ernst Kantorowiczs famous phrase.
Yet even if the monarch was expected to honor laws and rights acquired
by constituent groups over the centuries, those rights were thought to
constitute the monarchy itself, and insofar as the monarch conformed
to the nature of the monarchy, those rights seemed consubstantial with
the monarchs own person.1 The radicalism of modern democracy lies
in the novel disincorporation or disembodiment of power in the name
of an egalitarian perception of social relations. The center of modern
democratic power is a lieu vide, an empty place. There is no power linked
to a body, writes Claude Lefort. Power appears as an empty place and
those who exercise it as mere mortals who occupy it only temporarily or
who could install themselves in it only by force or cunning.2 No one can
appropriate or incarnate democratic power, nor can it be represented.
Even the people, the democratic sovereign, eludes representation, embodiment, substantiality. In place of a symbolic logic of embodiment or
incorporation, modern democracy is marked by a loss of foundation, an

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openness and indeterminacy in which the notion of legitimate power is

replaced by an interminable debate as to what is legitimate.
These remarks on the empty place of democratic power furnish
a crucial point of entry to the political dimension of Left Hegelianism
in the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed, the problem of embodiment united the
Left Hegelians critique of religionespecially their attacks on Christian incarnationwith an increasingly radical political and social critique. After all, their radical campaign was waged within living memory
of the French Revolution, the great event that brought the dynamic of
political disembodiment to the surface with the force of an eruption. In
associating manifestly theological debates between the Young Hegelians and their opponents over the nature of God and the essence of
Christianity with the political reverberations of the French Revolution,
I do not mean to say that the theological debate over the Christian incarnation was simply a political debate fought by other means. Nonetheless, the theological controversy was closely, even inseparably bound
up in political meaning. I want to substantiate this claim by focusing on
the controversy over personality (Persnlichkeit), which was a concept
that fused political and theological dimensions in the discourse of the
Young Hegelians and their adversaries alike. This fusion becomes dramatically apparent in the claims of two Hegelians in 1841: while Karl
Ludwig Michelet could insist that the question of Gods personality had
dominated the history of philosophy in the previous decade, Friedrich
Wilhelm Carov could declare personality to be a question of life and
death (Lebensfrage) for Prussian politics.3
If there were to be a history of philosophical words, Theodor
Adorno has written, the expression personality and the changes in its
meaning would not be an unworthy object.4 In the 1820s and 1830s,
the task set by Adorno must focus on the conflict between Hegelianism
and the array of its critics in theology and politics. One level of this antiHegelianism may be found among conservative theological circles, who
were preoccupied by the effort to reassert Protestant orthodoxy against
the theological rationalism that had, by the end of the eighteenth century,
infiltrated even the clergy itself. In this atmosphere, Hegel appeared as
the arch-rationalist, the heir of enlightened philosophy. Hostility toward
Hegel focused on his alleged pantheism and its conception of the divine
being as an impersonal, immanent world-force. The charge that Hegel
was a Spinozist, a pantheist, or a panlogist became the stock- in-trade
of conservative Protestants such as August von Tholuck or Ernst Hengstenberg, editor of the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung. Tholuck and Hengstenbergs reaction took the form of a vigorous reassertion of the orthodox

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dogma of the transcendent personal deity, and Christ as the incarnate

Son of God. The proper object of human devotion was God understood
as a person, that is, as a being distinct from the world and endowed with
consciousness, will, and love for human individuals.
The reassertion of a personal God decisively shaped the philosophical anti-Hegelianism of the 1830s as well, although the various currents of philosophical personalism should not be fully identified with the
orthodox adherence to revealed religion seen in figures like Hengstenberg.5 By the later 1830s, much of this line of philosophical discussion
was concentrated in the pages of the Zeitschrift fr spekulative Theologie,
which the historian of philosophy J. E. Erdmann described as the audience chamber of all the anti-Hegelians.6 The editor of the Zeitschrift,
Immanuel Hermann Fichte, recalled in the 1860s that at the height of
the philosophic campaign against Hegels panlogism and the necessity of his dialectical process, Fichte and the other leader of speculative theology, Christian Hermann Weisse, inscribed their banner with
the principles of individualism, freedom, and personality.7 This philosophical anti-Hegelianism drew on many sources, including the campaign launched against pantheism by F. H. Jacobi in the late eighteenth
century; but the most decisive influence was undoubtedly the positive
philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling, which Schelling had introduced in his
lectures and writings in the late 1820s and early 1830s.
The sine qua non of the positive philosophy was the revelation of a
complex, living, willful, and active personal God. Whereas Hegels God
is immanent in the world, limited by the necessity of the system, the later
Schellings God is a pure will unbounded by the creation. This was a dramatic revaluation of the pantheism of Schellings youthful philosophy of
nature, the absolute idealism that he had developed in the late 1790s.
As a Romantic idealist in those years, Schelling conceived God as the totality of the cosmos. In 1795 he could make the radical claim that there is
no personal God, and our highest strife is to destroy our personality, passing over into the sphere of absolute Being.8 By 1809, however, Schelling
pitted what he called the lifeless abstractions of idealism, both Hegels
and those of his own youth, against a cosmos animated by personality,
which he called the sole principle of life.9 By the 1820s, Schelling affirmed his rebellion against a system reducing everything to mere rational relationships, a system excluding freedom and personality.10
Schellings claim for divine personality grounded his claim for
human personality. This was not a straightforward repetition of the biblical notion that God made man in His image, but rather, it rested on
a philosophically oriented form of analogical thinking. In one formulation, persons are simple (noncomposite), of an intrinsic worth not

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equaled by nonpersons, and at least one of their number is ontologically

ultimate.11 Another way to construe this claim for the ultimacy of one
person over all others would be in terms of Slavoj ieks attempt to articulate a logic of universality whereby one element within a series breaks
off and becomes the exception that anchors the series, in this case the
series of persons.12 If we follow ieks explication, this is not just a case
of a single entity erected as an exemplar. Rather, the analogical grounding of persons derives from a paradigmatic act of internal splitting: God
as substantial entity must itself split and engender itself as subject, that is,
God becomes man. The gesture by which substance becomes subject,
iek writes, is not simply dispersed among the multitude of subjects,
but is always centered at some point of exception, in the One, the individual who takes upon himself the idiotic mandate of performing the
empty gesture of subjectivation. The freedom of human personhood
is thus grounded by the analogous extension of the divine gesture: for
freedom to take place (as our positing), it must already have taken place in
God as his incarnation.13
The crucial dimension of Schellings account, as iek and numerous other commentators have emphasized, is that Gods act of subjectivation is never fully free of the substantial ground that it seeks to overcome. Indeed, Schellings Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom
argued that God is rent by a tension between two wills, one that seeks
to universalize all, to raise all to unity with the light, the other the dark
principle of the ground, which seeks to particularize all or to make
it creaturely.14 Even divine freedom depends, as Andrew Bowie writes,
upon a ground from which it can never be wholly separated, lest it lose
that via which it can reveal itself and be itself.15 Though God seeks to
impose order on the ground, He can never fully master it. This in turn
provided Schelling with the basic tenet of his critique of Hegels philosophy of identity, for subjectivity depends upon a ground that it can never
know, an indivisible remainder that it will never be able to invoke except through mystical and mythopoeic language.16
Human personality analogically duplicates divine freedom, but at
a lower level, where particular things not only emerge as anti-types
(Gegenbilder) of the whole that is their ground, but may actively will to
tear themselves away and affirm their separation from the Absolute. For
Schelling, this act of will was a Fall, the origin of human evil, which he
defined precisely as this will to resist the Absolute. Yet if evil is an intrinsic potentiality of personality, its other potential is redemption. Contrary
to his youthful yearning to overcome personal particularity, the older
Schelling maintained that persons will instinctively reject an Absolute
that threatens to swallow them, whereas they may freely choose in faith

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a God who is living, personal, and loving. Hence, Schelling offered a

philosophical reformulation of the meaning of the Christian Incarnation: only the personal human form of Christ can heal the wound of the
human person.17 The redemptive power of personality thus rests on the
human persons potentiality as the imago dei, but only insofar as Christ
offers a perfect Gegenbild of the Absolute. This Christological dimension,
already present as a crucial theme in Schellings Philosophy and Religion
(1804), came to play an ever-increasing role in his later works on positive
philosophy, mythology, and revelation.18
Schellings emphasis on the fallenness of man led him to a political
stance that was radically at odds with his youthful enthusiasm for the
emancipatory politics of the French Revolution. Whereas the young idealist had envisioned freedom in terms of the fulfillment of mans destiny
as a self-legislating and self-determining subject, the elderly Schelling
viewed the state as a disciplinary institution erected to constrain mans
unruly impulses. This political direction found much fuller expression
in the work of Friedrich Julius Stahl, whose The Philosophy of Right in Historical Perspective (Die Philosophie des Rechts nach geschichtlicher Ansicht), the
first volume of which appeared in 1830, launched his career as the preeminent conservative political philosopher of Vormrz Prussia. Stahls
political philosophy rests on an elaborate analogy between the personal
God and the personal monarch. The legitimate state is a kingdom of
personality for Stahl, a living unity of many personalities with and in
the one highest personality (God-king-authority).19 Like Schellings
God, Stahls monarch is not bound by any rule or law. Although the
monarch is the ground of all political relations, permeating all social
and political life, he transcends all the constraints of the sociopolitical
collectivity. His relation to the body politic is in the final instance irrational, voluntaristic, decisionistic, contingent.
In thus developing a political theology based on personal sovereignty, Stahl tried to resolve the concrete political dilemmas posed in
the French Revolution and its aftermath. The central notion of democracy, the sovereignty of the people, became unintelligible from Stahls
perspective because the general will has no power to shape itself into a
sovereign personality; the unity of the political community rests strictly
on the capacity of the monarch to incarnate the body politic. Moreover,
Stahls position subordinated liberal efforts in the years after Napoleons
defeat to introduce constitutions into Prussia and other German states
to the will of the personal monarch, who is the ground of the rule of law,
not merely a functional part of a constitutional state. This last point was
at the core of Stahls critique of Hegel, whom he considered the most
egregious of the constitutionalists. For as Hegel argued in the Philosophy

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of Right, the monarch is a moment of the state regarded as a great architectonic edifice, a hieroglyph of reason.20 Of course, Hegel had his
own theory of the necessity of a personal monarch at the pinnacle of a
state founded on the value of subjectivity. But in contrast to Stahl, Hegel
insisted merely that the monarch is important because an edifice of legal
norms cannot itself make decisions. Someone is needed to finally say I
will and thereby cause a transition from discussion to actuality. However, Hegel immediately clarified that this reliance on a personal decision does not imply that the monarch may act arbitrarily. Rather, in an
ultimate reduction of personal power, Hegel maintained that in a fully
organized state, it is only a question of the highest instance of formal
decision, and all that is required in a monarch is someone to say yes
and to dot the i.21 In Stahls view, Hegel thereby negated the real,
determinate personality and recognized only personality in abstracto
as the vehicle of a Spirit whose telos leads toward the overcoming of personality.22 Writing in the 1845 edition of his Philosophy of Right in Historical
Perspective, Stahl expressed no surprise about the outbreak of democratic
republicanism among Hegels younger disciples, believing as he did that
Hegels governmentalist standpoint had already negated the principle
of transcendent authority.
Stahls political personalism expressed at a sophisticated level the
more basic effort of Prussian conservatives to reinvest monarchy with the
majesty of divine ordination. In reaction against the threat of a democratic disembodiment of power, as well as against constitutionalisms displacement of sovereignty into the impersonal rule of law, the personalist
political theology of the Prussian Restoration attempted to incorporate
power once again. This impulse may be seen powerfully at work in the
influential thought of the pietist nobleman Ludwig von Gerlach, who
combined Carl Ludwig von Hallers essentially feudal notion of power as
Herrschaft, or personal sovereignty, with an insistence upon the divine origins of what he called the institutions of personality and patriarchy.23
The restorationist vision epitomized by Gerlach struggled throughout
the 1820s with more progressive impulses lingering on from the Reform
era, with conservatives like Hengstenberg and Gerlach finally gaining
the position of intimate counselors to the aging Friedrich Wilhelm III
by the mid-1830s. The kings openness to this Christian political theology remained moderate compared to the crown prince, Friedrich Wilhelm, who steeped himself in theology and surrounded himself with a
coterie of pietist fundamentalists and Christian Romantics. Not surprisingly, when Friedrich Wilhelm IV came to the throne in 1840, he quickly
reneged on some vague promises of constitutional reform and turned
toward his dream of creating a Christian-German state in Prussia.

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This was a total effort, involving a style of governance as well as a

cultural politics. The historian John Toews detects this cultural politics at
work even in as unlikely a place as Felix Mendelssohns Lobgesang.24 Similarly, the art historian Frank Bttner recognizes the influence of personalist political theology in the monumental art of the period.25 Already
in the 1830s, Peter von Corneliuss frescoes in Munichs Ludwigskirche,
which represented the revival of fresco art on a scale not seen since the
Renaissance, gave powerful expression to the theological reassertion of
the principle of personality. In God as Creator and Sustainer of the World,
Cornelius revived a motif that had almost entirely fallen out of the artistic vocabulary of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the
personal God represented as a magnificent bearded figure in a swirl of
drapery, surrounded by a host of angels. The same personalist theology is
on view in Corneliuss fresco of the Last Judgment. Here, Christ, with arms
outstretched, dominates over a hierarchically structured cosmos full of
angels and apostles. Below, the Archangel Michael, bearing shield and
upheld sword, divides a scene that on the right side depicts the damned
being dragged to Hell and on the left side depicts the redeemed turning
heavenward. In Berlin, Friedrich Wilhelm IV tried to capitalize on this
revival when he dreamt of building a great cathedral, a project that in
the end was never realized. To adorn the monumental apse of the cathedral, the new king himself chose the unusual theme Awaiting the Last
Judgment, by which Friedrich Wilhelm placed himself directly under
God, thereby intending a double message that he was a just sovereign
answerable to God and the only political power in Prussia. He initially
considered competing designs by Philipp Veit and Edward von Steinle,
both of which incorporated elements of Friedrich Wilhelm IVs political theology; but it was not until after 1848 that Friedrich Wilhelm chose
a design by Cornelius, attracted by Corneliuss balance of theological
complexity and political subtlety. At the bottom of the cartoon for the
never-realized fresco, Cornelius depicts the king and queen kneeling at
an altar, surrounded by human figures, some realistically representing
a cross-section of Prussian society from elites to commoners, others allegorically depicting virtues. As one ascends the vertical axis above the
king and queen, one encounters Church Fathers and still higher, the enthroned Christ, surrounded by a heavenly host. The vertical axis clearly
establishes the subordination of the worldly to the heavenly, while the
horizontal axis places the monarch at the center of worldly relations. In
turn, this earthly relation mirrors Christs dominion over the heavens,
thereby suggesting a strong homology between Christs sovereignty and
the restricted sovereignty exercised over men by the monarch.
The new king also set about entrenching his views in Prussias uni-

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versity in Berlin. The most significant expression of this policy was the
summons to Schelling and Stahl to come to Berlin to slay the dragonseed of Hegelian pantheism. Schelling accepted the chair held by
Hegel up to his death in 1831, and Friedrich Julius Stahl took the position held by the eminent Hegelian philosopher of law Eduard Gans until
his death in 1839. Observing these developments, Karl Marx described
Schelling as Prussian policy sub specie philosophiae,26 and in an open letter to Arnold Ruge, Marx claimed of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, He is the
sole political person. In one way or another, his personality determines
the system. . . . The King of Prussia has tried to alter the system by means
of a theory which in this form his father really did not have.27
Yet in fact it did not take Friedrich Wilhelms heavy hand to bring
the politico-theological issue of personality into the consciousness of
left-wing Hegelians like Marx. Indeed, it had been a central concern
of Hegelian thought throughout the 1830s. The ongoing assault from
conservative theologians and political writers, as well as the more sophisticated critiques from personalist thinkers like Schelling and Stahl, contributed significantly to the breakdown of the Hegelian school. This is
a topic that cannot be explored in any depth in the present essay, except to note that particularly after the publication of David Friedrich
Strausss The Life of Jesus (1835), many conservative Hegelians, such as
Karl Friedrich Gschel, found it prudent to disavow Strauss and insist on
the full compatibility of the Hegelian system with the notion of a transcendent personal God and His worldly correlate, the sovereign monarch. Conversely, a smaller group of Hegelian philosophers engaged in
progressively more radical attempts to undermine the Christian idea of
personhood.
If Karl Ludwig Michelet was correct in claiming that the personality of God dominated the history of philosophy in the 1830s, then Feuerbachs Thoughts on Death and Immortality, published anonymously in 1830,
already staked out a radical position right at the outset of the decade.
His critique of the doctrine of personal immortality centered upon a
speculative and historical examination of the idea of the personal God
of Christianity. Against the religion of the pure self, the person as the
single spirit, the task is now to found a kingdom of the Idea, of thought
which contemplates itself in all that exists and is conscious of itself.28
Although the pantheism that Feuerbach espoused in 1830 would soon
give way to atheism, one insight from the Thoughts survived to become a
major part of his mature philosophy, namely the idea that belief in the
personal God is a product of human egotism, that in worshipping God as
a person, the devout receives back the image of human personality.29
It is perhaps not surprising that Feuerbachs Thoughts drew little

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attention until 1836, when the University of Erlangens senate initiated

an inquiry that led finally to the exposure of Feuerbach as its author.
For in the previous year, David Friedrich Strauss had published The Life
of Jesus, a work that aroused outrage across German academe, including
the University of Erlangen, where pietists and fundamentalists formed
what Feuerbach called a pernicious party, and where Friedrich Julius
Stahl enjoyed prominence as the emissary from the land of the mystical dreams of the newest Schellingian philosophy.30 More than any
other work, Strausss book shattered the fragile unity of the Hegelian
school. Like Feuerbach, Strauss pitted the idea of humanity as a collective essence against the idea of personality. In Strauss, this took the notorious form of an explicit refutation of the unique incarnation of God in
Christ. He described the biblical account of the God-man as the product
of ancient Hebrew mythic consciousness, the truth of which lies not in
the unity of one man with God but in the divinity of humanity itself.
Jesus could unconsciously symbolize the divine perfection of humanity,
but the historical Jesus could not be that perfection, because we never
find the ideal completely realized in a single individual, but only in an
entire cycle of appearances, which reciprocally complete each other.31
By subordinating the perfection of the God-man to the perfection of the
species as it realizes itself in history, Strauss blew the lid off the various
accommodations that Hegelians had made between the philosophy of
identity and personalist theism.
After The Life of Jesus, the Left Hegelian critique of Christianity unfolded and expanded with such speed that the humanistic pantheism
of Strauss was soon left behind in favor of various conceptions of an immanent, universal human essence. Indeed, by 1841 Strauss felt himself
so maligned by the authors publishing in the Young Hegelian Deutsche
Jahrbcher that he withdrew his support. By 1841 Feuerbach had published his major work, The Essence of Christianity, which reduced religion
to esoteric psychology and traced the worship of the personal God and
God-man not back to the divinity of humanity, as Strauss had, but to the
collective life of man as a natural and social being. In 1841 Bruno Bauer
also weighed in with two major works. In Critique of the Evangelical History of the Synoptics (Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker), Bauer
celebrated the power of human self-consciousness to dissolve all merely
given phenomena, chief among which is personality, along with its foundational incarnation in the God-man. In The Trumpet of the Last Judgement
Against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist, Bauer brilliantly adopted the persona of an anti-Hegelian pietist to argue that Hegelianism was in truth
a revolutionary philosophy. Personality, reality and everything positive
can in fact be gobbled up and consumed by the Hegelian idea, declared

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Bauers pietist persona.32 Bauers idea of an infinite self-consciousness

in permanent revolution against all positivity rapidly brought him into
conflict with many of the other radical Hegelians and gave his critique
of personalism a specific inflection. Strauss had considered Bauer an
adversary on the Hegelian Right in 1837, because Bauers articles in the
Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftliche Kritik between 1835 and 1837 amounted
to the Prussian Hegelian establishments official censure of The Life of
Jesus.33 By 1841 Bauer had abandoned his defense of the accommodation
between philosophy and theology, and he attacked Strausss mythic explanation of the New Testament for obscuring the origin of the Gospels
in human self-consciousness. Bauer insisted that Strauss had elevated
substance over subjectivity, and he eventually extended this charge to
Feuerbachs naturalism as well. Indeed, where Strauss had placed himself
alone on the Hegelian Left in 1837, Bauer came to distinguish between
a false Hegelian Left based on Spinozist determinism and heteronomy,
or the immediate causal impact of substance on consciousness, and a
true Left based on the autonomy of rational thinking, a struggle that
Bauer traced to Hegels attempt to combine Spinoza with Fichte.34
Whereas Bauer saw his radical project as a continuation of Hegels own
radical implications, Feuerbach pursued his atheistic attack on personalism into another vitally important area when he turned his critical attention toward Hegel himself. In his 1838 Toward a Critique of the Positive Philosophy (Zur Kritik der positiven Philosophie), Feuerbach
explored the ways in which the positive philosophys fixation on personality extended into the realm of speculative philosophy the tendency
of the naive Christian to confuse his own sense of personhood with the
essence of the divine itself. Feuerbach took pains to distance Hegel from
this trend, but he saw irony in the fact that the pervasive tendency toward
personification in contemporary German philosophy had reached a climax in the Hegelians reverence for Hegel. Hence, Feuerbach concluded
with a call for philosophy to surpass Hegel: It is speculative superstition
to believe in an actual incarnation of philosophy in a particular historical
appearance.35 By 1839, Feuerbach applied the analogy between the
Christian Incarnation and the idolatry of absolute philosophy directly to
Hegels philosophy. The Incarnation implied by Hegels claim for absolute knowledge is incompatible with history, with the life of the species
in time and space. Indeed, Feuerbach insisted on a radically historicized
vision of human culture, whereby every human phenomenon, whether
religious, artistic, political, or philosophical, originates . . . as a manifestation of its time; its origin presupposes its historical time.36 Rejecting
the closure implied by the concept of incarnation, Feuerbach conceived

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of history as an open-ended process of development and supersession

in which the repudiation of the possibility of incarnation effectively removes the teleological drive toward an end-state of perfection. He thus
strongly set himself on the side of progressive Hegelians who were beginning to insist that the dialectic will never reach a point of rest; and he
added something new by depicting Hegel as the philosophical Christ, a
figure of incarnation to be resisted in the fight against all attempts to arrest the dynamic of historical development.37
The furor aroused by Strausss Life of Jesus forcefully united the theological and political currents of the discourse of personality. Political reactionaries saw immediately that Strausss denial of the transcendent God
and the Incarnation undermined the personalist theory of sovereignty
that was at the core of Restoration political theology. In Strausss claim
for the immanent divinity of humanity, conservatives recognized a thinly
concealed democratic argument against hierarchy and inequality. By the
same token, the intensification of debate emboldened radical Hegelians
to underscore the democratic implications of their commitment to an
immanent universal principle, whether that was some form of pantheism, Bauers self-consciousness, or Feuerbachs species-being. As early as
1834, Heinrich Heine had predicted that through the marriage of pantheism and politics, there will be played in Germany a drama compared
to which the French Revolution will seem but an innocent idyll.38 Like
Heine, the most radical Hegelians embraced the democratic and republican implications of their pantheism and immanent humanism. Hence,
for example, from an important 1835 essay on Friedrich Julius Stahl onward, Feuerbach became increasingly explicit in linking his attack on
theological personhood with a democratic commitment. By 1841, Feuerbach could comment in The Essence of Christianity that personality is only
an abstract, modern expression for sovereignty.39 Likewise, Arnold Ruge,
the editor of the Hallische and Deutsche Jahrbcher, attacked the Christian
state of Friedrich Wilhelm IV and the personalization of political sovereignty in the theories of Schelling, Stahl, and even Hegel. With increasing boldness, Ruge championed the notion of the state as the embodiment of the collective essence of the sovereign people. Ruge summed
up the fusion of the critique of theological personhood and adherence
to democratic politics with his adoption of a cardinal maxim of early
democratic theory: the peoples voice is Gods voice.40 Similarly, a less
prominent Hegelian, Christian Feldmann, wrote in 1842 that a Young
Hegelian victory would mean that the monarchic principle would make
way for the republican, and the perfect sovereignty of the highest God
would be distributed among millions of earthly Gods.41
In the thought of numerous progressive Hegelians, this politico-

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theological approach to democracy intersected with a radical social program. For example, in On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany
(1832) Heinrich Heine argued that Spinozas identification of infinite
thought and infinite substance as attributes of the absolute substance
bore directly on the epochal task of the nineteenth century, namely the
true reconciliation of spirit and matter. Heine described this pantheistic
campaign against the Christian dualism as the open secret of German
philosophy, although he conceded it was the French Saint-Simonians
who successfully transformed pantheism into an activist program.42 The
new Christianity of the Saint-Simonians may have adopted the esotericsounding slogan rehabilitation of matter, but this quasi-religious goal
manifested itself as a political program focused on neighborly love, overcoming poverty, and the redistribution of wealth. Surveying the SaintSimonians, F. W. Carov asserted that they had introduced political and
industrial pantheism in Europe.43 For Heine, pantheism demanded a
struggle for the welfare of Matter, the material happiness of nations,
not, like the materialists, from a contempt for the spirit, but because we
know that the divinity of humans reveals itself also in their corporeal
form, that misery destroys or debases the body, Gods image, and thereby
also brings the spirit to ruin. With the vision of an end to material scarcity through the social organization of work and wages, Heine claimed
to break with the revolutionary asceticism of the past:
The great word of the revolution pronounced by St. Just, Bread is the
right of the people, is translated by us, Bread is the divine right of
man. We are fighting not for the human rights of the people, but for
the divine rights of humanity. In this and in much else we differ from
the men of the revolution. We do not wish to be sans-culottists, nor frugal citizens, nor unassuming presidents; we are for founding a democracy of terrestrial gods, equal in glory, in blessedness, and in sanctity.44

Heine did not go so far as to attack private property per se; rather, like the
Saint-Simonians, he sought a relatively moderate equilibrium between
the social advantages of private property and the socially harmful effects
of the principle of private inheritance. By contrast, Moses Hesss The Sacred History of Humanity (Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit, 1837) equates
the transition from monotheism to pantheism with the change from
the regime of private property to the community of goods (Gtergemeinschaft). Regarding this process as the fulfillment of a divine plan, Hess
asserted that the end of private property will necessarily come as soon as
humanity recognizes the incarnation of the divine in the holy alliance
of social life.45

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At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the concept of personality held a central place in all contemporary ideas of private property.
Whether in the tradition of Locke, Kant, or Hegel, the right to private
property was based on the antecedent right of personality. Even antiliberal Christian thinkers developed a variant of this argument, whereby
they grounded the right of private property through a further analogy
between the personal God and the created individual as the image of
God, specifically an analogy between God and the patriarch who possesses property on the basis of a kind of sovereignty within his domain,
regardless how small that domain might be. Despite differences, the essence of this form of argument appears in the neo-feudalism of a Ludwig
von Haller or Ludwig von Gerlach, as well as in the personalist metaphysics of a Friedrich Julius Stahl. Common to all of them is the construction of a series of analogies that move from the sovereign God to the
sovereign monarch to the sovereign individual, the latter presenting a
conservative Christian form of what C. B. MacPherson once called possessive individualism.46
In the German states in the 1830s and 1840s, above all in Prussia,
this Christian personalism became an important target of an increasingly radical critique of civil society. This point is worth emphasizing, because for radicals it was this conservative Christian personalism and not
liberalism in the style of Western modernity that presented the most immediate and tangible example of egoism, antisocial individualism, and
the negative effects of private property. This complex intersection of religious and social motifs finds exemplary expression in a passage from
Hess: Since the time of the patriarchs, the belief has ruled that the individual, upon dying, returns not to the general creator, to God, but to his
father. This fantasy inverts the eternal and the temporal; it assigns finite
attributes to the infinite, and infinite to the finite. The same inversion
spiritually consecrates the system of inheritance with its whole range of
attendant consequences. Hess means to say that the asserted right of
inheritance depends on the belief in personal immortality, on the belief
in the eternal integrity of the person who may thus rule over his property equally in life and death. The modern age, Hess continued, knows
better, since it is growing more and more conscious of the true nature of
divinity. Genuine self-consciousness tells us that our individual lives are a
loan of capital which will revert to the creditor upon our deaths: the
eternal right of property belongs to the eternal God alonethe great
whole; individuals and even specific nations, by contrast, can acquire
nothing for eternity, insofar as they are temporary and limited.47
Two years before Hess, in 1836, Feuerbach had attacked Stahls
effort to justify private property through the analogy between the sov-

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ereign God and the sovereign property-owner. It would be a profound

mistake, wrote Feuerbach, to believe that the paltry limitation of finite
relations could be derived from the infinite essence of God.48 Even if
Feuerbachs article did not call into question the basic right of private
property, it is revealing that the editor of the Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftliche Kritik, the moderate Hegelian Leopold von Henning, issued a stern
and pedantic reprimand. Henning found much to criticize in Feuerbachs article on Stahl, but he concentrated on the threat to property
rights that he saw in Feuerbachs pantheism. Henning was willing to
concede that the essence of Christianity is love, but not love in a sense
that would exclude freedom and independent personality, the latter
of which formed for him the foundation for possession, indeed specifically for exclusive private property. He urged Feuerbach to recognize Christianity as a religion of absolute Spirit that raises and preserves
the finite spirit. A correct interpretation of Christianity, concluded Henning, could never assert, as Feuerbach did, that property has no basis in
Christianity. So say the Saint-Simonians, but not the Christians.49
The close connection between the Young Hegelian critique of
Christian personalism and democratic and, increasingly, socialistic
politics inevitably raises the question of how this account of radical
Hegelianism influences our understanding of the young Karl Marxs development. Two points are especially worth emphasizing. First, we see
that Marx was a relative latecomer to this Young Hegelian radicalism.
Indeed, even Marxs critique of anti-social individualism and its effects
on society was profoundly shaped by the earlier identification of personalism with an egotistical denial of the collective essence of human and
divine being. Marxs critique of civil society in his 1843 works Critique
of Hegels Philosophy of Right and On the Jewish Question was as
much a culmination of the earlier radical discourse about personhood,
which embraced the themes of divinity, sovereignty, and egotism, as it
was the initiation of a new socialist discourse. Second, a better understanding of the complex discourse of radicalism in the 1830s alters the
way we think about the target or object of Marxs important writings
in 1843 and 1844, those pivotal years when Marx broke with Hegelian
idealism and began to develop the core ideas of historical materialism.
On the Jewish Question, in particular, announced Marxs move from
the relatively narrow Prussian context to a broader critical opposition to
a western European and American postrevolutionary modernity characterized by bourgeois individualism, liberalism, and capitalism. Scholars generally take it as a given that Marx should thus address himself to
this generic Western social and political configuration. However, insofar
as the dominant intellectual influences on Marx at this time remained

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Prussian, Marxs critique of Western modernity was not developed in

direct response to the liberal bourgeois societies of France, England, or
America. Instead, his engagement with the West was filtered through the
language and concepts that had evolved in the earlier radical Hegelian
reaction against a more specific Prussian context. That is to say, a context
where liberal political and social forms were still overshadowed by monarchy and what we might call bastard feudalism, and where theological, political, and social themes bled easily into each other. Hence, even
though Marx had moved from the kind of republicanism envisioned by
Arnold Ruge or Christian Feldmann to a commitment to social revolution, we hear unmistakably the language of the Young Hegelians
struggle against personalism in Marxs charge that
political democracy is Christian since in it man, not merely one man,
but every man, ranks as sovereign, as the highest being, but this is man in
his uncultivated, asocial appearance, man in his accidental existence . . .
in a word, a man who is not yet an actual species-being. The fantasy,
dream, postulate of Christianity, i.e., the sovereignty of manbut man
as an alien being different from the real manbecomes in democracy
tangible reality, present existence, and worldly principle.50

If we recall Claude Leforts claim that the center of democratic

power is an empty place, then we can understand why early nineteenthcentury intellectuals were so intensely preoccupied with the nature of
sovereignty and the religio-political problem of incarnation. Against
the upheavals of the revolutionary period, against the indeterminacy of
democracy and its subversion of the symbolic and real order of power
and privilege, the personalist political theology of German conservatives attempted to reincorporate and resanctify power, to give it substance, visibility, and representability in the kings body. In opposition,
the Young Hegelians strove to accept democracys radical disincorporation of power, to conceive and articulate an emancipatory discourse adequate to a democratic and secular age. Yet, in their rebellion against
the sovereign discourse of their day, the Young Hegelians faced the constant temptation to substitute one form of incarnation with another, to
replace democracys indeterminate and contestatory interactions with
a more substantial form of unity, whether in the form of Feuerbachs
species-being, Arnold Ruges notion of the Volk as a collective essence, or
Marxs proletariat. The radical Hegelians were all too quick to identify a
human essence in which all humans share and to posit a vision of radical
collectivization that would secure both the conditions for individual selfrealization and the perfectibility of human species-being.

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Dreaming of a total unification of humanity, the Young Hegelians

succumbed to a temptation of radical democratic theory, present already
in Rousseaus representation of the sovereign people as the direct opposite of the monarch: against the arbitrary will of the monarch, the rational will of the people, against the natural personality of the monarch,
the moral personality of the people, the monarch as private person
against the public person formed through the union of individuals.51
The radical democratic struggle over the essence of sovereignty did not
break fully with the structure of monarchic discourse, nor did it fully
withstand the temptation to fill again the empty place of democratic
power. The Young Hegelians are an example of the difficulty of breaking
the mental habit that ties the conception of power to a unified and unifying embodiment. Likewise, they show the challenge of breaking fully
with the theologico-political framework against which they struggled.
Lefort has remarked that many early nineteenth-century French thinkersboth of the Left and of the Rightlooked to the religious for the
means to reconstitute a pole of unity which could ward off the threat of
the break up of the social that arose out of the defeat of the Ancien Regime.52 Leforts observation can apply in Germany as well, not only to
the personalists but also to their radical opponents. It seems that neither
Moses Hess nor August von Cieszkowski, Arnold Ruge nor Ludwig Feuerbach were in a position to envision a democratic order without some kind
of reappropriation of religion as a secularized political faith. Hence, Left
Hegelian humanism appears as an exteriorized, demystified religion,
but with an intact devotional core ready to be self-consciously directed
toward its true object, Man.
The status of the theological was a complicated question in the
political debates of the early nineteenth century. To echo Hans Blumenberg, one must be wary of moving from a recognition of the presence
of theological motifs in a secular language to identifying theology as the
real substrate of secular concepts.53 The development of the Hegelian
Left traced in the present chapter does not suggest that theology was
the real substance of political concepts. Rather, the controversy over personality reveals the categories of the theological functioning in complex
ways, as metaphor, parallel, and analogy within a debate that groped for
a transcendence that might fill the empty place of power. The Young
Hegelians revealed this impulse in a double move, first to negate transcendence by exposing the human secret behind all mystifications and
then, second, to reinscribe the immanent human community as itself
a source of transcendence. To note this is not to diminish the radical
novelty of their critique of Christian culture nor its status as one of the
inaugural gestures of modern radical thought. However, the theological

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remainder in the politics of Left Hegelian humanism does underscore

the difficulties that a secularizing critique encounters when it begins to
paint from the palette of religious analogies and metaphors that saturate
Christian culture.
Driven by the desire to locate the truth of human being in a collective essence, the Young Hegelians began to identify the model of selfhood that they found in the Christian personhood of their day with any
conception of selfhood that did not embed the self in a constitutive web
of relations. It is important to be clear on what I am asserting: the Hegelian Left did not wish to erase the self. Indeed, they sought to facilitate
the selfs liberation and full realization, but this potential lay with the
species, the general. The Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie entry on
Personalismus can help clarify the point. There, Michael Theunissen
traces a line of substantialistic personalism from figures like Boethius
and Aquinas through to moderns like Hermann Lotze and Josiah Royce.
The analogical thinking of the Christian personalists would be a further instance of this. Conversely, Theunissen traces out another tradition that stressed the relational dimensions of personhood. The ancient
Greek word prosoponone of the etymological roots of personsignified both the mask worn by an actor on stage and the dramatic role
itself; in early Christian usage, the word came to refer more broadly to
both the social role of the individual and the individual shaped by this
role.54 Jan Olof Bengtsson rightly points out that the substantialistic
and relationistic threads were rarely, if ever, fully separated.55 Nonetheless, among the Left Hegelians of the late 1830s and 1840s we see a very
strong accent placed on the relational constitution of personhood. They
came to regard any notion of the distinct, substantial self as theological, that is, as deriving its substance from its connection to a form of
religious personalism that the Left Hegelians condemned as antisocial
and antipolitical. And so selfhood came to be a source of alienation, to
be overthrown, or, as Feuerbach put it, dethroned along with the other
dimensions of religious belief that alienated the individual from his or
her true, collective species-being. One trajectory of the radical Left
Hegelian critique of personhood was thus toward the erasure of the category of personhood altogether or, what was essentially the same thing, its
displacement into the metapersonal universal identity of human speciesbeing or, as in Bruno Bauer, self-consciousness.
Certainly, this form of collectivist thinking encountered opposition even within the ranks of the Left Hegelians. So, for example, Max
Stirner attacked Feuerbachs conception of species-being as a rudimentary theological abstraction. Reluctant as Feuerbach was to acknowledge
Stirners objections, by the time Stirners The Ego and Its Own appeared

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(1844), Feuerbach was already moving away from the universalizing idea
of human essence that had animated The Essence of Christianity toward an
increasingly strong emphasis on the sensuous, needful, individual human
being.56 Arnold Ruge also grew uneasy with some of the implications
of Young Hegelian humanism, as well as with the communist position
he had flirted with during his collaboration with Marx on the Deutschfranzsische Jahrbcher. Impressed, if not fully convinced by Stirners insistence on the actual person, Ruge agonized over the obliterating
generality of both communism and Feuerbachean humanism.57 Undoubtedly, he continued to hold radical democratic views and a socially
oriented account of personhood, positions that would place him on the
far Left of the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848. Nonetheless, he came to
worry that the social construction of the person imperiled the rights
and freedoms for which he had fought, because the primacy of society
threatened to undermine the reality of the person who is the bearer of
those rights and freedoms.58 Ruge never succeeded in reconciling this
new rights-based concern for personhood with his commitment to the
actualization of the civic and social dimensions of the person; but the
problem that led him to retreat from communism in 1844 has dogged
radical thought ever since.
Marx seemed immune to these anxieties. The Holy Family, completed
in collaboration with Friedrich Engels near the end of 1844, echoed the
structure of earlier Young Hegelian critiques of Christian personalism,
even as Marx condemned Feuerbach and Stirners turn to an actual
person as a theological construct. The malleability of the categories of
personality and the theological suggest that Marx was no longer really
concerned with the theistic discourse of personality as such; rather, he
reached for a powerful, polemical language that would discredit his rivals on the politico-philosophical Left.59 At stake was the credibility of
any conception of personhood outside that of the social individual. Here
again it is important to be clear as to what I am claiming. Marx was clearly
concerned with enhancing the conditions of individual human development, with human flourishing, in the words of a recent author.60 Yet
Marxs claim that the free development of each is the precondition of
the free development of all is couched in terms that repeatedly elevate
the social above the individual, species-being above particularity. It may
well be that Marxs vision of a fully realized social union that overcomes
individuals alienation from their communal essence does not exclude
the possibility of future conflicts between individual interests and the
common good, but that possibility exists more because Marx does not
explicitly rule it out, rather than because he positively accommodates
it. Marx seems to have had little interest in discussing the persistence of

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individual interests at odds with the common; or, more likely, he believed
that such conflict would diminish as its social sources were overcome.
Marxs efforts to envision the institutional structure of the future society
remained exceptionally vague at best, but any suggestion of how such
a society might mediate between individual interest and the common
good is conspicuously missing. Indeed, by mid-1843 Marx indicted the
entire discourse of liberal individual rights, with its core assumption that
any meaningful conception of freedom must suppose some degree of
tension or distinction between the individual and the society that shapes
her or him. Inadvertently and fatefully, in the quest for human emancipation from all external authority, in the search for the preconditions of
the fullest individual self-realization, Marx left vacant the very center of
the discourse of rights, the person as the bearer of rights and freedoms.
With a single metaphoric leap, Marx traversed the ground separating
theism from liberalism and dispensed with the focal concerns of modern
juristic discourse. Having slipped from theistic personality to all forms of
legal personhood, Marx never returned to the question of the individual
person except to deride it.

Notes
This essay condenses themes treated in much greater detail in Warren
Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
1. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, ed. J. B. Thompson
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 256.
2. Ibid., 303.
3. Karl Ludwig Michelet, Vorlesungen ber die Persnlichkeit Gottes und Unsterblichkeit der Seele (Berlin: Dmmler, 1841), 7; and [Friedrich Wilhelm Carov],
Hegel, Schubarth und die Idee der Persnlichkeit in ihrem Verhltniss zur preussischen
Monarchie, von Dr. Immanuel Ogienski, Hallische Jahrbcher, nos. 6873 (March
1841): 269.
4. T. W. Adorno, Glosse ber Persnlichkeit, in Stichworte: Kritische Modell, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969), 639.
5. This distinction is underscored in Jan Olof Bengtsson, The Worldview of
Personalism: Origins and Early Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
6. J. E. Erdmann, A History of Philosophy, vol. 3, trans. W. S. Hough (London: Sonnenschein, 1899), 20.
7. I. H. Fichte, Bericht ber meine philosophische Selbstbildung, als Einleitung zu den Vermischte Schriften und als Beitrag zur Geschichte nachhegelscher
Philosophie, Vermischte Schriften zur Philosophie, Theologie und Ethik, vol. 1 (Leipzig,
1869), 62.
8. Schelling quoted in Bernard M. G. Reardon, Religion in the Age of Roman-

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ticism: Studies in Early Nineteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge

University Press, 1985), 95.
9. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of
Human Freedom and Related Matters, in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. Ernst
Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), 247, 282.
10. F. W. J. Schelling, Jacobi: Der Theosophismus, in Smmtliche Werke,
vol. 10 (Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1861), 168.
11. See Bengtsson, Worldview of Personalism, 31. The passage is quoted, but
wrongly attributed to Keith Yandells entry on Personalism in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
12. I have discussed this logic in ieks treatment of Hegels concept
of the monarch. See Die Rckkehr des Knigs: Radikaldemokratische Adaptionen eines hegelianischen Motivs bei Jean-Luc Nancy und Slavoj Zizek, in
Hegel in Frankreich, ed. Ulrich Johannes Schneider (Berlin: Alber, 2007), 20518.
An expanded English version of this essay appears as The Return of the King:
Hegelianism and Post-Marxism in iek and Nancy, in The Modernist Imagination: Essays in Intellectual and Cultural History, ed. W. Breckman et al. (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2009), 11736.
13. Slavoj iek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 228.
14. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations, 56.
15. Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction
(New York: Routledge, 1993), 57.
16. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations, 23839.
17. Ibid., 59.
18. The Christological dimension of Schellings positive philosophy is
emphasized in one of the most profound works on Schelling, Miklos Vets Le
fondement selon Schelling, 2nd ed. (Paris: Beauchesne, 2002). On the importance
of Kants late speculations on the problem of radical evil in the path leading toward Schelling, see also Miklos Vet, De Kant Schelling: Les deux voies de
lidealisme allemand (Grenoble, Fr.: Millon, 1998).
19. F. J. Stahl, Philosophie des Rechts nach geschichtlicher Ansicht, 2nd ed., vol. 2,
pt. 2 (Heidelberg: Mohr, 1845), 5.
20. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans.
H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 321.
21. Ibid., 323.
22. F. J. Stahl, Hegels Naturrecht und Philosophie des Geistes, in Materialien zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie, ed. Manfred Riedel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1975), 84.
23. Gerlach quoted in John Toews, The Immanent Genesis and Transcendent Goal of Law: Savigny, Stahl, and the Ideology of the Christian German
State, American Journal of Comparative Law 37 (1989): 162.
24. See John Toews, Musical Historicism and the Transcendental Foundations of Community: Mendelssohns Lobgesang and the Christian-German Cultural Politics of Frederick William IV, in Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and
the Psyche (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 183201.
25. Frank Bttner, Peter Cornelius: Fresken und Freskenprojekte, 2 vols. (Stuttgart

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and Wiesbaden: Steiner, vol. 1, 1980; vol. 2, 1999). The three images described
may be seen in volume 2 of Bttners work: Gott als Schpfer und Erhalter der Welt
(fig. 58), Jngstes Gericht (fig. 56), and In Erwartung des Weltgerichts (fig. 117).
26. Marx to Feuerbach, October 3, 1843, in Collected Works, vol. 3 (Moscow:
Progress, 1975), 350.
27. Marx, Letters from the Deutsch-Franzsische Jahrbcher, in Collected
Works, 3:139.
28. Feuerbach to Hegel, November 22, 1828, in Briefwechsel (18171839),
vol. 1, ed. W. Schuffenhauer and E. Voigt (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1984).
29. Ludwig Feuerbach, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, trans. James
Massey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 23.
30. Feuerbach to Christian Kapp, January 1835, in Briefwechsel, vol. 1.
31. D. F. Strauss, The Life of Jesus, ed. George Eliot (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1972), 770.
32. Bruno Bauer, The Trumpet of the Last Judgement Against Hegel the Atheist and
Antichrist, trans. Lawrence Stepelevich (Berkeley, Calif.: Edwin Mellen, 1989), 67.
33. See D. F. Strauss, In Defense of My Life of Jesus Against the Hegelians,
trans. Marilyn Chapin Massey (Hamden: Archon Books, 1984). On Bauers position in the Right Hegelian attack on Strauss, see John Toews, Hegelianism: The
Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 18051841 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 291307.
34. Douglas Moggach, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 73 and 109. See also his chapter in this volume.
35. Ludwig Feuerbach, Zur Kritik der Positive Philosophie, in Gesammelte
Werke, vol. 8, ed. W. Schuffenhauer (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1973), 207.
36. Ludwig Feuerbach, Towards a Critique of Hegels Philosophy, in The
Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. Zawar Hanfi (New York:
Anchor Books, 1972), 59.
37. I discuss a French variant of this critique of Hegel as an incarnation
in Politics in a Symbolic Key: Pierre Leroux, Romantic Socialism and the Schelling Affair, Modern Intellectual History 2 (2005): 6186. This article also appears as
Politik in symbolischer Tonart: Pierre Leroux, der romantische Sozialismus und
die Schelling-Affre, in Hegelianismus und Saint-Simonismus, ed. Hans-Christoph
Schmidt am Busch et al. (Paderborn: Mentis Verlag, 2007), 20128.
38. Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany, trans. John Snodgrass (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 160.
39. Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christenthums (Leipzig: Otto Wigand,
1841), 440.
40. Arnold Ruge, Die Presse und die Freiheit, in Anekdota zur neuesten
deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik (Zrich: Verlag des literarischen Comptoirs,
1843), 96.
41. Feldmann quoted in Wolfgang Essbach, Die Junghegelianer: Soziologie
einer Intellektuellengruppe (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1988), 229.
42. Heinrich Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 8/1, ed.
Manfred Windfuhr (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1981), 15354.

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43. F. W. Carov, H. Heine und Prosper Enfantin, in Neorama, 2 (Leipzig:

Otto Wigand, 1838), 154.
44. Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 8/1, p. 61.
45. Moses Hess, Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit: Von einem Jnger
Spinozas, in Philosophische und sozialistische Schriften 18371850: Eine Auswahl, ed.
Wolfgang Mnke (Vaduz and Liechtenstein: Topos, 1980), 51.
46. C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From
Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).
47. Hess, Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit, 5657.
48. Feuerbach, Die Philosophie des Rechts nach geschichtlicher Ansicht
von Friedr. Jul. Stahl, in Gesammelte Werke, 8:29.
49. Henning to Feuerbach, April 17, 1835, in Briefwechsel, vol. 1.
50. Marx, On the Jewish Question, in Collected Works, vol. 3, 159.
51. J.-J. Rousseau, Du contrat social et autres oeuvres politiques (Paris: Garnier,
1975), 244.
52. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 249.
53. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 93.
54. Michael Theunissen, Personalismus, in Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 7, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Grnder (Basel: Schwabe, 1971),
33940.
55. Bengtsson, Worldview of Personalism, 34.
56. See especially Feuerbachs Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans.
Manfred Vogel (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1986).
57. Arnold Ruge, Unsre letzten zehn Jahre, in Smmtliche Werke, vol. 6
(Mannheim: Grohe, 1848), 113.
58. Arnold Ruge, Freiheit und Recht, in Smmtliche Werke, 6:35258.
59. For a broader exploration of the internecine polemics of the radical
Hegelians, see Warren Breckman, Diagnosing the German Misery: Radicalism
and the Problem of National Character, 18301848, in Between Reform and Revolution: Studies in the History of German Socialism and Communism, ed. D. E. Barclay
and E. D. Weitz (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), 3361. An updated version of
this essay appears in German as Die deutschen Radikalen und das Problem des
Nationalcharakters 18301848, Marx-Engels Jahrbuch (2009), 176207.
60. David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics,
and Human Flourishing (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Hegelianism and the Politics

of Contingency
Chris Thornhill

This chapter examines the writings of the Young Hegelians as part of

a long discursive lineage, and it claims that their works are organized
around an intentional reconstruction of the constitutive motifs of the
philosophical and political history of European societies. Central to this
argument is the claim that political theory is interlaced with processes of
social formation and political consolidation in European societies, and
that it has the social function of providing semantic termsthat is, vocabularies and conceptual categoriesin which societies can examine,
explain, and stabilize the resources of political power which they contain. In this respect, the works of the Young Hegelians describe a deep
semantic caesura in the history of European societies and European
political philosophy, as, in their critique of theologico-political personalism, they mark and articulate that theoretical juncture in which societies confronted metaphysical accounts of their power as irremediably
paradoxical and unsustainable, and sought to reconstruct their political
self-analyses on non-metaphysical foundations. In addition, the theories
of the Young Hegelians show a high degree of self-reflexivity regarding theorys societal role. They mark the evolutionary moment at which
theory began consciously to understand societys reliance on its semantic
fabric, and to organize its conceptual apparatus and objectives around
this knowledge.
The arguments of this chapter are founded in three preconditions. First, the chapter claims that the beginnings of modern European
political thought (with anticipations in the late medieval period) were
marked by a dramatic experience of the contingency of political power
and that, from this point on, political theory has had fundamentally
to do with the confrontation and the organization of political contingency. Theorys first encounter with political contingency occurred in
late medieval Europe, and it coincided with the abandonment of Scholastic political perspectives. These outlooks had defined God as a spon118

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taneous rational-volitional personality, and they had argued that God,

in exercising his own freedom, institutes laws of rational freedom in the
world, which form the perennial legal substructure of the legitimate
body politic.1 In the transition from medieval to early modern Europe,
however, these ideas became precarious and untenable, and they were
insufficiently refined for the rapidly changing legal and political functions of European society. Through this transition, laws were increasingly required that could be applied in fluid and iterable fashion, and
law, as its own positive guarantor, was expected to explain its validity without recourse to points of metaphysical regress outside itself. The first
emergence of modern Europe, therefore, was marked by a need for law
that could authorize itself, and laws contingent ability to found law became the central element of worldly organization.2 In the course of this
transition, then, the realm of human politics also lost its support in the
rational personality of the divinity, and it lost its source of legitimacy in
absolutely authenticated laws. Politics consequently began theoretically
to reflect on itself and its contingency, and political theory gradually assumed the function that it allowed politics, or society more generally, to
formulate positive foundations for the legitimization of political power,3
and so to bring positive conceptual and temporal security into the otherwise contingent realm of political facts. This originary experience of
political contingency is always in the memory of political theory: political
theory is endlessly attentive to societys awareness of the contingency of
its political forms, and it endlessly seeks to provide iterable principles to
stabilize and conceal this contingency.
Second, this chapter also argues that, throughout the early evolutionary history of political theory, the theoretical stabilization of political
contingency occurred through a process of subtle dislocation. This was a
process in which the originary form of Gods rational personality, guaranteeing rational freedom in the state under divine-natural law, was parasitically transposed onto new conceptual structures, whose function was
to provide self-reflected positive foundations for societys politics. For example, the early modern concept of the sovereign territorial state was at
one level a wholly positive form, emerging in the contingent and exceptional space left vacant through the abandonment of political Scholasticism. However, the sovereign state explained itself as a positive actor by
absorbing earlier metaphysical concepts into its own structure and, thus,
by internalizing Gods rational/volitional personality as its own rational/
volitional personality.4 Later, in the Enlightenment, the original authority of Gods rational personality was reconstructed as a condition of legal
personality in the state: in the Enlightenment, theory began to argue that
the state is legitimate, not merely where it acts as a sovereign, but where

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it acts in compliance with its own internally necessary legal structure.

This theoretical adjustment is exemplified by the view of the state as
a person under rationally self-imposed laws proposed by Leibniz and
Christian Wolff.5 Similarly, Kant also accounted for the legitimate state
as a person under freely but necessarily deduced laws.6 Kant saw the state
as the central institution in an existential condition in which the human
being accepts as its own the functions of rational-legal authorship and
self-causality once, in Scholasticism, imputed to God,7 and the state obtains its legitimacy from the pure source of the concept of law, which
human minds deduce as rationally self-causing agents.8 In other contexts, theorists of the later Enlightenment also employed the construct
of the legal person under Roman law, a uniquely flexible and iterable
instrument for positivizing the foundations of civil law and state power,
to establish, under conditions of increasingly recognized contingency,
the premises of the states legal personality.9
In these alternating principles underlying the course of theoretical
formation in European politics, we can identify a semantic process,
which is often called secularization.10 This means that through the transition from medieval to modern Europe, political theory shaped itself
and its conceptual structure around the problem of contingency, and it
recognized, functionally, that its objective was to provide templates for
the exercise of power that were wholly positive and without invariable or
external foundation. In this process, however, theory also learned to account for the legitimacy of the state by reviving or relocating prepositive
forms, and by employing these as a paradoxical reference to authorize
the states power, even in its contingency. Political theory, on this account, initially emerged as a semantic fabric of conceptual or paradoxical displacement, using a conventional store of concepts to provide support for sociopolitical forms and to harden these against the knowledge
of their own contingency. Throughout the history of European political
thought, in fact, it has been the objective of theory to provide an account
of the states legislative authority beyond which there is no necessary
regress, and to show how the state, even in its positive contingency, can
act, or describe itself as acting, as a rationally necessary order of norms.11
In this, the originary idea of Gods personality as a source of rational
freedom enacted in human law has repeatedly prestructured subsequent
theoretical constructs and made itself available as a primary semantic
reference for sustaining state power.
The third claim in this chapter is that in the course of its evolution
political theory has become increasingly knowledgeable about its semantic or paradoxical functions. The history of political thought is marked
by repeated incursions of self-reflexivity, in which theory has observed

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both its tasks of social displacement and the paradoxical formulae that it
uses to fulfill this task. This is quite apparent in the Enlightenment. For
example, Kants account of the legitimate state as a state that founds itself in its own originary act of rationally free self-causality, spontaneously
generating laws that all people recognize as the necessary terms of their
freedom, might already be viewed as a knowing reflection on the fact
that theorys function is, if necessary by paradoxical means, to institute
points of ultimate regress for society, so that a society can stabilize potential experiences of its contingency around reliable points of ascription.
In the aftermath of the Enlightenment, however, theorys self-reflexivity
became more emphatic, and debates about political form were often
conducted in terms that show insight into theorys societal functions and
the subterfuges that these require. Indeed, the period of theoretical history examined by this chapter, the longer wake of the Enlightenment
and the French Revolution, might be described as a semantic interim. This
was a period in which the ancient form of the states personality had
been deeply disrupted by the concepts of citizenship and the rights of
man expressed in the French Revolution, and in which theory evolved
as intensely alarmed both by the problems of contingency to which it
referred and by the disjuncture between its conceptual structure and the
realities that it confronted. Because of this disruption, postrevolutionary
theory struggled to produce reliable models of legal and political ascription from its inherited body of concepts, it was forced to reflect on and
recognize its own precariousness, and it often deployed its concepts with
an implicit recognition of their artifice and their inadequacy for explaining their social objects. As a result of this, political theory was at this time
divided into two widely polarized lines, both of which showed a high
degree of self-consciousness. Some theorists of this era sensed, remotely,
that the paradox of rational freedom in the states person was now redundant and openly paradoxical, and that a new conceptual structure
had to be devised for the state. Indeed, such theories reflected on the
theoretical apparatus underlying European politics, and they began to
identify a collusion between the semantic vocabularies of politics and
prevalent reactionary practice. They therefore committed themselves to
explaining how these vocabularies might be refashioned in order to facilitate new processes of political foundation. At the same time, however,
many theorists resisted the onset of rights and citizenship as structural
principles of the state, and they often resorted to desperate and wittingly
paradoxical strategies to reconsolidate the personal state as an enduring reference, orat mostto reconfigure the state by integrating the
citizen as one of its constitutive elements. In both lines of reflection,
therefore, theory, meta-theoretically, reflected on its interwovenness

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with the social realities that it described and prescribed, it grasped its
own construction around issues of contingency, and at times it deliberately articulated its arguments with their semantic function in mind.

Political Personalism and Self-Reexive

Theory
The self-reflexivity of theory is particularly manifest in the works of theorists who, after 1789, positioned themselves around the conservative
reaction against the French Revolution. Some of these theorists mobilized the residues of the theoretical tradition by stridently asserting the
absolute personality as the foundation of all state power. In France, for
example, Joseph de Maistre argued that all legal rights of persons are
founded either in the concessions of monarchical personality or in the
anterior rights of historical tradition, and that Christianity is the necessary legitimatory basis of the state.12 Similarly, Louis de Bonald argued
that human beings are not able autonomously to form legitimate constitutions and that a hereditary Christian monarchy is the necessary state
form.13 In the German states, analogously, Schelling also concluded that
the legitimacy of the state depends on its structural analogy to Gods
personality. Sustainable rights, Schelling claimed, are externalized enactments of the personality of the state, and rights posited as natural
attributes of singular persons merely reflect the murky source of selfinterest and antagonism, on which the liberal constitutional state is
founded.14
It is in the work of Friedrich Julius Stahl, however, that conservative political theory reflected most self-consciously on its social functions and that it grasped its particular role in relation to social contingency. Stahl argued that a legitimate polity must be a personal polity,
united around a monarch representing Gods personal will. The monarchical principle, Stahl concluded, is the necessary foundation of
all German state law,15 and the monarch obtains legitimacy because
he effects a personification of divine will in the state. Stahl did not
entirely negate the constitutional principles evolving from the French
Revolution. He advocated a limited monarchy,16 combining personalist monarchism with elements of constitutional legal statism.17 Unlike
the ultra-reactionary theorists around Karl Ludwig Haller, therefore, he
claimed that a personal-monarchical state must necessarily be a legal
state, and he insisted that pure absolutism could not produce a reliable
state form.18 It is fundamental to the princely state, he argued, that the

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prince is inclined not to contravene the law,19 and to ensure that laws
are communicated in procedurally correct manner.20 Consequently, it
is also fundamental to the princely state that it wills the existence of a
legal-political condition in which all subjects are treated as equals (that
is, as rights-holding persons) under law and as endowed with a firmly
delineated and assured legal position.21 In Stahls thought, therefore,
the princely state replicates the unity of reason and freedom in Gods
own person: this state, although freely constructed by the prince, has a
necessary and inviolable legal order, and those subject to the state obtain
necessary rights through this legal order. The legal order of the state,
however, is always spontaneously generated by the state itself, and the origin of laws and rights is absolutely external to particular citizens. Rights,
in fact, are elements of statehood that the state enforces as it expresses
its own innate divine personality.
At the center of Stahls theory is an attempt to describe a state
whose laws are both entirely contingent yet also capable of being plausibly applied as absolutely valid general norms. The laws of the state, he
argued, derive solely from the will of the prince, and as such they have a
content that is entirely positive. The princely will is a principle of legislative freedom and rationality in the state, which has no source outside
itself and spontaneously causes itself, ex nihilo, as the source of law. This
will, therefore, is the source of law in its absolute positivity. As emanations of a princely will, however, Stahl also insisted that these laws are
not reducible to their merely positive content, but they also contain a
paradoxically authenticated validity. The symbolic form of the princely
will allows the state to assume a legal personality which, in positively authorizing laws, also confers unshakably authoritative status on these laws.
The fact that the princely will is a princely will, existing in formal analogy
(though not identity) to Gods will, means that the self-causing origin of
law is always more than merely this, and in its legislative freedom, paradoxically, it creates laws that are also absolutely necessary and liberating
for those subject to them. Underlying Stahls thought, in consequence,
it is possible to identify a theoretical moment where European political
thought clearly comprehended that its task was to provide formulae for
stabilizing political contingency, and where, in accepting this task, it was
prepared to utilize even the most implausible paradoxes to obscure or to
create immovable or indubitable security for this contingency. Indeed,
Stahls recourse to the idea that the will of the prince is both positively
decisionistic and the source of a metaphysically necessary legal order appears desperately and in fact absurdly knowledgeable about the paradoxical functions of theory and its need to institute an ultimate reference for
power and law.22

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The desperate self-reflexivity of theory at this time is also underlined in early German legal positivism, whose moderate conservative
theoretical premises are exemplified by the works of Georg Friedrich
Puchta. Puchta argued that the state must necessarily be viewed as a person and that the most legitimate state is organized around a monarch.
He therefore defined the legitimate exercise of power as the right of a
person.23 In proposing this argument, however, he also explained that
the state, although centered in a monarchs person, is formed through
its integral relation with the law and it constantly presupposes the law in
order to explain and to validate its authority. The state might exist as a
distinct or privileged element in public law: it might even act as a necessary complement to the law, executing law through its constitutional
competence.24 However, for Puchta, the state is always a legal personality: it presupposes the law and a generalized consciousness of law,
and it can only act as a state on the condition that the law, and the rights
embedded in the law, determine the application of its power.25 The unity
of the state and law is thus the primary source of political legitimacy.
In this, however, Puchta emphasized that the state does not become an
agent under law through any concrete process of legal formation or any
interaction with factual or natural legal persons. The state is not a substantial legal person, comprising factual or organic faculties. The state in
fact emerges as a legal person through a simple act of legal self-causality.
The state, as an agent under law, is a juridical fiction which both state
and law construct for themselves because they recognize this fiction as
necessary for rendering the acts and statutes of the state plausible and
likely to obtain compliance. The origin of the states personality, thus,
lies in the ability of the state to generate an account of itself through reference to law, and to recognize itself as bound by law and rights through
this act of self-construction.26 The states legal personality is always a fictitious personality, which the state, reflecting earlier ideas of rational
self-causality, articulates for itself as the self-deduced or autogenetic precondition of its actions. Like Stahl, therefore, Puchta clearly reflected
on the ineliminable contingency at the core of state power. However,
whereas Stahl insisted on the princely person as the founding element
of the states legitimacy, Puchta was prepared even to accept the states
fictionalization of itself in law as the basis of its claim to act as the author
of rationally valid legislation. Puchtas work, in fact, might be viewed as
a last and most desperate endeavor to invoke the paradox of absolute
personality to underwrite laws. The absolute personality, here, originates
solely in the states openly paradoxical projection of itself as such.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, theorys awareness
of its paradoxical function was not exclusive to conservative political

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thought. Indeed, if Stahl and Puchta strategically exploited the forms

of personalism, Hegels political philosophy also focuses self-reflexively,
though far more critically, on the fictions underlying the states power and
personality. Central to Hegels thought on this point is a primary critique
of all personalism, which, in all its dimensions, he viewed as uncomprehending of the dialectical and mediated structure of spirit, and so as incapable of grasping rational and social forms in their full formative complexity. In religion, for example, Hegel argued that there is no absolute
personality that antecedes the formation of human reason or that can be
stabilized as invariably independent of human consciousness.27 Hegels
account of spirit, in fact, might be viewed as a contingent and temporally
embedded duplication of Gods original and absolute personality. For
Hegel, the emerging forms of spirit are always formed as dialectically
other to any absolute personality or absolute positive essence, and spirit
shapes itself constantly as self-negating self-consciousness, which can
never possess an adequate determination of its positive or personal content. In law, similarly, Hegel asserted that constructions of legal personality, either private or public, act hypostatically to extract rational beings
from the formative grounds of their actual rational freedom, and they
permit only highly depleted and formalistic experiences of liberty. The
legal freedom of absolute personality, therefore, is autonomy without
spirit or empty generality.28 In each respect, the claims of personalism
reflect an unformed rational outlook, and they impute categorical status
to forms of reason that are isolated and abstracted from their location in
the dialectical emergence of spirit.
At the center of Hegels work, in consequence, is the knowledge
that all positively or invariably postulated forms of personality are false
and that all attempts to stabilize social reality around personality are reductive and self-serving. For Hegel, there is no positive living substance
in the social world, and the rational structures in this world only emerge
through the negation of those forms that self-conscious spirit, in its original self-negating contingency, has produced for itself.29 The rationality
inherent in social reality evolves as it progressively articulates the objective reality of substance. But this rationality can never be more than the
endlessly self-negating configuration of substance, and it contains no
self-identically personalized center of reason to which the forms of social reality could refer for validation or support.30 The rationality underlying social forms, in consequence, is entirely contingent, and it cannot
assume a final personal shape or provide an indubitable point of ascription for any positive institution in the social world.
In its specifically political implications, therefore, Hegel suggested
that the notion of a state as a rational person, offering freedoms under

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laws as expressions of its own formal personality, is a classically simplistic

fictionalization of the sources of legitimate political power. Indeed, Hegel proposed this critique not only because he saw personalism as poor
metaphysics, but because he perceived its probable collusion with socially repressive politics. In consequence, Hegel deliberately positioned
himself against accounts of the states personality that position the state
dualistically against society. Throughout his work he intimated that statically personalized models of statehood fail to acknowledge the socially
constitutive sources of law, and so produce unfree legal orders. Hegels
rejection of absolute personality thus reflected a commitment to a substantial political constitution in which laws were formed not by absolute
but by real rational personalities. Despite this, however, Hegel did not
entirely abandon the idea that the state has a personality and that, to be
legitimate, the state must express this personality in necessary laws. Running through Hegels political philosophy is in fact an attempt not only
to overthrow but also to reconstruct the states rational personality, and
to place it on fully substantial foundations. In this, he sought to account
for the states personality not as a prior or primary fact of statehood but
as an organically formed personality, evolving through the concrete integration of human rationality in all the distinct stages and places of its
formation.31
Hegel therefore argued that states possessing legitimacy are states
that apply laws as constitutional manifestations of an objectivized rational will. These laws are internally formed expressions of the states
rational organism, and they explain and demonstrate their legitimacy
by recognizing their addressees as bearers of certain rights and certain
freedoms. The legitimate state, in consequence, must have a rational
personality, and this personality must be articulated through the allocation and recognition of constitutionally enshrined rights. In this argument, however, Hegel deviated from other theories of the states personality, and he refused to accept that this personality can be produced
as an attribute of self-causality within the state or that the state obtains
this rational personality on any absolutely prior foundation. Instead of
this, he sought to show that if the states personality is to be other than
a mere paradox, it must be a personality that is shaped by the ideas of
freedom that evolve in all spheres of activity that form a society, and it
must rationally incorporate the legal claims of all particular persons, as
they are formed in their particular social practices and locations.32 The
states personality, Hegel thus concluded, is the reality of the substantial
will; that is, it is a universal rational will in which all agents recognize the
rationally generalized and objectively necessary form of their own wills
and of the particular claims and liberties contained in and demanded

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by their wills. This universal will is formed as the state integrates the legal claims and volitional demands of legal persons throughout society,
and, once formed, this will acts both as the rational embodiment and
as the guarantor of these claims and demands.33 Specifically, first, the
state incorporates and guarantees rights of citizens, under the category
of abstract right, as the formal or particular rights of legal persons and
property owners. Then, second, the state also incorporates and guarantees morally founded rights, either as the particular rights of conscience
or the formalistic rights of universal ethical imperatives. In both of these
cases, these rights are absolutely necessary preconditions of the states
rational-personal form. However, these rights are also finally insufficient
foundations of the states existence as a rational will. The states will
only becomes truly rational and substantial, and it only assumes a fully
evolved legal/constitutional personality if, at one and the same time, it
actively integrates all particular rights and successfully transforms these
rights into reliably universalized laws, which it can then transmit across
all different societal locations. The personality of Hegels state is, therefore, formed by its incessantly emergent and unstable rationality, and
this rationality constitutes itself by integrating, mediating, and universalizing, in the form of legal rights, the many claims to rights made by the
many particular wills that it incorporates.34
The crucial innovative point in Hegels approach to the states personality is that he argued that the state cannot evolve an integrative rational personality if it remains particularly attentive to all the needs and
all the rights-claims of all the positive persons throughout civil society.
Attention to the particular needs of persons would burden the state with
unmanageably pluralized and mutually exclusive commitments. Moreover, it would limit the freedoms transmitted in laws to the freedoms
of particularized and singularly interested persons and it would make
it impossible for the state to express its personality in generally or rationally legitimized laws. In fact, Hegel claimed that in order for a state effectively to integrate and preserve the legal claims of particular persons
and to constitute itself as a rational person through this integration, it
must also be able to negate these persons in their primary quality as persons, it must be able to negate the rights to which, as particular persons
in their different social functions, they think that they are entitled, and
it must be able to legislate across all society a set of general laws that disarticulate rights and freedoms from possessive or unilaterally purposive
motives. Underlying the states rationality, therefore, is not a simple legal
duplication of the rights-claims of particular persons as they factually
exist in society. This, for Hegel, would simply represent an inversion of
the metaphysical fiction that states are based in absolute personalities.

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Instead, he argued that the states rationality is formed through the specific abolition of all the absolute or positively finite forms of personality
that persons assume in their social practices and so, also, through the
transformation of rights of particular persons and particular rationalities into rights of universal persons and universal rationalities. The state,
in other words, obtains its constitution as an author of legitimate laws by
sublating the absoluteness of other personalities and by ensuring that
these personalities become other to themselves, and so obtain their necessary rights, in an emerging common structure of rationality, which it
as a rational stateboth embodies and practically enacts. The substance
of the states rational personality, consequently, evolves from the contingent negation of personality, and the function of the states person is to
guarantee rights and duties that other persons recognize as necessary
only through the process of their self-negation.
On one hand, therefore, Hegel saw the positing of metaphysical
personality, both in the state and in the singular person, as an oppressive fiction of political self-causality, employed to stabilize chimerical
and unaccountable forms of order. On the other hand, however, he did
not definitively relinquish the claim that legitimate laws have a rationalpersonal origin, and he saw the rational personality as the necessary
shape of a modern state that integrates citizens on the basis of their
claim to rights. For the states personality to be a truly rational personality, however, it must renounce all positive-metaphysical foundations,
and it must construct itself through the constitutive negation of all absolute persons, including itself. At the heart of Hegels state, thus, is the
knowledge that European political thought, in its desire to obscure the
original contingency of political form, has founded itself on falsely positivized preconditions, and these increasingly act to obstruct humanitys
accomplishment of its rational freedom. To obtain true legitimacy, the
state must revisit its original contingency, and it must find ways of incorporating this contingency and of constructing a rational constitution
that do not merely insinuate an absolute personality, as Gods likeness,
as the immediate premise of its legitimacy. In fact, to be other than paradox, the state must accept that there is no founding order for rational
political life, and it must accept that contingency, or the negation of
positive essence, is the factual though dialectical precondition of its own
evolving rationality. The state can only obtain a legitimate personality if
it accepts itself as formed through the self-negating contingency of all
social process, and so as the absolute other of all primary self-causing
personality. The state, therefore, can only become the free author of rational laws if it subjects itself to a socially infinite negation of all absolute
or primary claims to rationalized legislative authority.

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For Hegel, in consequence, European political history has been

dominated by states of unfreedom, and political philosophy, in enunciating personal-metaphysical justifications for power, has contributed profoundly to the persistence of unfreedom. A state of freedom, however,
presupposes that political reflection accepts the birth of reason from
contingency and accepts that there are no absolute positive forms to sustain legitimate order. Theory that helps to build the state of freedom is
theory that abandons all hypostasis and elucidates the states rational personality as founded only in the endlessly contingent emergence of reason. Despite this, however, the state of freedom remains a personal state.
Indeed, although he proceeded from the claim that the metaphysical
paradox of Gods absolute personality serves, when positively asserted, to
consolidate the state around chimerical freedoms and insubstantial laws,
Hegel lastly concluded that this personality must also be reimagined as
the foundation of political freedom. This reimagination requires that
the states personality must be both absolutely repudiated and absolutely
refounded. This reimagination also requires that political philosophy
must self-reflexively engage with its own social functions and its semantic structure, and it must commit itself to admitting, to negating, and
to rearticulating the conceptual forms around which, throughout European political history, it has explained and consolidated political order.

Hegelianism and the Paradox

of Personality
The diverse social theories associated with the Young Hegelians refer directly to Hegels commentary on the contingent personality of the state.
However, if Hegels work can be interpreted both as a radical critique and
as a reconstruction of the states metaphysical personality, the writings
of the Young Hegelians sought definitively to dismantle the personalmetaphysical conceptual forms underlying the state. In this approach,
the Young Hegelians proposed an experiential or quasi-existential approach to personalism, and they viewed the paradox sustaining the personal state both as a metaphysical simplification and as a concept that
alienates human life from itself and causes human suffering. In giving
this existential intonation to the analysis of personalism, the Young Hegelians hoped finally to resolve the paradox of state power, not through its
conceptual relocation, but through its revocation, and through the institution of completely human foundations for its exercise.35 Indeed, in this
respect the Young Hegelians intimated that pure theory always conspires

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with personalism, and it is only where the consequences of personalism

are grasped experientially that it can finally be supplanted.
The critique of personalism among the Young Hegelians is most
evident in their anthropological theories of religion. These theories converge in the view that God is not a transcendent or absolute agent that is
remote from human knowledge and experience, but that the faculties of
human persons are alwaysat the very leastco-implied in divine persons. Bruno Bauer, for example, argued in his early works that religious
contents and revelations should be seen as symbolic moments in the formation of human self-consciousness, and that these are contents in which
human reason progressively reflects its own ideas of freedom.36 In religious knowledge, Bauer explained, humanity and God approach each
other in a process in which God renounces his metaphysical strangeness toward humanity, and humanity overcomes its factual otherness
toward itself and toward the conditions of its own freedom: at the center
of true religion, consequently, is an increasing self-possession of humanity as fully human and fully free.37 Similarly, David Friedrich Strauss argued that in Christian religion humanity confronts not an absolute personality divided from itself, but an idea of its own essential nature and
freedom. In Christian symbols, he claimed, human reason observes its
own divine-human life and it expresses and invigorates the idea of
humanity within itself. The person of Christ, in consequence, is not one
unique historical personality: it is in fact an idea, symbolically objectivized in a historical form, through which the human mind can generally
envision and configure the freedoms that all human beings, as a species
(Gattung), have in common.38 For Strauss, Christ is the encompassing
personality (Allpersnlichkeit) of the entire human species. The predicates ascribed to Christ belong not to one absolute person, but to all
persons that constitute the human species,39 and each person is responsible for interpreting and elaborating Christs attributes of humanity and
freedom as his or her own social attributes.
Feuerbach also organized his philosophy of religion around a
powerful attack on theological personalism and on the doctrine of Gods
absolute personality.40 Feuerbach argued that the conception of God as
an absolute personality represents a radical estrangement of humanity
from itself. The idea of God as a metaphysical person, he claimed, is distilled from the ideal predicates and the founding attributes of humanitythat is, humanitys species-being (Gattungswesen)and Gods person incorporates these predicates in distortedly expropriated shape. If
projected as God, the ideal predicates of humanity become contents of a
fictitiously constructed divinity, and they are alienated from and allowed
to exercise tyrannical power over those agents in which they factually

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originate.41 Gods personality, in short, is the ideal personality of humanity. It is the personality of the species that has been falsely externalized
and stabilized against the human being in the shape of a divine/metaphysical person. This metaphysical personality becomes a viciously alienating paradox at the center of the human world, and it acts endlessly to
dominate and to withhold the conditions of freedom from humanity.
Human freedom, consequently, can only be founded at that moment
where the metaphysical personality of God is recognized as paradoxical,
where it is interpreted as the residue of a human personality or of many
human personalities,42 and where God is recuperated by humanity as
humanitys own idea of itself.
Bauer, Strauss, and Feuerbach thus all proposed a model of authentic personality in which Gods absolute freedom as a person is obtained only as God becomes finally other to himself in and as humanity.
Thus, while Hegel had suggested that the historico-temporal expansion
of Gods personality, incorporating the embedded freedoms of all particular persons, would ultimately realize this personality, as spirit, in the
realm of human facts, the Young Hegelians argued that the paradox of
personalism must be brought to a definite and categorical end, and that
Gods metaphysical person must finally become a determinately human
person. Like Hegels account of personality, this perspective also contains emphatic legal and political implications. Indeed, the desire among
the Young Hegelians to emphasize Gods anthropological dimension is
clearly bound up with a desire to alter the states personality, and their attempt to reconstruct religious personality as an account of human freedom necessarily also proposes a reconstruction of the state as a state
of human freedomthat is, as a state of citizens. In consequence, the
Young Hegelian attacks on religious personalism also have fundamentally to do with questions of law and rights, and their anthropological
interpretation of Gods personality is directly tied to a theory of human
freedom under law.
In his early works, for example, Bauer incorporated in his theory of
religion a specific account of the law, and he examined religious histories
as articulated moments in the formation of human freedom as a condition of legally formed liberty.43 He described the Christian scriptures as
figuring the stage-by-stage development of humanitys consciousness of
freedom, in which freedom first evolved with the negation of the autocratic personality of God in Old Testament theocracy44 and progressively
took self-conscious shape in the revealed religion of the New Testament, in which people interpret the new laws of faith as their own law.45
The evolutionary structure of human reason, he thus claimed, moves
toward a condition of self-consciousness under its own laws, in which

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laws lose all trace of metaphysical heteronomy.46 Following Bauers antitheological turn in the late 1830s, then, he revised these views to claim
that all religion places humanity beneath a tyrannical law,47 and that
only a final overcoming of religion can bring liberation from false law.
The state, he concluded, is the sole form in which the infinity of reason can become reality.48 Religion has no legal existence outside the
state, and it cannot generate reliable conditions of freedom and entitlement.49 Authentic law, consequently, can only be instituted by a strong
republican state, and it is only in a state comprising active citizens that
fully self-conscious ideas of freedom under law can be realized.
Underlying Bauers later legal arguments is the suggestion that a
legitimate state cannot be based in laws derived from formal or abstract
principles, and that the constitutional order of a legitimate state must reside in a substantially formed personality. After the failure of the Frankfurt Parliament in 184849, for example, Bauer claimed that the inability
of the German liberal factions to engender a viable constitutional state
had been internally connected with their incapacity to free themselves
from metaphysical ideas of law and state and to found politics and law
on a decisively expressed common will.50 Most strikingly, he argued that
the emancipatory ambitions of the constitutionalists around 1848 failed
because they were unable to grasp the law as a vital terrain for the formation of freedom and powerfully asserted rights. The revolutionaries,
he argued, had remained obligated to a formalistic cult of law which,
owing to its obsession with codification and the paragraphing of state
power, failed to recognize the difference between the state of formal law
and the state of free citizens: it ultimately suffocated every sign of life
with its pedantically oppressive formalism.51 Bauer applied this analysis
most particularly to the positivist orientation in German constitutional
theory. He saw positivism as responsible for a conception of constitutional rights that comprehended rights not as the vital legal claims and
freedoms of citizens, but merely as the formally allocated attributes of legal persons. Underlying positivism was thus a thin constitutional personalism, directly analogous to the fiction of personality expressed by the
metaphysical God, and this personalism had cruelly impeded the emergence of political freedom as a shared and substantial realm.52 Underlying Bauers political thought is thus the suggestion that, to be a state of
freedom, the state must always become other to its abstract metaphysical
personal form, and its legal order must reflect a fully and actively human
law. The state as absolute person is always an unfree person, and the state
can only renounce this personality if other persons become formative of
its laws.
Feuerbach also clearly emphasized the legal and political implica-

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tions of the critique of religious personalism. First, his philosophy of

religion revolves around the general argument that the liberation of humanity from its condition of alienation in theistic religion must initiate
a condition of legal freedom. In this condition, human beings will be
reunited with their common essence, and, as a result of this, they will
act both as authors and interpreters of their own laws. In setting out this
argument, Feuerbach asserted that under conditions of religious personalism God is projected as an absolute lawgiver, demanding moral
obedience from the human species. In this capacity, however, Gods law
is the alienated form of humanitys own ideas of moral freedom. God
is the personified law of morality or the moral essence of humanity
transformed into absolute and absolutely alienated prescriptions.53 In
showing obedience to such law, humanity allows itself to be terrorized
by the objective heteronomy of the law, and all possibility of freedom
under law is obstructed. If humanity comprehends God as its own alienated essence, however, humans might develop laws to express their primary human orientations and needs, and the legal ordinances projected
heteronomously onto Gods moral person might be recuperated as the
contents of a personally living law, a law become flesh, a human law.54
True law, in short, defines a condition in which humanity reclaims its
freedom from Gods person: the true law is thus Gods law that has become a human law. Through humanitys self-liberation from God, the
law of Gods absolute person is bound into and articulated by the law
of the many persons constituting the human species, and the absolute
law of the absolute person becomes the common law of many different
persons. The precondition of true personhood, in other words, is that
laws absolute personality becomes other to itself in other persons, and
that these persons are united in a new shared person. This person, then,
is the author of laws as laws of freedom.
Second, Feuerbachs analysis of Gods legislative personality also
contains implications relating specifically to the states personality. Indeed, Feuerbach clearly employed constitutionalist imagery and vocabulary to express the end of humanitys self-estrangement in Gods absolute
person. He claimed that the absolute personality of God is analogous to
a state of tyrannyto the rule of arbitrariness over law55and Gods
final act of becoming human is a condition in which God renounces his
transcendent jurisdiction. The state is thus, by analogy, close to Gods
personality, and just as Gods person is redeemed by becoming other to
itself in free human law, the states person is also redeemed as it becomes
other to itself, to its originary person, in other persons and in other laws.
The self-estrangement of the human in the divine is mirrored in the
self-estrangement of the human in the state, and as the divine becomes

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human as the humans own law, so the state becomes human as a state
under constitutional law. For Feuerbach, in consequence, the constitution of the state is the states human law, and this law is instituted as the
law of citizens who, in forming constitutional laws, actively reclaim their
externalized essence from the state.
Traces of this emancipatory legal conception are also implicit in
the hermeneutical or dialogical turn in Feuerbachs work. Human beings, Feuerbach argued, are fundamentally defined as such by the fact
that they have the ability to speak with and to understand one another,
and they have the ability to understand one another because they share a
common species-being. In speaking, a human being speaks with another
human being as a member of the same species, and these two beings
understand each other because of the species life that encompasses and
unites them. The speech-acts that are conducted between two human
beings are a species function and they always involve an intersubjective
elaboration of capacities and insights that are common to all people.56
The human being is thus closest to the realization of its species-life when
it speaks with others, when it integrates other people in its own selfhood,
and when, in so doing, it discloses and reinforces its founding commonality with other people. For Feuerbach, this means that the human
being is at its most authentic when it throws off its form as an absolute or
monadic person, when it allows itself to be shaped and transfigured by
other human beings, and when it acknowledges that other persons are
immediately and dialogically co-implied in its own formation.
This dialogical notion of human authenticity has clear legal dimensions. The main implication of this hermeneutical turn is that the particular human being becomes most fully human as it becomes other to
itself, and it becomes other to itself as it communicatively reflects itself
as unified with other persons. In this respect, the particular person is an
analogue to God and to the state. As the absolute person of God and the
absolute person of the state share the telos that they become other to
themselves and guarantee freedom in so doing, so the particular person
of the human being also has the telos that it obtains integrity as it becomes other to its primary personal self. By analogy, then, just as the God
and state become other to themselves as bearers of law, the particular
human being that has become other to its first absolute person is also a
bearer of a distinctively human law. Indeed, it is implicit in the dialogical structure of Feuerbachs thought that that moment when a human
person, communicatively, becomes other to its own original or personal
form, and when it integrates others into its account or reflection of itself,
is the genetic or formative moment of truly human law. The authentic
subject of law, consequently, cannot be a formal or absolute person. The

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authentic subject of law, in fact, is the dialogical person. The authentic

subject of law is the person who actively shapes and communicatively
elaborates himself as a person, and whose freedoms and rights-claims
are communicatively and actively structured articulations of the needs of
himself with others: that is, of the needs of the species.
Feuerbachs anti-personalism, in sum, contains a religious utopia, a political utopia, and a social utopia. The precondition of each
of these utopias is that persons under law cease to think of themselves
and others as absolute persons, fully self-reliant, atomized, and eternally
distinct from other subjects, and that law evolves as legitimate through
this process. Personalism, for Feuerbach, engenders a paradoxical selfestrangement in all aspects of human life: in religious life, it alienates
people from their essential inner selves; in politics, it alienates people
from the public form of their freedom; in society, it alienates people
from the private form of their freedom. Societies structured by the paradox of absolute personality are incapable of instituting legitimately
human legal and political orders and they are marked by deeply divided
political experiences of themselves. Such societies are polarized naturally
between public institutions based in authoritarian semi-constitutional
orders and private spheres inhabited by pluralized groups of antagonistic and self-seeking legal persons. Under these conditions, states offer
(at most) formal rights as spontaneous articulations of their absolute
persons, and citizens or subjects receive these rightsprimarily, rights
of ownershipas confirmations of their formal and atomistic legal
status.57 Authentic law, authentic political form, and authentic private
liberty, consequently, are only obtainable in societies where, in analogy
to Gods own act of becoming other to himself in humanity, all persons,
both public and private, become other to their primary selves in other
commonpersons, and, in so doing, produce legal conditions founded
in shared, transpersonal liberty.
The writings of the Young Hegelians, then, might be seen to intensify the degree of theoretical self-reflexivity that is already evident in the
works of Hegel. These writings are deeply marked by knowledge of the
extent to which social forms obscure their contingency through conceptual paradoxes, and they are strongly shaped by the sense that theory
condenses the forms of a societys self-explanation, and that, by subtly
adjusting one aspect of a societys self-examination, theory can prefigure
transformations in all society. Unlike Hegel, however, the works of the
Young Hegelians constitute a radical unwriting of the semantics of European politics, and at the heart of this is the insistence that the citizen, as
the states person in otherness to itself, must be the term, or the personality, under which theory seeks to efface powers paradox. In focusing

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on an anthropological critique of personalism, the Young Hegelians attempted finally to dislodge the traces of metaphysical paradox in European politics, and in their implicitly experiential reference to the term of
the citizen they proposed a final demystification, or deparadoxification,
of political power.

Citizenship and the Paradox of the State

It is notable, however, that the doctrines of the Young Hegelians only
very fleetingly succeeded in consolidating alternatives to these political
paradoxes, and their solutions quickly yielded to new experiences of precarious and metaphysical paradoxicality. The early writings of Karl Marx
gave first articulation to such experiences. Marxs early writings contain
the argument that, although valuable, the attempt to rearticulate the
foundation of state power among the Young Hegelians had miscarried
and now required immediate revision. To this effect, Marx argued, first,
that even to assume that the state can be a location of human freedom
and legitimacy is to fall foul of metaphysical paradoxes or mystical abstraction.58 The conviction that the state can give an unmediated legal
form to the idea of human freedom, he claimed, obscures the fact that
state power is underpinned by laws whose sole purpose is to provide bureaucratic protection for private property, and the belief that the state
is a terrain of rights, citizenship, and common human freedom ideologically conceals the determination of the state by powerful economic
interests. The state can under no circumstances offer rights or liberties
that contradict the interests of the potent economic groups in civil society, who use the state and its laws as utensils for pursuing and sanctioning their own economic purposes. The primary function of the state is in
fact to impose and uphold conditions of contractual stability and legal
security for functions in the economic base. Against the republican ideas
of the state as the expression of citizenship proposed by the Young Hegelians, therefore, Marx denounced as an illusion the assumption that
laws of state are founded in the free will of the realized human agent, or
citizen:59 in fact, the modern state factually presupposes and represents
the unfree person, living in a condition of realized alienation under
the capitalist mode of production.60 On this basis, then, Marx concluded
that the belief that the state is a place of freedom for citizens transposes
the earlier belief in religious authority as the source of freedom into
a parallel and equally paradoxical belief in political authority as the
source of freedom.61 Indeed, Marx observed that the republican ideas
of citizenship among the Young Hegelians were sustained by an abiding

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trace of absolute personalism, which accounted for human freedom in

ultimately metaphysical terms. The Young Hegelians reflected the state
as a free constitutional personality, able to present itself to its subjects as
a repository for the free participatory personality of citizens. For Marx,
however, they only arrived at this view of the state because they detached
the state, as a person, from the material processes shaping its formation,
and they distilled its constitution in categories indelibly marked by hypostatic or metaphysical personalism. As a consequence, they failed to capture the material character of the state, and they failed to examine how
the state, its laws, and the human persons (citizens) addressed by its laws
are determined by a material reality of oppression and estrangement.62
While the Young Hegelians had sought to unearth the real person beneath the fictitious persons of modern politics, Marx suggested that the
belief that persons are singular, natural, or invariable bearers of freedom
obstructs adequate societal analysis, and it prevents theory from gaining
insights into the dialectical nature of the historical process. To move
reliably beyond the metaphysical semantics of politics, therefore, Marx
indicated that the idea of the human person itself must be repudiated as
a fictitious paradox, and it is only when persons and their laws are examined in the total constellation of material process that theory can begin
to indicate conditions of genuine personhood and authentic freedom.
Only through this radical act of theoretical depersonalization can a thoroughly non-metaphysical terrain for political freedom be envisaged.
Despite his intensified critique of personalism and the ideas of state
and citizenship arising from it, the early Marx still remained committed
to reimagining the legitimate (human) sources of social and political
power, and in this he did not fully abandon the Young Hegelian concern with authentic legal personality and authentic political legitimacy.
In fact, the early Marx continued the attempt of the Young Hegelians to
propose alternative legal premises for the metaphysical form of power,
and he tentatively described three distinct paths beyond the legal personality. First, he argued that a legitimate political order might be established if radically active citizens, as distinct from citizens allotted and
satisfied with formal human rights (droits de lhomme), were to expand
and enrich their rights as participatory rights of citizens (droits du citoyen)
in order to reform the political arena as a condition of actively elaborated and socially integrative freedoms.63 Second, he also beganalbeit
very allusivelyto outline a condition of political legitimacy as a state of
natural-organic life under law. In this respect, he intimated that sociopolitical formations might obtain legitimacy if people encounter their
laws as elaborated externalizations of their internal needs and their innermost species-life. Against the conventional legal-state tradition, then,
Marx argued that genuinely legitimate laws might be founded in the

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instinctual or organic legal sense of people engaged in natural labor,64 and that commonly fulfilled labor, as a shared act of transformative
working on the natural world, might be defined as the source of substantial rights, constitutive of legitimate political order.
Third, and most importantly, Marx also argued that capitalist legal
states have their irreducible foundation in false persons. As discussed,
Marx saw the public law of capitalist states as based in fictions of citizenship and constitutional legitimacy. In conjunction with this, he also saw
the private law of capitalist states as founded in the fictions of freedom
enshrined in rights of purposive autonomy and free acquisition under
Roman law.65 Although purporting to give legal sanction to personal
freedoms, these principles of private law depend on a construction of
the human person that obliterates all real freedom: they construct the
human person as an isolated and withdrawn monad, whose freedoms
are defined in purely purposive or possessive categories and whose pursuit of these freedoms is occluded against all social relationships and
shared interests.66 Capitalist states, in other words, manufacture legal
persons by reducing the personality of social and legal agents to those
abstracted attributes that are required for the imputation of economic
accountability and the stabilization of contractual predictability. The
asocial subject of the legal person, Marx thus claimed, is the central
though paradoxicalreference around which modern capitalist (both
public and private) law is consolidated, and all legal rights and entitlements are constitutively extrapolated from this self-serving legal reference. By referring to the asocial legal person, all societys lawsboth
public and privateare able to authorize themselves, and this subject, as
a secularized absolute person, makes itself available, in infinite iterability, to support all public and private legal structure. This asocial subject,
however, can only ever be a chimerical form of human subjectivity: it is
a form of subjectivity that does not factually exist, but which is placed as
a fictional and simplificatory legal stratum across the authentic reality of
human subjects in order to arrange them as points of legal and political
imputation. For Marx, therefore, a sociopolitical reality guaranteeing
authentic freedoms would reflect a condition in which all traces of this
fictitious legal personality had been erased. A sociopolitical reality of
this kind would be predicated on human subjectivity as a state of social being, in which particular life was unified with the totality of all
human relationships, and in which legal claims and freedoms expressed
natural and reciprocal relationships between genuine human subjects.67
At the legal center of Marxs earliest works, therefore, is an implicit account of personality underlying legitimate law (both public and
private) as a social subject. This social subject emerges beneath the absolute personality of capitalist law when human beings observe that they

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need other human beings as the integrally constitutive conditions of their

natural self-realization and that their authentic rights and freedoms depend on a reality of shared need-fulfillment.68 If the monadic or asocial
person is the source of false or paradoxical law, then, Marx indicated
that a condition is at least imaginable in which persons might express
legal claims that supplant solitary desires or purposes and reflect the
mediated needs of social subjects. Indeed, Marx implied that if human
subjects abdicate their enforced self-construction around ideas of ownership and allow their personalities to develop and to be accounted for
as social, they might ultimately acquire legal forms and ideas of personality and obligation that derive law from organic, communal, and social necessities. In this condition, persons might emancipate themselves
from merely abstract or formal laws: they might found fully emancipatory rights, based in the practical-moral inclusion of material and collective or shared needs,69 and they might activate these rights to institute
emancipatory sociopolitical orders based not in the formally personalized diremption of autogenetic states and atomized legal subjects, but in
shared natural persons.
The three lines of Marxs early legal analyses thus give expression
to the intuition that the Young Hegelians had provided an invaluable
critique of the perennial paradoxes underlying the politics of modern
societies, and that their endeavor to dislodge and rewrite the personality
of the state was of the highest socio-theoretical importance. At the same
time, Marxs analyses were also marked by an acute sense that the Young
Hegelians had not plausibly reconfigured the personality of the state,
and their accounts of state and law were still ensnared in the persistent
metaphysical fictions that had underscored the politics of post-Scholastic
thinking. Marxs notion of ideology, and of the necessity of its critique,
might be seen as a radicalization of the transformative semantics of the
Young Hegelians. In fact, Marxs early work might be viewed as reflecting
an awareness that the enduring paradox of modern politicsthe absolute personality of law and poweris the critical linchpin that sustains societal form against its contingencies, and that it is only by focusing either
on the material analysis of this person or on its implied correlative in the
social subject that human society, and human theory in this society, might
escape the tyrannical shadow of its own semantic self-construction.

Notes
1. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. and trans. D. Bourke and A.
Littledale, 61 vols. (London and New York: Blackfriars, in conjunction with Eyre
and Spottiswoode, 1969), 5:21. On this, see John L. Farthing, Thomas Aquinas and

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Gabriel Biel: Interpretations of St. Thomas Aquinas in German Nominalism on the Eve of
the Reformation (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1988), 10.
2. For a brilliant analysis of this, see Bernard Willms, Kontingenz und
Konkretion: Wilhelm von Ockham als Wegbereiter des neuzeitlichen Rechtsund Staatsdenkens, in Die Rolle der Juristen bei der Entstehung des modernen Staates,
ed. Roman Schnur (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1986), 1350; 35. For a broader
theory of the relation between law, modernity, and contingency, see Niklas Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 280.
3. On this, see Meyrick H. Carr, Realists and Nominalists (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1946), 97. For a recent semantic account of God as the originary paradox of social form, see Hugues Rabault, Sens et porte de loeuvre
de Niklas Luhmann: Un libralisme dsenchant? Droit et socit 65 (2007): 175
89; 176.
4. This quasi-secularist conception of the state can be found in many different variants. However, the classical examples of the transposition of divine
authority from God to the princely or territorial states are found in the political
doctrines emerging through the consolidation of political reflection and the
rejection of antinomianism in the era of the Reformation. Luther himself opposed the idea that the state could exist in any kind of analogy to God. However,
after 1522 Melanchthon began to endorse a doctrine of political ius-naturalism,
and he ascribed far greater weight to the first use of the law (the usus politicus or
civilis) than Luther was prepared to do. (See Adolf Sperl, Melanchthon zwischen
Humanismus und Reformation: Eine Untersuchung ber den Wandel des Traditionsverstndnisses bei Melanchthon und die damit zusammenhngenden Grundlagen seiner Theologie [Munich: Kaiser, 1959], 141.) Melanchthon in fact described law as the
voice of God (Philipp Melanchthon, Oratio de dignitate legum, in Melanchthons Rechts- und Soziallehre, ed. Guido Kisch [Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967], 23440;
240); he argued that the law of God is inscribed in the minds of men, so that
they obtain a rule from God which governs worldly laws (Philipp Melanchthon,
De dignitate legum oratio, in Kisch, Melanchthons Rechts- und Soziallehre, 210
13; 224); and he claimed, against Luther, that there exists a politically relevant
law of nature, which God has buried in each mind (Philipp Melanchthon, Die
haupt artickel un furnemesten puncten der gantzen heyligen schrifft [Augsburg: Grimm,
1522], 54). The custodian of this natural law, he then concluded, is the pious
prince of a territorial state: it is, he explained, the calling of kings to set laws,
to create peace, and to reinforce the civil regiment with laws and arms (Philipp
Melanchthon, Ein christliche Ermanung an den hochgebornen Knig Ferdinandum, jetzt
jungst zu Speyer geschriben [1529], 3). Princely laws thus act to illustrate Gods
marvelous wisdom, and they bring all subjects of the prince into a direct relation to Gods own law. After Melanchthon, Martin Bucer pursued this argument
still further. He argued that princely rule is ordained by God (Martin Bucer,
Vom Ampt der Oberkait, in Deutsche Schriften, ed. G. Seebass, 15 vols. [Gtersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1984], vol. 6/2: Zum Ius Reformationis: Obrigkeitsschriften aus dem
Jahre 1535, pp. 1738; 36) and that princely legislation assists in the establishment of Gods realm (p. 28). He consequently concluded that there is a necessary divine order in the worldly exercise of political authority, and this order is

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most effectively instituted when pious princes hold offices of state (Martin Bucer,
Dialogi, in Deutsche Schriften, 6/2, pp. 39188; 49).
5. See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Mditation sur la notion commune de
la justice, in Rechtsphilosophisches aus Leibnizens ungedruckten Schriften, ed. Georg
Mollat (Leipzig: Robolsky, 1885), 5681, 76; and Christian Wolff, Grundstze des
Natur- und Vlckerrechts (Halle: Renger, 1754), 47.
6. I share with Ian Hunter the belief that Kant reconstructed Scholastic
ideas, but thoroughly disagree with his claim that Kant and the metaphysicians
of the Enlightenment sought to return to an anti-positivistic concept of natural
law (see Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early
Modern Germany [Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 323).
There seem to be a number of problems with this thesis; it rests not lastly on
the belief that Kant was a metaphysician, whichI thinkis at least debatable.
In my view, Kants philosophy was specifically not, in any meaningful sense of
the word, metaphysical, and it was thoroughly committed to the construction
of positive forms for law and state. My opposition to Hunter here also includes
a wider opposition to the historiographical analyses of Reinhart Koselleck. Koselleck argued that the rights claims and constitutional models of the Enlightenment developed metaphysical ideas to assert a claim to domination over
the state, and that the Enlightenment undermined the positive foundations of
statehood that had emerged through the early formation of the state as a positive
political actor (see Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese
der brgerlichen Welt [Freiburg: Alber, 1959], 101). Despite my deep admiration
for Kosellecks work, my position is antithetically related to his claims. My view
is that the concepts of rights in the Enlightenment specifically reinforced the
political autonomy of the state that had been tentatively consolidated through
the transition from feudal to early modern forms of power.
7. Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, in Werkausgabe, ed.
Wilhelm Weischedel, 12 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 7:88.
8. Immanuel Kant, Zum Ewigen Frieden, in Werkausgabe, 11:195251; 205.
9. See, for example, Theodor Schmalz, Handbuch des rmischen Privatrechts:
Fr Vorlesungen ber Justinianische Institutionen, 2nd ed. (Knigsberg: F. Nicolovius,
1801). For a still excellent critical explanation of the construction of the personality of the state in Roman law, see Rudolph Sohm, Ein Lehrbuch der Geschichte und
des Systems des Rmischen Privatrechts (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1899), 189.
10. Here my theory of structural principles and their secular displacement
might be placed in a certain relation to Carl Schmitts argument that all aspects
of political theory are secularized theological concepts (Carl Schmitt, Politische
Theologie [Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1922], 46) and especially to his later
argument that each era of human history revolved around a dominant structural
principle (Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen [Berlin: Duncker und Humblot,
1932], 97115). This argument might be brought into still closer relation to
Hans Blumenbergs suggestion that theoretical modernity is determined by the
self-grounding rationality of humanity, which transforms originally absolutetheological accounts of meaning and so asserts itself as specifically authorized
and self-reliant. (See Hans Blumenberg, Skularisierung und Selbstbehauptung

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[Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966], 255.) Unlike these views, however, this
analysis shares with Niklas Luhmann the belief that dominant conceptual constructs are paradoxes around which a society consolidates and describes its functions. These paradoxes cannot necessarily be made transparent to anthropological processes and experiences, and human interests, needs, and demands have
secondary status in forming these concepts. On Luhmanns account of the paradoxes of the political system, see Niklas Luhmann, Staat und Politik: Zur Semantik der Selbstbeschreibung politischer Systeme, Politische Vierteljahresschrift,
special edition 15: Politische Theoriengeschichte: Probleme einer Teildisziplin der Politischen Wissenschaft (1984), 99125; 100.
11. On the sense of political theory as the self-description of politics,
see Niklas Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2000), 31971.
12. Joseph de Maistre, Considrations sur la France (Lyon: J. B. Plagaud,
1847), 81.
13. Louis de Bonald, Thorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la socit
civile, 3 vols. (Paris: Adrien le Clere, 1843), 1:1, 11819.
14. F. W. J. Schelling, ber das Wesen deutscher Wissenschaft, in Werke,
ed. Manfred Schrter, 12 vols. (Munich: Beck and Oldenbourg, 192754),
4:37794; 387.
15. Friedrich Julius Stahl, Die Philosophie des Rechts, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (Heidelberg: J.C.B. Mohr, 1856), vol. 2/2: Rechts- und Staatslehre auf der Grundlage christlicher Weltanschauung: Die Staatslehre und die Principien des Staatsrechts, p. 413.
16. Ibid., 2/2:258.
17. On the unity of monarchism and legal statehood in Stahl, and the resultant critique of this among the Young Hegelians, see Douglas Moggach, The
Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 9394.
18. Stahl, Die Philosophie des Rechts, 2/2:13839.
19. Ibid., 2/2:257.
20. Friedrich Julius Stahl, Die Philosophie des Rechts, vol. 2/1: Rechts- und
Staatslehre auf der Grundlage christlicher Weltanschauung: Die allgemeinen Lehren und
das Privatrecht, p. 235.
21. Friedrich Julius Stahl, Der christliche Staat und sein Verhltniss zu Deismus
und Judenthum: Eine durch die Verhandlungen des Vereinigten Landtags hervorgerufene
Abhandlung (Berlin: Ludwig Oehmigke, 1847), 62.
22. See Luhmanns comment on the principle of credo quia absurdum
informing political theology. Niklas Luhmann, Die Unbeliebtheit der Parteien,
Die politische Meinung 37 (1992): 511; 8.
23. G. F. Puchta, Cursus der Institutionen, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hrtel, 1841), 1:64.
24. Ibid., 1:29.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 2:268.
27. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Religion II, in Werke in

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20 Bnden, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp, 1969), 17:273.
28. G. W. F. Hegel, Phnomenologie des Geistes, in Werke, 3:35658.
29. Ibid., 3:23.
30. Ibid.
31. Note my opposition here to the French tradition of reading Hegel
as totalizing metaphysician. See Jean-Franois Lyotard, Phenomenology, trans.
B. Beakley (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 68. In Paul S.
Miklowitzs terms, therefore, my account of Hegel sees him as a theorist of metafictions, not of metaphysics. See Paul S. Miklowitz, Metaphysics to Metafictions: Hegel, Nietzsche and the End of Philosophy (New York: State University of New York
Press, 1998), xxiii.
32. For an outstanding recent account of Hegel as legal sociologist, see
Robert Fine and Rolando Vzquez, Freedom and Subjectivity in Modern Society: Re-Reading Hegels Philosophy of Right, in Law and Sociology, ed. Michael
Freeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 24153.
33. G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Werke, 7:399.
34. This is what Stahl most deplored in Hegels philosophy. See Friedrich
Julius Stahl, Die Philosophie des Rechts nach geschichtlicher Ansicht, 1st ed., 3 vols.
(Heidelberg: J.C.B. Mohr, 1830), vol. 1: Die Genesis der gegenwrtigen Rechtsphilosophie, p. 307.
35. For an excellent shorter analysis of the rejection of personalism in
the post-Hegelian philosophy of the Vormrz, see Warren Breckmann, Marx, The
Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 911.
36. Bruno Bauer, Die Religion des Alten Testaments in der geschichtlichen Entwicklung ihrer Principien, 2 vols. (Berlin: F. Dmmler, 1838), 1:xxii.
37. Ibid., 1:xlvii.
38. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, 2 vols., 4th ed. (Tbingen:
Osiander, 1840), 2:70910.
39. David Friedrich Strauss, Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtlichen
Entwicklung und im Kampfe mit der modernen Wissenschaft, 2 vols. (Tbingen: C.F.
Osiander, 1840), 2:75.
40. Ludwig Feuerbach, Kritik der christlichen Rechts- und Staatslehre
(Von Fr. J. Stahl, 1833), in Smtliche Werke, 10 vols. (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1846),
vol. 1: Erluterungen und Ergnzungen zum Wesen des Christenthums, pp. 10827; 109.
41. Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, ed. Werner Schuffenhauer, 2 vols. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1956), 1:72.
42. Ibid., 1:237.
43. Bauer, Die Religion des Alten Testaments, lix.
44. Ibid., 145.
45. Ibid., lxvi.
46. Bruno Bauer, Die Prinzipien der mosaischen Rechts- und ReligionsVerfassung, nach ihrem inneren Zusammenhang entwickelt, Zeitschrift fr speculative Theologie 2 (1837): 297353; 333.

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47. Bruno Bauer, Das Entdeckte Christentum: Eine Erinnerung an das achtzehnte
Jahrhundert und ein Beitrag zur Krisis des neunzehnten (Zrich: Verlag des literarischen Comptoirs, 1843), 12.
48. Bruno Bauer, Die evangelische Landeskirche Preussens und die Wissenschaft
(Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1840), 104.
49. Ibid., 100.
50. Bruno Bauer, Russland und das Germanenthum (Charlottenburg: Egbert
Bauer, 1853), 45.
51. Ibid., 93.
52. Bauer also attributed the failure of the Revolution of 1848 to the
political weakness of the constitution, and he attributed this to the religious affiliations of its authors. See Bruno Bauer, Die brgerliche Revolution in Deutschland
seit dem Anfang der deutsch-katholischen Bewegung bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin: Gustav
Hempel, 1849), 51, 26062.
53. Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christenthums, 99.
54. Ibid., 22829.
55. Ibid., 468.
56. Ibid., 36.
57. Ibid., 124.
58. Karl Marx, Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts, vol. 1, in Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, Werke, 43 vols. (Berlin: Dietz, 195868), 203333; 263. For a
parallel reading of Marx as a critic of metaphysics, see Friedrich Vosskhler, Der
Idealismus als Metaphysik der Moderne: Studien zur Selbstreflexion und Aufhebung der
Metaphysik bei Hlderlin, Hegel, Schelling, Marx und Heidegger (Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 1996), 380, 39596.
59. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Die heilige Familie, in Werke, 2:7223; 118.
60. Ibid., 2:233.
61. Ibid., 2:118.
62. Karl Marx, Zur Judenfrage, in Werke, 1:34777; 35253.
63. Ibid., 1:364.
64. Karl Marx, Debatten ber das Holzdiebstahlgesetz, in Werke, vol. 1, 119, 116.
65. Ibid., 63.
66. Marx, Zur Judenfrage, 1:36465.
67. Karl Marx, konomisch-philosophische Manuskripte, in Marx, Frhe Schriften,
ed. J.-J. Lieber and P. Furth (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1962), 60665; 597.
68. Ibid., 593.
69. Ibid., 370.

Part 3

Politics, Civil Society, Ethics

Hegelianism and the Theory

of Political Opposition
Norbert Waszek

An appropriate starting point for this chapter is the following apparent contradiction: on the one hand, there is a large consensus among
historians of political thought that, in the 1830s and 1840s, Hegelian
ideas exerted a considerable influence on the way in which a political
opposition was conceived in Germany. The role of Hegel and his school
is said to have been particularly strong in the debate about the status
and function of political parties.1 The names of eminent Hegelians such
as Karl Rosenkranz (18051879) and Arnold Ruge (18031880) have
often been mentioned in this context. More recent work on the German
contribution to a theory of political opposition has added the name of
Eduard Gans (17971839), which has become increasingly prominent
with the revival of interest in that author.2
And yet, on the other hand, an explicit theory of opposition appears to be lacking in Hegels principal text,3 the Elements of the Philosophy
of Right.4 At any rate, that text at the center of his political philosophy
does not appear to contain such a theory; and among many of Hegels
readers who have sought it there has been a feeling of having been misled. If Hegels crucial text is almost silent on the question of parliamentary opposition, and not enough room is made for such a theory, how
could Hegel have come to be the founding father of a school eventually
distinguished for pioneering in this field? The paradox is striking . . .
The following remarks are intended to supply certain elements of
an answer to the legitimate question posed by this paradox which has left
such a considerable number of Hegels readers perplexed. I shall challenge the conventional view that a theory of opposition is almost absent
from Hegels philosophy, and attempt to arrive at a more balanced evaluation. And second, I shall attempt to analyze the central, highly original,
and somewhat neglected role of Eduard Gans in the elaboration of a
theory of opposition. A short conclusion will indicate the impact of Gans

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on the better-known Hegelians or Young Hegelians views on opposition, as expressed by, for example, Rosenkranz and Ruge.

The Context of the Debate

Prior to this, it does however seem necessary to recall the context of the
contemporary debate around the question of opposition, a context that
was German and European, but first of all British, rather than French.5 A
full recognition of the legitimacy of a parliamentary opposition is not to
be found either in Rousseau or in the political conceptions of the representatives of the French Revolution. Whereas talk of party or faction
can be found in Robespierre, or in Saint-Just, the adjective criminal is
never far away. It also seems possible to find a certain hostility to the idea
of an opposition as late as Sieys manner of conceiving political representation. Mirabeau alone seems to accept the idea of a parliamentary
minority facing up to a majority. Only during the Restoration, with the
liberal Doctrinaires gathered around Royer-Collard and Guizot, did
things change in France. Then, however, reference to Britains political
life became dominant, nay omnipresent. For example, when Guizot
spoke of a national opposition, he constantly referred to Charles James
Fox, the longtime champion of the opposition in Britain.6
A model primarily British thus dominated the conduct of debates,
and thus became, too, the source of inspiration for all the advocates
of an opposition throughout continental Europe. In Britain, the theory
and practice of a parliamentary opposition goes back, at least, to the
reign of George I (reigned 171427)with the long and famous conflict between Robert Walpole and Lord Bolingbroke.7 Against the party
of government or Court party, led from 1721 by Walpole, Bolingbroke,
leader of the Whigs, though himself as a hereditary peer no longer a
member of the House of Commons, assembled a group of MPs hostile
to the Court and supposed to represent the country. It is to this group
around Bolingbroke that, as of 1731, the term the opposition was first
applied in the sense here relevant, and it became established soon afterward.8 The rivalry between the Whig Charles James Fox and the Tory William Pitt, which dominated the political life of Britain from 1782 to 1806
(Pitt died in January and Fox in September of the latter year), no doubt
established another milestone in the slow process of the institutionalization of oppositionand not very distant from the period of concern of
the following remarks. Finally, toward the end of Hegels life (d. 1831)
and at a high point in the development of his school, a third period

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opened up, as illustrated by the following anecdote. In 1826 a member

of the House of Commons, John Hobhouse, used the eloquent expression His Majestys Opposition, in analogy with the famous formula of
His Majestys Government, in a parliamentary debate. The anecdote is
revealing: pronounced by a radical MP, the expression was laughed at in
the House of Commons.9 Nevertheless, in reality, the opposition had by
then attained to the status of an institution. When William IV succeeded
to the throne in 1830, a further change in the direction of the oppositions modern form occurred in the political life of the United Kingdom.10 The election which followed on William IVs succession put the
Tories under the Duke of Wellington into the minority, Wellington and
his government resigned, and the king called Lord Grey, leader of the
Whigs, to form a new government, initiating an era of reforms.
Hegel and his disciples were extremely well informed about the
whole social and political life of Britain. Of course, their being well informed does not necessarily mean that these thinkers were in accord
with or admired everything that happened in the United Kingdom.
The study of British conditions, the country they knew to be the most
advanced in industry and commerce, and one with its own and quite
specific political culture, served them rather as an experimental laboratory or testing ground, in which problems of the future could be analyzed, and possible solutions tested, before the same problems arrived
in their native Germany. Numerous documents from throughout almost
the whole of Hegels lifetime reveal his considerable interest in Great
Britain, ranging from the regions history and literature, via philosophy
and the sciences, into the social, economic, and political realities of that
country. In his later years, as a regular reader of at least three British periodicalsthe Morning Chronicle, the Edinburgh Review, and the Quarterly
Review 11it was to British political life that Hegel devoted what became
the final study and the last publication of his life.12 His interest in Britain
can, however, be traced back at least as early as the years he spent in Switzerland (179396).13 Beginning with his first publication,14 the philosopher showed himself fully aware of the fierce competition which characterized British political lifeof the separation and continuous conflict
between the party in government, on the one hand, and the party called
country, on the other hand, that was often insufficiently represented.15
Yet even allowing for the fact that Hegel was particularly well informed
about British circumstances, it needs to be added that he was far from
unique in this respect in the Germany of his day. Others were clearly
taking their orientation from the same source. Some specialists have
claimed that, for instance, his younger friend and follower Gans was even
more powerfully inspired by the British model than Hegel himself.16 The

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famous Encyclopedia of Political Sciences (Staatslexikon)17 of Carl von Rotteck (17751840) and Carl Welcker (17901869)a key document of
the early liberalism of southwest Germanyconfirms this orientation,
and leads to conclusions hardly different: the opposition is discussed
in several articles within that work, a number of them written by Welcker
himself. In these presentations reference to the British model is once
again constant, pretty well ubiquitous.18 This subject is dealt with in vol. 5
(1837; pp. 66162), in one of Welckers own articles, under the revealing
title: Fox and Pitt and their politics; political parties, party of government and opposition; Tories and Whigs. This perspective is maintained
to the end of the fifteenth and last volume of the encyclopedia (1843)
with articles such as political constitution (Staatsver fassung) and systematic opposition.

Hegel and the Opposition

The Conventional View
When the published version of Hegels Philosophy of Right (1820) is taken
as the unique starting point of an analysis of Hegels attitude toward a
political opposition, the result may well be misleading. In this crucial
text, even the German term Opposition is not explicitly used where one
might expect to find it, despite Hegels use of the term in other writings; that is to say, in the part of the Internal Constitution (Das innere
Staatsrecht) that deals with The legislative Power (sections 298320).
Of course, one should not look only for occurrences of the term, but
seek further: even though the German word Opposition is missing, Hegel
does speak of the Gegensatz gegen die Regierung (section 302); and
this term, Gegensatz, is in the end only a synonym of Opposition, perhaps a
little more discreet and less explicit, but a synonym nevertheless, and the
English translator, Barry Nisbet, did not hesitate to use it.19
Nevertheless, a study of the paragraphs Hegel dedicates to the Internal Constitution (sections 27273) reveals that he does not easily
accept the idea of a popular sovereignty (Volkssouvernitt).20 What he
says of the legislative Power is far removed from what a modern reader,
characteristically referring to an ideal of the representation of the people
as standard, might expect from a national assembly or parliament. Hegel
is thinking rather of a representation of different sections and professional groups within society, and he is only being consistent when he uses
the centuries-old term of Stnde (estates) in this connection. And even

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in this limited conception of representation he questions the necessity

or usefulness of the struggle (literally, Hegel speaks of the Konkurrenz,
competition) between the party in government and the party in opposition.21 The belief that the government has an ill will, or less good will
than the people is explicitly characterized as a conviction of the rabble
(Pbel).22 And according to the addition to section 301though edited
by Gans, the additions (Zustze) were based on students notes, some
now availableHegel even made the following remark:
The attitude of the executive toward the Estates should not be essentially hostile, and a belief in the necessity of such hostility is a sad mistake. The executive is not a party standing over against another party in
such a way that each has continually to steal a march on the other and
wrest something from the other. If such a situation arises in the state,
that is a misfortune, but it cannot be called health.23

As a matter of fact, in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel conceives the estates as a mediating organ between the government at
large on the one hand and the people in their division into particular
spheres and individuals on the other.24 And since mediation appears
to presuppose that there was a conflict to be resolved, Hegel immediately hurries to minimize such a possibility: It is only through their mediating function that the Estates display their organic quality, i.e. their
incorporation in the totality. In consequence, their opposition is itself
reduced to a [mere] semblance [Schein].25 This assertion reminds us of
a well-known passage from Hegels Philosophy of History:
The common conception of the state tends to make a division between the government on the one hand and the people on the
other . . . Thus, the government and people are treated as separate
entities . . . but [this] opposition . . . is overcome in the concept of
the state. . . . The rational concept of the state has left such abstract
antitheses behind it; and those who treat them as if they were necessary
know nothing of the nature of the state.26

If despite such warnings, the House of Commons (Abgeordnete) should

really show itself opposed to the principle of the sovereign or monarch
in general, 27 there would always be something like the House of Lords,28
constituted by families with landed property, an inalienable inherited
property, burdened with primogeniture, 29 which might realize another
mediation, this time between the monarch and the House of Commons.
Yet, to put it mildly, since all this does not really amount to a decidedly

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bold stance in favor of the legitimacy of political opposition, is it not

necessary to accept some of the criticisms that have been raised against
Hegel?
A More Balanced Evaluation
In spite of what has been said so far, once one has decided to go beyond
the published version of his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (or at the
very least to look even closer at this text), Hegels work does include conceptions with prospects of becoming an inspiration to those who soon
came to develop a full-blown theory of opposition. In the following effort to revisit and to vindicate some of Hegels views, four types of argument will be ventured. It will be demonstrated that:
1.

2.

3.

4.

Some of Hegels political writings (other than the Philosophy of Right )

contain passages which clearly support the idea of a political opposition.
Some of Hegels lectures on the philosophy of right, several of which
have already been published on the basis of students notes30in
particular the notes from his 181718 lectures at Heidelberg, taken
by Peter Wannenmann31handle the issue of opposition in a more
detailed and more explicit manner than Hegels own published text.
It is probably in the 181718 lectures that the earliest draft of a theory
of opposition worthy of the name is to be found in Hegelian thought.
Even looking at the text Hegel himself published, his Elements of the
Philosophy of Right, and seeking ideas or conceptions which might
belong to a theory of opposition, the result is not entirely negative.
It is possible to draw political conclusions from options elaborated in
Hegels Logic. We shall come back to this last point in our conclusion,
but have to deal right away with the first three points.

1. In his political writings, Hegel clearly expresses himself in favor

of a political opposition. His 1817 article on the Proceedings of the Estates Assembly in the Kingdom of Wurttemberg, 18151816, to give but
this one striking example, contains a passage (unknown to those who
depend on the existing English translations!)32 in which the vital need
for an opposition in an assembly is insisted uponthe expression vital
need seems hardly exaggerated, for Hegel does use the term vitality
(literally: Lebendigkeit). An English translation of the relevant part of the
text will now be provided, in order to allow a full scrutiny:
Whoever has thought a little about the nature of an Assembly of estates,
and is familiar with its forms, cannot ignore that without an opposi-

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tion such an assembly possesses neither external nor internal vitality;

that such a contradiction within itself clearly belongs to its essence, to its
justification; and that it is really constituted only when an opposition has
emerged within it. Without such [an opposition], it has the shape of
nothing but a party or even of a heap/lump. (Hegels own emphasis)33

A statement so clear, so general, and so strong cannot decently be minimized or even interpreted away, as is done by those who, tongue in
cheek, suspect Hegel of supporting the opposition only when it was in
favor of the king (of Wurttemberg).34 And those who consider Hegels
above-quoted option as a contingent political evaluation only, and thus
marginal to his system,35 fail to recognize just how central politics were
for Hegels thought. The critique of religion and politics was the pathway that led the young Hegel to philosophy, and politics remained for
him a preoccupation throughout his life.
2. The Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science (see note 31)
that Hegel delivered in 181718 in Heidelbergclose in time to the
final stage of his career, its peak even, in Berlinaccord to the idea of
opposition, without any doubt, a much more significant place than his
published Philosophy of Right. Of the longish paragraph (section 156) of
the 181718 lectures in which Hegel insists upon the necessity of an opposition, it is sufficient to quote the striking extracts that follow:
An estates assembly cannot be regarded as having actually engaged
in activity until it includes an opposition . . . If . . . the assembly were
unanimously in favour of the government, it would not be fulfilling its
vocation or attaining its goal. Of necessity there must be an opposition
within the assembly itself; the cabinet must have the majority in an assembly, but the opposition must necessarily be there as well.36

The conviction thus expressed might be completed by a passage

from a slightly earlier paragraph (section 149): The opposition too
has a major and necessary part to play in enlivening the assemblys debates . . . [which, as Hegel adds a few lines further on] must always be
public.37 These statements are particularly important and allow the conclusion that the 181718 lectures contain the earliest draft of a theory
of opposition worth the name, that is to be found in Hegels thought.
But, of course, as soon as an interpreter uses student notes of lectures,
however fascinating these might be, he is in the midst of two lively debates. The first concerns the different degrees of authenticity of respective texts, and the second, linked to the first, is about whether it makes
sense to distinguish between the exoteric Hegel of only those texts published by himself, often very prudent or cautious in the expression of

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political opinions; and an esoteric Hegel, communicating with friends and

disciples, for example in the limited sphere of a lecture hall, and occasionally expressing more daring views on the religion and politics of his
time. Such a distinction, once accepted, leads to the further question of
the real Hegel, writing and expressing himself under difficult circumstances, marked by censorship and more generally by the conditions of
the post-1815 Restoration, in particular the 1819 decrees named after
Carlsbad, the town in which they were elaborated. The alternatives, to
sum up the matter in a pointed, if somewhat simplified, manner, would
be that of a progressive or a rather conservative thinker. While these issues go beyond the scope of the present chapter and cannot be dealt
with in a satisfactory manner here, some stand on the issue should at
least be indicated. The continuity of Hegels political thought seems to
me the most appropriate consideration in attaining some account of
the philosophers development, but a continuity understood in terms
sufficiently broad to admit appreciation of certain changes and modifications of his views. Once this option of continuity is accepted, one
cannot of course play unpublished esoteric material against the public
exoteric figure of the philosopher. Rather, the progressive or conservative thinker has to be looked for and found in all his texts, published or
unpublished at the time.
3. There is no alternative, then, to looking again at the published
version of Hegels Philosophy of Right. But though it contains, as has been
shown, neither a true theory of opposition nor even a clear justification
of such an opposition, the result of such reconsideration need not be
entirely negative. A less hostile reading of the text does indeed reveal
certain elements commonly associated with a theoretical justification of
political opposition. To begin with, Hegel insists upon the public accessibility of the proceedings of the estates (sections 31415); the debates
in such assemblies ought to be open to the public, Hegel writes, for such
public accessibility is indeed one of the most important means of educating them [the individuals and the mass]. 38 This leads him to consider and to appreciate highly the public opinion which embodies . . .
the eternal and substantial principles of justice. 39 These reflections on
public opinion lead him almost naturally to vindicate the freedom of
public communication, or simply the freedom of the press40and it
should be recalled that this is a classical demand of the opposition, already expressed by Kant when he called the freedom of the pen . . .
the only safeguard [Palladium] of the rights of the people.41 Hegel, to
be sure, is less emphatic and articulates also certain limits, but he still
considers the freedom of the press as legitimate or at least as harmless
(unschdlich).

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In the Philosophy of Right, the possibility of an opposition also crops

up, somewhat surprisingly in another context, that of the civil servants
(Staatsbeamte; sections 295 and 297). Hegel reminds his readers of the
fact that it is through the conduct . . . of the officials [that] the laws and
decisions of the executive . . . are translated into actuality. 42 If the civil
servants can fulfill this mission eagerly and efficiently, they can also dilute or frustrate the governments intentions, in other words, they might
act in opposition to their . . . superiors.43 In this manner, the civil servants may, as a middle class,44 play the role of an opposition, without
explicitly using this term.
If Hegel shows himself very prudent, if he vindicates the rights of
the opposition in a rather timid way only, this follows from his belief that
the royal promise of a constitution (the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm III, had promised to grant a constitution on no less than three occasions: 1810, 1815, and 1820) would still and even soon be fulfilled. He
thus remained waiting and patient. This attitude was founded on his profound conviction that the Prussia of his time was already very close to the
reconciliation of the consciousness and the realization of freedom.
Given the relative success of the Prussian reform movement (180615),
his hope was not as unrealistic as it must have appeared to the following
generation. In the decade or so after the philosophers death (1831), the
adverse political circumstances, the setbacks associated with the Restoration, became more pronounced and called for another and more radical
reaction that would indeed soon emerge.

Eduard Ganss Theory of Opposition

Rather than giving another outline of Ganss career, and his wider intellectual and political achievements,45 the following remarks will concentrate on his views on opposition. From the available evidence, it seems
that Gans first introduced a full-blown theory of opposition in his
182829 lectures on Natural Law and the Philosophy of Right, when
Hegel was still alive, and he continued to use that line of argument until
his own death in May 1839. Among his relevant texts, there are (a) the
notes on two years of his lectures (182829, 183233), taken by his students at the time, and edited only in 1971 and 1981;46 and (b) hints and
passages in a variety of printed texts, prepared by himself for publication, and which appeared during his lifetime. Since some of the materials from (a) and (b) have been used in an earlier article,47 the following
treatment will be based on another and largely still unexploited source,

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which can be considered as Ganss last word on the issue: (c) the remarkable document On Opposition, dated November 2, 1837 (a further account of this source will follow).
While avoiding undue repetition, a brief reminder of the earlier
evidence is not out of place in order to get the perspective on the later
text right. From his 182829 presentation onward, and without ceasing
to underline that point, Gans introduces the relevant part of his lectures
by showing that an opposition, far from being merely accidental or contingent, and limited to the political life of England or another country
in particular, is in the interest of every state, and thus necessary.48 Gans
emphasizes this point of view by directing the attention of his audience
to the negative consequences of the absence of the opposition: Where
the state does not have to deal with an opposition, it declines into stagnation;49 since the original German for stagnation is Faulheit, the final
clause of this quotation might even be translated, [the State] will rot.
In his 183233 lectures, Gans goes even further in his justification of
the opposition by adding that the opposition has to be systematic, as the
negation must not be contingent.50 This is an important addition to his
previous presentation. For, to begin with, systematic opposition was
a somewhat provocative slogan at the time, and then, with the term of
negation, Gans alludes to a category of Hegels Logic, a strategy whose
significance will soon be revealed.
At least two further aspects of Ganss earlier treatment ought to
be recalled, implications of his theory of opposition that he spelled out
as necessary consequences in the process of realizing the full activity of
an opposition. The first is the opening of the assemblys meetings and
debates to the public: Public access [ffentlichkeit] is not only useful
and good, but even necessary. The people thereby gain an insight into
the common good.51 In his 183233 lectures, Gans adds the argument
that an assembly, whenever there is no public access to its debates, can
easily be pressurized by the government; and, in order to emphasize this
argument, he refers to assemblies that are not open to the public as
eingeschlossena term that might be rendered in a neutral way as
closed, but could also be translated as captured or locked up.52
Second, Gans considers freedom of the press to be a necessary consequence of the public character of the debates:
The public character of the estates assemblies leads to freedom of the
press. Freedom of the press is a good thing. What is bad in it will disappear and the [true] core will remain. As long as freedom of the press
remains precarious, freedom of speech in the assembly will also come
under pressure.53

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For Gans as for Hegel, freedom of the press might indeed have undesirable consequencesfor example, the press is able to manipulate its
readers. But Gans seems to share an optimism, inherited from the Enlightenment, which implies the conviction that the truth, in the end, will
prevail. At any rate, Gans concludes: A state would be weak if it were
unable to bear the press. Censorship contains something unpleasant.54
Obviously, behind these two aspects that Gans presents in the context of
his theory of oppositionpublic access to debates and freedom of the
pressthere also emerges the even wider topic of public opinion and
the public sphere (ffentlichkeit) in general. Public opinion, says Gans in
a striking formulation, is the highest tribunal of the present times.55
Bearing in mind these remarks on his previous presentations, we
turn to his 1837 document On Opposition, which in view of his untimely death (1839) might be considered his last word and legacy on the
issue of opposition. The circumstances of its publication are remarkable and deserve to be recounted. Since the Prussian censorship kept
an eye on all his activities, Gans used cunning to get this text, written in
early November 1837, beyond his lecture hall and to a wider readership.
He sent his handwritten text, as if it were a personal letter, to Wilhelm
Dorow, a professor and pioneer of Oriental archaeology at the University of Halle, but also a collector of autographs, of which he regularly
published facsimile samples. The two men had probably arranged previously that Dorow would publish Ganss manuscript in this manner, and if
they did Dorow would indeed seem to have kept his word on the matter,
for he published the text twice, in 1838, and in a second edition of 1841
where Ganss text is dated November 2, 1837.56
Gans begins his account by way of a critique of the attitude
according to him widespread in the Germany of his time, but more
generally characteristic of the immaturity of a political systemwhich
identifies all opposition to the government with high treason: those opposed to the government are traitors. Against that attitude he insists
strongly on the necessity of an element of opposition or of negation in
any and every civilized State, but also in each cultivated individual,
and furthermore in every family which has crossed the threshold from
patriarchalism.57
As for what concerns the individual, he says, this element of opposition can be justified by two arguments. First of all, it is better to take account of the dialectical nature of the human being, who has a consciousness of selfwhich the animal does not haveand who is thus double:
at the same time both object and subject, at the same time the one who
knows (der Wissende) and that which is known (das Gewusste). Second,
it is necessary to remember that the individual needs to form himself,

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and this is accomplished by way of conflicts, all at the same time external
and internal, equally with his circle of contacts as with himself.58
The existence of an opposition, let alone contradictions within the
family, seems less obvious, since the measure or the substance of the
family is love. But Gans insists, with Hegel, on the fact that the family
does not constitute a simple union, or unity. The family is above all the
mediation of differences, and develops in three phases: there exist at the
beginning two different personalities, autonomous and equal in power.
Over a second period, these personalities voluntarily renounce their independence; and it is only by way of that complete renunciation that, in
a third phase, a union emerges, some new identity. The differencea
sort of oppositionbetween the partners becomes thus a necessary
condition of the development of the course of love. When, later, the
members of a family leave the familial intimacy to win their subsistence
within civil society, the conflicts characteristic of this last-named will have
their repercussions within the family. They will introduce a new and additional source of opposition, and of contradictions. But, Gans underlines, a family as such which loses this element of opposition and its free
articulation will lack relish and be attended with ennui.59
In the same text, Gans finally underlines that opposition is equally
indispensable on the level of the State; it is only by means of debate that
it is possible to arrive at a truth in politics. The party in government
will therefore always need an oppositional interlocutor, which will counterpoint measures proposed with suggestions and critical comment. The
negative side will be necessaryGans underlines explicitly that it was
England which served as a model for his reflections: he rehearses the
well-known anecdote in which Pitt the Younger, finding himself unopposed, had wanted to purchase an opposition with his own funds. Gans
also repeats the expression His Majestys Opposition, attributing it incorrectly to the parliamentarian George Tierney, instead of to John Hobhouse. The government, Gans hammers the point again, is enriched
by the opposition: the opposition must be listened to and its arguments
taken account of in the adoption of policies.60
The text culminates, and closes, with a vibrant plea on behalf of opposition and its free exercise. If, Gans writes, the opposition is put under
oppression, if a government restricts itself to putting only obstacles in its
path, still the opposition will not disappear. A different development will
have been facilitated: the opposition which could have been worthy and
responsible will degenerate into intrigue and cabal, which eat away
at the State like an abscess; and the deplorable result will be anarchy,
the dissolution of the State.61

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Conclusion
By way of conclusion, it might be worthwhile to bring up again and explicate a recurring argumentative strategy in Gans: to underline the necessity of the opposition, he makes of it a negation; and he recalled the
constitutive role of the negative in the Logic of Hegel, a work in which
contradiction is a fundamental principle: it is the root of all movement
and all vitality.62 It is thus possible to say that the technique followed by
Gans consists in drawing the political consequences of Hegels Logic. In
other words, Gans plays the Science of Logic against the Elements of the Philosophy of Right in order to go farther than his master Hegel into the question of political opposition, and to elaborate a true theory of opposition.
This strategy was followed by numerous adepts of the Hegelian school
and affords evidence of the pioneering role of Gans. From the early
1840s onward, Arnold Ruge proceeded to elaborate, beginning with
the notion of logical contradiction, a genuine theory, that of a party of
political opposition. For Ruge, the opposition, like moreover the negative in general, was conceived as a constructive principle, in philosophy
as in political history.63 A little later, the Bauer brothers appear to have
pushed in the same direction. In an anonymous pamphlet of 1843, State,
Religion and Party, sometimes ascribed to Bruno, but more likely by Edgar
Bauer, a distinction between State and government is made in a manner
that allowed an integration of the opposition to government into an enlarged conception of the State. There again, the opposition is described
as a dialectical process, in which the negation has a vital role to play.64
Almost at the same time, Karl Rosenkranzwho had been closer to Hegel, and was also more of a moderateconceived the different political
parties as elements of the State. He asserted that the political debates
between these parties made it possible, by means of a healthy competition, to detect the path of progress in history; such a progress manifesting itself not as the realization of the program of one party among
several, but more on the model of the cunning of history: it reveals itself
only behind the back of the actors, by way of the conjunction and interaction of different projects.65

Notes
An earlier version of this paper was read at the 10th international conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas: The European Mind: Narrative and Identity, held in Malta, July 2006, in the session

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on German Idealism and Modernity, chaired by Douglas Moggach. A modified French version of this chapter was published in the journal Revue franaise
dhistoire des ides politiques 25 (2007): 89107. The work on this English version
was supported by an ANR/DFG grant (under the title: Ides sociales et idalisme. Rceptions de doctrines sociales franaises dans le champ daction de
lidalisme allemand.) This help is gratefully acknowledged.
1. See, for example, the article by Wolfgang Jger on opposition in the influential encyclopedia Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politischsozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 8 vols., ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze, and Reinhart
Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 19722004), 4:469517, particularly 499, 502,
etc., which insists heavily and repeatedly on the impact of the Hegelians.
2. New editions of Ganss writings, in several languages, confirm this new
interest. See also the following two books: Johann Braun, Judentum, Jurisprudenz
und Philosophie: Bilder aus dem Leben des Juristen Eduard Gans, 17971839 (BadenBaden: Nomos, 1997); and Reinhard Blnkner, Gerhard Ghler, and N. Waszek,
eds., Eduard Gans (17971839): Politischer Professor zwischen Restauration und Vormrz
(Leipzig: Universittisverlag, 2002). For Ganss stand on the question of opposition, see the following articles: J. Braun, Die Lehre von der Opposition bei Hegel
und Gans, Rechtstheorie 15 (1984): 34383; N. Waszek, Freiheit und Verfassung:
Von Hegel zu Gans, Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy 78 (1992):
46071; and Iring Fetscher, Eduard Gans ber Opposition und Karl Rosenkranz ber den Begriff der politischen Partei, Hegel-Studien 32 (1997): 16169.
3. In his contribution to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (see above, note 1),
4:495, Wolfgang Jger expresses this deception eloquently: Hegel philosophische Schriften liessen fr politische Parteien und parlamentarische Opposition
keinen Platz.
4. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood,
trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991) (henceforth cited in abbreviated form as EphR). For the original German text, I am
using the following edition: G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts
(henceforth cited as GPhR), ed. Eva Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1970) (vol. 7 of the Theorie Werkausgabe [henceforth cited as TWA] in
20 vols.).
5. It is striking and characteristic that the following encyclopediaDictionnaire de philosophie politique, ed. Philippe Raynaud and Stphane Rials, 3rd
ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003)representative of the French
tradition as it is, does not contain an entry on opposition.
6. Compare Jger, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 48285.
7. Compare the three classical studies of Sir John PlumbEngland in the
Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1950); The First Four
Georges, 12th ed. (London: Batsford, 1975); and Sir Robert Walpole, vol. 1: The Making of a Statesman; vol. 2: The Kings Minister (London: Cresset, 195660)with
the more recent study by A. S. Foord, His Majestys Opposition 17141830 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1964).
8. Foord, His Majestys Opposition, 154.
9. Ibid., 1.

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10. Compare Foord, His Majestys Opposition, 1011; Jger, Geschichtliche

Grundbegriffe, 479.
11. Compare Michael J. Petry, Hegel and the Morning Chronicle, HegelStudien 11 (1976): 1180; N. Waszek, Hegels Exzerpte aus der Edinburgh Review,
Hegel-Studien 20 (1985): 79112; N. Waszek, Hegels Exzerpte aus der Quarterly
Review, Hegel-Studien 21 (1986): 925.
12. G. W. F. Hegel, On the English Reform Bill [1831], in Political Writings, ed. Laurence Dickey and H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23470; in German, Hegel, TWA, 11:83128.
13. See H. Schneider and N. Waszek, eds., Hegel in der Schweiz (Frankfurt:
Lang, 1996), especially the articles on Hume and Gibbon.
14. Hegels erste Druckschrift: Jean Jacques Cart, Vertrauliche Briefe . . . , facsimile
of the 1798 edition (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970)see particularly Hegels note to the Fifth Letter, p. 81.
15. See N. Waszek, Fox und Pitt: Spannungsfeld britischer Politik im Spiegel des Hegelschen Denkens, in Hegels Rechtsphilosophie im Zusammenhang der europischen Verfassungsgeschichte, ed. H.-C. Lucas and O. Pggeler (Stuttgart-Bad
Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1986), 11128; N. Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegels Account of Civil Society (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988); N. Waszek,
Auf dem Weg zur Reformbill-Schrift: Die Ursprnge von Hegels Grossbritannienrezeption, in Politik und Geschichte: Zu den Intentionen von G.W.F. Hegels ReformbillSchrift, ed. C. Jamme and E. Weisser-Lohmann (Bonn: Bouvier, 1995), 17790.
16. Fetscher, Eduard Gans ber Opposition, 162: Mehr noch als Hegel . . . orientierte sich Eduard Gans am britischen Vorbild.
17. Staatslexikon: Enzyklopdie der smtlichen Staatswissenschaften fr alle Stnde,
15 vols., ed. C. v. Rotteck and C. Welcker (Altona: Hammerich, 183443).
18. For an analysis of the relevant articles, see Lothar Gall, Das Problem
der parlamentarischen Opposition im deutschen Frhliberalismus, in Politische
Ideologien und nationalstaatliche Ordnung: Studien zur Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Kurt Kluxen and W. J. Mommsen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1968),
15370, here 16566; Jger, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 49092.
19. Hegel, GPhR, 302, p. 472; Hegel, EPhR, 342.
20. Hegel, GPhR, 279, p. 446; Hegel, EPhR, 318.
21. Hegel, GPhR, 301, p. 469; Hegel, EPhR, 340.
22. Hegel, GPhR, 301, p. 470; Hegel, EPhR, 341.
23. Hegel, GPhR, 301 add., p. 471since Nisbet did not translate the
additions, the English is here quoted from the Knox translation: G. W. F. Hegel, Hegels Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1976), 292.
24. Hegel, GPhR, 302, p. 471; Hegel, EPhR, 342.
25. Hegel, GPhR, 302, p. 472; Hegel, EPhR, 342.
26. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction: Reason in History, in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 119; G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, vol. 1: Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg:
Meiner, 1955), 14243.

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27. Hegel, GPhR, 304, p. 474; Hegel, EPhR, 344.

28. The distinction between the two houses of Parliament is clearly made
in Hegel, GPhR, 312, p. 481; Hegel, EPhR, 351.
29. Hegel, GPhR, 3056, p. 475; Hegel, EPhR, 345.
30. Karl-Heinz Ilting was the first to have opened this field with his rich edition: Vorlesungen ber Rechtsphilosophie 18181831, 4 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 197374).
31. This text has been edited twice in German: (1) once again by KarlHeinz Ilting: G. W. F. Hegel, Die Philosophie des Rechts: Die Mitschriften Wannenmann
und Homeyer (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1983); and (2) by a team from the Hegel
Archives: G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ber Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft (henceforth cited as VNS ), intro. Otto Pggeler (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983). An English
version of this text is also available: G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right and
Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right: Heidelberg 18171818, with additions
from the lectures of 18181819 (henceforth cited as LNR ), transcribed by Peter
Wannenmann; translated by J. Michael Stewart and Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995).
32. The older edition of Hegels Political Writings, translated by T. M. Knox,
and with an introductory essay by Z. A. Pelczynski (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1964), provides only an abridged version of this text, while the more
recent Cambridge edition (see above, note 12) does not include it at all.
33. Hegel, TWA, 4:514. Wer nur etwas ber die Natur einer Stndeversammlung nachgedacht hat und mit ihren Erscheinungen bekannt ist, dem kann es
nicht entgehen, dass ohne Opposition eine solche Versammlung ohne ussere
und innere Lebendigkeit ist, dass gerade ein solcher Gegensatz in ihr zu ihrem
Wesen, zu ihrer Rechtfertigung gehrt und dass sie nur erst, wenn eine Opposition
sich in ihr hervortut, eigentlich konstitutiert ist; ohne eine solche hat sie die
Gestalt nur einer Partei oder gar eines Klumpens. (Hegels own emphasis; N.W.)
34. J. Braun, Die Lehre von der Opposition bei Hegel und Gans, 348:
Hier, wo die Opposition zugunsten des Monarchen ausfiel, trat Hegel offen
dafr ein.
35. For example, Jger, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 498.
36. Hegel, LNR, 29091; Hegel, VNS, 24041.
37. Hegel, LNR, 27677; Hegel, VNS, 22627.
38. Hegel, EPhR, 315, p. 352; Hegel, GPhR, 482.
39. Hegel, EPhR, 317, p. 353; Hegel, GPhR, 483.
40. Hegel, EPhR, 319, p. 355; Hegel, GPhR, 486.
41. I. Kant, On the Common Saying: This May Be True in Theory, But
It Does Not Apply in Practice, in Kants Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 85.
42. Hegel, EPhR, 295, p. 334; Hegel, GPhR, 463.
43. Hegel, EPhR, 295, p. 33435; Hegel, GPhR, 463.
44. Hegel, EPhR, 297, p. 335; Hegel, GPhR, 464.
45. Compare my previous publications on Gans, most notably Eduard
Gans on Poverty and on the Constitutional Debate, in The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School, ed. Douglas Moggach (Cambridge, Eng.:

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Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2449. See also Michael H. Hoffheimer,

Eduard Gans and the Hegelian Philosophy of Law (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995).
46. E. Gans, Philosophische Schriften, ed. Horst Schrder (Glashtten im Taunus: Detlev Auvermann, 1971), 37154; E. Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte (henceforth cited as NU ), ed. Manfred Riedel (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,
1981).
47. Waszek, Eduard Gans on Poverty, pp. 4344 for (a); pp. 4546 for (b).
48. Gans, Philosophische Schriften, 136.
49. Ibid.
50. Gans, NU, 102 (my own emphasis).
51. Gans, Philosophische Schriften, 13637.
52. Gans, NU, 103.
53. Gans, Philosophische Schriften, 137.
54. Ibid.
55. Gans, NU, 104.
56. It was first published in Facsimile von Handschriften berhmter Mnner
und Frauen aus der Sammlung des Herausgebers: Bekannt gemacht und mit historischen
Erluterungen begleitet von Wilhelm Dorow, 4th part (Berlin: Sachse, 1838), here no.
26, pp. 910; and then a second time in Denkschriften und Briefe zur Charakteristik
der Welt und Litteratur, ed. Wilhelm Dorow, new series, vol. 5 (Berlin: Duncker,
1841), 9093. Ganss text is now more easily available in N. Waszek, ed., Eduard
Gans (17971839): HegelianerJudeEuroper: Texte und Dokumente (Frankfurt
am Main: Peter Lang, 1991), 15556, and will be quoted from this edition.
57. Waszek, Eduard Gans, 155: das Moment der Opposition . . . ist ein
nothwendiges, welches jedem gebildeten Menschen, jeder tchtigen und ber
den Standpunkt des Patriarchialismus hinausgehenden Familie und jedem civilisirten Staate wesentlich inwohnend ist, nmlich das Negative berhaupt.
58. Ibid.: Ein Mensch, der ein Blumenleben fhrte, dem nie strake Widerwrtigkeiten entgegengetreten, der sich nie opponirte und nie tiefe Wehklagen
ber sich selbst empfand, ist kein wahrer Mensch.
59. Ibid., 156: schal und langweilig.
60. Ibid.: Eine Regierung soll sicherlich der Opposition Herr werden,
aber nur, indem sie von ihr lernt, durch sie bereichert wird, und sie gleichsam
in sich aufnimmt.
61. Ibid.: Anarchie und Auflsung.
62. My own translation of Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, in Hegel, TWA,
6:75.
63. Arnold Ruge, Kritik und Partei: Der Vorwurf gegen die neueste
Geistesentwicklung, Deutsche Jahrbcher fr Wissenschaft und Kunst 5 (1842): 1179
and 1182.
64. Anonymous [but most likely by Edgar Bauer], Staat, Religion und Parthei
(Leipzig: Wigand, 1843); see especially the concluding section of the 23-page
pamphlet.
65. Karl Rosenkranz, ber den Begriff der politischen Partei: Rede zum 18. Januar 1843, dem Krnungsfeste Preussens, gehalten in der Kniglichen Deutschen Gesellschaft (Knigsberg: Theile, 1843).

Between Hegel and Marx:

Eduard Gans on the
Social Question
Myriam Bienenstock

In the account of his travels in France published in Berlin under the

title Looking Back on Persons and Situations (Rckblicke auf Personen und
Zustnde),1 Eduard Gans,2 the celebrated Hegel follower among the jurists, described a conversation which unfolded during a meal at the famous Parisian restaurant Au Rocher de Cancale. Participants in this conversation included Eugne Lerminier and Jules Lechevalier, two men in
sympathy with Saint-Simonism, as well as the French politician Abel Franois Villemain and the historian and journalist Jean Alexandre Buchon:
Discussion bore exclusively on the great hopes which partisans of the
new doctrine vested in its propagation. When Villemain remarked that
no religion could take root without dolors and sufferings, sacrifices and
martyrs, Lerminier responded, These martyrs will be found.But
the Christian martyrs, Villemain retorted, hadnt dined at the Rocher
de Cancale. And this witticism can in fact be taken seriously. During
a period of indifference in matters of religion, young people who, far
from renouncing the lushness of this world, turn this very world into
the object of a religious treatment, will not be able to bring about any
upheavalan upheaval which does seem necessary, after all, to the
founding of any new divine doctrine.3

Gans, by way of this quip, no doubt wished to present a counterimage

to the description Heinrich Heine gave in his History of Religion and Philosophy in Germanythe text of which had been published just two years
earlier, in 1834:
We do not wish to be sans-culottes, Heine had proclaimed, thrifty
citizens, bargain-basement presidents: we are founding a democracy
164

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of gods who are all equally magnificent, equally holy, and equally
happy. . . . We . . . demand nectar and ambrosia, purple robes, delicious scents, sensual pleasures, splendor, dances of laughing nymphs,
music and comedies. . . . To your censorious reproaches we reply in
the words of a Shakespearean fool: Dost thou think, because thou art
virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? [Twelfth Night, act 2,
scene 3, line 1056; Heine replaces ale by sweet champagne.] The
Saint-Simonians had some such ideas and plans. But they were on unfavorable soil, and they were suppressed, at least for some time, by the
materialism all around them.4

Heines description is doubtless half-ironical. It is nonetheless

obvious that his appreciation of the Saint-Simonian program is totally
different from that of Gans. As a matter of fact, Gans seems to have
remained extremely skeptical altogether in face of the surprising metamorphosis which can be observed in Paris toward 1830 among SaintSimonian adepts: the metamorphosis of the ideas of Saint-Simon into a
religious doctrine, of which Gans himself gives an eloquent account in
his Looking Back on Persons and Situations. Attaching political goals to a religious impulse seemed to him manifestly to be completely artificial, with
regard to what mattered to a modern world, which he believed wholly indifferent to religion. In his Looking Back on Persons and Situations, he goes
as far as to write that it was Benjamin Constant who had counseled the
Saint-Simonians to make of their principles a religion, for their better
propagation.5 This account of the strange transformation which SaintSimonism had at that time undergone is certainly an exaggeration, and
in any case hardly credible regarding Benjamin Constant, but Gans seems
nonetheless to have considered the account plausible. He also insists on
itand this is very revealing of his own position: the perspective which
he himself adopted in dealing with the social question is obviously not
that of the philosophy of religion, or for that matter that of a critique of
religion. Gans scarcely felt sympathy for the religious philosophy of the
Saint-Simonians, or for their associating a religious conception to a philosophy of right, or further to a social philosophy. The comparison with
the position adopted by Heine is very enlightening here, for it marks
clearly the difference between the two attitudes: there undoubtedly was
a political purpose, and even an extremely important one, in Heines
critique of religion: by trying to disengage his contemporaries from their
acceptance of suffering, which he deemed Christian, he wanted to incite
them to protest. Such a purpose does not appear in Gans. What is also
missing in his case is the projectexpounded so eloquently by Heine
of making people happy, down here in this world; of building some sort

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of paradise on earth. Nothing whatever of the kind appears in Gans. It

was on the contrary imperative for him, as he wrote explicitly, to turn
away from the religious habit which, after a fashion totally superfluous,
the Saint-Simonians threw on to their shoulders, in order to examine
seriously their social and economic-political principles.6
We are presented here with two very different appropriations of
Saint-Simonism in Germany: on the one side that of Gans, and on the
other that of Heineto which it can be added that some years later, in
184344, the young Marx would maintain a position which seems quite
close to that of Heine, for in his introduction to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, he wrote that the abolition of religion as
the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.7 What we have here are two different appropriations of SaintSimonism, but alsoand this point, too, deserves to be emphasized
two completely different appropriations of Hegelianism. At the period
of time under consideration it is not easy, however, to draw a distinction
between, on the one hand, what one might be tempted to consider as a
German appropriation of Saint-Simonism and, on the other, what can
be called a French appropriation of Hegelianism: were there not writers
who in these years went so far as to believe that Saint-Simonism was of
German origin, and perhaps even of Hegelian origin?8 The constellation
is truly astonishing, but since it has already been the object of erudite
researchin particular on the part of Michel Espagnethere is no real
need for me to repeat his investigation here. Taking Espagnes results
as a basis and precondition of my own questions, I shall rather dedicate
this chapter principally to Eduard Gans: to his reading of Hegel, and his
appropriation of Saint-Simonism. At the end of the chapter, I also add
some remarks on the fate of pantheism and its social significance in
the nineteenth century: a question bearing on the history of this concept which has not been sufficiently studied even till today, and which is
very different from the aforementioned one, about the appropriation of
Saint-Simonism.
It is in my opinion of great interest to note that in his investigation
of the social question Gans did not follow the path which proceeded
via the philosophy of religion, unlike many others in his time: he turned
directly to Hegels Philosophy of Right, and to the paragraphs of that book
dedicated to the division of labor and to the creation of the rabble or
populace (Pbel ): these are the paragraphs he interpreted, and which
he valued. If one pays attention to this context, one realizes that Norbert
Waszek is saying something very far from trivial when he explains in his
article on Eduard Gans and Poverty that on the theme of poverty, for
example in his courses of 182829, if one excepts some complements,

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and some modifications, Gans did not go beyond a precise exposition

of the Hegelian conceptions:9 for at the time, and also later, there were
many who proceeded very differently! Here, the point is certainly not
simply to say that Gans relied on Hegel, and did not go beyond himfor
a closer examination shows that precisely with regard to the social question, Gans definitely went beyond Hegel. He submitted Hegels theses
to a critical scrutiny: he seems to have judged that Hegel himself had
not got to the root of the matter, that he had not found any satisfactory
solution. That was the fundamental reason for which he himself turned
toward the Saint-Simonians. Yet what was it that Gans believed he could
not find in Hegel, but might find among Saint-Simonians?
If we want to find an answer to this question, we must pay particular attention to the passage in which Gans explains that the project
of a state-driven realization of the Saint-Simonian principle to each according to his capabilities/capacities ( chacun selon ses capacits) runs
the risk of leading to a new slavery, a slavery of surveillance (Sklaverei
der Aufsicht):10 it is at this point that the acuity of his analysis shows most
clearlybut also at this point that the full extent of his debt to Hegel
emerges clearly into the light. He explains that competition, just like
chance and the fortuitous acquisition of possessions, is just as inevitable
and impossible to proscribe as civil society itself, which cannot be suppressed or abolished: Just as the lower sphere of reflection is included
in the idea, so the subordinate situation of civil society is included in the
State. One cannot separate the reflective character from civil society:
civil society itself cannot be raised to the State.11 That is indeed the
philosophical-religious program of the Saint-Simonians, which Gans
criticizes, from a Hegelian perspective: the objection he raises against
them is that it would be erroneous to attempt to raise civil society to
the State. This is what the Saint-Simonians would attempt to perform,
with their project of a state-driven, religiously consecrated realization of
the principle to each according to his capabilities/capacities, and this
is also what Gans criticizes, by recurring to Hegel. My thesis is thus that
Gans had found in none other than Hegel himself the means of criticizing the religious coloration of the Saint-Simonian program.
At first sight, this may seem paradoxical: dont we know that the
young Marx had directed his critique precisely against the Hegelian conception of the State, in denouncing its mystical or religious presuppositions? Marx had emphasized in his Critique of Hegels Philosophy
of Right (1843) that from now on, the question was not any longer, as
in Hegel, that of beginning with the State in order to give an account
of manof the real human being, the private person, belonging to
bourgeois society; rather should one start with man, and with bourgeois

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society and its presuppositions, in order to understand the State. Just as

religion does not make man, but rather man makes religion, so the constitution does not make the people, but the people make the constitution.12 The reversal of the relation between the State and man, between
the State and civil society, which the young Marx realizes here, is formulated according to a model drawn very explicitly from the critique of
religion. It is manifest that the young Marx understood Hegel, and more
particularly Hegels Philosophy of Right, wholly otherwise than Gans, and
according to presuppositions entirely different from those of Gans
even though, as is known, he heard Ganss lectures, and even used the
edition made by Gans of the Philosophy of Right, without expressing any
reservations about it.
It is beyond the scope of the present chapter to elucidate the origins
of the conception developed by the young Marx. But I shall say nevertheless that, without doubt, Saint-Simonism exercised a significant influence
on him. We do know, of course, that in his review of Karl Grns text on
The Social Movement in France and in Belgium, Marx was very critical of the
German prophets of Saint-Simonism, those who defended true socialism.13 One does, however, note with some interest that in the same review Marx also defends Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism against the German apostles. Even if Marx absolutely had no intention of founding a
religion, and thus criticized with some virulence those Saint-Simonians
who believed they could themselves achieve that end, he was also aware
of a debt he had toward Saint-Simon. He even seems to have shown some
understanding of the religious views of the Saint-Simonians. But it is
above all their critique of the existing order which constitutes (to recur
here to his own wording) the most important part of Saint-Simonism;14
and what it is important for us to underline here is that at the time, for
Marx as for the adherents of the Saint-Simonian school, it is civil society
which has necessarily to be the point of departure for any analysis of the
State. To say that Marx would have wanted, like the Saint-Simonians, to
raise civil society to the State (in Ganss phrase) would admittedly not
be correct. Nevertheless, it should be acknowledged that his approach
is closer to that of the Saint-Simonians than to that of Gans on this very
point. What Gans had rejected and criticized, for reasons taken from
Hegel, had actually been precisely this point of departurein civil
societyadopted by the Saint-Simonians, and by the young Marx. For
Gans as for Hegel, it is the State which must remain the only acceptable
point of departure for any analysis of historical phenomena, and it is
thus the State which remains the only possible point of departure for an
analysis of civil society.
Gans is often read today in a search for the young Marxs teacher.

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This may explain why it is often assumed, and usually doubtless far too
quickly, that Gans was the teacher who, himself being under the influence of Saint-Simonism, would have taught Marx that civil society is
more important than the State, and that it had equally determined its
functioning.15 But Saint-Simonism never led Gans to any such conclusion. Such an assumption presupposes a concept of civil society which
developed much later than Hegel, and indeed much later than Gans. As
Manfred Riedel has shown in an excellent study dedicated to the concept of civil society,16 it is not possible to clarify the meaning of any use
of that concept without locating it within the tradition which is its provenance: it is necessary to link it to Kant and to Wolff, and beyond these
authors to the Aristotelian notion of koinonia politik, for it is only within
that ambit that it becomes possible to comprehend what Hegel achieved:
because Hegel had still been aware of the ancient identity of the civil
(brgerlich) and of the political, he was in a position to understand the
separation of society from the State as a historical processand to accord that process its proper value. Because and to the extent that he was
a disciple of Hegel, Gans did not fall prey to the danger of a post festum
interpretation of the concept of civil society: in his preface to his edition
of Hegels Philosophy of Right (1833), he very adequately underlines the
fact that it is the State which is, for Hegel, the whole life of liberty.17
Those parts of economic and social life which during the Middle Ages
had developed to some extent in separation from political lifein the
language of Hegel, in abstraction or singularization from the Statewould
be understood anew, but organically; that is, in the State, in the political
sphere.18 Civil society is and remains included in the political sphere,
that of history: that is what Gans wished to say when he wrote in his Looking Back on Persons and Situations that civil society could not be raised to
the State, and that civil society will always retain a subordinate situation
within the state, just as within the idea is included the inferior sphere
of reflection.19
Civil society has a subordinate situation within the State, but an extremely important one, because it is there and only there that the human
being has value as a human being, that the human being has worth because he is a human being, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, etc.20 Gans had plainly perceived the importance
of this Hegelian analysis. His critique of the plans made by the SaintSimonians to eliminate any and all competition concerns precisely this
point: if these plans were adopted, Gans wrote in his course of 183233,
the harmony of the Simonians would annihilate all reflection, all activity, all individual liberty.21 But the person also belongs to oneself.22
It is also primarily through Hegels eyes that Gans perceived the

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historical development of civil society, and the formation of a populace (Pbel). It is in effect Hegels text which Gans follows, very closely,
in his courses of 182829 and 183233 on natural right. Equally possibly,
Gans could have heard from Hegels own mouth how important the social question was: where Hegel had said that the important question of
how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially,23 Gans in his course of 182829 says that the
means of knowing how to deal with poverty is an insoluble problem,
because poverty is the shadow of wealth. Extreme wealth will produce
extreme poverty.24 In his courses of 183233 Gans again sharpened his
analysis, doubtless following a visit he had just made to factories in England, which let him see with his own eyes the gravity of the social problems engendered through the development of industrial society. Poverty, which is in England definitely too greatas Gans himself puts
itand the formation of a populace which has no means of existence
at all, and cannot survive anymore, bring about a problem which to him
is new, and acute.
It is at this point that Gans refers to the Saint-Simonians. Here, he
says, they alone were rightthey alone, which is to say that only the
Saint-Simonians, and not Hegel, were right! But in what were they right?
Here is how Gans explains his position in his Looking Back on Persons and
Situations: the Saint-Simonians, he says,
have put a finger on a gaping wound of the times. They have justly observed that in reality slavery does not yet belong to the past, that it is, to
be sure, in the course of being eliminated formally, but that materially
it exists in a very complete form. Just as at an earlier time the master
confronted the slave, later the patrician the plebeian, then the feudal
seigneur the vassal, thus now the do-nothings (or idle) confront the
worker. Let one visit the factories of England and one will find hundreds of men and women who, emaciated and unhappy, sacrifice their
health and happiness in life to live in the service of only one man,
simply to be able to subsist miserably. Is it not slavery, when a man is exploited like an animal, even if he could still be free to die of hunger?25

Here Gans goes back, almost word for wordthe example of England
being set asideto the Saint-Simonians description of the exploitation of man by man in the sixth sance of the Doctrine of Saint-Simon
(1829): he takes over the comparison between the wage-earning modern
and slavery,26 the opposition of the do-nothings to the workers, the
latter described by the Saint-Simonians as a class of proletarians 27the
point deserves to be notedand finally, the condemnation of exploi-

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tation. The fact that Gans cites the Saint-Simonians does not by itself
mean that he was in agreement with all their theories, or with the fundamentals of their analysis. Here, as in many other cases, it is necessary
to distinguish clearly between citation and what by contrast amounts to
agreement. The fact that Gans adopted the Saint-Simonians characterization of wage-earning as slavery does not mean that he took up all
of their philosophy of history. In reality, he is a long way from wishing
to take it up: as fully as he wished to keep his distance from their philosophy of religion, he also wished thoroughly to remain at a distance
from the philosophico-historical scaffolding of the Saint-Simonians,
which he treated as a scientific consideration of secondary importance.28 Gans had markedly little sympathy with their abstract contrast
between ages called respectively organic and critical, and in addition
he had little sympathy with the thesis of a recurring antagonism which
characterized the ages called critical. The Saint-Simonians, when they
evoked the thesis of an antagonism between two classes, probably
thought of Kants Idea of a Universal History, a text which had made a
profound impression on Auguste Comte. The term antagonism had
in any event not been used by Hegel, certainly not in the context of
his philosophy of history, and on this question Gans associated himself
with the approach of his master: it is that approach which he wished
to recover, for example when he said that the ideas we have there are
much too abstract to be capable of accounting for history. Here too, the
comparison with the development of the Marxian conception of history
is interesting. It may well be that the Saint-Simonian philosophy of history constituted in effect a first formulation of the Marxist theory of history as class struggle, which came later. However, the fact that Gans cites
these formulations does not mean that he would have felt any inclination to accept that philosophy of history. What Gans took from the SaintSimonians concerns uniquely, in my opinion, their analysis of contemporary society: contrary to other authors, they have well understood that
today slavery is not over, that it is by no means exclusively a property of
the past.
And this Hegel, despite his acute sense of history, did not understand. The populace, Gans wrote, is a fact, but not a right. It is necessary
to gain an understanding of what the facts are grounded on, and then
do away with that. (Der Pbel ist ein Faktum, aber kein Recht. Man muss zu
den Grnden des Faktums kommen knnen und sie aufheben.)29 His use of the
term Faktum, rather than the German term Tatsache, already shows the
analysis encountering a difficulty whose solution is not obvious: facts
understood as Tatsachen can be observed and taken into consideration in
an analysis which would realize their meaning, and the right, the reason

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to which they belong: what Hegel wanted to express by way of his celebrated equivalence of the rational to the effectively real: what is rational
is effectively realthat which is effectively real is rational. But a fact
(Faktum) like that of the populace is not so easily reconcilable with reason, and with the right which becomes effective in history. This is why
according to Ganscontra Hegelit is necessary to do away with it.
Hegel, in his Philosophy of Right, had already given an account of the
formation of the populace. He had also, as has been said, emphasized
that poverty, even extreme poverty, does not of itself make a populace,
or rabble. What engenders the populace is only the disposition associated with poverty, by inward rebellion against the rich, against society, the government, etc. Hegel had condemned that disposition of
the spirit: for him, it constituted the evil (das Bse). But he had also
attempted to explain its formation: he said that because people in civil
society are dependent on contingency, they
become frivolous and lazy, like the lazzaroni of Naples, for example.
This in turn gives rise to the evil that the rabble do not have sufficient
honour to gain their livelihood through their own work, yet claim that
they have a right to receive their livelihood. No one can assert a right
against nature, but within the conditions of society hardship at once
assumes the form of a wrong inflicted on this or that class.30

That is why it is necessary to find a means of regulation in respect of

poverty. When Gans in his course of 183233 says that the populace is a
fact (Faktum), he is relying, certainly, on that analysis. If, however, he
underlines the factual existence of the populace, it is also very probably
in order to argueagainst Hegelthat it is not enough to characterize
the populace by such subjective determinations as those of the disposition of the spirit, or to condemn it as being the bad. The main point
Gans wants to make in his own analysis of the populace is not so much
that one should leave subjective determinations out of it, even though
it should be noted all the same that he most certainly wanted to keep
aloof from the term Pbel: he had already adopted the term proletariat,
taken from the vocabulary of the Saint-Simonians. What, for him, then
became fundamental was to establish the fact, as a Faktum: the very fact
of a proletariat in constant growth. What had also become fundamental
to him was the questiona question which is not Hegelian: Must the
populace remain? Does it purely, eternally exist? (Muss der Pbel bleiben?
Ist er reine ewige Existenz?)
I have already cited the answer Gans gave to this question: It is
necessary to gain an understanding of what the facts are grounded on,

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and then do away with that. From this answer, Gans did not draw revolutionary conclusions. It is easy to understand why: only someone who believes that the development of civil society determines the whole of history, and therefore also political history, and the transformation of the
State, could conclude that doing away with the populace might also lead
to an abolition of the State. But Gans, as we have seen, never shared this
belief. For him as for Hegel, it is the koinonia politike, the political community, which is primary; and it is primary not only in a chronological
sense, but also and in the first place in a conceptual one. Gans never
doubted that man is a political animal, whose goal is to live in common
with others, in communities like that of the family, or also the State. This
is why the means whereby he proposes in the end to do away with the
populace are not revolutionary means, like thosesuch as abolition of
the familywhich the Saint-Simonians recommended.
All the revolutionary means proposed by the Saint-Simonians are
expressed in markedly religious termsone could cite here, for example, the idea of a universal association, in German Vergesellschaftlichung. This idea, in any case the very term association, does not seem
to have been used by Saint-Simon, but only by Saint-Simonians, such as
Enfantin and Olinde Rodrigues.31 The sources are not clear: in his Looking Back on Persons and Situations, Gans refers to Fourierwho had earlier made this principle of association the subject of an obscure book,
written in formulaic style32and was perhaps thinking of the Treatise
on Domestic-Agricultural Association (Trait de lassociation domestique-agricole,
1812), known later under the title Theory of Universal Unity (1834).33 He
refers also to Jules Lechevalier, and again to others, who have confused
the banner of their doctrine with that of Fourirism.34 Manifestly, Gans
was not enthralled by the way in which these ideas were elaborated, and
one could easily understand why: the term association, which was used
as a concept opposed to those of struggle and antagonism, had a
very clear pacifist connotation,35 and it was that which could not find
favor in Ganss eyes: according to him, as we have seen, competition and
struggle could not be excluded from civil society. Above all, the fact to
which he could not give his agreement was that by this watchword the
Saint-Simonians wished not simply to characterize a sort of communaut
solidaire between individuals, but also to call for the creation of an entirely new regime, a social order to be organized from above, beginning
from a State established at the center. In this new social order, property
would be transferred to the State, metamorphosed into a community of
workers. The State would now be a universal system of banks, a central system, and it would administer the organization of production and
of consumption.36 Gans did not fail to subject this idea to ridiculefor

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example, when in his course of 183233 he remarked that those who

were active on behalf of Saint-Simonism were organizing a large commercial deal, with the firm God and Co.37
It is nevertheless this idea of association which he puts to the fore
in the Looking Back on Persons and Situations: he sees in it the best means,
perhaps even the only way, of fighting against the growth of the populace, this modern slavery.38 If we take his criticism of Saint Simonian
ideas into account, we come to the conclusion that he most certainly
used the concept otherwise than the Saint-Simoniansbut how? To answer this question, and to decipher his own use of the idea, it would
obviously be useful to know precisely which writings of Saint-Simon and
of the latters disciples he knew. Regrettably enough, the sources available to us do not allow an adequate answer to that question. One apparently reasonable supposition is that Gans began to understand the idea
of Vergesellschaftlichungthus of associationby way of the very first
introduction of Saint-Simonism to Germany: in the articles of Friedrich
Buchholz, published in the Neue Monatsschrift in 182627; for in these
articles there appeared, as a translation of the French association, the
unusual term Vergesellschaftung 39 which Gans would later use, in the variant form Vergesellschaftlichung. This supposition seems particularly plausible, since Buchholz himself showed little interest in the religious
games of the Saint-Simoniansas was the case later with Gans. The way
Gans had arrived at the thesis according to which a blatant opposition
would in the future come to exist between wealth and poverty was that
of a positive method: a method referring to facts, observations, and
experience, which brings him near Saint-Simon, but also very near to
Auguste Comte. When Gans mentions in his Looking Back on Persons and
Situations that he had already heard talk of Saint-Simonism even before
he arrived in Paris, he also addsand this is noticeable enoughthat
what he hopes to find in this doctrine of political economy is a scientific
realization: From what I had heard, I had to conclude that what was put
forward here was entirely new views of political economy or industrial
conceptions, and that everything moved in the circle which has been at
all times assigned to science.40 That supports the hypothesis that Ganss
interest in Saint-Simonism had been kindled in the first place by the
publications of Buchholz. This hypothesis, if confirmed, would also help
to explain why Gans, in his investigation of the social question, did not
follow the path which proceeded via the philosophy of religion, unlike
many others in his time.
It is in any case this unique blend of Hegelianism and SaintSimonism that one finds in his writings which makes the great interest of
his ideas, and which also accounts for their continuing actuality. According to the thesis which Gans develops,

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civil society, when it is thus maintained in order by the police . . . will arrive at an organized condition which will divide into, on the one hand,
the rich, the possessors of goods, or those who have the wherewithal on
which to live, and, on the other hand, those others who do not have the
wherewithal, or any consciousness of an assured existence.

This contrasts clearly with the description Hegel had given of the distribution into estates within civil society. Ganss thesis owes much more to
Saint-Simonian writings. But when he deplores the fact that in Paris the
populace would still not be organized, unlike in London, and when
he argues that what is required is its organization into corporations
for these are the association of torn-apart sections of civil society (die
Vergesellschaftlichung der zerrissenen Teile der brgerlichen Gesellschaft)it is,
on the contrary, of Saint-Simonian conceptions of which he takes leave,
in order to reconnect with the Hegelian philosophy of right. According
to him, it is not the State, it is the police (Polizey), which is to say an
exterior foresight (eine usserliche Vorsorge), which must maintain order
within civil society: in France, there are no corporations, the question
only arises of knowing whether it would not be good to form some41
or, to clarify what must be meant here: the question only arises of knowing whether it would not be a good thing to help workers organize
themselves.
What Gans attacks most violently in this context is the famous
Loi Le Chapelierthe law which had forbidden such associations in
France, in respect of those political objectives which perhaps might
have been able to insinuate themselves there.42 Did Gans himself think
that some corporationsto which one might almost refer by the term
trade unionsshould also have the right to be political organizations?
It is not clear. What is, however, very clearand this is the main point I
have wanted to bring out in this chapteris that according to Gans such
organizations, if they have to be set up, have to come from civil society,
not from the State. Disaffection with Saint-Simonism, and proximity to
Hegel, show extremely clearly in this matter. In a comment on one of the
paragraphs of his Philosophy of Right (section 290), Hegel seems in effect
to have noted that
for some time now, organization has always been directed from above,
and efforts have been devoted for the most part to this kind of organization, despite the fact that the lower level of the masses as a whole can
easily be left in a more or less disorganized state. Yet it is extremely important that the masses should be organized, because only then do they
constitute a power or force; otherwise, they are merely an aggregate, a
collection of scattered atoms.43

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Whether that comment came from Hegel himself, or was reformulated

by the editor Gans, is not known. But we know that Marx himself, when
reading Hegels Philosophy of Right, used Ganss edition of the book. This
means that he most certainly knew Ganss additions, especially the
one quoted above. What he learned about Hegel should also be sought
there.
It is here, on this point, that the continuing actuality of Hegels
thought on social and political matters can be seen most vividly. Hegel
is quite often, and rightly, celebrated as the author who, together with
his school, has done the most to impose in the European context, from
1830 onward, a clear-cut conceptual distinction between the state and
civil society. Hegels reflections on the inherent lack of organization of
civil society, and on the necessity to organize it from within civil society itself,
may also have exerted an influence of their own, one which however is
not yet acknowledgedand which deserves much more interest than it
has obtained, up to this day.

Notes
An earlier version of this paper was published in German, Die soziale
Frage im franzsisch-deutschen Kulturaustausch: Gans, Marx und die deutsche
Saint-Simon Rezeption, in Eduard Gans (17971839): Politischer Professor zwischen
Restauration und Vormrz, ed. Reinhard Blnkner, Gerhard Ghler, and Norbert
Waszek (Leipzig: Leipziger Universittsverlag, 2002), 15375. The work on the
English version of this paper was supported by the ANR/DFG research program
Ides sociales et idalisme. Rceptions de doctrines sociales franaises dans le
champ daction de lidalisme allemand. This help is gratefully acknowledged.
1. Eduard Gans, Rckblicke auf Personen und Zustnde (Berlin: Veit, 1836),
reprinted with an introduction, notes, and bibliography by N. Waszek (StuttgartBad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995).
2. See N. Waszek, Eduard Gans on Poverty and on the Constitutional Debate, in The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School, ed. Douglas Moggach (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2449.
3. Gans, Rckblicke, 94.
4. H. Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, in
The Hartz Journey and Selected Prose, trans. and ed. Ritchie Robertson (London:
Penguin Books, 2006), 24950.
5. Gans, Rckblicke, 92.
6. Gans, Rckblicke, 9495.
7. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right: Introduction, in
Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Roger Benton (Harmondsworth,
Eng.: Penguin Books, 1981), 244.
8. See Michel Espagne, Le saint-simonisme est-il jeune-hglien? in
Regards sur le saint-simonisme et les saint-simoniens, ed. Jean-Ren Derr (Lyon:

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Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1986), 4571. The most astonishing declaration

is without a doubt that of Pierre Leroux, who was at one time an adept of SaintSimonism, and who transformed the influential journal Le Globe, after 1830, into
an organ of Saint-Simonism: France knows well the ideas expounded by Monsieur Enfantin. It will be necessary some day to appreciate that the metaphysic of
M. Enfantin is positively that of Hegel, and it is in following Hegel that the SaintSimonian school went astray. . . . The disciples of Hegel made themselves SaintSimonians, the disciples of Saint-Simon made themselves Hegelians. P. Leroux,
Du cours de philosophie de Schelling, Revue indpendante 3 (1843): 332 ff. On
Leroux and Le Globe, see also Norbert Waszeks introduction to the Rckblicke of
Gans, pp. lxilxvi.
9. Norbert Waszek, Eduard Gans on Poverty: Between Hegel and SaintSimon, Owl of Minerva 18 (1987): 16778, 17072.
10. Gans, Rckblicke, 99.
11. Ibid.
12. Marx, Critique of Hegels Doctrine of the State, in Early Writings,
intro. Lucio Colletti, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1975), 87.
13. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie (1845
46), in Marx Engels Werke, vol. 3 (Berlin: Dietz, 1969), 47398.
14. Marx and Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, 3:493. See also 3:495: Le
Globe contains, as M. Grn certainly could not have known, the most detailed
and most substantial critiques of the existing order, particularly in the economic
realm. Marx was prejudiced so favorably toward the Saint-Simonian school that
he even did his best to explain the origins of the religious conception of the
New Christianity: that introduced the necessity of the hierarchy and of the
summit of that hierarchy, in connection with the question of knowing how to
determine capacit. Marx and Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, 3:494.
15. See, for example, Georges Gurvitch, Saint-Simon et Karl Marx, Revue
internationale de philosophie 14 (1960): 399416, 401.
16. See on this question Manfred Riedels article, State and Civil Society:
Linguistic Context and Historical Origin, in his study Between Tradition and
Revolution: The Hegelian Transformation of Political Philosophy, trans. Walter Wright
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 12956.
17. Eduard Gans, Preface to Hegels Philosophy of Right (1833), translated by Michael H. Hoffheimer, as an appendix to his study Eduard Gans and the
Hegelian Philosophy of Law (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), 8792, 88.
18. E. Gans, Philosophische Schriften, ed. Horst Schrder (Berlin: Akademie,
1971), 6 ff.
19. Gans, Rckblicke, 99.
20. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Rem. trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 209, p. 240.
21. Eduard Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte, ed. M. Riedel
(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 52.
22. Gans, Rckblicke, 99.
23. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 244, add. p. 267.
24. Gans, Philosophische Schriften, 120.

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25. Gans, Rckblicke, 100.

26. He also says in his courses of 183132 that it was the Saint-Simonians
who had understood that work for wages was a treatment of men as if they
were things, and thus a sort of slavery (Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte, 51).
27. See Doctrine de Saint-Simon, Exposition (Exposition), originally published
1829, edited by C. Bougl and E. Halvy (Paris: Rivire, 1924), 239.
28. Gans, Rckblicke, 96.
29. Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte, 92.
30. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 244, add. p. 266.
31. Olinde Rodrigues (17951851), a mathematician who later became a
banker, was the eldest brother of Eugne Rodrigues. He was until February 1832
one of the directing members of the Saint-Simonian school.
32. Gans, Rckblicke, 101.
33. It is this work to which Norbert Waszek refers in Gans, Rckblicke, 382.
34. Gans, Rckblicke, 101.
35. See Doctrine de Saint-Simon, quatrime sance (fourth meeting), 203 ff.
See also, on this point, Norbert Waszek, La rception du saint-simonisme dans
lcole hglienne: Lexemple dEdouard Gans, Archives de philosophie 52 (1989):
58187.
36. See Doctrine de Saint-Simon, septime sance (seventh meeting), 253 ff.
37. Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte, 51.
38. Gans, Rckblicke, 101.
39. See, for instance, the translation by Buchholz of O. Rodrigues, De
Henri de Saint-Simon (ber den Grafen von Saint-Simon), Neue Monatsschrift
fr Deutschland 21 (1826): 272, now available in Saint-Simonistische Texte, ed. Rtger Schfer, 2 vols. (Aalen: Scientia, 1975), 498.
40. Gans, Rckblicke, 92.
41. Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte, 93.
42. Gans, Rckblicke, 101.
43. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 290, add. p. 331.

Post-Kantian Perfectionism
Douglas Moggach

Virtue and Economy

Like many British and French republicans of the century before them,
German Left Hegelians in the period described as the Vormrz (preceding the outbreak of revolution in March 1848) shared the view that a
deep-seated opposition exists between virtue and commerce.1 They thus
appearat first sightinattentive to the reworking of this problematic
in the later eighteenth century by Condorcet, Payne, and Smith: a fundamental shift in republican thinking to which Gareth Stedman Jones2
and Istvan Hont3 have alerted us, in which the idea of virtue is redefined
in ways compatible with the practices of mercantile society. Though the
older republican tradition was far from unitary, it tended, in many of its
variants, to follow Aristotle in contrasting sober household management
to chrematistic (an excessive concern with things, or accumulation)
and to pleonexia or immoderate appetite. The Aristotelian tradition had
considered the pursuit of excessive wealth to be a cause of corruption
among citizens, since it dissuaded them from political participation, or
subverted its proper ends, the pursuit of the common good. Superfluous wealth was inimical to political virtue, and to the maintenance of just
political constitutions. While Rousseau continued to hold a position of
this kind, it had been decisively challenged by his time.
In the mid and latter parts of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment theorists undertook a thorough and fundamental revision of the
republican vocabularies of virtue, seeking to mitigate the conflict with
emergent commercial relations and standards: under the revised definitions of virtue, the market and its values did not necessarily undermine
the capacity of citizens to seek a common interest.4 Indeed, the market,
it was argued, was uniquely able to promote virtues of honesty and reciprocity, and it provided more reliably the material means to ensure the
safety and welfare of the state. Similar adjustments had occurred before,
though without supplanting the Aristotelian criticisms. One of the characteristics of Roman republicanism was that, instead of the direct and
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transparent relations which, ideally, prevailed in the Greek political community, it had conceived of citizens in relations mediated by property.
Roman thought thus introduced a tension into the idea of citizenship
between juridical and political status, between the abstract legal person and the active co-legislator.5 Italian Renaissance humanists were far
from unanimous in their views of the political significance of property
and wealth;6 recent research distinguishes Greek and Roman influences
in these debates.7 It was primarily the new commercial realities of the
eighteenth century, however, which led to a profound reappraisal of the
Aristotelian tradition, with Scottish theorists in the vanguard, but with
important representatives in France, the German territories, and elsewhere.8 In reverting to a position reminiscent of Aristotle, members of
the Hegelian school seem perhaps oblivious to these fundamental conceptual changes.
If we were to apply the older interpretative approach to the Left
Hegelians, one which saw them as purely religious or philosophical critics, with little to say about concrete social issues, this inadvertence would
not be surprising. In these readings, the Left Hegelians were depicted
as mere way stations on the road (whether upward or downward) leading from Hegel to Marx.9 This interpretation also connects with criticisms like those of Engels regarding die deutsche Misere, or German
political, economic, and cultural retardation, capable of generating only
vapid intellectual posturing, but no serious political engagement or understanding:10 a claim whereby Engels and Marx sought to distinguish
themselves from their own milieu. It would be evidence of the Left Hegelians disinterest in or ignorance about the pressing questions of the day,
confirming their status as isolated intellectuals, detached from political
and social struggles. Yet, beginning with the work of Ingrid Pepperle11 in
the 1970s, and ranging through recent studies in several languages,12 this
older framework has now been quite effectively dismantled, and republicanism has been established as a fruitful perspective in which to view the
writings of figures like Eduard Gans, Arnold Ruge, Ludwig Feuerbach,
and Bruno Bauer, as well as the young Marx and Engels themselves.
Are the views of the Left Hegelians on the opposition of citizenship and chrematistic then an anachronistic reversion to discredited republican positions? I want to argue that they are not. They are forwardlooking, and informed both by new ethical conceptions and by insights
into the characteristics and problems of modern civil society. Recognition of fundamental social change, the diversity and conflict of interest
based in the modern division of labor, makes a reversion to Aristotelian
models impossible, insofar as these models had presupposed a homogeneous citizenry; and recognition of the Kantian revolution in ethics

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makes it illegitimate to recur to older doctrines of virtue. If virtue and

commerce remain opposed, it must be on a new basis. In acknowledging
the force of particularity and diversification of interest, the Left Hegelians are strikingly unlike the older republicans, or even Rousseau and
the Jacobins.13 Moreover, they pursue the analysis of particularity as it
is shaped by the impress of the social question, the appearance of new
forms of urban poverty and exclusion. This is not poverty due to natural
causes or mischance, or to the survival of precapitalist relations, but to
the mechanisms of the market itself. In this way Bauer and others among
his collaborators anticipate Marx in his critique of capitalism, but they
offer other solutions, more consistent with republican ideas of freedom,
and with the extension to economic and political questions of an ethic
derived (but distinct) from Kants.
Thus, two related issues will be addressed here: first, the development of a specifically post-Kantian version of perfectionist ethics14 as a
historicized doctrine of freedom, linked to ideas of republican virtue
and citizenship; and second, the impact of the social question on republicanism, especially its assessment of modern society and the prospects
for emancipation. These two aspects are closely connected, as it is the
second that imparts a particular practical urgency to the first, and accounts for certain of its distinctive theoretical features.
German republicans in the Vormrz, especially Bruno Bauer, respond to problems of a general interest in conditions of modernity with
an account of the realization of reason and freedom that can be characterized as post-Kantian perfectionism. Unlike the older perfectionist
doctrines of Christian Wolff or Karl von Dalberg, for example, its end is
freedom, not happiness; it presupposes the divergence and opposition
of particular interests, not their intrinsic harmony; and it proposes a
historical, not an essentialist or naturalistic, account of perfection and
its obstacles. The Kantian distinctions within practical reason, among
welfare, right, and the good, are maintained, but reconfigured. This adaptation is undertaken in response to Hegelian criticism of Kants ethics, but, in its deliberation on the social question or the new problems of
urban and political life, it goes beyond Hegels own position.15 The new
thinking in the Hegelian school reflects the fundamental insight that
the modern division of labor, as a system for satisfying the objectives of
welfare, creates especially intransigent forms of particularity and heteronomy. It engenders interests that are conflictual rather than complementary or harmonized, as earlier perfectionisms had believed; and it
impinges illegitimately on the practice of right by denying some persons
the possibility of free causality in the world. Part of the solution, at least,
lies in transposing into the sphere of right some of the considerations

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that Kant had reserved for virtue or the good: the concept of autonomy
comes to be related not only to inner morality, but to political institutions and practices; and political virtue is required of republican citizens
as a means of holding in check the distorting effects of private interest.
This broadening of the sense of autonomy has two principal effects on
the theoretical structure of post-Kantian ethics: first, motives for action,
which Kant had excluded from the sphere of right, now become relevant
to the assessment of political acts, in that political autonomy and virtue
enjoin the practice of universal norms; and second, the effects of action
must be taken into account insofar as they extend or constrict the operation of right. The result is a teleological ethical theory, with the furtherance of freedom and autonomy as its central value.
This post-Kantian perfectionism differs from pre-Kantian forms,
but shows a superficial resemblance to older republican theories suspicious of mercantile interests. This appearance belies the rich reworking
of Kantian themes, and the new diagnosis of modernity, which acknowledges right and subjective spontaneity, but also the opposition of interests as these arise from civil society itself. In the Hegelian school this
attitude is not restricted to Bruno Bauer, who shares important parts of
the perfectionist program with Eduard Gans,16 Ludwig Feuerbach,17 and
Karl Marx.18 For Bauer, a universal interest emerges in modernity only
through the practice of political virtue, whereby private interests, rooted
in the division of labor, are consciously reshaped through critique, and
through participation in the struggle for rational political and social institutions. This perfectionism is not sanguine about the prospects for
transformation, but recognizes the urgency and the difficulty of the task
in conditions of fragmentation or diremption,19 the result of social and
economic changes wrought with the onset of modernity.

Pre-Kantian Perfectionism
Perfectionism is the doctrine that the development of certain capabilities is of intrinsic and not merely instrumental value;20 and that it is of
supervening value, providing the appropriate and predominant end for
ethical orientation. Taking aim primarily at perfectionist doctrines inspired by Leibniz, Kant had described these as forms of rational heteronomy, based on intelligible goods taken to be independent of the
moral will itself.21 Besides Leibnizian-Wolffian happiness as spiritual and
intellectual thriving, Aristotelian eudaimonia as the development of virtue would also be a rationally heteronomous end in this sense.22 This

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perfectionism is inadmissible for Kant because even though it favors intelligible over merely sensible goods, it considers them as prior to, and
foundational for, duty. The moral will is thus determined, teleologically,
by an appeal to a value outside itself, and this is inconsistent with Kants
sense of autonomy. Perfectionism is also consequentialist in that it assesses moral actions in their effects, rather than solely in their maxims.
We can distinguish pre- and post-Kantian forms.
The pre-Kantian perfectionism of Christian Wolff,23 deriving primarily from Leibniz, though with an admixture of other sources, is a cognitivist, consequentialist ethic, based on an idea of human nature and
the requisites of its material and intellectual thriving. Normatively, it calls
upon the state, through active intervention, to secure these conditions for
its subjects, and thus to promote happiness. In Wolffian perfectionism,
the imperative to leave the state of nature and enter civil society is based
on the natural-law requirement that we perfect ourselves in our physical,
intellectual, and spiritual capacities. Relations with others in the state of
nature are not necessarily conflictual, but in the absence of stable organizational forms, we are incapable of reliably orienting our actions toward
our own and our mutual betterment.24 Once we have entered civil society,
the need for perfection remains the overriding consideration for determining rights and duties, which encompass labor and its prerequisites.25
Perfection involves cooperation, which is not to be left to spontaneous
initiatives26 (ineffective or self-defeating without proper direction), but to
be coordinated by the state. Wolff thus espouses a baroque welfare state
whose objective is to guarantee decent living conditions, education, housing, and preservation of the environment (water, forests, etc.).27 These
are to be secured under the aegis of an interventionist tutelary regime, an
enlightened absolutism. While Wolff recognizes certain residual rights in
civil society, their exercise is conditional on their ability to promote perfection or happiness, and no appeal is allowed from happiness to rights.
What is of fundamental importance for Wolff is the result of action, its
contribution to welfare in a broad sense. Within civil society, moreover,
the basic actors are not rights-bearing individuals, but households: quasiAristotelian composite societies aiming at physical, cultural, and economic reproduction, and headed by a master. Within these households,
there exists a complementarity of interests between masters and servants
(employees contracting for a wage, although Wolff seems to find a place
even for serfdom under certain conditions),28 in that each has a necessary, mutually beneficial, functionally and hierarchically differentiated
role to play in the perfection of the household and its members.
A variant of Wolffs perfectionism is developed by Karl von Dalberg,29 the last arch-chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire before its

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dissolution, and later one of the leading figures in the Napoleonic Confederation of the Rhine. He is a post-Kantian chronologically, but not
conceptually, as he tries, in response to the new juridical thinking inspired by Kant, to undergird Wolffs theory with reflections on the anthropological factors that limit spontaneity, and that require perfection
to be fostered in the first instance by political authorities. In his naturalistic account of happiness and its constraints, Dalberg stresses the inefficacy of spontaneous acts to achieve the objective of perfection. This
failure is rooted in fixed attributes of human nature, its tendency toward
inertia30 and its preference for immediate and effortless gratification.31
For Dalberg the immobilizing weight of private interest is an anthropological constant, perhaps representing a version of original sin in the eyes
of this Catholic prelate. It is the task of the enlightened state to awaken
the dormant energies of its people, and to direct these efforts toward the
common good of happiness, including spiritual development. Partial associations are to be restricted, as they foster private interests potentially
at odds with the common good;32 but in general the state should rely as
much as possible on education rather than coercion to attain the ends of
general felicity. Despite Dalbergs mildness, it is theories of this type that
Kant, in Theory and Practice, describes as the greatest possible despotism,33 since they attempt to prescribe to individuals the ways to attain
their own happiness, and so disregard spontaneity and rights.

Kantian Criticisms
Kants juridical thought and his opposition to perfectionist theories
are based on his distinction between empirical practical reason (whose
domain is das Wohl, the good in the sense of individual happiness or
need-satisfaction) and pure practical reason: the wills capacity to be
self-determining (spontaneity) and its capacity to be self-determining
through the moral law (autonomy). In Kants late work, The Metaphysics
of Morals,34 pure practical reason is described as underlying two distinct
spheres of activity: that of morality, or das Gute, where full autonomy
in Kants sense of moral self-legislation can be practiced; and the juridical sphere, or right (das Recht, or conformity to the conditions of free
agency for all subjects). Against Aristotle and Aristotelian republicanisms, Kant depoliticizes the virtues, situating them in the sphere of morality, as aids or motivational supports for the moral will and duty. Perfection is not repudiated, but recast as an individual duty to oneself; and it
is sharply distinguished from happiness as material satisfaction, which is

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in the purview of empirical practical reason. The sphere of right is the

arena in which the principles limiting individuals in the choice of their
particular goods (their own Wohl ) are worked out, insofar as these are
mutually compatible. Political prescription of these specific choices is
precluded, as an infringement of spontaneity and right; the state may
not legitimately determine for us the manner of achieving happiness,
though it must prevent us from encroaching on the capacity of others to
exert free agency themselves. Right is not based on utility but is a facet
of freedom, grounded in pure practical reason; yet it remains distinct
from virtue or the good, as it concerns only the external aspects of action, not its maxim or principle. Kants demarcation of pure practical
reason offers a defense of rights, the compossibility of freedoms in their
external usage, which explicitly leaves the motivations of legal subjects
out of account. Prudential calculation may provide sufficient grounds
for rightful action.35
Kants juridical republicanism thus makes no direct appeal to virtue, though virtue is required in a full account of pure practical reason
and the inner legislation of moral autonomy.36 Juridical relations, concerning external acts only, demand no change of self, but only an intelligent mutual partition of the external world. Yet right and morality
are not absolutely distinct in Kants thought. Like morality, the juridical sphere is grounded in freedom and not in utility, in pure and not
empirical practical reason. Right enjoins at least outward respect for the
independence and spontaneity of others, though it cannot compel motives for this respect, which may be entirely self-regarding. There is one
fundamental transition within the sphere of right, however, where mere
external show is insufficient: the passage from the state of nature to the
civil condition is a rational requirement whose categorical force does not
repose on calculations of advantage, but expresses a practical necessity
(one conjoined with coercive force), so that rights can be practiced at all.
E statu naturae exeundum is a command of morality voiced expressly
to potential bearers of rights. If the civil condition is to be instituted
and maintained, it may also be concluded that its preservation entails
regular adaptation and extension; recent research has placed emphasis
on the importance in Kants thought of ongoing reforms, as gradual approximations to the ideal of reason. These are taken in the literature
to represent a kind of juridical ought, perhaps restoring a measure of
perfectionism within his theory.37 This question is not immediately germane to our concerns, but it should be noted that Kant understands
interactions in the juridical sphere as mutually limiting, but potentially
reconcilable; civil society does not appear to generate necessarily opposing interests. The emergence of the social question in the nineteenth

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century will elicit a contrary conclusion, and will lead to a reappraisal of

the relations among the spheres of Kantian practical reason.

Post-Kantian Replies
If, then, there is to be a conceptually post-Kantian perfectionism, it
would take cognizance of Kants criticisms of earlier forms, and would
retain the stress on self-determination and spontaneity. It would aim
to promote freedom, rather than happiness; and it would rethink the
boundaries between welfare, right, and virtue. Bruno Bauer exemplifies
such a theory.38 Drawing on current ethical thinking, we can distinguish
its metaethical and normative dimensions.39
1. Metaethically, post-Kantian perfectionism can be described as
a cognitivist non-naturalist ethics. It is cognitivist because the universal
maxims of actions can be derived from proper (theoretically guided) reflection on the historical process, and raise truth claims: we know what
we must do, when we determine the principal contradictions which limit
the practice of freedom at any specific time.40 It is non-naturalist because the conditions for autonomy do not make reference to a putative human nature and the empirical conditions for its thriving, but to a
transcendental capacity to free the will from the causal effects of sensibility and desire; that is, they refer to spontaneity in a Kantian sense. It is
perfectionist because it holds that the development of capabilities, here
the capacity of self-determination, is of intrinsic, indeed ultimate, value.
It posits the overriding importance of autonomy, including its political
conditions;41 yet it differs from deontological accounts like Kants because it sees autonomy as a value to be realized in the self and in the
world, rather than as an implicit property of the moral will.42 Unlike
pre-Kantian perfectionism, the end to be promoted is freedom rather
than happiness; and the obstacles to perfection are not rooted in a permanent human nature, but are thoroughly historical and subject to our
intervention.
Post-Kantian perfectionism assumes the validity of Kants criticisms of earlier perfectionist theories, and builds on Kantian foundations, but it seeks to stress Hegelian Wirklichkeit, the effective realization
of reason in the objective world, or the fusion of concept and objectivity
as a historical process. Hence perfectionism after Kant builds in two dimensions: one is that of the self-relating individual, who acts from the
knowledge of freedom (here freedom is constitutive of the act itself, and
not only an external end); the other is an objective, permanent striving,

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where the act contributes to a process of realization or objectification.43

The departures from Kant himself are clear here. The former aspect implies that universalistic maxims for action must be located in the sphere
of right, as well as in morality; the latter requires us to take account of
the consequences of action as part of their moral assessment, as they
enhance or hamper right. It may seem paradoxical to describe a theory
based on autonomy as a form of rational heteronomy, but it is also difficult
to escape the conclusion that this usage is authorized in Kantian terms,
insofar as the idea of a state to be achieved determines the will (a form of
consequentialism), and insofar as autonomy is treated, not as the principle of a timeless moral law of duty, but as a value to be maximized (a
form of teleology, as opposed to deontology).
2. Normatively, Bauers post-Kantian perfectionism is an agentcentered universalism, which requires the cultivation of political virtue
as the ability to abstract from private interest and identity where these
conflict with historical progress. It is not an invocation of the state to
further happiness, but enjoins individual action to realize the demands
of reason and freedom.
Though Max Stirner, treated elsewhere in this volume,44 is not at all
a perfectionist, it might be relevant, the better to illustrate Bauers own
position, to note the major disagreements between them. Metaethically,
Stirner represents non-cognitivism and decisionism: the good is what I
take it to be. Any specific good that I choose is valid for myself only, and
counts as good only as long as I remain so disposed. Normatively, Stirner
stands for particularism, not universalism, viewing any putative universal as necessarily a transcendent power holding the (particular) self in
thralldom; whereas Bauer distinguishes true and false universals, defining the former as the immanent striving of reason to realize itself in the
world, and thus to further the cause of emancipation; while the latter
merely feign universality, or treat it as an exclusive privilege. Bauer thus
sees freedom as self-transformation in light of universal purposes, not as
immediate gratification or self-assertion.
Such gratification is mere particularity, and a possible source of
heteronomy. The particular, as the material of the will provided by contingent desires, experiences, and social function (and one might add,
cultural identities),45 must be submitted to critique, and may not count
as immediately valid. Thus Bauer distinguishes Bestimmtheit or determinateness from Besonderheit or particularity.46 Such determinacy, as clarity
and steadfastness of purpose, is part of his definition of virtue, and its
scope extends over what Kant calls the sphere of right, as much as of
morality. Political virtue is the result of a dialectical synthesis, that is, of
submitting the particular to the discipline of the universal. It is not the

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affirmation of particularity, but its reworking in light of general principles which specify the ends of action. Thus it is no contradiction if
Bauer speaks of modern society as at the same time highly particularistic
(heteronomously determined by private economic and sectarian interests) and yet largely unbestimmt or indeterminate, insofar as its members
have not submitted themselves to the critique and discipline of universal
self-consciousness.47 Determinacy issues from the critique of the positive
and the particular, and not from enacting immediate interests.
Bauer also criticizes his fellow Left Hegelians D. F. Strauss and
Ludwig Feuerbach for remaining fixed in what he calls a substantiality
relation:48 for them, the universal is substance, not subject; extension,
not thought. Unlike Stirner, they recognize universality, and grasp this
as an immanent process or species-being, rather than a transcendent
force; but they conceive it as a merely generic universal, a given, shared
property, and not a spontaneous, personal acquisition. On this account,
individuals are merely unreflective moments of the whole, exhibiting
its properties without having critically internalized them. Bauer insists,
rather, that we conceive individuals as spontaneous beings capable of
relating to and adopting general interests through their own acts and in
their own way. Leaving the idea of individual agency underdeveloped,
Strauss and Feuerbach thus miss the implications of the Kantian turn.49

Perfectionist Freedom
For Bauer, modern freedom consists in critique, involving theoretical
assessment of given values and practices, and an examination of their
validity claims; but it also mandates practical intervention, challenging
and expunging all irrational relations and institutions.50 In his account
of universal self-consciousness and the standpoint of principled determinacy, Bauer adapts Kantian practical reason. In taking up the standpoint
of the general interest, and rationally deliberating on the maxims of
their action, ethical subjects exhibit spontaneity, liberating themselves
from determination by external causes or unexamined inner drives. Because they actpoliticallyon universal maxims, they exhibit autonomy. Bauer extends the idea of autonomy by taking Kantian moral premises as a basis for political and juridical actions and relations. He thus
replaces virtue into the sphere of right, from which Kant had extracted
it; but this shift is occasioned by a new conception of civil society and
its limits, and is not a theoretical regression behind Kant. The idea of
political virtue means that the ends of political (as well as moral) action

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require universalistic sanction and rational justification, based on promoting the conditions for freedom. Personal advantage or welfare may
not override considerations of the general good. Recognizing the ability of all subjects to claim moral and juridical equality, this universality
repudiates inherited distinctions of rank, status, rights, and privileges.51
Wolffs hierarchical world is unacceptable to the new perfectionism. But
the economic interests of modern emancipated individuals must also be
submitted to critique.
Bauer also historicizes autonomy by linking it with perfection as
historical progress. Actions are justified consequentially by their contribution to the good cause of freedom, and to the overcoming of alienation, and they are guided by an understanding of the historical process
as one of alienation and liberation through reason. The cognitivist aspects of the theory are clear in its reflection on history and the dominant
contradictions of the present. The realization of reason requires that the
relations and institutions of the external world conform to subjective intent and insight; perfectionism traces the process whereby this accord is
achieved, and assesses historical obstacles to it.
Bauers non-naturalistic cognitivism does not invoke permanent
anthropological dispositions or traits, but presents a phenomenological progression of consciousness and forms of social life, as animated by
changing conceptions and practices of freedom. According to this view,
human nature is not fixed, but self-producing. It is true that the will always
contains particular and universal dimensions: our immersion in our immediate circumstances, and our ability to abstract from them and to modify them, thereby determining our own ends. But these are mere forms,
whose contents are neither invariant nor arbitrary, but produced under
specific and changing historical conditions. The will in its spontaneity,
its capacity to be self-causing, relates in various ways to this given material. Historically, the experience of the intrinsic duality of the will has
engendered alienation, and diremption, or separation and opposition
of its aspects. Alienation occurs when subjects recognize a universal, but
fail to see it as their own capacity for self-legislation. Instead, they transpose it outside themselves, as if it were a property of a transcendent force
or being; 52 they then experience contradictions resulting from this act
of self-mutilation, and must reconfigure their relationship to themselves
and their world, giving rise to new experiences and new limitations.
As the basis for his ethical program, Bauer develops a comprehensive account of alienation in history, whose religious and political dimensions, while distinct, share common defining attributes. The religious arena is for Bauer one of fetishistic self-abasement, resting on the
(dialectically necessary) positing of a universal outside the self, which

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can now, with the advance of enlightenment, be reclaimed as finite spirits own work, a finite spirit elevated and freed by the very experience
of self-loss. At its origins, the Christian principle, the unity of God and
man, expressed in religious form an essential historical truth: that individuals have a universal dimension, and are not merely mired in particularity. They are capable of rational freedom, transforming themselves
and objective conditions, and becoming agents of progress and general
interest. But religion has now become a merely positive principle in Hegels sense, devoid of the rational justification it once enjoyed, and manipulated by churches and sects seeking to perpetuate themselves and
their privileges.53 Second, Bauer outlines a dialectic of the state and the
modern economy, where narrow economic interests confine personality
and limit political engagement, giving rise to new political despotisms.54
These two forms of alienation have in common what Bauer calls a transcendent universal, or an abstract beyond: an idea of universality, freedom, and irresistible power separated off into a distinct realm, which
corresponds to and confirms the isolation and rigid egoism of empirical
individuals. This alienated relation, for Bauer, is the common root of
religion and of irrational and oppressive state forms. His alternative,
before 1848, is an immanent universality, the idea of a community of republican subjects able to formulate and enact universal interests in their
own lives. Breaking the traditional hierarchical order of estate society,
modernity releases individuals to reconstruct social relations, either by
simply following the bent of private interest or by struggling against irrational institutions, seeking to disseminate justice throughout all spheres
of activity. This new kind of freedom, universal self-consciousness, requires individuals to disavow their immediate interests and identities
wherever these conflict with higher aims. Bauer understands his position
as advocating a comprehensive, non-exclusionary, modern republican
freedom.

The Social Question and Freedom

As a component of universal self-consciousness, post-Kantian perfectionism situates virtue in the sphere of right, transgressing the Kantian
boundaries between the moral and the juridical. Virtue is to be operative
within the political realm, guiding judgments about common interests,
and the ways in which such common interests can be freely pursued.
This transposition is necessary for theoretical reasons, because, following Hegel as his leftist students understand him, political autonomy must

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complement moral subjectivity; the practice of right comes to be suffused with the values of Sittlichkeit or ethical life. Supporting this change
are important historical considerations. It is especially necessary in modern conditions of civil society. In the analysis of these conditions, Hegel
is a guide, but does not offer definitive solutions. If virtue must pervade
the practice of politics, if the good (das Gute) is to direct the right (das
Recht ), this necessity is based, in part at least, on the recognition that the
ways of organizing the pursuit of welfare (das Wohl ) impinge fundamentally on the very possibility of right, and on the forms of its enactment.
The historical relations of modern civil society, and not a fixed human
nature, pose obstacles to the exercise of spontaneity, and to the attainment of freedom and perfection.
The analysis of the social question in the Vormrz reveals two sets of
issues, which require the reconfiguring of Kantian practical reason. The
first problem is exclusion, the denial of the possibility of free external
causality to all. The sphere of right can be illegitimately constricted by
the economic institutions whose ends are individual welfare. This constriction occurs when, as a result of polarization and ensuing poverty in
civil society, individuals are deprived of access to the means of activity in
the objective world, and thus are denied freedom. Kant had foreclosed
the problem by restricting full and active membership in civil society to
those who were economically independent, leaving servants equal with
their employers before the law, but less than fully enfranchised;55 but this
exclusion came to be seen as incompatible with the universalistic claims
of right. Fichte had early recognized the problem, and had based his 1800
Closed Commercial State on this realization.56 For all its problematic surveillance and intrusiveness, Fichtes interventionist state is conceived by
him to promote the conditions of freedom, and not happiness; it is thus
an early example of a post-Kantian perfectionist doctrine. It is intended
to preserve the possibility of free causality and labour for all subjects.
In describing modern civil society (while impugning the Fichtean
state), Hegel had grasped the importance of poverty and exclusion, but
had been unable to envisage a solution to these problems; he did, however, recognize that they vitiated membership in the political community,
without which modernity offered the spectacle of constant diremption
and conflict.57 This becomes a leitmotif of subsequent Hegelian reflection, and of perfectionist theories in particular. When Eduard Gans takes
up the problem of civil society immediately after Hegels death, he does
not misunderstand Hegels normative intentions, but already sees the social question in a much different light. As Norbert Waszek has shown,58
Gans, critically reading Saint-Simon, defends the association of workers
and syndical organization, in order to offset the disparity in bargaining

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power between owners of capital and individual employees. The problem Gans addresses is not poverty as the result of individual misfortune
or malfeasance, but the monopolistic structure of the emergent market
itself. At the same time, Gans stresses the educative and ethical power of
property, seeing the right of inheritance as enjoining upon proprietors a
claim to treat their goods as a trust for future generations, thus mitigating
the idea of absolute dominion. According to Gans, the Saint-Simonian
socialists of his day were fundamentally wrong in wishing to collectivize
property, which is an essential component of modern subjectivity.
Likewise, in the 1840s, Bauers assessment of the social question
leads him to the conclusion that modern poverty, and the existence
of disenfranchised urban workers, pose a fundamental obstacle to the
emergence of a rational political order.
The final, but also admittedly the most difficult task which remains for
the state in this respect [the attainment of a rational political order] is
the freeing of the helots of civil society [brgerlichen Heloten], who must
struggle daily with matter, who must conquer sensuousness for the universal, without becoming truly personally conscious in this struggle of
the universal which they serve.59

The republican response to the social question is to institute a humane

relation between labor and capital. For Bauer it is not property itself
which is illegitimate; here he is closer to Gans, and in fundamental disagreement with Marx.60 It is rather the tendency of property toward monopoly and exclusion that create obstacles to the practice of freedom.
As an anonymous article stemming from Bauers close circle of collaborators asserts in 1845, At first, naturally, labor power can triumph only
in the form of its alienation [Entusserung], as capital.61 Subsequently,
mankind will be able to consider labor and capital as its life-content, as
the basis and manifestation of its life.62 As Bauer himself puts it, all relations are to be infused with justice.63 Property itself is not to be abolished,
but subject to republican regulation.64 The struggle against injustice may
not make a direct appeal to the interests of a particular class, however,
as this would sanction another kind of heteronomy; nor is it possible for
one subject to emancipate another, as freedom cannot be bequeathed,
but is always a spontaneous act. It is, however, necessary to perfect the
framework in which rights claims can be raised and sustained.65 The subjective side of freedom is the moment of individual engagement; the
objective side is the contribution of the act to the historical process of
emancipation.
The second issue arising from the examination of the social ques-

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tion is the critique of particularism, the tendency of property to disfigure the political domain. The danger is that individuals become frozen
in their private spheres of interest, while the universal is arrogated by
the state as a transcendent power, acting in the interests of the ruling
groups. In this account, virtue and commerce are in conflict because
the market promotes heteronomy and the opposition of interests. It inclines subjects to maximize property to the detriment of their political
commitments. This is a repetition of the older republican criticism of
chrematistic, which Bauer attempts to vindicate through his reflections
on the course of the French Revolution and its aftermath. Originating
as an emancipatory struggle against irrational privilege and hierarchy,
the revolution became, after the overthrow of the Jacobins, a vehicle for
rapacity and imperial conquest in the interests of the French bourgeoisie.66 The postrevolutionary world, according to Bauer, is on the verge
of dissolution and diremption into an indeterminate mass society. Individuals in such a world are particularistic in pursuit of their immediate
interest, but indeterminate: they surrender the powers of spontaneity
and autonomy which modernity uniquely makes possible. The tutelary
state appears not only in the guise of Wolffian interventionism, but as a
complement to failures of autonomy in modern civil society.67 Republican perfectionism must vanquish these new forms of heteronomy,68
transposing virtue into the practices of right.
This solution is rendered even more imperative because the interests that comprise modern civil society are not only diverse, but also opposed to each other. Unlike the hierarchically differentiated but harmonious society of Christian Wolff, or the compossibility of external spheres
of activity posited by Kant, Bauer sees civil society as marked by incompatible and conflicting private interests.69 The political problem for him
is not merely to accommodate these interests through compromise and
pragmatic adjustment. Since these positions are still defined heteronomously, they are inadmissible as principles of political action unless they
pass the test of the common good. They must thus be changed before
they can be harmonized, or rather, they must change themselves. This is
what the analysis of the social question reveals.
In his critique of contemporary liberalism, Bauer contends that
emancipation is not the work of mercantile interests; he shares with
the older republicanism the view that these interests are inimical to the
values of citizenship, adducing arguments from heteronomy in support
of his position. While, unlike older Aristotelian republicanisms, he is
not averse to the expansion of the market, he recognizes that economic
processes engender new and profound social dislocations. He contrasts
a virtuous citizenry, or the people as a self-determining political entity, to

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mass society on the grounds that the former has immunized itself from
the dissolving and exclusionary effects of property and private interest,
in order to act decisively and determinately in the general interest.70
The future republican state must assure the extension of relations of
right, reciprocity, and justice throughout all spheres of activity. The practices of right are to reform the institutions of welfare. The condition of
possibility of such a state is a virtuous citizenry, for whom autonomy is a
political as well as moral value.
Lest this appeal to virtue seem vacuous, it should be placed in the
context of the political program which Bauer defended energetically but
unsuccessfully in 1848.71 He advocated the rejection of the monarchical
constitution as a mere concession from the fullness of power, whose arbitrary character remained intact. Instead, the legislature itself should issue a constitution irrevocably on the authority of the people, as an act of
popular sovereignty. The lower house was to seize legislative and political
initiative against the obstreperous representatives of the landed interest
in the upper chamber, and to use its power to develop the home market, and to encourage foreign trade. On the basis of these immediate
gains, it would be possible to extend and consolidate the sphere of right,
with the aim of suffusing all social relations with justice. Political virtue meant the execution of this program with determination and clarity.
These measures were not intended as Wolffian interventions to promote
happiness among the subjects of an enlightened absolutism, but as republican freedom at work: spontaneity and autonomy giving themselves
the conditions for their own exercise. This is the heart of post-Kantian
perfectionism.
On the other hand, lest the concrete measures Bauer proposed
seem to be fairly conventional, and not to require elaborate theoretical
underpinning, it is worth recalling his own demarcation from liberalism.
Besides his arguments from heteronomy, he views liberal constitutionalism, or power-sharing with the king and landed interests, as a theoretically unacceptable compromise between the diametrically opposed principles of monarchical and popular sovereignty, for Bauer the defining
question of 1848.72 Beyond this, however, the political order will remain
imperfect as long as the social question, the exclusion and alienation of
labor, remains unresolved.
Bauers writings after the failure of the Revolutions of 1848 are
highly problematic, and have no place in an account of perfectionist ethics.73 His Vormrz critique, however, is of abiding interest. It traces forms
of domination and heteronomy concealed in contemporary economic
relations, and defends modern republican options, the extension and
promotion of the sphere of right, and the virtues of active citizenship.

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Bauers perfectionism is not a blithe optimism, as Wolffs often is; there

are no metaphysical guarantees of success, and the obstacles to be overcome are formidable. It is rather an invitation and a challenge to expand
the practice and understanding of freedom, under the guiding idea that
nothing is impossible for spirit.74

Notes
Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at the Centre for History and
Economics, Kings College, Cambridge; and at the Faculty of Political and Historical Studies, University of Padua. Thanks are due to the participants in these
sessions, especially Giovanni Fiaschi, Melissa Lane, Gareth Stedman Jones, and
Massimiliano Tomba. The author acknowledges the generous support of the
Canada Council for the Arts (through a Killam Research Fellowship) and of the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
1. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of
Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Raimund Ottow, Markt, Tugend, Republik (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 1996); Fania Oz-Salzberger, Scots, Germans, Republic and Commerce,
in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2:197226.
2. Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004).
3. Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State
in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
4. This is the principal theme of the papers in Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth
and Virtue.
5. On citizenship under the Roman Empire, see J. G. A. Pocock, The
Ideal of Citizenship Since Classical Times, in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald
Beiner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 2952. Compare Hegel, who contrasts Greek solidarity to Roman society as a plurality of separate
points: G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York:
Harper and Row, 1967), 49799. See also G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History,
trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 317. When, in the dying days of the Republic, Cicero reformulates the Stoic distinction between katorthoma and kathekon, he may have in mind the Roman differentiation of active magistrates and
(relative to the Greeks) passive citizens, whose typical virtues are also distinct,
the former being held to a higher standard: Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1913). Cicero has been criticized
for incoherence in holding simultaneously an intersubjective-discursive and a
monological-declarative, or political and judicial, account of citizenship: Cary
Nederman, Rhetoric, Reason, and Republic: Republicanisms Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, in Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed.
James Hankins (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 24959;

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but Ciceros reference is probably to two different audiences, and is not a case
of genuine incoherence. On the more remote Stoic origins of the ethical terms
Cicero employs, see Luca Fonnesu, Dovere (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1998), 813.
6. On this question, see the essays in Hankins, Renaissance Civic Humanism.
7. Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).
8. Hont, Jealousy of Trade. On German receptions, see Norbert Waszek,
The Scottish Enlightenment in Germany, and Its translator, Christian Garve
(174298), in Scotland in Europe, ed. Tom Hubbard and R. D. S. Jack (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 5571; Douglas Moggach, Schiller, Scots, and Germans:
Freedom and Diversity in The Aesthetic Education of Man, Inquiry 51 (2008): 16
36. Oz-Salzberger, Scots, Germans, 197226, offers a contrasting perspective.
9. A representative example is Sydney Hook, From Hegel to Marx: Studies in
the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1962).
10. Friedrich Engels, Deutscher Sozialismus in Versen und Prosa, in Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol. 4 (Berlin: Dietz, 1972), 232. This idea is
central to Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen
Kritik: Gegen Bruno Bauer und Konsorten (Frankfurt am Main: Literarische Anstalt,
1845 / Berlin: Dietz, 1973).
11. Ingrid Pepperle, Junghegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie und Kunsttheorie
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1978); Heinz Pepperle and Ingrid Pepperle, eds., Die
Hegelsche Linke: Dokumente zu Philosophie und Politik im deutschen Vormrz (Frankfurt
am Main: Rderberg, 1986).
12. See, for example, M. C. Massey, Christ Unmasked: The Meaning of the Life
of Jesus in German Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983);
Stephan Walter, Demokratisches Denken zwischen Hegel und Marx: Die politische Philosophie Arnold Ruges (Dsseldorf: Droste, 1995); Warren Breckman, Marx, The
Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Etienne Balibar and Grard
Raulet, eds., Marx dmocrate (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001); Massimiliano Tomba, Crisi e critica in Bruno Bauer (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2002); Arnold
Ruge, Aux origines du couple franco-allemande: Critique du nationalisme et rvolution
dmocratique avant 1848, trans. and ed. Lucien Calvi (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2004); Douglas Moggach, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno
Bauer (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Douglas Moggach, ed., The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
13. Sarah Maza, The Social Imaginary of the French Revolution: The
Third Estate, the National Guard, and the Absent Bourgeoisie, in The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France 17501820, ed. Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 10623.
14. On perfectionism or Vollkommenheit, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of
Practical Reason, trans. L. W. Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 3342; and Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New
York: Harper and Row, 1964), 11011. Paul Frankss illuminating work on post-

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Kantian skepticism suggested to me the possibility that there might be an analogous way of examining perfectionism. See Paul Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2005), 146200.
15. Norbert Waszek, Eduard Gans on Poverty and on the Constitutional
Debate, in Moggach, New Hegelians, 2449.
16. On Gans, see the texts by Myriam Bienenstock and Norbert Waszek in
this volume.
17. On Feuerbach, see Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, 90130; Daniel
Brudney, Marxs Attempt to Leave Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 25108; and David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 183218. See also the text by Todd Gooch in this volume.
18. Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, 27997; Brudney, Marxs Attempt,
299322; Leopold, Young Karl Marx, 21845. Leopold does not sufficiently bring
out the Kantian elements in Marxs 1844 manuscripts: alienation, or the vitiation
of subjects in their vital activities, can be understood as heteronomy, and, implicitly, emancipated labor as autonomy. The result is to obscure the specifically
post-Kantian character of Marxs perfectionism.
19. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ber die sthetik I, in Smtliche Werke, ed.
H. Glockner, vol. 12 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1964), 88, 9091.
20. Leopold, Young Karl Marx, 185. See also Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
21. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 3342; Kant, Groundwork, 11011.
Compare John Rawls, Themes in Kants Moral Philosophy, in Kants Transcendental Deductions, ed. Eckart Frster (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1989), 97. In contrast to Aristotelian and Leibnizian perfectionisms, Benthams
utilitarianism can be conceived as a system of empirical heteronomous principles
designating objects of sensibility and desire as determining grounds for the will
(or at least offering no qualitative grounds for distinction among pleasures).
22. Both these doctrines also include physical development among the
conditions of perfection.
23. On Wolffs political thought, see Emanuel Stipperger, Freiheit und Institution bei Christian Wolff (16791754) (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1984); on his
ethics, J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 43244.
24. Christian Wolff, Institutiones juris naturae et gentium (1754), in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 26, ed. M. Thomann (Hildesheim: Olms, 1969), paragraphs 186
89; Christian Wolff, Principes du droit de la nature et des gens, extrait du grand ouvrage
latin (1758; Caen: Centre de Philosophie Politique et Juridique, 1988), 8889. It
is interesting to note that despite Wolffs high regard for Confucianism, which
he considers as a rationalist ethic, his views on the state of nature and its incumbent difficulties are close to those of a passionate critic of Confucius, Mo Ti (or
Mo Tzu). Active in the fifth century b.c., Mo Ti developed what might be called
a proto-utilitarian perfectionism, arguing against Confuciuss rosy view of the
past that it was a time of discord, because individuals (even within the family, the

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domain sacrosanct to Confucius) could not cooperate effectively in the absence

of state regulation and harmonization of standards. Excerpts from Mo Ti can be
found in E. R. Hughes, ed. and trans., Chinese Philosophy in Classical Times (London: Dent, 1942), 4367, esp. 6566.
25. Wolff, Institutiones, paragraphs 11216; Wolff, Principes, 32, 3639. See
also Christian Wolff, Vernnftige Gedanken von dem gesellschaftlichen Leben der Menschen und insonderheit dem gemeinen Wesen (1721; Frankfurt: Athenum, 1971),
paragraph 224.
26. Wolff, Institutiones, paragraph 972.
27. On the related political-economic theories and practices of cameralism, see Keith Tribe, Governing Economy: The Reformation of German Economic Discourse, 17501840 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
28. See, for example, Stipperger, Freiheit und Institution, 6773; Knud
Haakonssen, German Natural Law, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century
Political Thought, ed. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 27476.
29. On Dalberg, see Robert Leroux, La thorie du despotisme clair chez Karl
Theodor Dalberg (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1932); Karl von Beaulieu-Marconnay, Karl
von Dalberg und seine Zeit: Zur Biographie und Charakteristik des Frsten Primas, 2 vols.
(Weimar: Bhlau, 1879), 1:168200; and Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the
Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 2:3233.
30. Karl T. Dalberg, Von den wahren Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats
in Beziehung auf seine Mitglieder, reproduced in Leroux, Dalberg, 4554.
31. Ibid., 46.
32. Ibid., 47.
33. Immanuel Kant, On the Common Saying: This May Be True in
Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice, in Kants Political Writings, ed. Hans
Reiss (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 74.
34. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
35. A fuller discussion of this issue and its context is provided in my article
Schiller, Scots, and Germans.
36. Thus his familiar assertion that the political problem can be solved
even for a population of intelligent devils: Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, in
Kant, Kants Political Writings, ed. Reiss, 11213.
37. On the imperative to extend the sphere of right, with quasi-perfectionist
implications, see, in Herta Nagl-Docekal and Rudolf Langthaler, eds., RechtGeschichte-Religion: Die Bedeutung Kants fr die Gegenwart (Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
2004): Paul Guyer, Civic Responsibility and the Kantian Social Contract, 2747;
and Luca Fonnesu, Kants praktische Philosophie und die Verwirklichung der
Moral, 4961.
38. Moggach, Bruno Bauer, identifies Bauer as a perfectionist, but does not
develop the specifically post-Kantian dimensions of his thought.
39. Fonnesu, Dovere, 2142.
40. Moggach, Bruno Bauer, 4649.
41. For a critique of readings which stress perfectionist elements in Kant,

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see J. B. Schneewind, Kant and Stoic Ethics, in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, ed. Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 28688.
42. While also non-naturalist, Kants ethics are cognitivist in a different
sense, based not on history as a record of struggles for liberation, but on an indubitable fact of reason, which is timelessly available to imperfectly rational beings.
Fonnesu, Dovere, 3137.
43. Moggach, Bruno Bauer, 1112.
44. See the text by Frederick Beiser in this volume.
45. That such a reference is not entirely anachronistic is evidenced by Bauers views of Jewish emancipation in Prussia, which he construes, highly problematically, as the defense of a particularistic identity. See Douglas Moggach,
Republican Rigorism and Emancipation in Vormrz Germany, in Moggach, New
Hegelians, 11435.
46. See, for example, Bruno Bauer, Der Fall und Untergang der neuesten Revolutionen (Berlin: Verlag von Gustav Hempel, 1850), part II. Der Aufstand und Fall
des deutschen Radikalismus vom Jahre 1842, vol. 1, 107.
47. On die Masse and its problems, see Moggach, Bruno Bauer, 15062.
48. On Strauss, see Bruno Bauer, Rezension: Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und im Kampf mit der modernen
Wissenschaft. von D.F. Strauss. 2 Bde. 18401841, Deutsche Jahrbcher, nos. 21
24 ( January 2528, 1843): 8195; on Feuerbach, see Bruno Bauer, anonymous,
Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs, Wigands Vierteljahrschrift 3 (1845): 86146.
49. Feuerbachs perfectionism also retains markedly pre-Kantian elements.
See Brudney, Marxs Attempt, 25108.
50. Bruno Bauer (anon.), Die Posaune des jngsten Gerichts ber Hegel den
Atheisten und Antichristen: Ein Ultimatum (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1841), 82.
51. See Massimiliano Tomba, Exclusiveness and Political Universalism in
Bruno Bauer, in Moggach, New Hegelians, 91113.
52. For Stirner, in contrast, alienation occurs simply because subjects recognize a universal at all; he does not distinguish genuine and spurious universality.
53. Bauer distinguishes his view from those of Enlightenment critics of religion because he recognizes the historical necessity of alienation, and does not
attribute its causes to contingent factors or deceptions. Moggach, Bruno Bauer,
4851.
54. Bruno Bauer, Theologische Schamlosigkeiten, Deutsche Jahrbcher fr
Wissenschaft und Kunst, nos. 11720 (November 1518, 1841): 46579; (anon.),
Bekenntnisse einer schwachen Seele, Deutsche Jahrbcher, nos. 14849 ( June 23
24, 1842): 58996; Rezension: Die Geschichte des Lebens Jesu von Dr. von Ammon,
in Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publizistik, ed. Arnold Ruge, vol. 2
(Zrich und Winterthur: Verlag des literarischen Comptoirs, 1843), 163.
55. Kant, Theory and Practice, 7479. The status of women remains
problematic in all these accounts.
56. J. G. Fichte, Der geschlossne Handelsstaat, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1/7
(Stuttgart: Frommann, 1988), 37141.
57. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood,

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trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991),

24146.
58. Waszek, Eduard Gans, 3341.
59. Bruno Bauer, Der christliche Staat und unsere Zeit, in Feldzge der
reinen Kritik, ed. H.-M. Sass (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 33 (my translation).
60. For a discussion and references, see Moggach, Bruno Bauer, 16669.
61. (Anon.), Das Wohl der arbeitenden Klassen, Norddeutsche Bltter 9
(March 1845): 59 (my translation).
62. Ibid.
63. Bruno Bauer, Erste Wahlrede von 1848, in Ernst Barnikol, Bruno
Bauer: Studien und Materialien, ed. P. Riemer and H.-M. Sass (Assen: Van Gorcum,
1972), 52629.
64. Bruno Bauer, Geschichte der Politik, Kultur und Aufklrung des achtzehnten
Jahrhunderts (Charlottenburg: Egbert Bauer, 1843), 3:1920.
65. Tomba, Exclusiveness, 11011, stresses the importance of selfemancipation in Bauer, but links this to a pseudo-aristocratic disdain for the unfree. In contrast, I emphasize, as more consistent with Bauers arguments, both
the recognition of the right of spontaneity (i.e., that no one can be forced to be
free) and the struggle to extend the conditions of possibility for freedom.
66. Bauer, Geschichte der Politik, Kultur und Aufklrung, 1:vivii. See also
Bruno Bauer and Edgar Bauer, eds., Denkwrdigkeiten zur Geschichte der neueren Zeit
seit der Franzsischen Revolution (Charlottenburg: Egbert Bauer, 184344).
67. See Norbert Waszek, Lhistoire du droit selon Edouard Gans: Une
critique hglienne de F.C. von Savigny, in Recht zwischen Natur und Geschichte,
ed. Jean-Franois Kervgan and Heinz Mohnhaupt (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), 278.
68. Bauer, Der christliche Staat, 26.
69. (Anon.), Das Wohl der arbeitenden Klassen, 5266.
70. Bauer, Geschichte der Politik, Kultur und Aufklrung, 1:vii.
71. Bauer, Erste Wahlrede von 1848; Bruno Bauer, Verteidigungsrede
vor den Wahlmnnern des Vierten Wahlbezirkes am 22.2. 1849, in Barnikol,
Bruno Bauer, 52531 and 51825.
72. Bauer, Erste Wahlrede von 1848, 525.
73. For a brief discussion of these later views, see Moggach, Bruno Bauer,
18087.
74. Bruno Bauer, Die Fhigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu
werden, in Sass, Feldzge der reinen Kritik, 195.

Part 4

Art and the Modern World

10

The Aesthetics of the

Hegelian School
Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov
Translated from the German by Douglas Moggach

Arnold Ruge and Young

Hegelian Aesthetics
This chapter will recall a tendency in the philosophy of art that has been
largely neglected, or only summarily researched: the aesthetics of the
Young Hegelians.1 The difficulty of depicting the contours of this aesthetic conception may be readily admitted. To speak of Young Hegelian
aesthetics can be misleading if it suggests that we are dealing with a
clearly defined position, set out through careful argumentation in key
texts, and openly acknowledged by a definite group of persons. All this,
however, is not the case.2
Hegels leftist students produced no definitive aesthetic theory, and
extensive monographs are wholly lacking. Rather, they developed and
applied their theories in literary essays and critiques, especially of contemporary literature. Aesthetics is in general not at all central to Young
Hegelian reflections, and those theorists who made an engagement with
art the exclusive or even the predominant object of their work remain in
the minority. Besides, Young Hegelian aesthetic thinkers, like the Young
Hegelians generally, formed less a single cohesive group than several
disparate groupings, representing often very divergent views.3 The membership of particular individuals in any such groupings could remain
merely episodic.
To speak of a Young Hegelian aesthetic is nonetheless justified by
two considerations. First, characteristic of their activities in the criticism
of art is a strong philosophical interest, from which emerge their central
aesthetic categories. Second, despite differences on particular questions,
we can identify shared fundamental convictions and intentions which are
based on this philosophical foundation, and which unite these theorists.
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Their leading publication forums were the Hallische Jahrbcher fr deutsche

Wissenschaft und Kunst (183840) and the Deutsche Jahrbcher fr Wissenschaft und Kunst (184143); these were the central organs of the Young
Hegelian movement. In art practice, it is especially in the literature of
the Vormrz that a corresponding aesthetic concept can be found.
Among the authors who contributed to outlining a Left Hegelian
aesthetic in this sense, Arnold Ruge4 will here assume a central role. The
philosophical-political direction of Young Hegelianism owes to him its
decisive impulses. Enthused by Hegels logic and the principle of dialectical development, he saw early on that the task of philosophy was to
represent the progressive spirit of the times, through which the historic
process was unstoppably accomplished.5 Ruges conviction that philosophy performs practical work in ever new stages in the service of history
is taken paradigmatically by the Young Hegelians as their credo. The tireless Ruge owes his designated place as manager in chief of the Young
Hegelians,6 or, as Heinrich Heine bitingly formulates it, as gatekeeper
of the Hegelian school,7 especially to his function as cofounder and
coeditor of the two extremely influential Jahrbcher.8 Ruge is not usually
considered a philosopher, but a philosophical and political writer. Besides his key position within the leftist movement, though, Ruges work
is of special interest in framing Young Hegelian aesthetics, in that unlike many of his fellow combatants, he dealt with art from a more strictly
philosophical vantage point.
Ruges treatment of aesthetic questions dates back to his time as a
political prisoner in the fortress of Kolberg. Here he translated, among
other texts, Sophocles Oedipus in Colonus 9 and wrote a tragedy of his
own.10 His study of Platos philosophy and of Jean Pauls Primer of Aesthetics formed the basis of a book, Platonic Aesthetics,11 with which he obtained
his Habilitation in Halle, and later of his New Primer of Aesthetics.12 As a
Privatdozent he lectured on aesthetic themes, among other topics. In the
early 1830s he was mainly engaged as a literary and art critic. While these
early works contribute to an idealistic, Hegelian aesthetic, they are of
lesser interest from the point of view of a specifically Left Hegelian version. They can be seen as belonging to the prehistory of a Left Hegelian
understanding of art.
Such an understanding emerged gradually from 1838 onward, during Ruges editorship of the Jahrbcher, where his critical activities also
attained their high point. Among the contributions that Ruge published
in each issue, an 183940 manifesto coauthored with Ernst Theodor
Echtermeyer, Protestantism and Romanticism (Der Protestantismus
und die Romantik),13 holds the central place, as much in the eyes of
contemporaries as in intellectual-historical perspective. For the recon-

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struction of the Left Hegelian aesthetic conception, this manifesto is

thus a document of the greatest importance.

The Basis and Context of Young

Hegelian Aesthetics
Hegels Characterization of Art
From the opening sentences of his Berlin aesthetics lectures, Hegel
makes clear that he holds aesthetics to be scientifically or philosophically
relevant only as it pertains to art.14 He thus differentiates himself both
from Kant, who recognizes the philosophical meaning of the aesthetic
only in the exercise of the aesthetic judgment, and from the Romantics,
who grasp aesthetics as a cosmic principle. Hegel grounds his aesthetics
in art as a product of spirit.15 His basic position is that art depicts not
only something, but something as something: art is the product of human labor, which simultaneously endows reality with meaning. It is a sensuousintuitive, but also consciously constructed, reality (Realitt), with both
cognitive and practical relevance.
Decisive in this respect is that the property of shaping reality
(Wirklichkeit) interpretatively distinguishes art categorically from nature,
but is also no monopoly of art. All cultural objects or formations are for
Hegel modes of human interpretative self-reproduction. The need for
art16 originates in the universal need that makes man a cultural being
the need to produce things a second time, through thinking and forming, in order to be able to appropriate them. In culture, as Hegel puts it,
man transforms the otherness of the merely given into the progressive
consciousness of being-for-him. Human beings accomplish this already
in their earliest individual and collective utterances, and the simplest
tools, cultural practices, and social formations already manifest how
mankind constitutes its own environment.17
Hegel thus distinguishes fundamentally between nature and culture, to which art also belongs. Nonetheless, a specific feature or art can
be identified: Hegel describes art as a form of human self-reflection
which serves no immediately practical purpose. Art gives a representation of representation (Vorstellung der Vorstellung).18 For this reason, in
Hegels system, art is neither a part of subjective spirit, through which it
first acquires consciousness of its freedom, nor of objective spirit, which
seeks to realize itself practically in the world of right and ethical life. Art
is instead a component of absolute spirit,19 together with religion and

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philosophy, but different from these other ways of self-understanding,

because it depicts [darstellt] what is higher in a sensuous manner, bringing it closer to receptive nature [der empfindenden Natur].20 The function
of art is thus the development of a sensuously graspable interpretation
of the world.
Altogether characteristic of Hegels aesthetic conception is that he
historicizes this vocation of art. In order to assume the same function of
self-ascertainment in historically diverse cultures, art itself must change.
As a phenomenon of absolute spirit, art for Hegel has its own history,
not identical with that of the other cultural formations. It is thus a phenomenon sui generis. It would be wrong to understand this primarily or
exclusively as an autonomous aesthetic context. Hegel rather grasps
art as a phenomenon which intersects in complex ways with the broader
cultural formations. Art is sensuous (anschauliche) reflection, but is not
primarily the reflection of the individual aesthetic subject. It is, rather,
reflection as a function of a culture, within which individuals understand
themselves.21 The work of art is thus for Hegel not essentially the product of an individual, a genius, but rather of a cultural community, which
reflects itself in the work and attains in it a common intuitable point of
identification.22 It is the result of social action, and at the same time, as
sensuous world construction, the thematizing of action in a culture. The
concept of the artwork therefore stands at the center of the Hegelian
aesthetic.23 The historical meaning of art is first clarified when its function in the various historical epochs and culturesin principle, all of
themcan be surveyed.
Hegel derives his conception of modernity from this historicizing
consideration of art. Under conditions of modern reflective relations to
the world, the ancient ideal of beauty is an aesthetic option of only limited
importance.24 Moreover, art no longer provides modern individuals with
a comprehensive worldview, as once afforded by the aesthetic religion
and mythology of the Greeks. Modern art is disenchanted; moderns
assume a reflective relation to the forms and contents of art. Nonetheless, even in modern conditions, art still retains its function of expressing the highest demands of spirit and bringing them to consciousness.25
Only now, art is just one means among others of human self-expression.
Essential Features of Hegelian Aesthetics
Hegels Aesthetics Outlines

Hegel gave his aesthetics lectures four times in Berlin between 182021
and 182829, without preparing a publishable version prior to his death
in 1831. It was his student Heinrich Gustav Hotho to whom, among other

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friends of the deceased, the task of editing the lecture manuscripts for
publication was conferred. In 1835 the first volume of the Aesthetics appeared, followed by two subsequent volumes in 1837 and 1838, and a
slightly revised second edition in 184243.26 These lectures, and especially the published version, were highly influential. Their effects were
not confined to the field of philosophy. They also gave rise to largely
empirical studies in art history.
This tendency toward empirical treatment was not limited to approaches to art, but penetrated many fields of knowledge, as almost all
Hegelians sought answers to the new questions of the day in this impetus
toward the phenomenal world. Hegels philosophy had to be shown to
be compatible with the constant progress occurring in the individual sciences. Two features especially promoted the adoption of this philosophy
in the empirical sciences of art: the fact that Hegel in his Aesthetics illustrated his philosophical theses with concrete examples of works drawn
from different epochs and cultures in world history; and his philosophical
grounding of the interpretation of art as itself a historical phenomenon.
In the perspective of the Hegelians, Hegel thereby laid the basis for
art history as a methodologically independent field of historical science.
It is still customary today to designate Hegel the father of art history.27
Hotho himself was not only active as the editor of the Hegelian
Aesthetics but also as one of the first academic representatives of the discipline of art history.28 Both research fields, the philosophical and the empirical, were at first still closely connected. The purely empirical attitude
of the mere art connoisseur was despised by the Hegelians. Their own
methodological principle was to integrate empirical analyses in a speculative philosophical framework. Paradigmatic is Hothos conception of a
speculative art history, which he understood as an empirical extension
of the philosophy of art, and at the same time as a philosophical embedding of art history.29
Equally characteristic with this combination of philosophy and empirical research in relation to art is Hothos attempt not only to write
about art for an informed publicwhich scarcely yet existedbut
also to be active as a poet. Hothos ambition was to influence public
life through broad artistic, critical activities. The aim was less to publish specialized technical studies than to contribute to educating the
aesthetic consciousness of the population.30 Despite differences in content among Hegels successors, Ruges engagement with art has a similar
profile. Besides his scientific treatment of art, Ruge was also active as an
author and translator of literary classics, as well as an art critic.31
In all these fields, philosophical reflection proper, art history, and
art criticism, a series of characteristic traits crystallizes, besides the stron-

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ger empirical orientation given to the Hegelian approach. These remain

altogether typical for the Hegelian understanding of art. Appealing to
Hegel, the Hegelians claimed to detect a teleological development in
art. They adopted Hegels aim of embracing the art of all times and all
peoples in philosophical reflection, and understood the individual artwork in principle as part of a universal history, a world history of art. Hegel had shown the artwork to be a basis of human culture; the Hegelians
grasped art as a part of cultural history. They analyzed the artwork in its
relations with other fields of culture and civilization: the religious, ethical, juridical, political, even geographical.
Most typical among all the Hegelians who were interested in art,
however, is the transformation of the so-called thesis of the end of art.
This notorious thesis, against which protests were immediately raised,
proved to be perhaps the most serious obstacle to the cultural and
political acceptance of the Hegelian aesthetic. It is thus no wonder that it
was drastically weakened in the hands of the Hegelians. It was either explicitly or implicitly turned into the thesis of the never-to-be-concluded
future of art. The Hegelians were convinced that Hegel had attained a
knowledge of the true essence of art, whose meaning for the present and
the future had to be preserved as central. These dreams of the Vormrz
collapsed with the failure of the Revolution of 1848.32
The Hegelians project of transforming the thesis of the end of
art into that of the future of art finds perhaps its clearest manifestation
in their more intensive application to the unclassical aspects of the aesthetic: the picturesque, the everyday, the ordinary, the ugly, and so on.
The Romantics had already brought these aspects into consideration,
but now they became essential material for any aesthetic that wanted
to claim arts undiminished relevance for a present that was evidently
not beautiful. Hegel had criticized Romanticism and its break with the
ideal of beauty. His critique was directed not against the aesthetic thematization of the not-beautiful as such, but rather against the Romantic
attitude of treating the not-beautiful as merely the gesture of the ironic
subject. With this denial of connectedness, Hegel claimed that art lost
its function of expressing the historical self-comprehension of a culture.
For Hegel it was without question true that in modernity, with the dissolution of the Greek world of the gods, and with the God-become-man
of Christianity, the not-beautiful also belonged essentially among these
collective forms of expression.
This was the nodal point of the Hegelians critique of Romantic subjectivism. At the same time, they deepened the inclusion that Hegel had
begun of not-beautiful elements in aesthetic reflection, pursuing these
into their remotest facets. Where they differ is that unlike Hegel, they

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do not accept the not-beautiful as independent manifestations of the

aesthetic. They seek rather to transcend (aufzuheben) the not-beautiful,
integrating it through dialectical constructions, especially through the
category of the comic, into the system of beauty.33
Differently than for Hegel himself, at the focus of the aesthetic reflections of the Hegelians, unable to accept the confinement of art to
the past, is the striving for a theoretical synthesis of realism and idealism:
Ruge and Echtermeyer speak in 1839 of a real idealism,34 in 1858 Max
Schasler proposes quite similarly the synthesis in a realistic idealism,35
before 1848, Friedrich Theodor Vischer creates an idealistic realism,36
Anton Springer a humorist idealism,37 and Moriz Carriere a personifying ideal acculturation.38 Many other examples could be given.39
Old and Young Hegelian Understandings of Art

Hegel had described art as the unity of aesthetic experience and historical culture. Both in the application of the philosophical concept of
art to art history and criticism, and in philosophical reflection itself, further developments isolated and absolutized certain aspects of the concept of art, like form, content, expression, history, and culture. We can
distinguish two lines of argumentation that transform Hegels concept
of art, splitting it into a polar opposition.
On the one hand, subjectivity is taken as the starting point of reflection on art. From this perspective, art is interpreted through the specific effects which flow from its formal appearance, independent of any
possible conceptually identifiable content. This approach privileges aesthetic experience and the psychology of the subject in producing or experiencing art; the analysis is of such a subjects aesthetic consciousness.
Art is thus nothing other than an objective correlate of this aesthetic
consciousness. On the other hand, history is taken as the starting point of
aesthetic reflection. From this perspective, one considers art the bearer
of contents, focusing on the material art object and its properties or
social conditions. Art is thus whatever is recognized as art by the institutions of the art world. Hegelian authors come to stress either the subjective, or the historical and objective, side.
This split affects the Hegelian movement itself. Against the common background of extended empirical and historical knowledge, a
cultural-historical understanding of art derived from Hegel, and the
weakening of the thesis of the end of art, the Hegelians develop distinct,
indeed opposed, views of art, and divide into two camps, even if vaguely
defined.
The Hegelians who initiate this discussion immediately after Hegels
death place the experience of the aesthetic subject at the center of their

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attention. This is especially clear with Hotho,40 who from the side of both
production and reception thematizes the subjective capacity as such, and
no longer, with Hegel, the rational structure of artistic accomplishment.
In Hothos explications of aesthetic subjectivity there emerge characteristic distinctions from the analyses of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, who stress
its rational character. Hothos own position, connecting aesthetic subjectivity ultimately to unrationalizable feeling, approaches the Romantic
tradition. At the level of production, Hotho takes the concept of fantasy to be fundamental, reducing the cultural-historical embeddedness
of art to the achievement of the creative subject: the genius as a great
individual. At the level of reception, in place of the cultural community
as addressee of the artwork, there appears the individual enjoying and
immersed in art, together with his modes of perception.41
This tendency toward subjectifying and psychologizing art is linked,
by this line of Hegels succession, with a continuing interest in the completion of the systematics of aesthetics. In order to grasp adequately the
whole development of art in its logical construction, supposedly in Hegels sense, his theory of art forms, which distinguished only three basic
phases, was subject to refinement and further differentiation. Hotho is
especially relevant here, as are Karl Rosenkranz and Friedrich Theodor
Vischer, who temporarily at least were close to the Young Hegelians. In
his aesthetics lectures, Hegel tries to make plausible in the historical development of art an immanent systematic, which he had established elsewhere, in the Encyclopedia. But the lectures remain in this respect an experimental field, in which Hegel reaches no definitive conclusions.42
In contrast, Hotho claims to close the gaps in the system of aesthetics with a Platonic-metaphysical speculative art history as the unity of
art, history (Historie), and philosophy. Philosophy is to provide an irrefragable criterion for the assessment of historical phenomena, to permit
judgments of art which follow stringently from philosophical systematics. Once the goal of art-historical development and of aesthetic knowledge is reached, the cultural-historical (geistesgeschichtliche ) meaning of
the past is revealed.43 Hotho links this completion of the philosophical
systematic with the tacit aim of correcting Hegels philosophical views of
art, adapting them to the changed conditions of scientific and artistic
discussion.
Hotho not only transposes these changed accents into publications
appearing in his own name but, as editor of Hegels aesthetic lectures,
also modifies his teachers material in the direction of this new understanding of art. The discovery of student manuscripts of Hegels lectures
has subsequently proven this.44 These transformations led to various
inconsistencies in the edited Hegelian Aesthetics, which have been remarked ever since.

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An example is Hegels thesis of the end of art, which Hotho as a

devoted student could not simply ignore, but which he tries to make acceptable by weakening its force.45 Hegels historical-philosophical thesis
is rendered as a melancholy settling of accounts by the aesthetic subject
with the prosaic conditions of the present. In this situation hostile to art,
one must not be disheartened. Hegelian absolute knowledge not only
opens the meaning of art history, but on its basis a future new era of artistic flourishing can be prefabricated theoretically in subjective inwardness. Not only in this prospect does Hothos understanding of art differ
radically from his teachers. Art is no longer for Hotho, as it is for Hegel,
merely one means of human self-exposition besides others. It becomes
the central focus of human existence. Thereby the function that Hegel
attributes to art as the self-reflection not simply of an individual, but of
an individual in a historical culture, disappears from view. An autonomous art world now stands opposed to the externality of the social and
political world. Its practical function is limited to the cultivation of the
individual and the transfiguration of an inadequate reality, in the sense
of an idealized reconciliation with it. Rdiger Bubner will characterize
this attitude as the aesthetization of the lifeworld.46
Opposed to this, it is a trait of the Left Hegelian understanding of
art that all questions of systematic construction and abstract categories
are radically repudiated. Only Ruge in his New Primer of Aesthetics reflects
on problems of aesthetic systematizing, but this work of 1837 appears in
a phase when debates had barely begun about David Friedrich Strausss
theses on the nature of Christ, which ultimately led to the split in the
Hegelian school. The specific character of this line of Hegel succession
is not to be found in the systematic field, but in the consideration of art
as part of a philosophy of the deed (August von Cieszkowski). The approach is fundamentally antimetaphysical, and is marked by the determination to draw out the social and political consequences of Hegels
philosophy, and to realize them.
For the Left Hegelians, Hegel is the philosopher of freedom. (This
characterization is pertinent but of course a generalization. So it should
be noted that for Eduard Gansa [liberal] Right Hegelianit fits as
well.) They give an antimetaphysical reading of Hegels concept of freedom, according to which spirit objectifies itself in history and recognizes
itself in this objectification. The idea is the truth in the here-and-now,
the immanent God, who reveals himself as self-consciousness.47 They see
in Hegel the philosopher who solved the problem, virulent since Kant,
of the relation of idea and reality, because he seeks reason not outside of
reality, but rather in it, in history. For Hegel, history, as made by human
beings, has close affinity with the Idea. History is not alien to spirit, is not
mere fate, but can and must be recognized in its necessity. Its meaning

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is revealed, as Hegel explains in his introduction to The Lectures on the

Philosophy of History, when it is grasped as progress in the consciousness
of freedom. So for the Young Hegelians progress and freedom become
central concepts, which are deployed in the first number of the Hallische
Jahrbcher (1838) as the basis for a comprehensive analysis of the existing
state. Just as in the scientific realm the question is the further development of rationalism, so in the realm of the state the issue is to promote
the assertion and exercise of the rights of freedom.
Especially characteristic of the Young Hegelian attitude are features
that emerge in the second number of the Jahrbcher (1839), the turn of
the progressive toward the practical, which now takes on a tendentious,
agitating aspect and becomes pronouncedly partisan. It is now a question of making philosophical knowledge fruitful for the shaping of life:
not only recognizing freedom in its historical necessity, but affirming it
in practical existence. Hegels philosophy comes to be interpreted as a
guide to action. Instead of seeking, like Hotho and the Old Hegelians, to
document the thought of a subject and to promote literary elegance, the
Young Hegelians preferred slogans and sharp contrasts, and placed their
own literary activity in the service of a general social or political ideal, be
it humanism, true socialism, a gradually emerging communism, or, for
Ruge, democratic activism.48
This impulse also becomes evident in respect to art. While the Old
Hegelians tend to subjectify and psychologize absolute spirit, the Young
Hegelians tend to historicize it radically. Thus even where their considerations touch on the meaning and value of art, they attribute no great
significance to Hegels aesthetics in its narrower sense. They draw primarily upon his philosophy of history. The Left Hegelian understanding
of art entails not a metaphysically based reflection on systematic questions, but the adoption of another methodological principle of Hegelian
philosophy: the thought that categories must be developed and understood historically if their potential for the attainment of freedom is to
be stressed.
Hegel had identified art with religion and philosophy as ways of
self-reflection. This is achieved in art when shapes are developed that
express human self-understanding in aesthetic form within a historical
culture, and that make this understanding accessible to perception (der
anschauenden Reflexion). The ideal is thus for Hegel not what Hotho formulates Platonically in his edition of the Aesthetics, the sensuous appearance of the Idea. Rather, student testimonies to Hegels aesthetics
lectures define the ideal as presence (Dasein), existence (Existenz), or
animation (Lebendigkeit) of the Idea.49 Hegel thereby characterizes art
as related to historical facticity, as developing suggestions that reveal its
meaning, but, being a reflection on reflection, as simultaneously cat-

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egorically distinct from it. Art indeed relates to history, and is objectified
in works; but as a phenomenon of absolute spirit, art is no purely historical, material phenomenon. For Hegel, historical facticity and artistic
constitution of meaning stand in constant reciprocal interaction.
With varying degrees of radicalism, the Young Hegelians turn another Hegelian thesis on art, that spirit can recognize itself only in its objectifications, into the primacy of historical facticity as Wirklichkeit. Ruge
sets art not only in relation to the becoming of the absolute in time;50
he also describes the immanent law of art as spirit in the world, which
can so little abstract from sensuousness that it can only come to appearance and be effective in the world of the senses.51 Art for Ruge has moreover the task of imitating (abzubilden) reality. Only reluctantly is the right
of the artist conceded to draw arbitrarily. He should rather renounce
his right to construct freely, but rather imitate [abbilden].52 Art has no
content in itself, but receives its content from the historical reality which
it imitates. The functions and developmental regularities of art are not,
in contrast to the Old Hegelians, isolated, elevated into an autonomous
aesthetic region, but partake of the one historical reality.
This imitative character of art does not mean a reduction to a mere
doubling of the given. Rather, imitation here implies opening up for
progress in the consciousness of freedom the meaning hidden in the
daily intercourse with things: The artist does not just reproduce what he
sees; and seeing is constructing and composing. Seeing rightly and penetrating the object is the most essential act in the creation of the second
world that the poet forms.53 Corresponding to this pragmatic tendency,
the Young Hegelians maintain the conviction that knowledge gained in
art must not simply remain confined to it. Art becomes a function of a
social utopia. Art not only imitates reality but works upon it, considering
reality from the viewpoint of freedom and evolving models which must
themselves become reality to satisfy the postulates of freedom. Art in this
conception is philosophically a testament to human freedom, but also
a motor of its practical attainment. The declared aim is to have practical effect on our people, and through literary creations to prepare the
greater creation of a free and happy era.54 Like the philosopher, the
artist must become the apostle of the future.55 Hegels action-theoretic
approach to aesthetics, which understands art as the work and as the
orientation point of a historical community, is recast in an activist mold.
Thus Ruge and his collaborators anticipate the definitive reconciliation
of men with their surrounding reality to occur in concrete history, particularly in the free state. Art, like philosophy, becomes the handmaiden
of history; through the propagation of concrete contents, it supports a
rational state, one promoting enlightenment and humanity.
For this reason, too, the Left Hegelians cannot allow Hegels thesis

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of the end of art to stand for the present age.56 Even in the (German)
present, the classical spirit of Greek art-religion can and must penetrate popular customs, which until now have been lacking in it.57 Here
Old and Young Hegelians agree that art in modernity is just as satisfactory
a form of self-reflection as science; hence the subtitle of both the central
organs of the Hegelian Left, Hallische and Deutsche Jahrbcher, journals
for science and art. Also shared with the Old Hegelians is the culturalcritical interpretation of the Hegelian thesis, understood as a diagnosis
of contemporary alienation. From this diagnosis, however, wholly different consequences flow: for the Left, it is not enough to render the
prose of daily life more bearable by transfiguring it in an autonomous
world of art and in inwardness; rather, art and science have a functional
relation to the mastery of the social and political problems of the day.
Art, however, does not derive its power of conviction and its practical potential from itself, but from correct political consciousness.
Thus Ruge praises Vormrz literature for making the opposition into
poetry.58 It becomes a common creed of the Hegelian Left that such
a correct consciousness is appropriate to artists, and should speak from
their works. They consider art a political instrument, indeed as a weapon.
Those who, like Rosenkranz, did not accept this Jahrbcher dogma were
soon ejected from the circle of collaborators.
It would be wrong, though, to conclude from the political progressivism of the Young Hegelians that they were unconditional proponents
of an aesthetic modernism. Their reversal of the thesis of the end of art
led them, like the Old Hegelians, to retain the classical ideal of art, which
remains valid as a criterion despite all concessions to the demands of the
time.59 Not only the content, humanity, was maintained in the classical
ideal, but also the form. The Young Hegelians applied this concept of
art, derived especially from Goethe and Schiller in literature, to activist
tendencies in political matters. This combination led to a dualism of
criteria,60 a separation of form and content in judgments. Works such as
agitational poems, which would have to be rejected on aesthetic grounds
because of their unclassical principles of composition, could still be defended because of their political partisanship for the cause of freedom.
For all his sympathy with their politically progressive content, Ruge offers a criticism of Georg Herweghs poems in formal perspective.61 In any
event, Herwegh is not himself to blame for this defect. A harmonious
art, perfected in form and content, is only possible, according to Ruge,
under conditions of fully emancipated social life.62
The chief concern of the Left Hegelian understanding of art is
thus less a philosophical than a strategic issue: What was sought was an
aesthetic theory compatible with the political goal of humanistic eman-

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cipation.63 Among the criteria of judgment, consequent political partisanship generally trumped artistic form. In a word, political freedom,
whole and undiminished, is the religion and poetry of our times.64
The Critique of Romanticism as the Paradigm of Young
Hegelian Aesthetics

However disparate Young Hegelian descriptions of art may appear, their

convictions and goals were formulated mostly ex negativo, in conflict with
one common enemy: Romanticism. In Echtermeyer and Ruges manifesto
Protestantism and Romanticism (Der Protestantismus und die Romantik, 183940), the Left Hegelians find their way to a principled position
in art theory. This essay reflects more clearly than any other the spirit
of the Jahrbcher and its editors. The goal of the manifesto is not arttheoretical but unambiguously political. As the subtitle shows, it intends
to come to an understanding of the times and their contradictions. The
art-theoretical consequences follow from political engagements.
Romanticism, understood not as the designation of a period, but as
an artistic and political tendency, stands in the estimation of the Hallische
Jahrbcher circles as the most important obstacle to historical progress.
The Left Hegelians form their concept from the conservative, Catholic
political Romanticism of the Restoration era.65 The manifesto seeks a
final reckoning with this tendency, severing all its nerves in public opinion,66 hunting down Romanticism everywhere, in literature, theology,
poetry.67 The material for the essay was largely provided by Echtermeyer,
while Ruge supplied most of the formulations.68
The authors of the manifesto summon the authority of Hegel for
the critique of Romanticism. Hegel had in fact expressed himself critically about the Romantics. Recourse to Hegel is for Ruge and Echtermeyer the occasion for drawing consequences far beyond Hegels own.69
With persistent irony they attack the genius as great individual, or
worldless, lyrical interiority, or insubstantial, bad, unreconciled subjectivity, aspects which Hegel too had emphasized in his own critique of
Romanticism and its protagonists.70 The manifestos polemics are much
sharper and more one-sided than Hegels utterances. Its pamphleteering character leaves no room for discerning analyses or finely weighed
judgements. The authors deliberately paint in black and white.
Romanticism is portrayed here as the essence of the conservative,
Catholic reaction. To this enemy is opposedagain appealing to Hegeltrue Protestantism as synonymous with the spirit of freedom, rationalism, enlightenment, and progress. Romanticism is decked with a
string of epithets: Catholic, medieval, feudal, pietistic, unfree, irrational,
obscurantist, fantastic, frivolous, hypocritical, deceptive, false, and so

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on.71 The most important catchwords are the denunciation of subjectivism and arbitrariness.72 The manifesto has been described as a grandiose document of partiality, arising from concern about the loss of a position of spiritual freedom acquired after centuries of difficult struggle,
whose effects on political reality could be calibrated according to a law
of causality, in Echtermeyers and Ruges view.73
The originator of the Romantic disease (Ungeistes) is rapidly identified in the manifesto. While diverse authors had performed unholy preliminary work for Romantic ideology, it is Schellings philosophy that
above all develops the principle of Romanticism.74 Here the manifesto
takes aim not at Schellings late positions, which he presents in Berlin
in the 1840s as a philosophy of revelation, but rather at his early System
of Transcendental Idealism (1800). This principle consists in Schellings
aestheticizing of thought, which is characteristic of his transcendental
idealism. The manifesto explains that at the center of Schellings system
stands perceiving spirit (anschauende Geist), not spirit becoming conscious
of itself. The absolute unity of knowledge with its object, the principle
and ground of all philosophy, cannot for Schelling be attained through
genuinely philosophical means. It is rather a matter of intuition, more
specifically of intellectual intuition. Art now assumes a central place in
Schellings system, as intellectual intuition made objective. In Ruge and
Echtermeyers account, this focusing on intuition is disastrous, because
it replaces reason with subjective arbitrariness. It is this defective subjectivity which reflects itself in aesthetics, instead of reason realizing itself in
historical actuality.75 The authors of the manifesto reproach Schellings
deviation from the path of enlightenment, and his barely concealed hostility to spirit which typifies the Romantic conception in general. The focus on intuition leads to an inappropriate underdetermination of spirit,
which underwrites a reactionary conception of history.76
The linkage of pragmatic tendencies, progressive political views, and
classical artistic ideals is also programmatic in Ruge and Echtermeyers
manifesto. They here apply their classically inspired artistic ideal exclusively against Romanticism and its regressive political consequences: the
alliance of the Romantics with the political Restoration. The Weimar classics are ranged on the opposing side, that of progress and enlightenment.
The manifesto proposes the ideal of synthesizing the principles of Schiller and Goethe: freedom, history, willing and doing, on the one hand;
culture and morality (Sitte), nature, and immediate subjective being on
the other, striving to combine Schillers subjective idealism and Goethes
ideal subjectivity into the objectivity of a real idealism as midpoint.77
In contrast to this ideal, Echtermeyer and Ruge disapprove of Jean
Pauls world-despising irony in the most extreme subjective idealism.

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In his humor, nothing remains but the self and its enjoyment, the I, in
whose inner world the objective world must shatter.78 Whereas Hegel
had explained Romantic irony as a misunderstanding of the Fichtean
structure of the reflexive self, the authors of the manifesto go further.
They detach irony from any philosophical or poetological interest and
stylize it as pure arbitrary will, a private, immediate subjectivism.79 In
irony persiflage80 is elevated to a principle. The lascivious Friedrich
Schlegel fares even worse than Jean Paul. His Lucinde succeeds in proving that Romanticism is nothing else than the inverted world.81
The effects sink even deeper: The final completion of Friedrich Schlegel . . . , the incarnate spirit of Lucinde, the palpable personification of ironic
genius82 appears to the authors in Friedrich von Gentz.83 His dandyish
self-understanding is the concrete embodiment of Schlegels ironic subject. Where the pure aesthetic comes to be the center of life-activity,
momentary pleasure becomes the ultimate value, and ethical principles
hopelessly break down.84
As the manifesto does not come up with other significant appraisals
of Romantic theory and its artistic practice, we can dispense with further
consideration of this polemic. It would be superfluous to reproach the
authors of the manifesto for misunderstanding the achievements of the
Romantics. The historical assessment of Romanticism has fundamentally
changed since their time, but the manifesto did contribute importantly
to the left image of Romanticism from Marx to Lukacs, the theories
of socialist realism, and the prevailing conception of Romanticism in
the nineteenth century.85 It would be equally superfluous to dwell on
the complete failure of the manifesto to bring about its intended socialpolitical effects.86 In 1843 the victory of conservatism led to the banning
of the Jahrbcher and to Ruges emigration.
What matters from the aesthetic point of view is rather the paradigmatic attempt to enlist art in the service of a political cause, the cause
of progress. If Ruge and Echtermeyer denounce the Romantics for remaining stuck in the realm of fixed ideas,87 this reproach can easily be
turned against the authors of the manifesto themselves: What they call
romantic is bitterly indicted by the critics of non-art, who are tormented
by the fixed idea that poets must improve the world, and must do so according to the prescriptions of those who know what the best of all possible worlds would look like.88 On this point, though holding diametrically opposed political ideals, the Left Hegelians are in agreement with
the Romantics, at least the more fanatical among them. In both cases, art
is instrumentalized in pursuit of extra-artistic ideological ends.
Criticism of the Romantics by Ruge and Echtermeyer is linked in
various ways with the polemics conducted by representatives of so-called

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Young Germany, especially Heinrich Heine in The Romantic School (1836).

But the main reference of their criticism remains Hegel himself. The
Young Hegelians even consider the Young German movement itself to
be essentially a modification of Romanticism: in both artistic practice
and theory, the Hallische Jahrbcher circles criticize Young Germany for
its merely subjective and arbitrary methods.89 Central to this debate
is the transition from an aesthetic-literary to an ideological-political
movement,90 drawing on Hegel. But in their effects in democratizing
literature and popular life, the Young Hegelians achieved much less
than Young Germany for the creation of a public sphere. The Hallische
Jahrbcher indeed adopt this tendency, but their determination to produce a scientific critique runs counter to it, assuming among its readership a broad philosophical knowledge, and eschewing a more popular
style. In short, its audience was an educated elite. The literature critique
of the Hegelian Left detached itself from the literary public, while politicizing literature and insisting more strongly than the radicals of the
1830s on the transition from a literary to a political public.91
Similarly disparate was the attitude of the Old Hegelians toward
Romanticism. Subjecting the Romantics to radical critique, they themselves adopted essential Romantic traits.92 Thus, for example, Hotho is
not far removed from Romantic ways of thinking and feeling when he asserts that it is possible from poetic dicta to bind and to loose the firmest
relations of ethical life, and in this happy play of self-conscious genius
to mold ones life as an artwork, the artwork as the highest life.93 His
works are a mass of contradictory positions: the Romantic apotheosis
of art and a melancholy relativizing of its meaning, aesthetic openness
and systematic rigorism, sensuous intuition and speculation, the thought
of progress and a nostalgic transfiguration of the past. Conspicuously,
under his pen an elegance of style or a late Romantic enthusiasm is
substituted for the objectivity of Hegels lectures on art. This secured for
Hothos publications, even for his edition of Hegels Aestheticsat least
tendentiallythat popular appeal that the Left Hegelians demanded,
but did not attain. To this extent Ruge and Echtermeyers verdict on the
Hegelites is thoroughly justified:
The Old Hegelians or Hegelites bore themselves theoretically in a
harmless fashion, but through their polishing up [Zurechtmacherei] of
Goethe and Shakespeare and of the unfree empirical conditions, and
through their absolute orthodoxy toward Hegels authority, revealed
themselves as Hegelians with a Romantic pigtail, and suffered . . . a fall
from the heaven of philosophy into the most confused traditions of
Romantic dogma.94

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Perspectives for a Hegel-Inspired Aesthetic

It is too easy to criticize Left Hegelian reflections on the social meaning of art against the background of the aporias of Marxist aesthetics or
the doctrine of socialist realism. The actuality and the limits of this approach, like that of the Old Hegelians, are today manifest in an entirely
different field, in the challenge of a universalized aesthetic, especially
the triumph of the new media.
The central aspect which, for all the specific differences, binds the
Old and the Young Hegelians with the Romantics, and distinguishes
them from Hegel, is the revision of the thesis of the end of art. In his
essay Dante in Relation to Philosophy (ber Dante in philosophischer Beziehung,
1803), Schelling describes the Divine Comedy as a new epic for modernity. Already in Jena, adducing arguments about differences between
historical periods, Hegel had rejected Schellings conceptual groundwork for a new epic.95 For Hegel, with the Enlightenment demand for a
mature use of reason, the function of art in grounding historical action
comes irrevocably to an end. Like Friedrich Schiller, Hegel thereby acknowledges the modern need for reason as a condition which could
only be reversed at the cost of falling back into immaturity, and instituting totalitarian relations. Hence, in the present, artwork and work of
state cannot, ought not, to be identical: Art is therefore bound to particular times; not a government or an individual can awaken a golden
period of art, but only the entire world condition.96
The common aim of the Hegelians is to supersede this notorious
thesis of their teacher. Considered more closely, the result of these efforts is not to perpetuate art, but to dissolve it. The adaptations of Hegelian aesthetics by Hegelians of left and right coloration reveal the same
tendency: either from a subjectivist or historical perspective, they develop aesthetic concepts that enrich the concept of art with empirical
knowledge, or through psychological or political-historical application,
but they hollow out its philosophical content. For the focus of these debates is no longer the question of art, but of its subjective presuppositions and reflexes, or of its social framework and functions. In place of a
philosophy of art, as Hegel had called for, there appears with the Hegelians a philosophy of the beautiful.97
Hereby the aesthetic designs of the Hegelians figure in the prehistory of tendencies at work today, when the aesthetic is considered
(again) as a more fundamental principle than art. Above all, the concept
of the image is validated against Hegels identification of art with the
aesthetic. His definition of art as an aesthetic and cultural phenomenon
sui generis is to be transcended by the integration of art into the world

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of images with which people live. Here reemerges the tendency to anthropologize and psychologize the aesthetic, as in Hotho. The same is
true for the Left Hegelian instrumentalization of the beautiful for extraaesthetic ends, which can now be analyzed from the perspective of ideology critique and cultural history.98
The rejection of a concept of art often manifested in the art
world, one that is alien from life and monopolistically determined, is
readily understandable. But we must ask whether freeing the direction
of aesthetic reflection from art can really perform the explanatory function which is claimed for it. When the sciences of the image assert that
the empirical fact of a growing number of images means that these images thereby become a medium of reflection, they are advancing a highly
questionable proposition.
Hegels thesis implies rather that without a concept of art, one
can express nothing about the meaning of images for human selfunderstanding. So Hegel develops the concept of art as the fundamental aesthetic concept. This does not at all mean that aesthetic reflection
must restrict itself to art. It does mean that aesthetic reflection must
begin with art. Thus, for Hegel nature appears beautiful because man
projects into nature the artistic experience of an aesthetic made by man
for man. This projection is the presupposition for mans recognizing
himself in nature and experiencing it as for him.99
For the question of the relation of art to the everyday aesthetic,
what is decisive is that for Hegel, the key aesthetic function of art does
not lie in a traditionalistic concept of art as metaphysically grounded
hierarchy. Its key function consists in a different manner of reflectively
relating to things, in a grounding relation. What the extra-artistic aesthetic is in its cultural meaning is first clarified from within art. For art
is not simply the application of aesthetic means, but, as Hegel puts it,
art always thematizes, reflects, and brings to consciousness the possible
meaning of the aesthetic presentation. If we are not to fall back into selfincurred aesthetic immaturity,100 we must, with Hegel, explore the function of art in culture, and its meaning in making concrete the wisdom
of the peoples.101
Notes
1. On Young Hegelian aesthetics, art theory, and criticism, see Ingrid
Pepperle, Junghegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie und Kunsttheorie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1978), esp. 109225; Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Literaturkritik in der
Epoche des Liberalismus, in Geschichte der deutschen Literaturkritik (17301980),
ed. P. U. Hohendahl (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985), 129204; Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die

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Kritik der Romantik: Der Verdacht der Philosophie gegen die literarische Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), esp. 182220; Norbert Oellers, Die Hallischen Jahrbcher
und die deutsche Literatur, in Philosophie und Literatur im Vormrz: Der Streit um
die Romantik (18201854), ed. Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Meiner, 1995), 141
52; Karl Lwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche: Der revolutionre Bruch im Denken des 19.
Jahrhunderts (1941: Hamburg, 1981), esp. 31720; Gnther Groth, Arnold Ruges Philosophie unter besonderer Bercksichtigung seiner sthetik: Ein Beitrag
zur Wirkungsgeschichte Hegels (phil. diss., Hamburg, 1967); Jost Hermand,
Der deutsche Vormrz, in his Von Mainz nach Weimar (17931919): Studien zur
Deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969), 174210; Sanna Pederson, Romantic Music Under Siege in 1848, in Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Ian
Bent (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5774.
2. See especially Pepperle, Junghegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie, 13439.
3. See Wolfgang Essbach, Die Junghegelianer: Soziologie einer Intellektuellengruppe (Munich: Fink, 1988).
4. Arnold Ruge (18021880) was actively involved in the nineteenthcentury opposition movement. Ruge studied philology and philosophy in Halle,
Jena, and Heidelberg, where he was arrested in 1824 as a member of a banned
student patriotic society, the Jnglingsbund, whose aim was the national unity
of Germany and political reform. Detained during a yearlong enquiry, he then
spent 182530 as a condemned prisoner in the fortress of Kolberg. From 1831 to
1841 he lived as a schoolteacher, after his Habilitation as a Privatdozent, and then
as an independent author in Halle, where he began writing in defense of freedom of the press and of religion, and popular sovereignty.
At this time Ruge began his critical examination of Hegels philosophy,
which, linked to his political engagement, marked his subsequent thought. He
also met Ernst Theodor Echtermeyer. Together, against the opposition of the
Old Hegelian Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftliche Kritik, these two admirers of Hegel
founded, in 1838, the Hallische Jahrbcher fr deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst. Soon
the Young Hegelians were trooping to this journal and to the busy Ruge. When,
in early 1841, the Prussian government banned the Jahrbcher for their liberal
tendency, Ruge transferred the editorship to Dresden, outside Prussian territory,
and changed the title to the Deutsche Jahrbcher fr Wissenschaft und Kunst. By the
beginning of 1843, this journal underwent the same fate. (See also the chapter
by Lambrecht and Bunzel in this volume.)
In the following years, Ruges standpoint rapidly changed. In Paris he
worked on Karl Marxs Vorwrts, and in 1844 they published together the Deutschfranzsische Jahrbcher. By winter 1844 Ruge withdrew from collaboration with
Marx, denouncing communism and advocating a bourgeois-democratic republic. (See the chapter by Calvi in this volume.) In 1847 he returned to Germany
via Zrich, where he collaborated with the radical liberal publicist Julius Frbel.
In Leipzig Ruge opened a bookshop and press, to publish writings on current
political events. In 1848 he edited the left-democratic newspaper Die Reform, first
from Leipzig, then from Berlin. He was elected in the same year to the Frankfurt National Assembly as a representative of the extreme left, but resigned in
October, frustrated by the daily business of politics. He was exiled because of

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his participation in the Berlin Democratic Congress. After stopping in Paris and
Brussels, in 1849 Ruge, together with Giuseppe Mazzini and Alexandre LedruRollin, established in London a European Democratic Committee, to promote
a pan-European republic. Ruge spent the last thirty years of his life in Brighton,
England. After the Battle of Kniggrtz in 1866, Ruge increasingly withdrew from
his earlier political stances, and came to see Bismarcks politics as offering Germany a respectable future. At Bismarcks personal request, from 1877 onward
Ruge was granted a stipend from the Reich in recognition of his work for German
unity. A large part of Ruges literary remains are now held at the International
Institute for Social History, Amsterdam.
5. N. Oellers, Vorwort, in E. T. Echtermeyer and A. Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik: Zur Verstndigung ber die Zeit und ihre Gegenstze: Ein Manifest, ed. N. Oellers (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1972), iviii (quotation on iii).
The main text is a reprographic reprint of the first edition in Hallische Jahrbcher
fr deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst (1839), col. 195355; 19612004, 211321,
216164, 24013, 240920, 243335, 244180, (1840), col. 41728, 43346,
497502, 50512.
6. Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeierzeit: Deutsche Literatur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Restauration und Revolution 18151848, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 197180),
3:541.
7. Heinrich Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in
Deutschland (preface to the second edition, 1834), in Werke und Briefe in zehn
Bnden, ed. Hans Kaufmann (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1972), 5:170.
8. Ludwig Salomon called the Hallischen Jahrbcher the most important
periodical of these years in Germany. (Ludwig Salomon, Geschichte des deutschen
Zeitungswesens von den ersten Anfngen bis zur Wiederaufrichtung des Deutschen Reiches,
3 vols. [Aalen: Scientia, 1973; reissue of the Oldenburg and Leipzig edition,
19001906], 3:495.) With its claim not only to reflect the spirit of the times,
but to advance the rights of freedom, this journal fell like a wolf upon a herd
of newspaper-sheep. (Oellers, Die Hallischen Jahrbcher, 144.) Salomon
cites Rudolf Haym, who sympathetically recalled a half-century later this most
distinguished manifestation of German journalism and the most effective organ
of that part of the Hegelian School who turned the pacific realm of absolute
idealism into a warlike and conquering one. We seized every newly appearing
issue and gladly followed the brave leaders as they pressed ahead in this vociferous game against a new enemy and onto new terrain, convinced that victory was
inscribed on their banners. (Cited in Salomon, Geschichte des deutschen Zeitungswesens, vol. 3: 492; cf. Oellers, Die Hallischen Jahrbcher, 152.) Among the
numerous contributors to the journal were well-known authors such as Friedrich
Wilhelm Carov, Johann Gustav Droysen, Ludwig Feuerbach, Jacob Grimm,
Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm Hinrichs, Heinrich Laube, Karl Rosenkranz, Adolf
Stahr, David Friedrich Strauss, and Friedrich Theodor Vischer. See the chapter
by Lambrecht and Bunzel in this volume.
9. Jena Schmid, 1830.
10. Schill und die Seinen (Stralsund: Lffler, 1830).
11. Halle: Verlag der Buchhuchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1832.

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12. A. Ruge, Neue Vorschule der sthetik: Das Komische mit einem komischen Anhange (Halle: 1837; Hildesheim: reprint OLMS, 1975).
13. Echtermeyer and Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik; this is cited
hereafter according to N. Oellerss reprint; also reprinted in Jaeschke, Philosophie
und Literatur im Vormrz, 192325.
14. These lectures are devoted to aesthetics, that is, the philosophy or
science of the beautiful, specifically the beautiful in art [Kunstschnen]. We exclude the beauty of nature [Naturschne]. (G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst oder
sthetik, nach Hegel, im Sommer 1826 [lecture notes of Hermann von Kehler], ed.
Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert and Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov [Munich:
Fink, 2004], 1.)
15. Ibid., 2.
16. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Kunst, Berlin 1823, [lecture notes of Heinrich Gustav Hotho], ed. A. Gethmann-Siefert, Vorlesungen:
Ausgewhlte Nachschriften und Manuskripte (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998), 13.
17. Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst 1823 (Hotho), 13.
18. Ibid., 211.
19. Ibid., 31. On the place of art as a phenomenon of absolute, not of
objective, spirit, see A. Gethmann-Siefert, Die Kunst ( 556563), in G. W. F.
Hegel Enzyklopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1830), Ein Kommentar zum
Systemgrundriss von Hermann Dre, A. Gethmann-Siefert, Christa Hackenesch, Walter
Jaeschke, Wolfgang Neuser und Herbert Schndelbach (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2000), 31774, esp. 31929.
20. Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst 1823 (Hotho), 5.
21. We find that art is a way in which man has brought to consciousness
the highest ideas of his spirit; we find that the peoples have set down their highest intuitions in the representations of art. Wisdom, religion, are contained in
[the] art forms, and art alone provides the key to the wisdom and religion of
many peoples . . . This is the object that we wish to consider scientifically, indeed
in a philosophically scientific manner [philosophisch wissenschaftlich]. (Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst 1826 [Kehler], 2.)
22. In his aesthetics lectures, as already in his Differenz-Schrift (1801), Hegel
defends the position that the artwork is indeed the product of the individual,
of the genius, but belonging to mankind. (G. W. F. Hegel, Vergleichung des
Schellingschen Prinzips der Philosophie mit dem Fichteschen, in Jenaer Kritische
Schriften I, new ed., ed. Hans Brockard and Hartmut Buchner [Hamburg: Meiner,
1979], 94.)
23. On Hegels concept of the artwork, see especially A. Gethmann-Siefert,
Die Funktion der Kunst in der Geschichte: Untersuchungen zu Hegels sthetik, HegelStudien supplement 25 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1984), 285316; and A. GethmannSiefert, Einfhrung in Hegels sthetik (Munich: Fink, 2005), 37104 and 26374.
For an interpretation of Hegels aesthetics from an action-theoretical standpoint,
see Einfhrung in Hegels sthetik, 20232; and Rainer Wiehl, ber den Handlungsbegriff als Kategorie der Hegelschen sthetik, Hegel-Studien 6 (1971): 13570.
24. See A. Gethmann-Siefert, Hegel ber das Hssliche in der Kunst: Zum
Problem der Musealisierung und sthetisierung der Knste, in Hegels sthetik:

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Die Kunst der PolitikDie Politik der Kunst, ed. Andreas Arndt, Karol Bal, and Henning Ottmann, second part (Berlin, 2000; Hegel-Jahrbuch, 1999), 2141; Francesca
Iannelli, Das Siegel der Moderne: Hegels Bestimmung des Hsslichen in den Vorlesungen
zur sthetik und die Rezeption bei den Hegelianern (Paderborn: Fink, 2007).
25. Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst 1823 (Hotho), 4.
26. See G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ber die sthetik, ed. H. G. Hotho, 3 vols.
(Berlin, 183538, 184243).
27. See Ernst H. Gombrich, Hegel und die Kunstgeschichte, in HegelPreis-Reden 1977, Ernst H. Gombrich, Dieter Henrich, and Manfred Rommel (Stuttgart:
Belser, 1977), 728, esp. 7; Stephan Nachtsheim, Kunstphilosophie und empirische
Kunstforschung 18701920, Kunst, Kultur und Politik im Deutschen Kaiserreich
7 (Berlin: Gebruder Mann, 1984), esp. 12 and 30; Hans Belting, Das Ende der
Kunstgeschichte: Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren (Munich: Beck, 1995), esp. 13439.
28. See Elisabeth Ziemer, Heinrich Gustav Hotho 18021873: Ein Berliner
Kunsthistoriker, Kunstkritiker und Philosoph (Berlin: Reimer, 1994).
29. See B. Collenberg-Plotnikov, Hothos Vorstudien fr Leben und
Kunst als Entwurf einer spekulativen Kunstgeschichte, in H. G. Hotho, Vorstudien fr Leben und Kunst, ed. B. Collenberg-Plotnikov (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt:
Frommann-Holzboog, 2002), ixlxxxv; B. Collenberg-Plotnikov, Philosophische Grundlagen der Kunstgeschichte im Hegelianismus: Zu H.G. Hothos Vorlesungen ber sthetik oder Philosophie des Schnen und der Kunst (1833), in
H. G. Hotho, Vorlesungen ber sthetik oder Philosophie des Schnen und der Kunst, Berlin, 1833 (lecture notes of Hegels son Immaniuel), ed. B. Collenberg-Plotnikov
(Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2004), xixxcix.
30. Wolfgang Beyrodt, Kunstgeschichte als Universittsfach, in K unst und
Kunsttheorie 14001900, ed. Peter Ganz (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991), 317.
31. Outside the context of art, Ruge also acted as a mediator between
Hegelian philosophy and empirical research, especially through his translation
of a masterpiece of English positivismthe History of Civilization in England by
Henry Thomas Buckle (2 vols., London: Parker 185761; German translation:
Geschichte der Civilisation in England, trans. A. Ruge, 2 vols. [Leipzig and Heidelberg: Winter, 186061]).
32. In 1841 Ruge recognizes in Georg Herweghs activist lyrics a true new
birth, a fulfilled revolution (A. Ruge, Neue Lyrik, Deutsche Jahrbcher [1841]:
251 and 256). Friedrich Theodor Vischer formulated it retrospectively: We believed then that we were standing before a political revolutionin this we were
correctbut also before the birth of a wholly new art, which seemed to us as
the necessary fruit of the revolutionand this was clearly a beautiful dream.
(F. T. Vischer, Kritische Gnge, ed. Robert Vischer, 6 vols., second expanded edition [Munich: Meyer & Jesson, 191422], 5:ix).
33. See Gnter Oesterle, Entwurf einer Monographie des sthetisch
Hsslichen: Die Geschichte einer sthetischen Kategorie von Friedrich Schlegels Studium-Aufsatz bis zu Karl Rosenkranz sthetik des Hsslichen als Suche
nach dem Ursprung der Moderne, in Zur Modernitt der Romantik, ed. Dieter
Bnisch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977), 21797; Gnter Oesterle and Ingrid Oesterle,
Gegenfssler des IdealsProzessgestalt der KunstMmoire processive der

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Geschichte: Zur sthetischen Fragwrdigkeit von Karikatur seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, in Nervse Auffangorgane des inneren und usseren Lebens, Karikaturen,
ed. Klaus Herding and Gunter Otto (Giessen: Anabas, 1980), 87130; Iannelli,
Das Siegel der Moderne.
34. Echtermeyer and Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik, 23; originally published in Hallische Jahrbcher (1839): 2121.
35. Cf. Max Schasler, Uber Idealismus und Realismus in der Historienmalerei Eine Parallele zwischen M. v.Schwinds, Kaiser Rudolph, der gen Speyer
zum Sterben reitet und Ad. Menzels Friedrichs II und Josephs II Zusammenkunft in Neisse, Die Dioskuren 3 no. 40/41 (1858): 14344 and 146.
36. F. T. Vischer, Die Abdankung Karl V. von Louis Gallait und der Kompromiss der flandrischen Edeln von Carl Bifve: Gedanken bei Betrachtung der
beiden belgischen Bilder (1844), in Vischer, Kritische Gnge, 5:8995.
37. Anton Springer, Der humoristische Idealismus, in his Geschichte der
bildenden Knste im 19. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1858), 10824; originally
published in Die Gegenwart 12 (1856): 71926.
38. Moriz Carrire, Ueber Symbol, personificirende Idealbildung und Allegorien der Kunst mit besonderer Rcksicht auf Kaulbachs Wandgemlde im
neuen Museum zu Berlin, Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, no. 63 (1856): 10013;
and no. 64 (1856): 101722.
39. See A. Gethmann-Siefert and Otto Pggeler, eds., Welt und Wirkung von
Hegels sthetik Hegel-Studien supplement 27 (Bonn, 1986), 11738, esp. 12528.
40. See Hotho, Vorstudien fr Leben und Kunst; and Hotho, Vorlesungen ber
sthetik.
41. See Collenberg-Plotnikov, Hothos Vorstudien fr Leben und Kunst;
and Collenberg-Plotnikov, Philosophische Grundlagen der Kunstgeschichte.
42. See A. Gethmann-Siefert, Phnomen versus System in Phnomen versus System: Zum Verhltnis von philosophischer Systematik und Kunsturteil in Hegels
Berliner Vorlesungen ber sthetik oder Philosophie der Kunst, ed. A. Gethmann-Siefert
(Bonn: Bouvier, 1992) (Hegel-Studien supplement 34), 939; and A. GethmannSiefert, Gestalt und Wirkung von Hegels sthetik (introduction), in Hegel,
Philosophie der Kunst 1823 (Hotho), xccxxiv, esp. xccxii. See also her Einfhrung
in Hegels sthetik, 3846.
43. See Collenberg-Plotnikov, Philosophische Grundlagen der Kunstgeschichte.
44. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesung ber sthetik, Berlin 1820/21 (lecture notes
of Ascheburg), ed. Helmut Schneider (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1995); Hegel,
Philosophie der Kunst 1823 (Hotho); Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst 1826 (Kehler);
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst, Berlin 1826 (lecture notes of von der
Pfordten), ed. A. Gethmann-Siefert, Jeong-Im Kwon, and Karsten Berr (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). On the transformation of the theses documented in the manuscripts in Hothos edition of Hegels sthetik, see the studies
by A. Gethmann-Siefert, e.g., H.G. Hotho: Kunst als Bildungserlebnis und die
Kunsthistorie in systematischer AbsichtOder die entpolitisierte Version der
Erziehung des Menschen, in Kunsterfahrung und Kulturpolitik im Berlin Hegels,
ed. O. Pggeler and A. Gethmann-Siefert, Hegel-Studien supplement 22 (Bonn:

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Bouvier, 1983), 22961; A. Gethmann-Siefert and Barbara Stemmrich-Khler,

Faust: Die absolute philosophische Tragdieund die gesellschaftliche Artigkeit des West-stlichen Divan: Zu Editionsproblemen der sthetikvorlesungen,
Hegel-Studien 18 (1983): 2364; and A. Gethmann-Siefert, Die Rolle der Kunst
im Staat. Kontroverses zwischen Hegel und den Hegelianern, in GethmannSiefert and Pggeler, Welt und Wirkung von Hegels sthetik, 295325.
45. See Pepperle, Junghegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie und Kunsttheorie, 156.
46. See Rdiger Bubner, Mutmassliche Umstellungen im Verhltnis von
Leben und Kunst and sthetisierung der Lebenswelt, in his sthetische Erfahrung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 12142 and 14356.
47. Deutsche Jahrbcher (1841): 609.
48. See Hermand, Der deutsche Vormrz, 18687.
49. On the description of the ideal in accounts of Hegels aesthetics lectures and their edited versions, see Gethmann-Siefert, Gestalt und Wirkung von
Hegels sthetik, cxiicxxxiii; Gethmann-Siefert, Einfhrung in Hegels sthetik,
2834; Lu De Vos, Die Bestimmung des Ideals: Vorbemerkungen zur Logik der
sthetik, in Die geschichtliche Bedeutung der Kunst und die Bestimmung der Knste:
Hegels Berliner sthetikvorlesungen im Kontext der Diskussion um die Grundlagen der
philosophischen sthetik, ed. A. Gethmann-Siefert, B. Collenberg-Plotnikov, and
L. De Vos (Munich: Fink, 2005), 2535.
50. Echtermeyer and Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik 22, originally published in Hallische Jahrbcher (1839): 2117.
51. A. Ruge, Wilhelm Heinses smmtliche Schriften (recension), Hallische Jahrbcher (1840): 1674.
52. A. Ruge Sden und Norden, Deutsche Jahrbcher fr Wissenschaft und
Kunst (1842): 967.
53. Ruge Sden und Norden, 967. Cf. Pepperle, Junghegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie und Kunsttheorie, 14952.
54. Robert Eduard Prutz, Kleine Schriften, Zur Politik und Literatur, 2 vols.
(Merseburg: Garcke, 1847), 1:66.
55. A. Ruge, Vorwort, Deutsche Jahrbcher (1841): 1.
56. See Pepperle, Junghegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie und Kunsttheorie,
15260. Ruge tries to refute Hegel with Hegel himself on this point: [For] we
can recognize neither absolute religion nor absolute art, and even less absolute
knowledge, and we will prove to him [i.e., Hegel] everywhere that such unfreedom
is contrary to his own eternal principle of the freedom and revelation [Offenbarung] of the absolute in history, that is, in development. (A. Ruge, Zur Kritik
des gegenwrtigen Staats- und Vlkerrechts, Hallische Jahrbcher [1840]: 2111.)
57. Beautiful humanity is the classical [die Classicitt]. But the classical
spirit is still a private affair. If humanity becomes the universal ideal, so art becomes the religious form [Religionsform] of the people, and poetry becomes immediately publicly effective and a source of real satisfaction, in which it is impossible to remain in beautiful egoism or [merely] to yearn for the freedom of the
people. A. Ruge, Smmtliche Werke, 10 vols. (Mannheim, 184748) [1847 under
the title Gesammelte Schriften], 1:212.

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58. H. Heine, Atta Troll, in Werke und Briefe in zehn Bnden, 1:344.
59. Note Heines ironic comments on the philistine Ruge: He has freedom in his head [im Geiste], but not yet in his limbs, and though he enthuses
about Hellenic nudity, he cant yet decide to peel off his modern barbarian trousers, or even the Christian-Germanic undergarments of morality [Sittlichkeit].
The Graces look smilingly on this inner struggle. (H. Heine, Aphorismen und
Fragmente, in Werke und Briefe in zehn Bnden, 5:427.)
60. Pepperle, Junghegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie und Kunsttheorie, 158;
and Hohendahl, Literaturkritik, 14951.
61. The otherwise beautiful diction suffers from many inaccuracies [Uncorrektheiten] . . . one must seriously warn against their taking hold, at a time when
it is necessary, in addition to acquiring civic freedom, to save from a barbaric reaction not only the free thinking of our great forebears, but also its perfected
form. (A. Ruge, Smmtliche Werke, 2:273.)
62. But this appearance [of a fully developed art] can only occur if Germany works its way to a free openness in its political relations [freien Oeffentlichkeit
seiner Staatsverhltnisse], if the reforming process can proceed from the subjectivity of feeling and the inwardness of merely theoretical thinking to the stage
where spirit perceives as realized in objective reality the freedom won through
knowledge, and willingly and actively joins forces with it. (Echtermeyer and
Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik, 23; originally published in Hallische
Jahrbcher ([1839]: 2121.)
63. Hohendahl, Literaturkritik, 152.
64. Ruge, Smmtliche Werke, 2:271.
65. The key texts are assembled in Klaus Peter, ed., Die politische Romantik in
Deutschland: Eine Textsammlung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1985).
66. Ruge to K. Rosenkranz, December 12, 1839, in Arnold Ruges Briefwechsel und Tagebuchbltter aus den Jahren 18251880, ed. Paul Nerrlich, 2 vols.
(Berlin:Weidmann, 1886), 1:178.
67. Ruge to D. F. Strauss, March 16, 1839, in Arnold Ruges Briefwechsel und
Tagebuchbltter, 1:192.
68. See Adolf Stahr, Kleine Schriften zur Litteratur und Kunst, 4 vols. (Berlin,
187175), 1:40910; and Oellers, Vorwort, viiviii. In his 1846 article Unsre
Classiker und Romantiker seit Lessing, Ruge reproduces the text of the manifesto almost completely and without substantial modification.
69. Oellers, Die Hallischen Jahrbcher und die deutsche Literatur, 149.
70. See O. Pggeler, Hegels Kritik der Romantik (1956; Munich, 1998).
71. See Oellers, Vorwort, v; and Oellers, Die Hallischen Jahrbcher
und die deutsche Literatur, 149.
72. The principle of Romanticism . . . consists in this, that the subject
holds fast to the singular, to the I, in the Protestant process of self-appropriation.
Thus it remains fixed in the negation of the universal, persisting in this empty
movement. The I, as such, is the positive; it is unable to understand the truth
in the objective. Thus the objective, drawn into the I, disappears into the bottomless pit of the self, which remains as it is, instead of purifying, transfiguring,

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and universalising itself as it would do if it recognized the objective idea. The I

remains nothing other than an empirical this and its arbitrary will, empty negativity. (Echtermeyer and Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik 27, originally
published in Hallische Jahrbcher [1839]: 2128.)
73. Oellers, Vorwort, v.
74. In Schellings development to his constrained consequences, we have
seen emerge the principle of Romanticism. In a word, . . . it is Schellings arbitrary subject, and the historical course of Romanticism is the extension of this
arbitrariness in the entire objective world. (Echtermeyer and Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik 42; originally published in Hallische Jahrbcher [1839]:
2401.)
75. Echtermeyer and Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik 38; originally published in Hallische Jahrbcher (1839): 2155.
76. In its necessary elaboration into the crassest empiricism and positivism, Schellings philosophizing becomes the root of an eccentric Christianity
[Christlichkeit], reveling in its incapacity to think, cheerfully embracing even the
most indigestible and untransparent myths of orthodox fantasy, and reading history backwards . . . The historical process (and this is the emblem of Romanticism, which connects here) becomes simply a reaction, from the present to Luther, from Luther to the Pope, from the Pope to Christ, from Christ to paradise,
in which state Schelling prophesizes the end of all science in immediate knowledge, for the immediate is the highest. (Echtermeyer and Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik 39; originally published in Hallische Jahrbcher [1839]:
215657.)
77. Echtermeyer and Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik 23; originally published in Hallische Jahrbcher [1839]: 2218 and 2121). See also note 34.
78. Echtermeyer and Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik, 2627;
originally published in Hallische Jahrbcher (1839): 2127 and 2130.
79. See especially Bohrer, Die Kritik der Romantik, 196.
80. Echtermeyer and Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik 43: originally published in Hallische Jahrbcher (1839): 2403.
81. It places nature above spirit, the head beneath, the legs above. The irrational, the reasonless like plants and the organic become the standard for the
rational, and nature and paradise become the goal of spirit and culture. (Echtermeyer and Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik 47; originally published
in Hallische Jahrbcher [1839]: 242728.)
82. Echtermeyer and Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik 76; originally published in Hallische Jahrbcher (1840): 498.
83. Friedrich von Gentz (17641832), political author, advisor, and ghostwriter to the Austrian foreign minister, later chancellor, Metternich. He inspired
and was a regular contributor to the semiofficial journal sterreichischer Beobachter
(181048), originally directed by Friedrich Schlegel. As first secretary and Protokollfhrer Gentz took part in the Congress of Vienna of 181415, and in subsequent
congresses up to 1822. He assisted Metternich as his minister of propaganda in
formulating and applying the repressive policies of the German Confederation

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against liberal and national currents. Later, as one of the fathers of censorship
policies promulgated in the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, Gentz became, next to
Metternich, one of the most hated symbols of reaction in the Vormrz.
84. See Bohrer, Die Kritik der Romantik, 21020.
85. See Oellers, Vorwort, esp. ivi; and Oellers, Die Hallischen Jahrbcher und die deutsche Literatur, 152.
86. Immediately after its publication, Ruge complains, resignedly: From
day to day and month to month we sink further; and the swing gets vertiginously
faster toward dumb Christianity and support for the aristocracy, and vulgar, lying theology. (Ruge to K. Rosenkranz, April 4, 1840, in Arnold Ruges Briefwechsel
und Tagebuchbltter, 1:214.) Two years later Ruges general assessment is that the
Justemilieu of Romanticism is everywhere at the helm. (Ruge to M. Carrire,
March 3, 1842, in Arnold Ruges Briefwechsel und Tagebuchbltter, 264.)
87. Echtermeyer und Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik 50; originally published in Hallische Jahrbcher (1839): 2444.
88. Oellers, Die Hallischen Jahrbcher und die deutsche Literatur, 150.
89. Pertinent to this assessment is Robert Prutzs comment: Young Germany was in the most decisive and explicit antagonism to previous Romanticism,
but in essentially romantic form. It wanted to do away with the one-sidedness
of our previous literary culture [Bildung], it wanted to draw literature closer to
life, and to revive its exhausted body by contact with politics, philosophy and
theology, but it used exclusively literary means to do this; it wanted simply to
raise literature beyond itself, but it succumbed in the midst of this effort to the
same literary caste-spirit to which the Romantics had paid homage. It wanted
to be a political and social party, but turned into a mere literary coterie. (R. E.
Prutz: Die deutsche Literatur der Gegenwart. 1848 bis 1849, 2 vols. [Leipzig: Voigt &
Gnther, 1859], 2:6.)
90. Hohendahl, Literaturkritik, 175.
91. Ibid., 155.
92. See Gethmann-Siefert, H.G. Hotho: Kunst als Bildungserlebnis;
Collenberg-Plotnikov, Hothos Vorstudien fr Leben und Kunst als Entwurf
einer spekulativen Kunstgeschichte.
93. Hotho, Vorstudien fr Leben und Kunst, 376.
94. Echtermeyer and Ruge, Der Protestantismus und die Romantik 82, originally published in Hallische Jahrbcher (1840): 512.
95. See Gethmann-Siefert, Die Funktion der Kunst in der Geschichte, 163235;
and Gethmann-Siefert, Einfhrung in Hegels sthetik, 13763 and 34760.
96. Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst 1823 (Hotho), 204.
97. See Oesterle, Entwurf einer Monographie des sthetisch Hsslichen,
254.
98. In empirical image-science [Bildwissenschaften], see the essays by Hans
Belting and Horst Bredekamp: H. Belting, Bild-Anthropologie: Entwrfe fr eine
Bildwissenschaft (Munich: Fink, 2001); and H. Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes: Der Leviathan: Das Urbild des modernen Staates und seine Gegenbilder, 16512001, 2nd ed.
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003).

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99. See K. Berr, Hegels Konzeption des Naturschnen (phil. diss. Hagen,
2009), http://deposit.fernuni-hagen.de/1659/1/Dissertation_Karsten_Berr.pdf.
100. See Willibald Sauerlnder, Iconic Turn? Eine Bitte um Ikonoklasmus, in Iconic Turn: Die neue Macht der Bilder, ed. Christa Maar and Hubert Burda
(Cologne: Dumont, 2004), 40726, 422; and B. Collenberg-Plotnikov, Die
Funktion der Kunst im Zeitalter der Bilder, Zeitschrift fr sthetik und Allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft 50, no. 1 (2005): 13953.
101. See note 21.

11

Karl Rosenkranz and the

Aesthetics of the Ugly
Margaret A. Rose

Karl Rosenkranzs Aesthetics of the Ugly (sthetik des Hsslichen) was first
published in Knigsberg by the Verlag der Gebrder Borntrger in
1853. Since then it has been republished several times in Germany in
the last few decades (in, for example, 19731 as well as in 1990, 1996, and
20072) and been translated into languages including Italian (1986) and
French (2004).3 Where many other works by nineteenth-century Hegelians on aesthetics have now been forgotten or relegated to discussions
in academic journals and books, Rosenkranzs Aesthetics of the Ugly is still
referred to in public discussions of contemporary art and aesthetics in
Germany as a work which has focused attention on the ugly as well as the
beautiful in art.
Only recently, the critic Jens Biski refers in a discussion of Umberto
Ecos On Ugliness of 2007 to Rosenkranzs Aesthetics of the Ugly as having
raised awareness of the ugly in aesthetics, if as the shadow side and
negation of the beautiful.4 Earlier discussions of, or references to, the
importance of Rosenkranzs Aesthetics of the Ugly for both nineteenth- and
twentieth-century art and aesthetics as well as for the aesthetics of the
ugly per se are to be found in works by Hans Robert Jauss, Theodor W.
Adorno, and others.5 Rosenkranzs Aesthetics of the Ugly has been seen
by several recent commentators as important for its turning of idealist
aesthetics toward an analysis of the ugly as a part of an aesthetics of the
beautiful, and is also of interest both for its analysis of the interaction
of the ugly with the comic in caricature and for the importance given
by it to caricature at a time when that form was the subject of political
as well as aesthetic criticism. It has further been suggested that one of
the impetuses behind Rosenkranzs Aesthetics of the Ugly was Hothos 1835
edition of Hegels Lectures on Aesthetics, which Rosenkranz had reviewed
in 1836 in the Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftliche Kritik. The text of this review was used for the article on Hegels Aesthetics of 1836 in Rosenkranzs Critical Explanations of the Hegelian System (Kritische Erluterungen
231

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des Hegelschen Systems) of 1840 (pp. 177217), which also states (p. 202)
that the concept of humor must find its place inside the concept of the
beautiful.6 Brigitte Scheer concludes her recent analysis of the Aesthetics
of the Ugly by suggesting further that with Rosenkranzs treatment of the
ugly in caricature, idealistic aesthetics in the narrow sense is left behind,
in spite of the binding of his theory to Hegelian metaphysics, and the
first step is made towards the full recognition [Erkennung] of the ugly in
the art of the modern.7
Hegels Lectures on Aesthetics had dealt with the arts from the earliest
recorded times to those of the early nineteenth century,8 but had also
spoken of their end and not only given poetry supremacy over music
and the visual arts, but philosophy over aesthetics. As Kliche and others
note in their commentaries to Rosenkranz,9 there is no systematized aesthetics of the ugly to be found in Hegels works, although comments on
its appearance in the history of art are made.10 Art at its height was for
Hegel the expression of the idea of the true, the good, and the beautiful.11 Modern art when ugly (see, for instance, Hegels comments on the
1828 exhibition of paintings in Berlin referred to in following passages)
is inferior art. Rosenkranzs Aesthetics of the Ugly is one attempt at an aesthetics by Hegelians after Hegel that not only takes up and challenges
issues discussed in Hegels Aesthetics as edited by Hotho (including the
inadequacy of modern caricature and wit and the supposed decline of
the arts in the modern world), but also discusses artists and writers of the
mid-nineteenth century who could not be covered by Hegel himself.
Karl Rosenkranz (18051879), the official biographer of Hegel,12
is said to have become acquainted with Hegel (17701831) in the last
year of the latters life. Prior to that Rosenkranz had studied theology in
Berlin from April 1824 with Schleiermacher, Marheineke, and Neander,
and had heard Henning lecture on Hegels Encyclopedia. Rosenkranz had
then continued his study of Hegels teachings while in Halle from Easter
1826, having attended Hinrichss lectures on the Aesthetics in 1826 and
those of Daub on the Philosophy of Religion in the following year, and having made a study of the Phenomenology and Science of Logic. From these
studies of Hegels thought, Rosenkranz is said to have transformed his
earlier Romantic view of the world as one divided into the self and the
other into an integrated system in which the Absolute is understood
as having revealed itself in nature and history.13 Having published his
Aesthetic and Poetic Notes (sthetische und poetische Mitteilungen) in Magdeburg in 1827 and been appointed to the philosophical faculty in Halle
in 1828, Rosenkranz embarked on a study of the History of German Poetry
in the Middle Ages (Geschichte der deutschen Poesie im Mittelalter, 1830)14 as a
contribution toward the study of the development of Spirit in German

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history.15 In addition to this and many other texts, Rosenkranz published

an Encyclopedia of the Theological Sciences (Enzyklopdie der theologischen Wissenschaften, 1831), in which the development of Christian theology was
analyzed from the point of view of Hegels understanding of the development of the idea of the Absolute in history. This text, however, was
then criticized by David Friedrich Strauss as creating too simple a conjunction of the Hegelian Absolute with Christianity.16
Rosenkranz was also described by D. F. Strauss in a systematization
of the Hegelians related to questions of theology (published in Strausss
defense of his Life of Jesus of 1837, before the majority of Rosenkranzs
works had been written), as a Center rather than a Left or Right
Hegelian. Strausss systematization of the Hegelians (which was said to
have been inspired by the model of the French Parliament)17 was later
parodistically evoked by Rosenkranz in an Aristophanic comedy of 1840,
published by the Verlag der Gebrder Borntrger, entitled The Center of
Speculation, A Comedy (Das Centrum der Spekulation, Eine Komdie). Here
the goddess Minerva (herself a parodic reference to Hegels comment
in his Philosophy of Right on the owl of Minerva beginning its flight only at
dusk) arranges for the warring philosophers left after the death of Hegel
to be judged as being worthy or not of continuing his work.18 The comedy begins, moreover, with a chorus of owls (Chor der Eulen) from Athens
that refer self-reflexively to their appearance in Hegels Philosophy of Right
and then comment critically on the action throughout the play.19
A diary entry of 1840 describes Rosenkranzs comedy as having liberated him from the attacks made on him by those jealous that Strauss
had described him as standing at the center of Hegelian thought.20 Later
still, in his Aesthetics of the Ugly of 1853 (work on which is said to have begun at the end of the 1830s), Rosenkranz will also speak of comedy as
liberation from both the commonplace and the ugly.
The two policemen or gendarmes who are brought in to disperse
the noisily disputatious Hegelinge (left-wing Hegelians opposed to the
more right-wing Hegeliter) and their hanger-on Arnold Ruge at the end
of The Center of Speculation,21 and who dismiss the owls as only belonging
to natural history,22 speak in dialogue similar to that of the figure of the
Eckensteher Nante based on the Eckensteher or corner loafer satirized
in Adolf Glassbrenners Berlinwie es ist und trinkt (BerlinAs It Eats/Is
and Drinks) of 1832, whose populist humor (also characteristic of the
Berlin Possen or farces of the time) is condemned with some irony in the
final chorus of the owls.23
Rosenkranz himself appears in his comedy of 1840 under the ironic
mask of Rosencrantzs companion Guildenstern from Shakespeares Hamlet as standing (following Strausss categorization of him) in the middle

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between both the old and the young Germany and the parties of philosophers.24 Among others given masks in Rosenkranzs farce, Christian Hermann Weisse (whose relevance to Rosenkranzs Aesthetics will be discussed)
appears in the play as Ubique and Ludwig Feuerbach as Gluthbach.
Although the conservative theologian Eduard Hengstenberg had
praised Rosenkranzs comedy, one other of those depicted in it, Arnold
Ruge (18021880),25 had criticized it in both a letter to Rosenkranz of
January 1840 and in an article for the Hallische Jahrbcher of August 4,
1840 addressed to Rosenkranz. In this article, To Rosenkranz on his
comedy The Center of Speculation (An Rosenkranz ber seine Komdie
Das Centrum der Speculation),26 Ruge criticizes Rosenkranzs comedy, first
on the literary grounds that it was a contradiction in terms in being a
critical comedy;27 second for what Ruge describes with some exaggeration as the insulting depiction of himself in the character of the lionlike Leo rugiens, which he claims had enabled Hengstenberg to attack
him further in a review of the play; and third for the fact (although
apparently contradictory to Ruges criticism of the piece as a critical
or philosophic, rather than a realistic, comedy) that Rosenkranz had
decided upon no winner among the philosophers, but had let them be
dispersed by the two farcical gendarmes.28
In addition to writing an analysis of the comic in his New Primer of
Aesthetics: The Comic with a Comic Appendix (Neue Vorschule der sthetik: Das
Komische mit einem komischen Anhange, the title being a reference to Jean
Pauls Vorschule der sthetik) in 1837, Ruge had written on the comedies of
Aristophanes as well as on the wit of Heine29 in the late 1830s and after,
and had condemned Heines use of irony to deflect from the expression
of his real feelings, as well as the frivolity of his wit.30 Heine (a student of
Hegel who had turned from the study of law to the writing of prose, fiction, and satire as well as poetry) is also criticized by Rosenkranz in the
Aesthetics of the Ugly for the frivolity of his more blasphemous works.31
It is in his Aesthetics of the Ugly that Rosenkranz nonetheless provides
a defense of caricature itself as a liberating force that goes beyond the position of Hegel on caricature as presented by Hotho,32 and which can also
be said to implicitly provide support for at least some (if not all) of the esoteric as well as exoteric uses of comedy practiced by radical Young Germans writing under the Prussian censorship of the 1840s and by some of
the Young Hegelians themselves.33 Rosenkranzs own fear of censorship
when writing on Hegels republican period in his biography of Hegel in
the early 1840s has been recorded and commented upon by Schumm,34
while problems with his liberal ideas at the time of the Revolution of
1848, and subsequent disappointments, are discussed by Kliche.35
As mentioned previously, Rosenkranz under the mask of Glden-

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stern had already remarked with some irony in The Center of Speculation
that he had found it difficult to decide whether he belonged to the
old or young Germany.36 Even if Rosenkranz can also be seen in
other works such as his Poetry and Its History (Die Poesie und ihre Geschichte)
to have argued for a literature that would be more than mere political
invective,37 his defense of caricature in Aesthetics of the Ugly cannot be
overlooked as having contributed in the context of his time to a radical
rather than a conservative defense of that form,38 where others had
viewed it with suspicion on political as well as aesthetic grounds.39
For Rosenkranz it will, moreover, specifically be caricature that is
able to both depict and go beyond the ugly by making the latter comic.
In the introduction to his Aesthetics as edited by Hotho, Hegel had described caricature as not only exaggerating a characteristic, but as being
characteristic of the ugly, which is itself a distortion (Zudem zeigt sich
das Karikaturmssige ferner als die Charakteristik des Hsslichen, das
allerdings ein Verzerren ist),40 and had later described the fantastic caricature as having been unable to depict the true Ideal.41 Such a view of
caricature would seem to be very different from that of Rosenkranz as
presenting, in its best examples, a release from the ugly.
Although written up in only seven months between October 1852
and May 1853, Rosenkranzs Aesthetics of the Ugly can, moreover, be traced
back to the late 1830s,42 when Rosenkranz was still concerned with the
legacy of Hegels philosophy, and to several other Hegelian as well as
pre-Hegelian sources.43 Dieter Kliche writes in his commentary to Rosenkranzs Aesthetics of the Ugly, following Rosenkranzs comments on chapters 2325 of G. E. Lessings Laocoon of 1766, in the opening note to his
Aesthetics of the Ugly,44 that the ugly had already been the subject of analysis not only in Lessings Laocoon, where it had been described as being
capable of eliciting emotions pertaining to both the laughable and the
terrifying, but also in an essay of 1795 by the young Friedrich Schlegel,
On the study of Greek poetry (ber das Studium der griechischen
Poesie),45 not specifically discussed by Rosenkranz,46 where the ugly
had been described as an element of modern art, but as one to be overcome.47 Kliche also suggests, following Rosenkranzs endnote to p. 5 of
his Aesthetics of the Ugly, that it was Christian Hermann Weisses System of
Aesthetics as Science of the Idea of Beauty (System der sthetik als Wissenschaft
von der Idee der Schnheit) of 1830 that had first attempted a systematic and
dialectical analysis of the ugly as an organic part of the idea of the beautiful.48 For Weisse, summarizes Kliche, it was the contradiction between
the reality in which the beautiful was to be found and the general idea of
it that forced beauty to appear as its own contradiction and to be related
not only to the sublime, but also to both the ugly and the comic.49

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Weisses discussion of the ugly in art had limited it nonetheless to a

few authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Zacharias Werner, and Lord Byron,50 and his analysis of the comic (das Komische) in his vol. 1, pp. 207
51 had also given few actual examples apart from speculating (pp. 232ff.)
on the way in which the characters and actions in Cervantess Don Quixote
might have remained at the level of the ugly without their authors saving humor. (He also briefly discusses similar issues raised by Jean Paul
Richters Comet, the comedies of Aristophanes, and Shakespeares Falstaff.) Weisse is nevertheless recognized by Rosenkranz as a pioneer in
the dialectical analysis of the ugly as a part of the beautiful (see Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of the Ugly, pp. 5 and 168) and can also be said to have
introduced an idea, which is to be found again in Rosenkranzs analysis
of caricature, that it is the element of the fantastic or the fanciful (das
Phantastische) that enables the comic to transform the ugly back into the
beautiful.51 Weisse even speaks in his opening book about the comic (die
Komik) in dialectical terms as superseded (aufgehobene) ugliness (Hsslichkeit) or as the restoration of beauty from its absolute negativity, which is
ugliness.52 Later Weisse will also remark on how humor in genre painting is able to raise subjects from the natural world into art.53
Rosenkranz also comments critically, however, on Weisse at the very
beginning of his Aesthetics of the Ugly by suggesting that Weisses understanding of the ugly had been far too spiritualistic and limiting of it
to the demonic, and that this failing had also been passed on to those
following him, including Arnold Ruge in his New Primer of Aesthetics of
1837.54 Rosenkranz then further criticizes Ruges book as the work of a
lively fellow full of naive views and inspired by a recent reading of Hegels
writings, who had been unable to explain all that he discussed clearly55
and had limited his examples of the ugly to the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Heine. Rosenkranzs own argument in his Aesthetics is that the
comic caricature could be seen not just as a depiction of the ugly (as according to Hothos Hegel and others), but as a liberation from the ugly
that returns it to the beautiful in the work itself as well as to the idea of
the beautiful.56 This is also a lesson of the Aesthetics of the Ugly that shows
Rosenkranz, in this work at least, to be a more radical writer than many
have assumed or wanted him to be represented as.57
Although, as late as 1878, Rosenkranzs old sparring partner Arnold Ruge appears to have wished to associate him with the reactionary
wing of the Hegelians,58 such a judgment can be described as personal
invective rather than as a statement of historical fact.59 Ruge, in fact, had
also noted in 1878 Rosenkranzs earlier sympathies for the Revolution
of 1848,60 and had already acknowledged, in an earlier letter of February 18, 1870, Rosenkranzs expression of understanding for the cause of

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more radical Hegelians.61 While Ruge speaks of the beginning of a reconciliation with Rosenkranz, in a letter to Franz Rhl of July 21, 1875,62
he also appears to ignore Rosenkranzs own skepticism about the division of the early Young Hegelians into left, right, and center with regard
to Strausss theological (or Christological) questions when he writes, in
reply to a claim by Rhl regarding Rosenkranz, that if Rosenkranz makes
himself the center of Hegelian philosophy, Leo the right wing,63 and
Ruge the left, then Ruge cannot say where the Hegelian school itself is,
as Rosenkranz was never in his opinion the central sun (Centralsonne) of
it. Rosenkranz, according to Ruge, had only moved in comet-like digressions (kometarische Ausschweifungen) and had made the mistake of moving too far away from the logical center (von dem Logischen Centrum); a
reference, it would seem, to Rosenkranzs divergence from Hegel in his
Science of the logical idea (Wissenschaft der logischen Idee) of 1858.64
In his entry on Rosenkranz in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie,65
Carl Prantl writes that the philosopher had been wary of accepting
Strausss characterization of him as being in the center (Centrum) of
Hegelian philosophy in both his The Center of Speculation of 1840 and his
Critical Explanations of Hegels System (Kritische Erluterungen zu Hegels System) of the same year.66 (Rosenkranz later criticizes Strausss own
tenets in his Critique of the Principles of the Straussian Doctrine [Kritik der
Principien der Straussschen Glaubenslehre] of 1845.) Rosenkranz is further
judged by Prantl as remaining wholly true to Hegel only in the areas of
natural philosophy and psychology (see Prantl, p. 215), and of diverging
from him in the areas of ethics and the philosophy of law as well as in his
science of the logical idea and aesthetics.67
It is in particular Rosenkranzs raising of caricature to a place of
importance in his aesthetics of the ugly that, together with his investigation of the ugly and the comic as a part of the beautiful, makes his aesthetics different from those of both Hegel as edited by Hotho and others
of his time, and of relevance to the modern understanding of the arts of
both the nineteenth century and after.
Umberto Ecos novel The Name of the Rose (1980) is but one influential work of the late twentieth century to return to the ideasupported
by the publication in 1839 of the medieval manuscript held in Paris
known as the Tractatus Coislinianus 68that Aristotelians could also have
seen comedy as cathartic and as a liberation from the laughably ugly.69
Not all historians of aesthetics70 appear to have noted, however, that the
title and part of the substance of Rosenkranzs Aesthetics of the Ugly can
also refer to Aristotles comments on comedy in his Poetics and his claim
in its chapter 5 that comedy deals with the laughable that is a species
of aischros,71 a word that is generally translated in nineteenth-century

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German editions of Aristotle as designating das Hssliche or the ugly

rather than (as is sometimes written in English) the deformed.72
Weisse had already referred in his analysis of the relationship of
the comic to the ugly in his study of the idea of beauty of 1830 to Aristotles Poetics as having dealt with the laughable (das Lcherliche) as a part
of the ugly, and had suggested that a lack of ability to make theoretical
use of the concept of the ugly had also led to the lack of development of
such ideas.73 Rosenkranz in his Aesthetics of the Ugly (pp. 53 and 44142),
following what may be described as an upsurge in interest in Aristotles
writings on comedy in Germany in the 1840s,74 also explicitly refers to
and quotes from chapter 5 of Aristotles Poetics on comedy as dealing
with the laughable in the ugly. Here Rosenkranz not only suggests that
it is the ugly and not comedy that is the negative aspect of the beautiful
(contrary to what some others had claimed), but also that comedy is able
to transform the ugly back into the beautiful by negating the negation of
the beautiful (the ugly) so that aesthetic harmony may follow from the
return from contradiction to unity.75
Although Hegel (writing and lecturing before discussions of the
Tractatus Coislinianus were published) makes no reference to Aristotle on
comedy in his Aesthetics as edited by Hotho, while referring frequently to
Aristotle on tragedy,76 he nonetheless appears in other passages to have
described the comic genre scenes of the Dutch masters as canceling out
or superseding the ugly. In addition to praising artists such as Jan Steen
for depicting more than the transitory,77 Hegels Aesthetics had gone at
least some way toward ascribing a liberating function to the comic in
discussing Dutch art at the conclusion of the chapter on on painting in
the section on The Romantic Arts of the Aesthetics as edited by Hotho,
when it is claimed that the comic aspect of the situations depicted by the
Dutch painters cancels out what was bad in them, whereas in most modern art the bad remains unredeemed:78
In the Dutch painters the comical aspect of the situation cancels [hebt
auf ] what is bad in it, and it is at once clear to us that the characters
can still be something different from what they are as they confront us
in this moment. Such cheerfulness and comicality is intrinsic to the inestimable worth of these pictures. When, on the other hand, in modern
pictures a painter tries to be piquant in the same way, what he usually
presents to us is something inherently vulgar, bad, and evil without any
reconciling comicality. For example, a bad wife scolds her drunken husband in the tavern and really snarls at him; but then there is nothing to
see, as I have said once before [regarding the 1828 Berlin Exhibition],79
except that he is a dissolute chap and his wife a driveling old woman.

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It is then added that the older Dutch masters were able to show human
nature with both artistic freedom and cheerfulness.
Rosenkranz himself defends both Hegel and Hotho against those
who claim that their defense of the Dutch genre painters was merely of
their realism (see Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of the Ugly, p. 211), and he also
quotes in his note to this passage (see Rosenkranz, p. 448ff.) the above
lines from Hegel on the cheerfulness of Dutch art. Other works by German artists painting after the death of Hegel were also (despite Hegels
criticisms of contemporary artists) to emulate the Dutch masters (see, for
example, the works of the Dsseldorf artist Eduard Geselschap [1814
78]), as well as to use caricature to produce humor from the commonplace in nature (as, for example, in the works of the Dsseldorf school
artists Adolph Schroedter [180575] and J. P. Hasenclever [181053]).
Arnold Ruge had already commented favorably on some of the
more modern paintings of the Dsseldorf Academy of Art (the birthplace of the Dsseldorfer Malerschule or Dsseldorf school of painting)
in his article The Spirit of the Age in the Dsseldorf Academy (Der
Zeitgeist in der Dsseldorfer Akademie) of 1838.80 Instead of speaking of the end of art as a whole, Ruge describes the age as seeing the
endor, at least, the decay or laying wasteof poetry (Die Zeit ist jetzt
poetisch verwahrlost)81 and a desire for a new expression of the ideal,
which would appear to us in a living and material (incarnate) way to
move us. It is, according to Ruge, this need that contemporary painting
has been seeking to satisfy. The self-mocking poetry as well as the philosophy of the present have proved wanting (Ruge, Spirit of the Age,
p. 189). It is, moreover, not the religious, more spiritual art of the academys Nazarene directors, Peter Cornelius (17831867) and Wilhelm
von Schadow (17881862), which Ruge praisesSchadows poetic
Mignon of 182628 is also commented upon critically by Hegel in his
Aesthetics as edited by Hotho (see Aesthetics, trans. Knox, vol. 2, p. 857)
for not adequately portraying the complexity of the situation in which
Mignon finds herselfbut the reaction to them of independent and
rational artists such as G. E. Lessings great-nephew Carl Friedrich Lessing (180880).82
For Ruge the storming of the Bastille would be a better topic for
contemporary art than the seven wise and foolish virgins which Ruge
says he had seen Schadow painting in his studio.83 To Ruge even The Storming of Iconium (Sturm von Ikonium) by H. F. Plddemann (180968) and
Lessings Hus Before the Council of Constance (Huss vor dem Concil), while
still concerned with the history of religion, mark the real awakening
of new epochs. Realism, but not imitation, is Ruges catchphrase here,
although the works explicitly praised by him may also be said to have

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imitated other, earlier works of history and fresco painting. The genre
painter Rudolf Jordan (181087) is then also praised for the truth of
his work, including its humor, in his representation of the fisher folk of
Heligoland in his Engagement on Heligoland (Verlobung auf Helgoland), as
is also Adolph Schroedter as the painter of Don Quixote reading and Sir
John Falstaff recruiting.84 Ruge even goes on to suggest here that humor
and sensual love85 stand to the extreme left of the sacred art of the directors of the academy and that it is they, the unholy,86 who achieve what
the holy or sainted (die Heiligen) had wanted to achieve in the realms
of both beauty and truth.87
For Rosenkranz in his Aesthetics of the Ugly, however, it is not so much
the opposition of the comic genre painters to the holy or sacred as the
liberation from the negation of the sublime in the commonplace that
derives from their humorous depiction of everyday life that is important.88 In his discussion of contemporary genre painting, Rosenkranz,
like Hegel, criticizes those modern works that have depicted the banality of everyday life all too realistically and without an atom of wit
(see Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of the Ugly, p. 211, on the paintings of cooks,
fruit sellers, schoolboys, mothers repairing stockings, and bootmakers
repairing boots as well as of pastors in dressing gowns and idlers in taverns), but he defends artists who have moved beyond the ordinary (das
Gewhnliche) and the paltry (das Kleinliche) through irony and humor. He
praises (p. 213) in particular among the Dsseldorf school of painters
the humor (Komik) of J. P. Hasenclever in his The Dancing Lesson (Tanzstunde), The Artists Studio (Maleratelier), The Tea Party (Theegesellschaft),
and Jobs as Nightwatchman ( Jobs als Nachtwchter).89
Hasenclevers The Artists Studio of 1836 90 had used both realism
and irony to parody the copy of the Louvres Borghese Warrior used in the
academys antique class (and discussed by G. E. Lessing in his Laocoon
with regard to Winckelmanns analysis of the question of which action is
represented by it) by showing an artist holding aloft a wine bottle rather
than a sword or spear. In addition to this, Hasenclever appears to have
parodied the gesture of the radical Hussite preacher in the historical
painting The Hussite Sermon (Hussitenpredigt) of 1836 by Carl Friedrich
Lessing (the artist praised by Ruge), where a chalice is held aloft to
represent the claim that those other than priests should be able to administer the sacrament.91 Paintings by Hasenclever such as The Sentimental One (Die Sentimentale) of 1846 had (as in Schroedters The Sorrowing
Tanners [Trauernde Lohgerber] of 1832) further parodied the sorrowing
gestures that are to be found in many Nazarene as well as late Nazarene
works following Schadow and Cornelius.92
Rosenkranzs foreword to the Aesthetics of the Ugly begins (p. iii)

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with the question: An aesthetics of the ugly? And why not? Aesthetics
itself, Rosenkranz goes on to say, is a collective name for a group of concepts which can be divided into three classes. These are concerned with
(1) the idea of the beautiful, (2) the understanding of its production,
and (3) the system of arts, or the representation of the idea of the beautiful in art in a certain medium. Already in his discussion of the first point
as involving the metaphysics of the beautiful, Rosenkranz moves on to
the idea that an investigation of the beautiful must involve one into the
ugly as das Negativschne (a composite word that brings together the
idea of the beautiful with that of its negative pole and which might
be translated into English as the negative aspect [or side] of the beautiful).93 Turning to his concept of the ugly, Rosenkranz speaks (p. iv)
of how he has developed the concept of the ugly as the middle point
(Mitte) between that of the beautiful and the comic and of a cosmos of
the ugly and its metamorphoses from its earliest chaotic and asymmetric
forms to the many different forms of the disorganization of the beautiful, as well as of how (p. v) the ugly produces caricature instead of the
Ideal. Rosenkranz adds (p. vi) that he realizes that while attempting to
cover a wide range of examples, he will only be making a start on the
study of this neglected topic. Turning again to the subject of the comic,
Rosenkranz writes (p. vii) that it (das Komische) is impossible without the
ingredient of ugliness that is released by it and is formed back (zurckgebildet) into the freedom of the beautiful.
In several sections of Rosenkranzs work, the comic is defended as
a way to the liberation of the spirit from the base and the ugly, and the
ugly is thereby made part of the aesthetic dialectic, but it is above all in
the concluding section on caricature (pp. 386ff.) that a defense of that
form, which was then still much politically mistrusted, is to be found.
Rosenkranz, however, does not prize mere satire in the caricature
(see also pp. 422ff.),94 but adds that the ideal caricature must also have
an element of the fantastic or imaginative able to bring about the freedom from that which it is distorting, and which can lead to the metamorphosis of the ugly (see especially p. 424). Beginning (p. 386) with
a description of the beautiful (das Schne) as appearing either as the
sublime or as its opposite in the merely pleasing (das Gefllige), Rosenkranz adds that the beautiful may also appear as the absolute that unites
the sublime and the pleasing in itself in perfect harmony.95 Still dependent upon the concept of the beautiful, the ugly (das Hssliche) is then
described (p. 387) as turning the sublime into the common, the pleasing into the displeasing or the repulsive (das Widrige), and the absolute
beautiful into caricature, in which dignity (Wrde) can become bombast
(Schwulst), and charm (Reiz) coquetry (Koketterie). Caricature is in this

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respect the high point in the formation of the ugly, but also enables the
crossing over into the comic through the contrast between itself and that
which it distorts.96
Caricature is already understood here as a reflexive process of
distortion productive of the comic rather than as a static image of the
ugly,97 and is then further described (in contrast to other definitions of
it) as being more than exaggeration. Furthermore (see pp. 38990), the
creation of a lack of proportion in a caricature is said to force us to bring
into our minds (subintelligieren)98 proportionality in its stead: the caricature thus gives us an idea of the beautiful while presenting us with its
distorted image.99
Rosenkranz suggests (p. 390) that the secret of caricature is, moreover, that harmony is produced again from disharmony in it (see also
Ecos On Ugliness, p. 152). Rosenkranz had collected many hundreds of
caricatures over the years between 1835 and 1853 while he was working
on his Aesthetics of the Ugly (Rosenkranz [p. 390] refers to Grandvilles The
Small Sorrows of Human Life [Petites misres de la vie humaine] of 1843 as
well as to Aristophanes caricature of Socrates in his Clouds [pp. 392
93]), and it would have been obvious to him that many of these caricatures had in fact made their point from within what could be described
as a pictorially or poetically harmonious whole. Rosenkranzs Aesthetics of
the Ugly can for this, as for other reasons, not just be seen as a justification of the ugly or the distorted in art, since the latter is almost always
superseded on the level of both the individual and the general in the
caricatures discussed by him.
Rosenkranzs Aesthetics of the Ugly also distinguishes between the involuntary caricature found in the real world (die Welt der wirklichen
Erscheinung) and artistic caricature (p. 393). It is here, moreover, that
Rosenkranz speaks explicitly of the satiric function of artistic caricature
(p. 394) and finds it not only in the visual arts (from Leonardo through
Hogarth to contemporaries such as Gavarni and Wilhelm von Kaulbach,
as well [p. 415] as Cruikshank, Phiz, and [p. 423] Daumier) but also in
literature, from the ancient parody (travesty) known as the Battle of
the Frogs and Mice (Batrachomyomachie) onward. Rosenkranz (p. 417) also
refers to the satirical journals Punch, Charivari, and Kladderadatsch (the
latter begun by David Kalisch and others after the German Revolutions
of 1848), having also noted (p. 415) how great cities like London, Paris,
and Berlin100 make fun of themselves (sich persiflieren) in their cockneys,
badauds, and Buffeys. (Herr Buffey was the character of a busybody
used by Adolf Glassbrenner in his satires of Berlin society of the late
1830s and early 1840s.)101 In all of these comic works Rosenkranz (see
pp. 41213) finds a drive to realize the Ideal. (Caricature is further de-

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scribed [p. 414] as having to represent the Idea in the form of its opposite [die Unidee] in a concrete medium.) He further argues that a history of the form from Aristophanes through Calderon and Shakespeare,
Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift and Boz (Dickens), Tieck and Jean Paul, to
Voltaire and Gutzkow102 will show this to be a canon which cannot be
ignored or decried, as can be the case with examples of bad caricature.
(Rosenkranzs typology of the bad caricature also suggests criteria for
the ideal caricature.)103
Such examples of good caricature are for Rosenkranz also examples of ideal content, wit, freedom, and daring as well as delicacy and
humoristic elasticity.104 Rosenkranz, moreover, concludes his study of
caricature, and the Aesthetics of the Ugly as a whole, with the claim that
caricature is able to dissolve (auflsen) the repulsive (das Widrige) in the
laughable, in being able to absorb (aufnehmen) all the forms of the ugly,
but also the beautiful, into itself (p. 432). This is achieved, moreover,
through the humor that drives the caricature into the fantastic or fanciful.105 It is also here, in his combination of both Hegel and Weisse with
what may be described as a nineteenth-century Aristotelian theory of
comedy as both the depiction of and liberation from the laughably ugly,
that Rosenkranz develops a more dynamic and radical Hegelian defense
of both ancient and modern caricature as the representation and liberation from the ugly in nature than either Hegel or his contemporaries
appear to have done. This also makes his text of interest still to the historian of Hegelianism as well as to observers of the development within
modern art of both the Aesthetics of the Ugly106 and of caricature.107
Although not recognized in all commentaries on his work, it is above all
Rosenkranzs concluding analysis of caricature as a liberation from the
ugly that marks a new and radical departure in both the analysis of the
ugly as part of an aesthetics of the beautiful and the analysis of caricature
as a cathartic and liberating form in his time.108

Conclusion
Although David Friedrich Strausss designation of Rosenkranz as taking
a middle position between those on the left and right of Hegel had related largely to the theological questions dealt with by Strauss in his Life
of Jesus, and had been treated with some skepticism by Rosenkranz himself, it has become usual for Rosenkranz to be categorized as either a
member of the Hegelian Center109 or even (following Ruge) as a more
reactionary or right-wing Hegelian.110 A careful study of Rosenkranzs

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long life and writings will show, however, that each of these categorizations will tell us very little about either his changing reception of Hegels
thought or of his varying personal as well as political and philosophic
attitudes to other Hegelians of his time.111 It is perhaps significant, moreover, that Rosenkranzs more radical Aesthetics of the Ugly is said to have
met with either misunderstanding or a lack of interest from many of his
contemporaries. Only nowwith the development in modern and postmodern art of a more global interest in both the ugly and the comic in
the arts, as well as with the growth in historical understanding of the
role played by the censorship of caricature in mid-nineteenth-century
Germany112is the radicalism of Rosenkranzs Aesthetics of the Ugly
being investigated further.
Notes
1. See Karl Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen (Knigsberg: Gebrder
Borntrger, 1853), reprinted with a foreword by Wolfhart Henckmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973). All citations of Rosenkranzs
sthetik des Hsslichen are to this edition, unless otherwise noted.
2. See Karl Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990,
1996, and 2007), with an essay by Dieter Kliche and list of works referred to by
Rosenkranz.
3. While commentaries may be found on some other of Rosenkranzs publications in English-language works on the Hegelians (as in, for instance, John E.
Toews Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 18051841 [Cambridge,
Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1980] on Rosenkranzs earlier writings and
autobiography of his early life in his Von Magdeburg bis Knigsberg of 1873), little
has yet been published in English on the sthetik des Hsslichen of 1853.
4. Jens Biski, Umberto Eco: Die Geschichte der Hsslichkeit: Panorama des
Widrigen, review in the Sddeutsche Zeitung supplement of October 9, 2007, of On
Ugliness, ed. Umberto Eco (London: Harvill Secker, 2007), which was published
in German as Die Geschichte der Hsslichkeit (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2007).
5. Hans Robert Jauss, Die nicht mehr schnen Knste (Munich: Fink, 1968);
Theodor W. Adorno, sthetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970);
Gnter Oesterle, Entwurf einer Monographie des sthetisch Hsslichen: Die
Geschichte einer sthetischen Kategorie von Friedrich Schlegels Studium-Aufsatz
bis zu Karl Rosenkranz Die sthetik des Hsslichen als Suche nach dem Ursprung
der Moderne, in Zur Modernitt der Romantik, ed. D. Bnsch (Stuttgart: Metzler,
1977), 21797; Holger Funk, sthetik des Hsslichen: Beitrge zum Verstndnis negativer Ausdrucksformen im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Agora Verlag, 1983); Werner
Jung, Schner Schein der Hsslichkeit oder Hsslichkeit des Schnen Scheins (Frankfurt
am Main: Athenum, 1987); and the collection of conference papers entitled
Im Schatten des Schnen: Die sthetik des Hsslichen in historischen Anstzen und aktuellen Debatten, ed. Heiner F. Klemme, Michael Pauen, and Marie-Luise Raters
(Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2006).

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6. Rosenkranz had also written the article on Aesthetics for the Brockhaus Conversationslexikon der Gegenwart in 1838; see also Wolfhart Henckmanns
foreword to the 1973 reproduction of Rosenkranzs sthetik des Hsslichen, v
xxi; x.
7. See Brigitte Scheer, Zur Theorie des Hsslichen bei Karl Rosenkranz,
in Klemme, Pauen, and Raters, Im Schatten des Schnen, 14155; 154 (my translation).
8. See also Robert Wicks, Hegels Aesthetics: An Overview, in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1993); 34877.
9. See Dieter Kliches essay in the Reclam edition of Rosenkranzs sthetik
des Hsslichen of 2007, entitled Pathologie des Schnen: Die sthetik des Hsslichen von Karl Rosenkranz, 458ff.
10. Hegel, as edited by Hotho, recognized the presence of the ugly in
Northern religious art, but also saw it as being canceled out by the depiction of
inner nobility; see Hegels Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (from
Hothos revised edition of 1842) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 2:884;
see also Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Hegel ber das Hssliche in der Kunst,
in Hegels sthetik: Die Kunst der PolitikDie Politik der Kunst, pt. 2, Hegel-Jahrbuch
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000), 2141; and Marie-Luise Raters, Metaphysische Schnheit und sthetische Hsslichkeit: Die Brandbreite der Kunst in Hegels Vorlesungen ber die sthetik, in Klemme, Pauen, and Raters, Im Schatten des
Schnen, 11739.
11. See also Kliche, Pathologie des Schnen, 464ff.
12. See Rosenkranzs G. W. F. Hegels Leben (1844), written when Rosenkranz was a professor at Knigsberg.
13. See Toews, Hegelianism, 160, on Rosenkranzs Von Magdeburg bis Knigsberg of 1873.
14. See also Eugen Japtok, Karl Rosenkanz als Literaturkritiker (doctoral
diss., Freiburg im Breisgau, 1964), on both this and Rosenkranzs other early
aesthetic and literary works.
15. See also Toews, Hegelianism, 161ff.
16. See ibid., 16364.
17. See also Henckmann, foreword, viii; and David McLellan, The Young
Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: Macmillan, 1969), 3.
18. See also Toews, Hegelianism, 2034; and Henckmann, foreword, vi, who
also refers to the article by Rudolf Unger, Karl Rosenkranz als Aristophanide in
the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fr Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte (henceforth referred to as DVLG) 11 (1933): 128.
19. See Karl Rosenkranz, Das Centrum der Spekulation, eine Komdie (Knigsberg, 1840), reproduced together with G. F. L. Lindners Der von hegelscher Philosophie durchdrungene Schuster-Geselle oder der absolute Stiefel (The Cobblers Apprentice
Impressed by Hegelian Philosophy, or the Absolute Boot) of 1844 and Otto Friedrich
Gruppes Die Winde oder ganz absolute Konstruktion der neuern Weltgeschichte durch
Oberons Horn, gedichtet von Absolutus von Hegelingen (The Winds, or the Wholly Absolute Construction of Modern World History Through Oberons Horn, by Absolute of
the Hegelings), Leipzig, 1831, in the volume Hegel Spiele (Hegel Games), edited by

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Heiner Hfener (Donauwrth: Rogner und Bernhard, 1977). Rosenkranz refers to Gruppes satire in his farce of 1840 and also mentions Gruppes parody
of Hegels lecturing style (Kathedermanier) in his sthetik des Hsslichen of
1853 (393), but without quoting the satirical caricature of himself in Gruppes
play (see Gruppe, 110, in Hfener, Hegel Spiele, 180) as ein absoluter, frommer
Mann (an absolute, pious man).
20. See Rosenkranzs collection of diary extracts, Aus einem Tagebuch: Knigsberg Herbst 1833 bis Frhjahr 1846 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1854), 174. Rosenkranz
also notes in this entry that Strausss designation of him as standing at the center
of Hegelian thought had in the first instance had to do with the christologische
Frage (the Christological question, as raised by Strauss in his Das Leben Jesu;
see also McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx, 2ff.), but that it had been
broadened and that this had led to jealousy on the part of Michelet and others
that he should apparently be given such a central position in the history of Hegelian philosophy.
21. See Rosenkranz, Das Centrum, 82ff., in Hfener, Hegel Spiele, 318ff. The
crowd of Hegelinge claim that philosophy is mature enough to watch over
(berwachen) itself, and the Hegeliter that it guarantees the most splendid results for the State from its battles.
22. See Rosenkranz, Das Centrum, 92, in Hfener, Hegel Spiele, 328.
23. Rosenkranz praises Glassbrenner in diary entries of 1840 and 1845 in
his Aus einem Tagebuch, 183 and 278.
24. Rosenkranz, Aus einem Tagebuch, 74 and 310.
25. On Ruge, see also Lars Lambrecht and Karl-Ewald Tietz, eds., Arnold
Ruge (18021880): Beitrge zum 200. Geburtstag (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2002).
26. See Arnold Ruge, An Rosenkranz ber seine Komdie Das Centrum
der Speculation, 1840, in Arnold Ruge, Werke und Briefe, vol. 3, Literarische Kritiken
18381846 (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1988), 14752; and Ruge to Rosenkranz on
January 3, 1840, in Arnold Ruge, Werke und Briefe, vol. 10, Briefwechsel und Tagebuchbltter aus den Jahren 18251847 (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1985), 199200.
27. Ruge suggests on p. 148 of his review of Rosenkranzs Das Centrum der
Speculation that he prefers the humor and realism of such as Boz (Dickens), Walter Scott, Fielding, The Vicar [of Wakefield], and the Paris Charivari.
28. Ruges review suffers from its mixing of personal defense with literary
criticism and also appears to have missed some of Rosenkranzs concluding ironies related to his parodic imitation (and ironic Aufhebung) of the Berliner
Posse, in which he comically depicts the lack of understanding of philosophic
issues by the two gendarmes. (See also Rosenkranzs 1840 response to Ruges
criticisms in his Aus einem Tagebuch, 173.)
29. See Ruges Heine und seine Zeit (Heine and His Age) of 1838 and
1846 and Heine und unsere Zeit (Heine and Our Age) of 1843 and 1846
in Arnold Ruge, Werke und Briefe, 3:138 and 3960. (Heine later complained to
Campe in a letter of January 3, 1847, about Ruges attacks on him.)
30. See also Gnter Oesterle, Integration und Konflikt: Die Prosa Heinrich
Heines im Kontext oppositioneller Literatur der Restaurationsepoche (Stuttgart: Metzler,
1972), 92ff., on this particular criticism of Heine, as well as on other writings

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on humor and frivolity of the time such as the Hegelian F. T. Vischers ber das
Erhabene und das Komische: Ein Beitrag zu der Philosophie des Schnen (On the Sublime and the Comic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of the Beautiful) of 1837. Rosenkranz refers in the sthetik des Hsslichen to Vischers sthetik oder Wissenschaft des
Schnen (Aesthetics or Science of the Beautiful) of 1846 and praises his article on the
caricaturists Gavarni and Tpffer of 1846, although Henckmann has also seen a
more general criticism of Vischer in Rosenkranzs work; see Henckmann, foreword, xvi.
31. See Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen, 267.
32. Hegel, as edited by Hotho, had opposed the fantastic caricature
to the true Ideal in the conclusion of part 1 of his Aesthetics, when discussing
the then popularity of the originality of wit and humour (see Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:295). Oesterle, Integration, 138n14, also comments on earlier eighteenthcentury oppositions of caricature to the ideal.
33. On the latter, see also Margaret A. Rose, Reading the Young Marx and
Engels: Poetry, Parody and the Censor (London and Totowa: Croom Helm and Rowman and Littlefield, 1978).
34. See K. Schumm, Briefe von Karl Rosenkranz ber seine HegelBiographie, DVLG 11 (1933): 2942; 4041.
35. See Kliche, Pathologie des Schnen, 471ff. Kliches conclusion that
the disappointment of Rosenkranzs liberal ideas led to his aesthetics of the ugly
becoming, in contrast to Friedrich Schlegels theory of the ugly, an aesthetics
of resignation, in which the ugly is accepted as a necessary part of life, appears,
however, to overlook the role given caricature in Rosenkranzs work of 1853 as a
liberation from the ugly.
36. See Gldenstern in Rosenkranz, Das Centrum, 74 (Hfener, Hegel Spiele,
310); and Henckmann, foreword, vi.
37. See also Henckmann, foreword, xxxxi.
38. See also the conclusion of Rosenkranzs defense of Cervantes in his
sthetik des Hsslichen, 66, where he appears to suggest that caricature inspired by
genius can help change circumstances the State and its police cannot.
39. See also Mary Lee Townsend, Forbidden Laughter: Popular Humor and
the Limits of Repression in Nineteenth-Century Prussia (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1992) and Europische Karikaturen im Vor- und Nachmrz, Forum
Vormrz Forschung Jahrbuch 2005, vol. 11, ed. H. Fischer and F. Vassen (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2006).
40. See Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:1819; and Hegels Vorlesungen ber die sthetik,
ed. H. G. Hotho (183538 and 184243 on the basis of Hegels 1823, 1826, and
182829 Berlin lectures), in G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in 20 Bnden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vols. 1315 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1970 ff.); vol. 13 (Frankfurt am Main 1970), 35. Rosenkranz (who did not
himself attend Hegels lectures) refers to Hothos edition of 183538.
41. See Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:295.
42. Henckmann, foreword, p. x, notes that Rosenkranz had written to Varnhagen von Ense toward the end of 1837 that he was already busy at that time with
a dialectical development of the subject of the ugly and the comic in which he

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had shown caricature to be the transition from the ugly to the comic, and that
he was then already gathering some of the material (and caricatures) that he
would use for his manuscript of 185253. (See Rosenkranz to Varnhagen on November 19, 1837, in the Briefwechsel zwischen Rosenkranz und Varnhagen von Ense, ed.
Arthur Warda [Knigsberg: Graefe und Unzer, 1926], 59: Das ist eine Entwicklung des Hsslichen und Komischen, wo ich den Begriff der Karikatur als den
Uebergang vom Hsslichen zum Komischen stringent nachgewiesen habe.)
43. Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen (240 and 451, and 307 and 455) also
makes reference to Schopenhauers Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as
Will and Idea) of 1819 as well as (on other pages) to Kant, Schiller, Goethe, and
Hegel, among others.
44. See Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen, 435.
45. See also Henckmann, foreword, xviii.
46. Rosenkranz discusses Schlegels Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und
Rmer (History of the Poetry of the Greeks and the Romans) of 1798.
47. See Kliche, Pathologie des Schnen, 461ff.
48. See Kliche, Pathologie des Schnen, 464. See also Oesterle, Entwurf; and Funk on sthetik des Hsslichen, on Weisse and Rosenkranz; as well as
Richard Qubicker, Karl Rosenkranz, eine Studie zur Geschichte der Hegelschen Philosophie (Leipzig: Erich Koschny [L. Heimanns Verlag], 1879), 77ff., on Rosenkranzs differences from Weisse.
49. Christian Hermann Weisses System der sthetik als Wissenschaft von der
Idee der Schnheit, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Hartmann, 1830), 1:210, describes the comic
as aufgehobene Hsslichkeit (superseded, canceled out, or dissolved ugliness),
oder als die Wiederherstellung des Schnheit aus ihrer absoluten Negativitt
welche die Hsslichkeit ist (or as the restoration of beauty from its absolute
negativity, which is ugliness).
50. See Weisse, System der sthetik, 1:182; and see also Rosenkranz, sthetik
des Hsslichen, 5, on this limitation. One other theorist discussed by Rosenkranz
in his notes to p. 5 is August Wilhelm Bohtz, whose ber das Komische und die
Komdie: Ein Beitrag zur Philosophie des Schnen (On the Comic and the Comedy: A
Contribution to the Philosophy of the Beautiful) of 1844 Rosenkranz suggests had
discussed the ugly (das Hssliche) as the inversion (turning upside down) of the
beautiful (see Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen, 435).
51. See Weisse, System der sthetik, 1:210 and 217ff. on die komische Phantasie (the comic imagination).
52. See ibid., 1:210 (my translation). See also 1:22930 on the negation of
the ugly in humor.
53. See ibid., 2:216.
54. See Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen, 435.
55. Rosenkranz sthetik des Hsslichen, p. 435, quotes from Ruges New
Primer of Aesthetics, 93.
56. See also Rosenkranz sthetik des Hsslichen, 425 f., on the phantastische
Karikatur (the fantastic caricature).
57. Die Hegelsche Rechte; Texte aus den Werken von F. W. Carov, J. E. Erdmann,
K. Fischer, E. Gans, H. F. W. Hinrichs, C. L. Michelet, H. B. Oppenheim, K. Rosenkranz

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und C. Rssler, ed. Hermann Lbbe (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1962), for example,
places Rosenkranz on the right wing of the Hegelians with a mixture of political
writings of both a liberal and a more conservative nature from differing periods
of Rosenkranzs life and without looking at works such as the sthetik des Hsslichen.
58. Letter to Rhl, March 28, 1878, in Arnold Ruge: Briefwechsel und Tagebuchbltter, vol. 11, Briefwechsel 18481880 (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1985), 412.
59. Ruge appears frequently to have wanted to place Rosenkranz on the
right rather than in the center after 1840. David McLellan, The Young Hegelians
and Karl Marx, 29, notes that Ruge, following Rosenkranzs criticisms of the
growing radicalism of the Hallische Jahrbcher after 1840, had described the contributors to the subsequent Deutsche Jahrbcher as consisting of more traditional
Hegelians such as Rosenkranz, then Strauss and F. T. Fischer, and, finally, the
atheists Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach. Ruge also criticizes Rosenkranz in a letter to him of April 1842 (in Arnold Ruge: Briefwechsel 182547, 10:271) for finding Ruge too radical an editor. Rosenkranz also criticizes die Bauersche Fraction des Junghegelianismus (the Bauer faction of Young Hegelianism) for the
cynicism of its atheism in an entry from 1842 in his Aus einem Tagebuch, 110
11, and later claims (Rosenkranz, Aus einem Tagebuch, p. 116 from 1843) to have
predicted the banning of the Deutsche Jahrbcher. (On Bauer, see also Douglas
Moggach, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer [Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press], 2003.)
60. Ruge: Briefwechsel, 11:413.
61. Ibid., 11:346.
62. Ibid., 11:38586.
63. Ruge had earlier noted in his review of Rosenkranzs Das Centrum der
Speculation that Leo had appeared in it as der Historiker (historian) who calls
the two policemen on stage to get rid of Ruge and the troublesome Hegelian
friends the historian describes there as Papageien, or parrots. In notes from
1839 recorded in his Aus einem Tagebuch, 46ff., Rosenkranz describes Leo as believing Hegelian philosophy to be pagan and the Hegeling Ruge that it should
engage in practical reform. And see also Ruges criticism of Leo in his Der literarische Kampf mit der Reaktion (The Literary Battle with the Reaction), in
Arnold Ruge: Werke und Briefe, vol. 4, Politische Kritiken 18381846 (Aalen: Scientia,
1988), 11472.
64. See also Rosenkranzs Meine Reform der Hegelschen Philosophie (Knigsberg, 1852). Qubicker, Karl Rosenkranz, 15, nonetheless praises Rosenkranz for
having developed Hegels Logic further.
65. See Carl Prantl, Joh. Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz, in Allgemeine Deutsche
Biographie, vol. 29 (Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker und Humblot, 1889), 21315.
66. See also Rosenkranz, Aus einem Tagebuch, 173ff.
67. Prantl, Joh. Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz, 215, suggests that Rosenkranz follows Weisse rather than Hegel in his aesthetics, but Rosenkranz also
clearly wishes to go beyond Weisse in the sthetik des Hsslichen.
68. See Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy with an Adaptation
of the Poetics and a Translation of the Tractatus Coislinianus (Oxford: Blackwell,

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1924); and Richard Janko, Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II

(London: Duckworth, 1984), and Poetics I / Aristotle: With the Tractatus Coislinianus,
a Hypothetical Reconstruction of Poetics II, translated with notes by Richard Janko
(Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987).
69. The exact nature of the cathartic release effected by laughter suggested
in the Tractatus Coislinianus is, however, still being debated: is it, for instance, the
catharsis (cleansing or purgation) of the emotions related to the ugly such as
that of revulsion (in tragedy the emotions to be purged include terror or fear),
or of the laughable in the ugly which makes us think the ugly foolish, or of something else altogether?
70. Monroe Beardsley, for one, describes Rosenkranzs work in his Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1966) as simply a
treatise on the ugly.
71. Ingram Bywater in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), translates Aristotle as saying in his De Poetica chapter 5, 1449b,
that as for Comedy, it is . . . an imitation of men worse than the average; worse,
however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous (geloion [the laughable]), which is a species of the
Ugly (aischros).
72. See also Kliche, Pathologie des Schnen, 460. Kliche also writes
(without going into the question of comic catharsis in later Aristotelian theories
of comedy) on how, in Aristotles Poetics, comedy (die Komdie), and not tragedy, is described as the imitation of the worse than average character or action,
but not in relationship to every kind of fault, but only to the laughable that is a
part of the ugly: die Nachahmung von Gemeinerem [Schlechterem], aber nicht
in Bezug auf jede Art von Schlechtigkeit, sondern nur des Lcherlichen, das ein
Teil des Hsslichen ist. (The last lines are taken by Kliche from Aristotles Poetik,
trans. O. Gignon [Stuttgart: Reclam, 1961], 29.)
73. See Weisse, System der sthetik, 1:209.
74. The Tractatus Coislinianus was commented upon in Germany by such
figures as Dntzer, Meineke, and Spengel in 1840 as well as by Theodor Bergk in
his edition of Aristophanes comedies of 1852 and by J. Bernays in 1853; see also
The Poetics of Aristotle and the Tractatus Coislinianus: A Bibliography from About
900 till 1996, comp. Omert J. Schrier (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 49ff.
75. See Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen, 53.
76. See, for example, Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:15 and 212 on Aristotle on tragedy, and Hegel on comedy in 2:1199ff.
77. See ibid., 1:599.
78. See ibid., 2:887.
79. See ibid., 1:169 regarding the exhibition of contemporary paintings
in Berlin in 1828; and see also Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Die Kritik an der
Dsseldorfer Malerschule bei Hegel und den Hegelianern, in Dsseldorf in der
deutschen Geistesgeschichte, ed. Gerhard Kurz, (Dsseldorf, 1984), 26388; 272ff.
80. See Arnold Ruge, Der Zeitgeist in der Dsseldorfer Akademie, in
Werke und Briefe, 3:18896.
81. Ruge, Werke und Briefe, 3:188.

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82. Ibid., 3:190ff.

83. See Wilhelm von Schadows Die klugen und trichten Jungfrauen of 1842,
in the Stdelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main.
84. Ruge, Werke und Briefe, 3:193.
85. Ibid., 3:19495 also praises the works of C. F. Sohn (18051867).
86. Ibid., 3:196.
87. Ruge concludes (ibid., 196) that after the mystic veil has fallen, liberated youth stands there in all its breathtaking beauty and shining truth (my
translation).
88. See Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen, 209ff. and 386ff.
89. See also Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen, 212 on the types of realistic, ironic, and comic representation available to the genre painter, as well as his
concluding pages on the liberating, cathartic aspects of the comic.
90. See also William Vaughan, German Romantic Art, 2nd ed. (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 22324. (Hasenclevers The Artists Studio
[Maleratelier or Atelierszene] of 1836 [72 x 88 cm] is held by the museum kunst
palast in Dsseldorf.)
91. See also Bettina Baumgrtel, Die Atelierszene als Programmbild der
Dsseldorfer Genremalerei, in Johann Peter Hasenclever (18101853): Ein Malerleben zwischen Biedermeier und Revolution (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2003),
6170.
92. See also Margaret A. Rose, Parodie, Intertextualitt, Interbildlichkeit (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2006). Rosenkranz also criticizes the sentimentality of the
early Dsseldorf school as well as (like Hegel on Schadow in Hegel, Aesthetics, following Hotho, 2:85657) its attempts to imitate poetry; see Rosenkranz, sthetik
des Hsslichen, 7273; and see also Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:162.
93. See also Kliches account of the term in his Pathologie des Schnen,
459.
94. Invective is also distinguished from comedy in the Tractatus Coislinianus;
see Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy; and Janko, Aristotle on Comedy.
95. See also Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen, 170: Im absolut Schnen
wird das Erhabene zur Wrde und das Gefllige zur Anmuth (In the absolute
beautiful the sublime becomes dignity and the pleasing grace; my translation).
Knox translates Schillers 1793 essay on Anmut und Wrde, to which this sentence can also allude, as Grace and Dignity in his translation of Hegels reference to it in his Aesthetics.
96. Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen, 387: Die Caricatur ist insofern die
Spitze in der Gestaltung des Hsslichen, allein eben deshalb macht sie, durch
ihren bestimmten Reflex in das von ihr verzerrte positive Gegenbild, den Uebergang ins Komische.
97. See also Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen, 168, on how the ugly must
be seen as part of a process of becoming.
98. See also Scheer, Zur Theorie des Hsslichen bei Karl Rosenkranz,
153n13.
99. See also Weisse, System der sthetik, 249, on the way in which true humor
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100. See also Karl Rosenkranz, Die Topographie des heutigen Paris und Berlin
(The Topography of Modern-Day Paris and Berlin) (Knigsberg, 1850).
101. Rosenkranz can also be said to point here to how figures such as the
badaud (a cousin of the flneur) were caricatured in some nineteenth-century
works as a release fromrather than as a depiction ofcity alienation; see Margaret A. Rose, Flaneurs & Idlers (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2007).
102. Rosenkranzs inclusion of nineteenth-century writers such as Dickens
and Gutzkow also points to a modern interest in the comic character studies and
sketches of his time; on the latter, see Martina Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth
Century: European Journalism and Its Physiologies, 183050 (Basingstoke and New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
103. See Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen, 41213.
104. See ibid., 413; and see also Scheer, Zur Theorie des Hsslichen bei
Karl Rosenkranz, 154.
105. Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen, 432: Dass sie in ihrer Verzerrung
schn werde, unsterblicher Heiterkeit voll, ist jedoch nur mglich durch den
Humor, der sie ins Phantastische bertreibt.
106. See also Ursula Franke, Jenseits von schn und hsslich: Eine Skizze
im Blick auf die Gegenwartskunst, in Klemme, Pauen, and Raters, Im Schatten
des Schnen, 289304. Dieter Kliche ends his essay on Rosenkranz (Pathologie
des Schnen, 482) with the suggestion that the first poetic protagonist of Rosenkranzs sthetik des Hsslichen was Baudelaire and his Fleurs du Mal, but more also
needs to be said in this context of Rosenkranzs emphasis on caricature as liberation from the ugly.
107. One of the texts used by Rosenkranz, C. F. Flgels history of the grotesque comic (Geschichte des Groteskkomischen, 1788) (see also Rosenkranz on Justus Msers Harlequin oder die Verteidigung des Groteskkomischen [Harlequin or the Defense of the Grotesque Comic] of 1761), has also found new
publics in recent decades following Wolfgang Kaysers study of the grotesque in
art and literature of 1957.
108. Other influences on Rosenkranzs work include Alexander von Humboldts Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, the explorers philosophic
attempt to find and show a unity in nature, published in Berlin from 1845 to
1858. (See also Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen, 438, on Humboldt.) Rosenkranz describes his own undertaking as a Kosmos des Hsslichen (Cosmos
of the Ugly) in his foreword, p. iv. It is also interesting to note that Humboldt
himself showed interest in the growth of caricature in contemporary works, such
as those of Wilhelm von Kaulbach (see also Rosenkranz, sthetik des Hsslichen,
398, on Kaulbachs caricatures for Goethes Reineke Fuchs, published 1846), when
he wrote to Wilhelm von Schadow about the latters Der moderne Vasari (1854;
The Modern Vasari) that Schadow should also investigate the tendency to treat
sublime objects in a burlesque and playful manner (Kaulbach in frescoes) in
contemporary art (see Humboldt to Schadow, quoted in Heinrich Finke, Aus
den Papieren Wilhelm von Schadows, Hochland 9 [1912]: 14780; 148). (Both
Humboldt and Schadow had been caricatured by Kaulbach.) Oesterle, Entwurf, 296n294, following Varnhagen, also refers to a letter from Humboldt to

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Rosenkranz about the latters sthetik des Hsslichen (see also Funk, sthetik des
Hsslichen, 245). And on Kaulbach as well as on Rosenkranz on caricature, see
Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov, Klassizismus und Karikatur: Eine Konstellation der
Kunst am Beginn der Moderne (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1998.) (My thanks also go to
Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov, Rodney S. Livingstone, and Douglas Moggach
for their comments on and assistance with this essay.)
109. Ingrid Pepperle, for example, has described Rosenkranz as belonging
on both political and theoretical grounds to the liberal center (dem liberalen
Zentrum) of the Old Hegelians in her Junghegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie und
Kunsttheorie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1978), 134.
110. One of the more liberal passages quoted by Lbbe from Rosenkranz,
which appears to undermine the designation of the latter as a right-wing Hegelian, contains a Habermasian defense of the opening up of the public sphere
with the increased freedom given clubs and reading groups following the 1848
revolutions; see Rosenkranz, Die Bedeutung der gegenwrtigen Revolution und
die daraus entspringende Aufgabe der Abgeordneten (The Meaning of the
Present Revolution and the Task of the Deputies Deriving from It) in Lbbe,
Die Hegelsche Rechte, 143ff.
111. See also McLellan, The Young Hegelians; and Toews, Hegelianism, on the
problems of categorizing the Young and Old Hegelians.
112. Rosenkranz himself comments on the changing laws governing the
publication of caricatures in his time when he notes in the Miscellen, 35354,
of his Aus einem Tagebuch, how new freedom for caricatures had even led to the
pious (die Frommen) publishing ones against David Friedrich Strauss.

Part 5

Appropriations and Critiques

of Hegel

12

Some Political Implications of

Feuerbachs Theory of Religion
Todd Gooch

Together with David Friedrich Strausss The Life of Jesus (183536), Ludwig Feuerbachs epochal work, The Essence of Christianity (Das Wesen des
Christentums, 1841), has come to represent the radical challenge posed
to traditional Christian doctrines by a younger generation of Hegels
disciples. A significant advance in English-language research on Feuerbach was marked by the publication of several books and articles in the
late 1970s and early 1980s by James Massey, John Toews, and Marilyn
Chapin Massey, who each sought in different ways to illuminate the
political significance of the superficially apolitical works of these two
leading Young Hegelians.1 Whereas previous Feuerbach commentators
such as Marx Wartofsky and Eugene Kamenka viewed Feuerbachs rhetorical and aphoristic prose as an obstacle to the comprehension of his
principal philosophical claims, in a paper entitled Censorship and the
Language of Feuerbachs Essence of Christianity (1841) Chapin Massey
argued that the linguistic strategies employed by Feuerbach in this work
were necessitated by the political circumstances in which he wrote and
directly related to the underlying purpose of his book. In opposition to
the prevailing interpretation of Essence of Christianity as an expression of
bourgeois complacency, Chapin Massey sought to identify an undercurrent of social critique in Feuerbachs book to which the adjectives
revolutionary and practical-critical (which are borrowed from Marxs
Theses on Feuerbach) can appropriately be applied.
More recently, Warren Breckman has pointed out a tendency on
the part of earlier interpreters to presume that a sudden shift in the
focus of attention of the Young Hegelians occurred sometime around
1844.2 On the view that Breckman seeks to overcome, whereas Strauss,
Bruno Bauer, and Feuerbach were inspired by Hegels philosophy to develop increasingly poignant attacks against the traditional faith, it was
left to Arnold Ruge, Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Moses Hess to draw out
the political implications of these criticisms of theology and to discover
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in Hegels philosophy resources for a radical critique of state and society.

The problem with this narrative, Breckman suggests, is that it prevents
us from recognizing the intrinsic political significance of the theological and anti-theological positions espoused by the Young Hegelians, and
especially by Feuerbach. What has specifically gone unnoticed is the crucial interrelationship between arguments about the nature of personality (Persnlichkeit) and the existence of a personal God, on the one
hand, and the contested issue of political sovereignty in post-Napoleonic
Europe, on the other.
There can be little doubt that Feuerbachs activity as a theorist of
religion was motivated by underlying practical concerns, and that discussions of Feuerbach have frequently suffered from a failure to take these
concerns into consideration. Seven years after the initial publication of
Essence of Christianity, after having spent over a decade secluded in a remote corner of Bavaria, Feuerbach delivered a series of public lectures
to a mixed audience of students, workers, and other interested people
in the city of Heidelberg. In the course of those lectures, Feuerbach
observed that his fundamental aim in writing about religion had always
been to illuminate the shadowy essence of religion with the torch of
reason so that humanity might finally cease to be the prey, the plaything,
of those powers that are the enemies of humanity, and that have always
sought, and still seek, to employ the darkness of religion to oppress
humankind.3 The fact that Feuerbach was invited to give these lectures
by popular demand at the height of the revolutionary fervor of 1848 is
an indication of the reputation he had come to enjoy among Germans
yearning for political change.
Because Feuerbach acknowledges that his theorizing about religion is meant to contribute to the project of human emancipation,
when, in the preface to the first edition of Essence of Christianity, he describes the purpose of that book as a therapeutic or practical one,4
it is tempting to interpret these words in some kind of straightforward
political sense. Feuerbach, who himself tells us that he was forced by
political circumstances to employ a veiled style of writing,5 could then
be taken to mean that Essence of Christianity was intended primarily as a
critique of the throne and altar ideology of the German ruling class.
Caution, however, is warranted. An initial complication arises from the
fact that, in the very same work, Feuerbach sometimes adopts a positively
disdainful attitude toward the practical standpoint, which he associates pejoratively with egoism and refers to at one point as filthy.6 On
the reasonable assumption that Feuerbach would not have described his
own authorial intent as filthy, the word practical must be used in at
least two different senses in Essence of Christianity. But the difference is

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not explicitly acknowledged, nor does Feuerbach ever spell out his understanding of the relationship between theory and practice. Indeed,
despite his obvious identification with the revolutionary cause, there
are some indications that, throughout most of his career, his interest in
politics remained relatively peripheral.7 Three years before his death in
1872, after having moved to Nuremberg, where he lived with his family
under severely strained financial circumstances, Feuerbach became a
dues-paying member of the Social Democratic Workers Party founded
by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht.8 Prior to this time, however,
in spite of his close association with a number of leading radical figures,
Feuerbach hesitated to identify himself too closely with any particular
political doctrine.
Because Feuerbach never addressed issues of political theory at any
length, information about his views must be gleaned from isolated and
sometimes obscure comments contained in his published writings on
religion, his reviews of other peoples books, and his personal correspondence. On the basis of these sources, in this chapter I hope to clarify the
nature of the practical concerns that motivated Feuerbachs theorizing
about religion. Although the argument developed here draws heavily on
the work of Breckman, in the end I find his portrayal of Feuerbach as
a social critic who was deeply troubled by the historical development of
civil society, that sphere of social life where the rules of the market prevail and individuals pursue their self-interest, to be misleading.9 Breckmans reading of Feuerbach is anachronistic insofar as it emphasizes a
concern with the social question that is more properly attributed to a
subsequent generation of radical German intellectuals who enthusiastically embraced Feuerbachs analysis of Christianity, but developed it in
ways that suited their own revolutionary purposes. The political implications of Feuerbachs analysis of Christianity ought not to be confused
with its historical influence.
Although many early German socialists rallied around the flag of
Feuerbachian humanism, there does not seem to be a direct conceptual
path that leads from Feuerbachs claims about the human species-essence
to a socialist position in political philosophy. The students who invited
Feuerbach to Heidelberg in 1848 believed that he had securely established the eternal rights of man on the sole true foundation of nature.10
Because Feuerbach does not in any of his writings propose a theory of
natural law, however, the manner in which he is supposed to have done
so is far from obvious. The nature and extent of these rights, how they
are derived from Feuerbachs claims about the human species-essence,
and the form of political organization that they call for are all matters
that are left unresolved.

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Feuerbachs ideas were embraced by people of significantly different political persuasions, although these differences are sometimes
obscured by the fact that a number of distinct positions on the left side
of the political spectrum had not yet been clearly distinguished at the
time when Feuerbachs influence was at its height. Terms like socialism and communism, for example, were only beginning to be incorporated into the European political vocabulary, and were capable of assuming a number of different meanings.11 During the 1840s, Feuerbach
occasionally identifies himself as a communist, but he invariably adds
some qualification, and the sense that he attaches to the word is unclear.
The following fragment, probably written in 1844, is typical: What is
my principle? Ego and alter ego, egoism and communism, for both are
as inseparable as head and heart.12 Apparently Feuerbach is unwilling to
sacrifice the interests of the individual to those of society as a whole or
vice versa, but the statement is by no means self-explanatory.13 In other
places Feuerbach sounds more like a pragmatic liberal than a socialist.
In a letter written in April 1848, Feuerbach expresses the view that a republic is the only form of state that corresponds to the dignity of the
human essence, but he is willing to accept a constitutional monarchy
provisionally. For now and the immediate future I want nothing further
than the complete realization and establishment of the rights and freedoms unanimously claimed by all German people; whether this occurs in
a monarchy or a republic makes no difference to me.14
Marx famously remarked that the philosophers have only interpreted the world, whereas the point is to change it.15 In spite of Chapin
Masseys effort to defend Feuerbach against this charge by pointing out
a practical-critical dimension of Essence of Christianity, Marxs judgment
is correct to the extent that philosophy was a vocation that Feuerbach
never aspired to leave behind. Although he sometimes has extremely
negative things to say about egoism, there are good reasons not to identify the kind of egoism that Feuerbach is concerned to expose with the
acquisitiveness that characterizes brgerliche Gesellschaft or civil society
(a term that is noticeably absent from Feuerbachs vocabulary). Feuerbachs primary target is more properly conceived as a kind of epistemological egoism that subordinates the pursuit of truth as an end in itself to
the satisfaction of inclinations that are irrelevant to this task. Bourgeois
or not, at least in Essence of Christianity and during the years leading up
to its publication, Feuerbachs overriding concern is to preserve and defend the achievements of the modern philosophical and scientific tradition (i.e., Wissenschaft broadly conceived) against what he perceives to
be a fundamental threat posed by pseudo-philosophers who enjoy the
patronage of a reactionary aristocracy.

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Of course, Feuerbach recognizes that the views espoused by his

opponents in the German universities serve the ideological purpose of
legitimizing despotism, but he does not criticize them on these grounds.
He criticizes them because he believes they are false and that human
beings have a sacred duty to expose falsehood and assist those who
are capable of distinguishing truth from error in doing so.16 Practical
or political despotism, in Feuerbachs way of thinking, follows from theoretical despotism, which is why he stubbornly insisted in the face of requests to turn his attention to politics that the eradication of theology
must be completed before a viable political solution to the most urgent
problems of the day could be discovered.17

The Positive Philosophy and the

Christian State
In October 1843 Marx wrote to Feuerbach inviting him to contribute a
critique of F. W. J. Schelling to the newly established Deutsch-franzsische
Jahrbcher. Tempted by the invitation, Feuerbach finally demurred, explaining that although he was able to recognize the political necessity
of such an undertaking, he considered the task to be theoretically superfluous in light of the criticism to which Schellings absurd theosophy
had already been exposed, not least of all by Feuerbach himself in his review of Friedrich Julius Stahls Philosophy of Law (Philosophie des Rechts).18
The review to which Feuerbach refers is the last of several reviews that
he wrote during the 1830s for the Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftliche Kritik,
the principal journal of the Hegelian academic establishment. Thereafter Feuerbach began to contribute reviews and essays instead to Arnold
Ruges Hallische Jahrbcher, which soon became an important vehicle for
the expression of Young Hegelian ideas in an increasingly contentious
series of polemical controversies toward the end of the decade.19 The
famous arguments presented by Feuerbach in Essence of Christianity concerning the reduction of theology to anthropology through a reversal of
the subject-predicate relation in theological propositions do not signal
a sudden breakthrough in Feuerbachs thinking. Rather, they develop
lines of thought first articulated in reviews and essays written by Feuerbach during the preceding six years.
The first edition of Essence of Christianity was published in 1841. A
revised edition appeared in 1843, and it is upon this second edition that
George Eliots influential English translation is based. Eliot omitted the
opening pages of Feuerbachs preface to the second edition because she

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felt they had too specific a reference to transient German polemics to

interest the English reader.20 The passages missing from Eliots translation, however, include comments that are important for assessing the
political significance of Feuerbachs position in its historical context.
The close association between Feuerbachs analysis of religion in
Essence of Christianity and his break with Hegelian idealism has often
been recognized. Whereas Hegel and the right-wing Hegelians maintained that the content of religious and philosophical truth is identical
despite the formal difference in the manner in which it is apprehended
in each case, Feuerbach had sought in Essence of Christianity to attack the
speculative philosophy where it was most vulnerable . . . by mercilessly
destroying this illusory identification. Less attention has been paid to
Feuerbachs further acknowledgment in the preface to the second edition of Essence of Christianity that the right-wing Hegelians were not the
only theoretical opponents against whom his book had been directed.
At the same time, he continues, I succeeded in placing the so-called
positive philosophy in a most fatal light by showing that the original of its
idolatrous image of God [Gtzenbild] is man, that flesh and blood belong
to personality essentially.21 In a postscript to this preface Feuerbach
added a scathing condemnation of Schellings late philosophy, which
he acerbically referred to as this theological farce of the philosophical
Cagliostro of the nineteenth century.22
In order to appreciate the political significance of the analysis of
Christianity presented by Feuerbach in Essence of Christianity, it is crucial
to recognize the extent to which Feuerbachs claims in that work are
directed against Schelling and other representatives of what Feuerbach
refers to as the positive philosophy, who were enlisted by Friedrich Wilhelm IV after he assumed the throne in 1840 to combat the influence of
Hegelian rationalism in the Prussian universities. Friedrich Wilhelms
inner circle consisted largely of deeply religious military officers from
the aristocracy whose sensibilities had been shaped by their participation in the wars of liberation against Napoleon and in the neo-pietist
Awakening or Erweckungsbewegung, and who shared with the king a sense
of having been called by God to establish a Christian state to serve as a
bulwark against the forces of enlightenment and revolution on the Continent.23 The preferment of academics whose ideas were consistent with
this vision, and the censorship and surveillance of those deemed subversive, were two ways in which they sought to fulfill this calling. When
Feuerbach refers in a letter to Christianism [Christianismus] with all its
barbarism breaking out again in Europe,24 these are some of the developments he has in mind.
Stahl, who was destined to become one of the most important con-

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servative political theorists of the nineteenth century, held a chair in

the faculty of law at the University of Erlangen from 1830 to 1840. In
1840, primarily because of his anti-Hegelian credentials, he was called to
Berlin to fill the chair that had previously been occupied by the liberal
Hegelian Eduard Gans. Thereafter he became, in Marcuses words, the
philosophical spokesperson of the Prussian monarchy.25 Throughout
the 1830s Stahl was closely associated with the Erlangen school of theology, which has been described as an academic expression of the Awakening.26 Although it was the publication of The Monarchical Principle in 1845
that sealed his reputation as a leading figure of the conservative cause
during the decades following the failed Revolution of 1848,27 the main
principles of Stahls political theory had been laid out over a decade earlier in The Philosophy of Law, the first edition of which was published in
three volumes between 1830 and 1837.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Stahl sought in this work to
repudiate the entire development of modern philosophy since the seventeenth century. Rationalism, which aims to discover the truth through
reason alone, natural law (Naturrecht), which establishes nonreligious
moral norms and identifies the purpose of the state with the promotion
of human interests, and liberalism, which insists upon the inalienable
rights of the individual, are in Stahls way of thinking inextricably linked.
Together they constitute a prideful rebellion against divine authority, the
folly of which was exposed by the social dislocation resulting from the
French Revolution. Stahls effort to expound a scientific (wissenschaftlich)
system of law, the theoretical basis of which is the personality of God as
disclosed in the Christian revelation, was self-consciously undertaken as
a response to these developments. That Stahls approach to the philosophy of right was influenced by his participation in the Awakening is reflected in the following statement. The urge [Drang] to faith and piety,
the divine spirit, which the world pushed away for so long, has mightily
seized it again, and finally science too, paying homage to its power, must
recognize that it can only find security in agreement with Christian doctrine.28 Stahl was a Privatdozent at the University of Munich when Schelling delivered a famous series of lectures there on the history of modern
philosophy in 182728, and the historical point of view that underlies
Schellings positive system immediately became the theoretical foundation of Stahls attempt to develop a Christian doctrine of right and of
the state.
As a student Stahl had been profoundly influenced by the writings of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, whose name is frequently associated
with the pantheism controversy in which a number of important German thinkers were involved in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

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centuries. At the risk of oversimplification, Jacobis fideistic position in

this debate may be summed up as follows. The philosophical pursuit of
truth through reason alone leads inevitably to a deterministic view of the
universe devoid of the providential influence of a benign deity, and thus
to fatalism. But feeling (Gefhl) protests against this conclusion and demands that there exist a free and loving God with whom it is possible to
develop a relationship of heartfelt intimacy. No philosophical argument
is capable of proving that such a God exists. Thus the only way to get by
in the universe is to make a leap of faith and choose to believe that such
a God exists. The point to be emphasized here is that Jacobi conceived of
faith and reason as mutually exclusive options, and was willing to relinquish entirely any claim to knowledge of the objects of religious belief.
In his lectures On the History of Modern Philosophy, Schelling describes
Jacobi as a philosophical prophet who set out into the desert in search
of a promised land, the entrance into which he himself regarded as impossible. Jacobi, in other words, could not conceive of the possibility of
philosophical knowledge of the positive existence of the personal God
of religious faith. Whereas Jacobi had presented knowledge and faith
as mutually exclusive options, the late Schelling proposes the possibility
of a transition from negative philosophy to positive philosophy that is
marked by a a subjective act, roughly comparable to the act of worship, whereby that rational knowledge which completes itself through
the dialectical unfolding of the concept, having recognized itself as the
principle of all finite being, would proceed to regard itself precisely in
this goal, in this completion as mere sub-stance, and thus necessarily distinguish that to which it is substance or is subordinated [i.e., God] . . .
from itself. The type of knowledge at which positive philosophy thus
arrives is one that, having reached completion, destroys itself in belief
[Glaube], but precisely thereby posits what is truly positive and divine.29
Unlike Jacobi, who felt compelled to regard himself as a non-knower
with respect to God, Schelling takes himself to have found the promised
land that Jacobi did not think existed by conceiving of Glaube as a kind
of knowledge.
For Stahl, Schellings announcement of the positive system inaugurates a new philosophical era. Whereas negative philosophy has to do
with concepts and logical relationships, positive philosophy has to do
with individuals and facts. For it regards everything that exists [da ist]
as something that is because it is, because the almighty author [Urheber]
willed that it be so, not as something that is because it could not not
be. 30 As appropriated by Stahl, Schellings late philosophy provides the
foundation for a new Christian science in which the truths of the Christian revelation serve as the organizing principle of all scientific knowl-

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edge.31 Personality is identified as the principle of the world, and the

personality of God as the supreme reality with reference to which knowledge is ordered.
Like other theological conservatives, Stahl regarded Hegels philosophy as the culmination of the rationalist tradition in modern philosophy going back to Descartes. These critics were suspicious of attempts
to prove the existence of God through reason, which they regarded as
intrinsically fallible. The suggestion that God should be made to conform to the rules of logic, or that the possible courses of action available
to him should be constrained by his nature as a perfect being, seemed
to them to involve a prideful violation of his divine sovereignty. The emphasis placed by Stahl and other representatives of the positive philosophy on the personality of God is meant as a criticism of the pantheistic
conception of God as an infinite substance devoid of consciousness and
will, whose necessary existence and attributes are able to be deduced
a priori. At one point Stahl goes so far as to suggest that being born
again (die Wiedergeburt) is a precondition for the apprehension of genuine philosophical truths.32
Stahl and other positive philosophers claimed that the only secure
knowledge of God that can be had is the knowledge that God chooses
to disclose through his own free actions, which take the form of objective historical facts. Personalitywhether the personality of God or of
a human beingis expressed through actions. Just as a human beings
moral character is revealed through his or her actions, the divine attributes, that is, the predicates that are united in the personality of God,
are revealed through the act of creation and the revelation of Gods will
in specific historical events. The course of nature, rather than being determined by invariable laws of causal necessity, is guided by omniscient
providence. The purpose of the state and the law is to regulate human
conduct in accordance with Gods intentions. In no other way can love
of obedience and of [ones] subordinate station arise than from the
certainty that this is Gods order [Ordnung] and from religion, which
alone, against the inclination of the natural man, makes humility, selfdebasement, patience even in the face of injustice into a commandment,
yea, even into a wish.33
The focus of Feuerbachs review of Stahl is the conception of God
as an infinitely free personality that underlies Stahls system of law. Stahl
defines freedom as the ability to choose ones actions. Unlike finite persons, whose ability to choose is restricted by their limited capacities, God,
who is infinitely free, is able to choose from among infinite possibilities.
Furthermore, there is no logical necessity that compels him to make one
choice as opposed to another. God, in Stahls view, could have chosen

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not to create the universe, or to have created a universe different from

this one. Feuerbach argues that this conception of freedom is unworthy
of the divine nature. Having to deliberate and choose between mutually
exclusive options is the condition of an imperfect, finite being whose will
is determined by external factors. Freedom, for Feuerbach (following
Spinoza), is not choice, but self-determination. On this view, God alone
is truly free because God alone is infinite and therefore not determined
by anything other than himself.
To imagine that God deliberates and is forced to choose between
mutually exclusive options is to commit a category mistake. It is to think of
God, who alone is infinite, as though he were a finite individual. Whereas
the inability to do something, in the case of a finite being, is a sign of the
imperfection and limitation that finitude entails, the same is not true
in the case of an infinite being. Thus it is precisely not-being-able-notto-create that is the absolutely positive power of God, his freedom, just
as the not-being-able-to-be-different, the unconditional negation of the
possibility of any other conceivable manner of being, constitutes the absolute being of God.34 It is not a coincidence that this argument anticipates one of the central claims of Essence of Christianity, namely, that the
object of religious consciousness is said to belong to an order of being
that is categorically nonhuman, and yet is described in terms that are
drawn from human experience and can only be meaningfully applied
to a being that is humanlike or whose essence is human. The concept of
an infinite person, in Feuerbachs view, is unintelligible, because every
person is a self-conscious I who is necessarily distinguished from, and
therefore limited by, a not-I. Only finite persons exist.
Apart from specific logical inconsistencies that Feuerbach detects
in a number of Stahls arguments, on a more fundamental level Feuerbach questions the intelligibility of the very notion of a Christian philosophy of right. True Christianity, as Feuerbach conceives of it, is essentially
otherworldly. Jesus instructed his disciples not to store up treasures on
earth, but to store up treasures in heaven. When Saint Anthony heard
Jesus advice to the rich young man, he sold his possessions and moved
to the desert to devote himself to prayer and fasting. Saint Francis wrote
hymns to Lady Poverty. The Christian who exhibits the true spirit of
Christianity has no interest in worldly possessions, and therefore no reason to develop a theory of property rights. The fact that Stahl seeks to
construct such a theory on the basis of Christian principles is an indication of the extent to which his modern faith has been adulterated by
concerns that have nothing to do with true Christianity. In the final analysis, Stahls Christian philosophy of right is neither Christian, nor is it
philosophy. Feuerbach applies the same criticism to positive philosophy

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in general, which he refers to as the asylum of the ignorant that has

made itself into the principle of science.35

The Impossibility of Christian Philosophy

The Evangelische Kirchenzeitung was established in 1827 through the initiative of the brothers Ludwig and Otto von Gerlach, members of an aristocratic Prussian family closely associated with the neo-pietist Awakening.
Although not officially affiliated with any confessional body or political
program, under the editorship of Ernst Hengstenberg, professor of Old
Testament at the University of Berlin, the Kirchenzeitung functioned for
several decades as a major vehicle for the expression of theological and
political conservatism.36 Two events in particular contributed to the politicization of the newspaper: the July Revolution of 1830 and the publication of David Friedrich Strausss Life of Jesus in 1835.
Among the primary contributors to the Kirchenzeitung was Heinrich
Leo, professor of history at the University of Halle, an erstwhile Hegelian who in 1832 attached himself to a pietistic conventicle in Halle established by Ludwig von Gerlach and August Tholuck and in 1833 announced his conversion experience.37 In a series of articles published
in the Kirchenzeitung and a long pamphlet published in 1838, Leo denounced the radical tendencies of the Young Hegelians, charging them
with atheism. The specific accusations leveled by Leo against the Young
Hegelians were that they denied that God is a self-conscious person; that
they denied that God had been incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ
in a unique way; that they taught that the Gospels were mythological;
that they denied personal immortality and the Last Judgment; and that
they employed abstract phraseology to mask their outright repudiation
of doctrines accepted by all three ecclesiastical bodies in Germany.38 Because their philosophical position contradicted the doctrines of the statesanctioned church and thereby undermined the authority of the state,
Leo argued, the Young Hegelians should be prohibited from teaching
in German universities. These charges were taken by Ruge and the contributors to his Hallische Jahrbcher as a declaration of war. The publication of Feuerbachs analysis of the ensuing controversy in the Jahrbcher
was suspended by the censor after the first two installments. Feuerbachs
response to Leo was subsequently published outside of Prussia in 1839
in the form of a pamphlet entitled Philosophy and Christianity (Philosophie
und Christentum), a text to which Feuerbach refers his readers in the 1843
preface to Essence of Christianity.

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In Philosophy and Christianity Feuerbach emphasizes the importance of viewing the controversy resulting from Leos accusations in the
proper historical perspective. For Feuerbach, Leos opposition to the
Young Hegelians is only the most recent of a series of cases, occurring
over several centuries, in which theology has sought to curtail the freedom of philosophical inquiry. Feuerbach views the entire development
of modern philosophy and science as a process through which the philosophical principle has gradually sought to distinguish itself from the
theological one, with which it is fundamentally incompatible. This thesis was developed by Feuerbach in three major works on the history of
modern philosophy published during the 1830s, and is a central theme
running through Essence of Christianity.
Ostensibly, Leo is not opposed to philosophy per se, but only to
those philosophical doctrines that are fundamentally incompatible with
the teachings of the church. What Leo in fact opposes, in Feuerbachs
view, is the disinterested pursuit of truth as an end in itself. Reason, for
the would-be Christian philosopher, is only a means to be employed in
the service of an apologetic defense of the tenets of orthodoxy, the truth
of which is presupposed at the outset of philosophical inquiry. The religious speculators want to serve two masters: faith and reason, but in
doing so they satisfy neither reason nor faith.39 In agreement with Jacobi, and in disagreement with the late Schelling and those influenced
by him, Feuerbach categorically rejects the possibility of a philosophical
faith, which he regards as a contradiction in terms. Because the rules of
logic are universally valid and there is no difference between the sense
organs of Christians and non-Christians, the idea of Christian philosophy is no more intelligible than the idea of Christian mathematics or
Christian botany.
It is interesting to note that Feuerbachs rejection of the speculative reconciliation of religious and philosophical truth begins to be articulated in the politically charged context of his response to Leo. In his
public denunciation of the Young Hegelians, Leo had given voice to the
suspicion harbored by many Christians that Hegels philosophy, despite
its employment of Christian terminology, was incompatible with the historic faith. Put on the defensive, as Breckman has observed, the Right
Hegelians had responded to the Strauss controversy by ceding nearly
everything to the Christian personalists.40 This led to increased polarization within the Hegelian camp, one expression of which was Feuerbachs
effort to demonstrate the untenability of the accommodation that the
right-wing Hegelians had sought between Christian doctrine and philosophical science.
In Philosophy and Christianity, Feuerbach argues that the difference

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between religion and philosophy is not merely a formal difference but

an essential one, which has to do with the manner in which religion and
philosophy, respectively, each relate to their object. The human faculties
that are employed in religion are the heart (Gemt) and the imagination
(Phantasie), whereas the faculty employed in philosophy is reason (Vernunft ). Imagination is the subjective intellectual faculty, which presents
things in accordance with the heart; reason is the objective intellectual
faculty, which presents things as they are, without taking the needs of the
heart into consideration.41 But because the nature of an object cannot
be conceived apart from its relation to the subject, and because religion
involves an essentially different kind of relation to its object than does
philosophy, the object of religious belief and the object of philosophical
knowledge cannot be identical. Because religion and philosophy are essentially distinct, there is no necessary conflict between them. Conflict
arises only when an attempt is made to provide a philosophical justification for religious belief and to present the objects of the religious
imagination in the form of a rationally coherent system of religious doctrine (Lehre). The conflict is not between philosophy and religion, but
between philosophy and theology.
Of particular interest to students of the theory of religion proposed
by Feuerbach in Essence of Christianity is the claim, expressed in Philosophy
and Christianity, that God is a species-concept (Gattungsbegriff ). One of
the central accusations leveled by Leo and other orthodox critics against
the Hegelians was that they had reduced God to a mere concept that
has no independent existence apart from thought, whereas the biblical
God is a distinct individual whose existence in no way depends upon the
consciousness of human beings. Feuerbach responds that the conception of God as a concrete individual is philosophically naive, appealing
in defense of this claim to the testimony of Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius,
Thomas Aquinas, and Albertus Magnus, all of whom maintained that
God is not good or just in the same sense in which an individual person is said to be good or just, but that God is goodness itself, justice itself, and so on. But what can this mean, Feuerbach asks, other than that
God is the reale Gattungsbegriff, that is, the species imagined in the
form of an individual? All of the predicates that are typically assigned
to God are personified species-concepts that have been abstracted from
human experience. For example, Gods creative activity is nothing but
human creative activity thought apart from its relation to any particular
material content. Omnipresence is existence in space and time, but not
in any particular spatiotemporal location. It is in his response to Leo
that Feuerbach begins to develop the method of genetic-critical analysis,
which, in the preface to Essence of Christianity, he likens to the method

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of analytical chemistry, and which he uses in that work to dissolve the

riddle of the Christian religion into the mundane facts of human experience from which it was originally synthesized through psychological
processes of abstraction, imagination, and projection.42 In light of the
political interests that Leo represents, the fact that this method and the
claims associated with it are first articulated in response to Leo suggests
a political dimension to Feuerbachs argument in Essence of Christianity
that has often gone unnoticed.

The Essence of Christianity in Its

Polemical Context
The first two installments of Feuerbachs analysis of the so-called LeoHegel controversy appeared in the Hallische Jahrbcher in March 1839.
In November 1839 Ruge wrote to Feuerbach from Halle, inviting him to
submit to Ruges journal a criticism of the conservative Swiss jurist Carl
Ludwig von Haller and those whom Ruge regarded as Hallers disciples,
including Schelling, Adam Mller, Friedrich von Schlegel, and Leo.43
Feuerbach declined Ruges invitation, but informed him that he had
begun work on a book that was directly relevant to the pressing practical
questions of the day. What is the ultimate source of our intellectual and
political bondage? Feuerbach asked. The illusions of theology. After referring to several patristic and medieval sources that he had been studying in connection with this work, Feuerbach went on to comment, It is
unbelievable what illusions have dominated, and continue to dominate,
humanity, and how the speculative philosophy in its last manifestation,
rather than freeing us from these illusions, has only strengthened them.
Feuerbach referred to his undertaking as a critique of impure reason,
which is apparently a reference to the theological presuppositions of the
positive philosophers.44 Although it is not possible in the limits of this
chapter to present a complete analysis of Essence of Christianity in relation
to the texts discussed thus far, several examples will suffice to show that,
on page after page of Essence of Christianity, we find Feuerbach substantiating and augmenting claims that were first put forward in polemical
works published in the 1830s.
The overarching thesis developed by Feuerbach in Essence of Christianity is that, in religion, human beings relate to their own essence as
though to a being distinct from themselves. What is said here about religion generally is precisely what Feuerbach had said about the positive
philosophers three years before the publication of Essence of Christianity,

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namely, that they speculate about themselves as another being, and in so

doing assign predicates to their own essence (Wesen), which they mistake
for an essence distinct from themselves.45 Whereas the positive philosophers think of God as an absolute person in whose image finite persons
are created, already in 1838 Feuerbach claims that the predicates attributed to this absolute person have been abstracted from concrete human
existence. It is not the finite person who is formed in the image of the
infinite personality of God, but the other way around. One place where
this claim is further developed in Essence of Christianity is in the chapter
entitled The Mystery of Nature in God, which makes explicit reference to Schelling. Here Feuerbach argues that personality has its basis
in corporeal finitude. Two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the
same time. The body alone is the negating, limiting, unifying, restricting force apart from which no personality is conceivable.46 Because personality entails finite corporeality, an absolute person is a chimera. The
phrase absolute person has an alluring ring to it, but in the end it is
shown to be an Unding, that is, something the existence of which is logically impossible.
When, in the chapter in Essence of Christianity entitled The Contradiction in the Revelation of God, Feuerbach addresses himself to you
poor German philosophers of religion who beat us over the head with
the facts of religious consciousness in order to knock out our reason and
make us the slaves of your superstitions,47 presumably he has in mind
the same representatives of the speculative philosophy to which he refers
in the letter to Ruge cited above. In light of the importance placed on
facts by the positive philosophers, the fact that Feuerbach uses the word
fact (Tatsache) no fewer than nineteen times (counting the footnote)
in the first paragraph of this chapter is surely significant. In their opposition to rationalism, the positive philosophers had claimed that the facts
that God chooses to reveal are the only reliable source of knowledge of
Gods nature. In this chapter Feuerbach argues that although God may
be free to choose whether or not to reveal himself, he is not entirely free
to choose the manner in which he does so. If God is to reveal himself
to human beings, he must do so in a way that is intelligible to human
beings. But in that case the distinction that the positive philosophers
want to draw between reason and revelation proves to be illusory, since
in either case knowledge of God must conform to the categories of the
human understanding. If, in response to this objection, a distinction is
introduced between God as he appears to us and God as he is in himself, then the die that leads to the de-anthropomorphization of God has
already been cast. As noted earlier, reason is for Feuerbach the capacity
to abstract from the given, to conceive things as they are in themselves,

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and not merely as they appear to the subject. In order to develop a clear
and distinct conception of God as he is in himself, reason negates the
anthropomorphic predicates, but the resulting conception of God as a
universal, impersonal being is no longer religiously efficacious. The immutable, impassible, abstract God of metaphysical reflection is not the
same God who so loves the world that he sends his only begotten son to
suffer death on a cross. It is only when several properties, themselves
contradictory [e.g., passibility and impassibility, or finitude, which is entailed by personality, and infinitude], are united in a single being, and
this being is conceived personally, that is, personality is especially emphasized, only then is the origin of religion forgotten.48
The genetic-critical method that Feuerbach employs in Essence
of Christianity, which criticizes dogma and reduces it to its natural elements, has no other purpose than to explain on the basis of reason and
empirical evidence the origin of the allegedly pure, empirical facts
about which one is only informed through revelation to which the positive philosophers had appealed.49 Whereas these facts are supposed to
have been produced through the free activity of the personal God whose
nature eludes all rational determination, Feuerbach shows them to have
been produced by the religious imagination, operating beyond the restrictions of rational necessity in the service of the human heart, which
knows no other law than the satisfaction of its own desires. This is the
sense of Feuerbachs reference (in the preface to the second edition of
Essence of Christianity) to the personalists conception of God as an idol
(Gtzenbild). The image (Bild) of God that is engraved in the personalists imaginations, before which they prostrate themselves, and to which
they sacrifice their humanity, is an idol of their own making. The true
ens realissimum, of which this image is but a distorted reflection, is the
human species-essence.
In the preface to the second edition of Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach commented that he had through the most apolitical, but, unfortunately, intellectually and morally necessary illumination [Aufklrung]
of the obscure essence of religion, fallen out of favor with the politicians.50 In light of the preceding discussion, it is not difficult to surmise
the cause of this disfavor. The argument developed by Feuerbach in Essence of Christianity that God is the imaginary personification of concepts
that are constitutive of human nature is first expressed as a refutation of
the claim made by the positive philosophers that the personality of God
cannot be deduced by rational means, and can only be known through
the positive historical facts in which it is revealed. The precondition for
such knowledge is submission to the authority of revelation. In Stahls
philosophy of right, the lordship (Herrschaft) of the person of God be-

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comes the ultimate basis of all public right (ffentliche Recht), the preservation of which is the raison detre of the state. Although he does
not emphasize this implication of his ostensibly apolitical analysis of
religious consciousness in Essence of Christianity, by demonstrating the unintelligibility of the concept of an infinite person, Feuerbach succeeds
in undermining the ideological justification of the paternalistic Christian state that Friedrich Wilhelm IV had taken upon himself to establish.
Thus, it was as much by his demystification of divine personhood as by
the breakthrough to materialism with which he has been credited in
the Marxist tradition that Feuerbach placed in the hands of the left
bourgeois-democratic forces a powerful weapon in their struggle against
the ideology and politics of the feudal-aristocratic reaction.51

Conclusion: Feuerbachs Therapeutic or

Practical Purpose
In August 1844, with reference to Feuerbachs Principles of the Philosophy of
the Future (Grundzge einer Philosophie der Zukunft) and The Essence of Faith
According to Luther (Das Wesen des Glaubens im Sinne Luthers), Marx wrote
to Feuerbach from Paris: You haveI dont know whether intentionallyin these writings given socialism a philosophical foundation, and
the communists at once understood these works in this sense.52 If Feuerbach did in fact produce a philosophical justification for socialism, it is
safe to say that he did so unwittingly, since he only began to familiarize
himself with socialist literature in the summer of 1844, after the works to
which Marx refers had already been published.53 It seems likely that his
sudden interest in socialist theory was partly due to the enthusiasm with
which his ideas had been embraced by the socialists.
Feuerbach emerges from Breckmans interpretation as a critic of
the egoistic individualism of Christian civil society whose deepest
political concern lay in the task of recovering humanitys social being
from the alienating and atomizing effects of Christian personalism.54
Breckman seeks to underscore that Feuerbach was not only a negative
thinker, but also had a positive vision for social transformation that emphasizes intersubjectivity and communitarianism. In my view, the negative political implications of Feuerbachs theory of religion are far more
easily discernable than the positive ones. In other words, it is much
easier to see what Feuerbachs theory of religion rules out (e.g., the legitimization of monarchical authority through an appeal to Christian
revelation) than it is to derive a positive social vision from it. I find no

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compelling evidence to support Breckmans admittedly tentative suggestion that Feuerbachs critique of Christian personalism was influenced
by Saint-Simonian ideas. When, in the Stahl review, Feuerbach claims
that there can be no such thing as a Christian theory of property rights
such as Stahl had sought to produce, he does not mean to deny the right
to own property. His point is merely to show how far removed Stahls attempt to base property rights on Christian principles is from the spirit of
true Christianity.
Certainly Feuerbach is concerned to expose the egoism that underlies a number of religious beliefs and attitudes. For Feuerbach, religious
consciousness is not only false in the sense that it erroneously mistakes
an illusion for reality. What is more insidious is the moral self-deception
that it often involves. The humility of the religious believer (at least the
kind of believer against whom Feuerbachs invective is directed) disguises
an underlying pride. The unmerited riches of grace, including the privileged access to truth enjoyed by the devout soul in a state of heightened
religious emotion, are riches that the believer has unwittingly bestowed
on himself. Hope in the world to come is also hope for the passing away
of the real world that frustrates my desires. Belief in miracles is belief in
an omnipotent cosmic ruler who is able to suspend the laws of nature
in order to grant my wishes. Nevertheless, the sort of egoism that Feuerbach associates with belief in personal immortality and miracles cannot
be simply equated with the pecuniary egoism that, in the minds of several early socialists, is the distinguishing feature of a civil society based
exclusively on market relations. One finds, for example, an explicit attempt to relate these two forms of egoism in Moses Hesss essay On the
Nature of Money (ber das Geldwesen, 1845). For Hess, Christianity
is the theory, the logic, of egoism. The classic site of egoistic praxis on the
other hand is the modern Christian business world [Krmerwelt].55 My
point is that this explicit linkage is not yet made by Feuerbach. When,
in Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach uses the term filthy to describe the
practical standpoint, what he is condemning is not the selfish motivations of shopkeepers and industrialists. Feuerbachs contempt is directed toward those who lack the capacity for objectivity, whose beliefs
are determined not by evidence and reason, but by their own subjective
inclinations, by Phantasie and Gemt. What is filthy about this attitude is
that it is fundamentally disingenuous. It is vice masquerading as virtue
cowardice and sloth either pretending to be, or mistaking themselves
for, a genuine love of truth.
The paragraph from the preface to the first edition of Essence of
Christianity which ends with the disclosure of Feuerbachs underlying
therapeutic or practical intent begins with the enigmatic observation

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that although his book is full of evidence cited from ancient sources, the
book itself was written in the modern age and for the modern age.56
After going on to observe that the Socratic injunction to know thyself
would be an appropriate epigram for his book, Feuerbach proclaims
that Schein, which generally means illusion but in a philosophical context appearance, is the characteristic feature of the age to which his
book is addressed: our politics are illusory, our morality is illusory, our
religion is illusory, our science is illusory.57 Although this comment
clearly has a polemical edge, it is not written off the cuff. Feuerbach is
engaging in a play on the words essence (Wesen) and appearance
(Schein). His intention is to contrast the essence of genuine Christianity
(which, he maintains, has ceased to exist as a real historical force) with
what he takes to be the inauthentic, self-contradictory Christianity of his
contemporaries. The true, anthropological essence of religion does not
conflict with philosophy because it has nothing to do with reason. The
false, theological essence of Christianity is false precisely because theology aims to systematize rationally the contents of faith in the form of
doctrines, and in so doing, unwittingly combines two essentially irreconcilable principles, Phantasie and Vernunft.
Contrary to what is generally assumed, in Essence of Christianity
Feuerbach does not present us with an argument against the existence
of God. Rather than seeking to persuade his modern readers to become
atheists, Feuerbachs therapeutic aim is to help them to recognize that
in fact they already are. In Philosophy and Christianity, Feuerbach had confronted the conservative critics of the Young Hegelians with the following accusation: You notice the unbelief of others, of your opponents,
but fail to notice that you yourselves do not believe what you imagine
yourselves to believe, that your faith is merely self-deceptionmerely
a miscarriage of unbelief that has not achieved the requisite degree of
maturity and development.58 The Christian philosophers lack both the
humility to be true Christians (which, for Feuerbach, involves the renunciation of reason) and the courage to embrace atheism (which is where
reason left to its own devices inevitably leads). Essence of Christianity is
Feuerbachs attempt to justify this claim by describing the essence of
true Christianity on the basis of its historical appearances in the works
of patristic and medieval authors (to which evidence drawn from Luthers writings is appended in the second edition), and contrasting this
authentic unphilosophical faith with the disbelieving faith (unglubige
Glaube) of the speculative theists who seek to justify their faith by pseudoscientific means.
By the spring of 1845, when he drafted his Theses on Feuerbach,
Marx stood at a more critical distance from Feuerbach than he had when

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he wrote to him in August 1844. It is impossible to gauge the extent to

which Feuerbach may have been aware of the specific charges leveled
against him by Marx. Nevertheless, from remarks found in the preface
to the first volume of his collected works, which appeared in 1846, it
is clear that Feuerbach had become aware of voices from the Left who
criticized him for failing to directly address the issues of social inequality
and the crushing poverty of the urban masses. Feuerbach concedes the
urgency of these concerns and responds to them in an uncharacteristically chastened tone. Nevertheless, he writes, there are also many maladies, including maladies of the stomach, the cause of which lies in the
head. And I have made it my task, for reasons both inward and outward,
to fathom and heal the diseases of head and heart that afflict humankind.59 Here, where he is introducing readers to his collected works,
Feuerbach casts himself not in the role of the social critic, but rather as
a physician of the soul.
Whatever else these comments may reveal, they show that Feuerbach did not believe, as Marx had, that the illusions of religious consciousness are merely a reflection of underlying economic relationships,
and that these illusions will disappear on their own once the classless
society has been achieved. Oppressive and false ideas perpetuate oppressive and unjust institutions, and the philosophical critique of those ideas
has a contribution to make to the project of human emancipation. Unlike Marx, whose scientific socialism turns out to have been as utopian
in its own way as that of the utopian socialists whom he excoriated, Feuerbach did not regard philosophy as the cure for every human ill. Philosophy does not give us our daily bread, but it does possess healing powers;
namely to disinfect with the sharp, bitter juice of the understanding historical ulcers and growths that disfigure the face of humanity and restrict
the progress of cultural development [der Fortgang der Bildung].60
Feuerbachs disappointment over the failure of the revolution in
1848 did not prevent him from taking a longer historical view. Although
he had only been, by his own retrospective account, a critical observer
and listener in 1848, Feuerbach continued to consider himself an active participant in a great and victorious revolution, but one whose true
effects and results are only unfolding over the course of centuries.61 He
does not specify the nature of this long-term revolution. As noted earlier,
however, Feuerbach viewed the attack against the Young Hegelians by
members of the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung faction as the latest in a long
series of efforts on the part of theologians and religious and political
authorities to curtail the freedom of philosophical and scientific inquiry.
By his own admission, Feuerbach identified with no one more closely

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than with Giordano Bruno, the Renaissance philosopher of nature who

was martyred by the church for refusing to recant his astronomical theories.62 When Stahl attempts to construct the edifice of learning on the
foundation of a salto mortale, and finds in Christian doctrine the solution
to all the problems that have beset modern philosophers from Descartes
to Hegel, Feuerbach likens this to a scientific preference for Homer and
Hesiod over Plato and Aristotle. The classical spirit, which Feuerbach
equates with Bildung, is the capacity to transcend subjectivity and attain
to an objective, rational view of the universe. Feuerbach believes both
that the decline of Bildung was identical with the rise of Christianity
and that German classical literature begins precisely at the point where
the spirit of orthodoxy comes to an end.63
In the preceding pages I have sought to show that Feuerbachs argument in Essence of Christianity elaborates claims that he began to develop in polemical writings published in the 1830s. These writings were
directed against those who, in the name of the German Christian state,
had publicly charged the Young Hegelians with atheism and political subversion. In his response to the Leo-Hegel controversy, Feuerbach argues
that the same charges could be leveled with equal justification against
Lessing, Herder, Schiller, or Goethe. Read in relation to the transient
German polemics which George Eliot thought could be of no interest to
Feuerbachs English readers, Essence of Christianity constitutes a response
to what Feuerbach regarded as a genuine attack against the dignity of
German literature and science, and thus, indirectly, an attack against
the dignity of the German nation.64 In light of the fact that Engels and
many after him have associated the publication of Essence of Christianity
with the end (Ausgang) of classical German philosophy, it is ironic that
Feuerbach thought of himself as a champion of this intellectual tradition against those who threatened to undermine its achievements.
Notes
1. James A. Massey, Feuerbach and Religious Individualism, Journal of Religion 56 (1976): 36681; James A. Massey, The Hegelians, the Pietists, and the
Nature of Religion, Journal of Religion 58 (1978): 10829; Ludwig Feuerbach,
Thoughts on Death and Immortality, trans. with an introduction by James A. Massey
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); John Edward Toews, Hegelianism:
The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 18051841 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1980); Marilyn Chapin Massey, Christ Unmasked: The Meaning of
The Life of Jesus in German Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1983); Marilyn Chapin Massey, Censorship and the Language of Feuer-

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bachs Essence of Christianity (1841), Journal of Religion 65 (1985): 17395. Toews

discusses a number of other figures in addition to Strauss and Feuerbach in his
indispensible book.
2. Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical
Social Theory (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Breckmans
book is the most comprehensive study of the Young Hegelians undertaken in
the last two decades. In a footnote on p. 7 Breckman cites the work of Chapin
Massey and Walter Jaeschke as having been particularly important to the approach adopted in the present study.
3. Ludwig Feuerbach, Vorlesungen ber das Wesen der Religion, in Gesammelte
Werke, ed. Werner Schuffenhauer (hereafter cited as GW; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1967ff.), 6:30.
4. Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, in GW, 5:8.
5. This acknowledgment appears in a footnote in the foreword to the first
volume of Feuerbachs collected works, which began to be published by Otto
Wigand in 1846. GW, 10:184.
6. Feuerbach, Wesen des Christentums, 5:333.
7. In a letter to his close friend, Christian Kapp, Feuerbach once wrote,
The fundamental drive [Grundtrieb] of my nature is the drive for knowledge
[Erkenntnistrieb], all other drives are only like children playing around their
father. Feuerbach to Christian Kapp, November 1, 1837, GW, vol. 17.
8. Josef Winiger, Ludwig Feuerbach: Denker der Menschlichkeit (Berlin: Aufbau
Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004), 323.
9. Warren Breckman, Feuerbach and the Political Theology of Restoration, History of Political Thought 13 (1992): 437.
10. Open letter of the Heidelberg students to Feuerbach, April 4, 1848, in
Feuerbach, GW, vol. 19.
11. See Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary,
Journal of the History of Ideas 9 (1948): 259302.
12. Ludwig Feuerbach, Fragmente zur Characteristik meines philosophischen curriculum vitae, in GW, 8:180.
13. I am in agreement with Howard Williams when he observes that aphorisms such as this do not amount to a moral and political philosophy. Howard
Williams, Feuerbachs Critique of Religion and the End of Moral Philosophy,
in The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School, ed. Douglas Moggach (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 64.
14. Feuerbach to Karl Riedel, April 26, 1848, GW, vol. 18.
15. Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach.
16. Ludwig Feuerbach, Philosophie und Christentum in Beziehung auf den der
Hegelschen Philosophie gemachten Vorwurf der Unchristlichkeit, in GW, 8:234.
17. See Feuerbach to Arnold Ruge, mid-April 1844, GW, vol. 18.
18. Marx to Feuerbach, October 3, 1843, GW, vol. 18. In this letter Marx
refers to Schellings philosophy as Prussian policy sub specie philosophiae, and
mentions that as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung he had received instructions
from the censor not to publish anything critical of Schelling. Feuerbach to Marx,
October 25, 1843, GW, vol. 18.

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19. See the chapter by Bunzel and Lambrecht in this volume.

20. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot
(Harper: New York, 1957), xxxiii. George Eliot was the pen name used by Mary
Ann Evans.
21. Feuerbach, Wesen des Christentums, 5:1011.
22. Ibid., 5:26. Cagliostro was the alias used by a famous eighteenth-century
charlatan who succeeded in defrauding several European aristocrats by persuading them that he possessed magical powers.
23. See David E. Barclay, Frederick William IV and the Prussian Monarchy 1840
1861 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 28, 3334, 5568.
24. Feuerbach to Christian Kapp, February 18, 1835, GW, vol. 17.
25. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (Boston: Beacon, 1960), 326.
26. See Johannes Wendland, Erweckungsbewegung, Die Religion in Geschichte
und Gegenwart, 2nd ed. (Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1828), vol. 2, columns 295303.
27. For discussions of Stahls ideas and his influence on Prussian politics,
see Robert M. Berdhahl, The Politics of the Prussian Nobility: The Development of a
Conservative Ideology, 17701848 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1988), 34873; Wilhelm Fssl, Professor in der Politik: Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802
1861): Das monarchische Prinzip und seine Umsetzung in der parlamentarische Praxis
(Gttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1988); and Otto Volz, Christentum und
Positivismus: Die Grundlagen der Rechts- und Staatsauffassung Friedrich Julius Stahls
(Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1951).
28. Friedrich Julius Stahl, Die Philosophie des Rechts nach geschichtlicher Ansicht, vol. 1, Die Genesis der gegenwrtigen Rechtsphilosophie (Heidelberg: J.C.B.
Mohr, 1830), 353.
29. F. W. J. von Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 176, 175, 176.
Bowie translates Glaube as belief, but neglects to mention that the same word
can be translated faith, and probably with more justification in this context.
See Manfred Schrter, ed., Schellings Werke, Fnfter Hauptband (Munich: C. H.
Beck, 1927), 25051.
30. Stahl, Philosophie des Rechts, 1:56.
31. Friedrich Julius Stahl, Die Philosophie des Rechts nach geschichtlicher Ansicht,
vol. 2, pt. 1, Christliche Rechts- und Staatslehre (Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1833), x.
32. Stahl, Die Philosophie des Rechts nach geschichtlicher Ansicht, 39.
33. Ibid., xiii.
34. Ludwig Feuerbach, review of Stahls Philosophie des Rechts, vol. 1 (1830)
and vol. 2, pt. 1 (1833), in GW, 8:30.
35. Ibid., 8:36.
36. See Marshall Kenneth Christiansen, Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
and the Kirchenzeitung Faction (Ph.D. diss., Graduate School of the University
of Oregon, 1972).
37. John Edward Toews, Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism,
18051841 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 227.
38. Heinrich Leo, Die Hegelingen: Aktenstcke und Belege zu der s. g. Denunciation der ewigen Wahrheit (Halle: Eduard Anton, 1838), 45.

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39. Feuerbach, Philosophie und Christentum, 8:260.

40. Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, 233. The main difference between
the two groups, according to Marcuse, is that the personalists understood Hegel
better than the right-wing Hegelians had done, and therefore recognized more
clearly than they the threat posed by Hegels philosophy to the existing social
order. See Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 36465.
41. Feuerbach, Philosophie und Christentum, 8:221.
42. Feuerbach, Wesen des Christentums, 5:1415, 19, 22.
43. Ruge to Feuerbach, November 12, 1839, GW, vol. 17.
44. Feuerbach to Ruge, end of November 1839, GW, vol. 17.
45. Ludwig Feuerbach, Zur Kritik der positiven Philosophie, in GW, 8:193.
46. Feuerbach, Wesen des Christentums, 5:177.
47. Ibid., 5:348.
48. Ibid., 5:59.
49. Ibid., 5:105.
50. Ibid., 5:11.
51. Werner Schuffenhauer, introduction to GW, vol. 1, pp. xivxv.
52. Marx to Feuerbach, August 11, 1844, GW, vol. 18.
53. See Feuerbach to Friedrich Alexander Kapp, October 15, 1844, GW,
vol. 18. In this letter Feuerbach refers to two specific works, Wilhelm Weitlings
Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit (1842) and Lorenz von Steins Der Sozialismus
und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreich (1842).
54. Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, 199.
55. Moses Hess, Ueber das Geldwesen, in Rheinische Jahrbcher zur gesellschaflichen Reform, vol. 1, ed. Hermann Pttman (Darmstadt: C.W. Leske, 1845), 10.
56. Feuerbach, Wesen des Christentums, 5:8.
57. Ibid., 5:173.
58. Feuerbach, Philosophie und Christentum, 8:267.
59. Feuerbach, GW, 8:190.
60. Feuerbach, Philosophie und Christentum, 8:22728.
61. Ludwig Feuerbach, introduction to Vorlesungen ber das Wesen der Religion, in GW, 6:4.
62. Winiger, Ludwig Feuerbach: Denker der Menschlichkeit, 109.
63. Feuerbach, Wesen des Christentums, 5:23637; Feuerbach, Philosophie und
Christentum, 8:261.
64. Feuerbach, Philosophie und Christentum, 8:26064.

13

Max Stirner and the End of

Classical German Philosophy
Frederick Beiser

The Modern Thrasymachus

On June 28, 1856, in the Kirchhof der Sophien-Gemeinde (the cemetery of the Sophia parish) in Berlin, there was laid to rest the body of
one Johann Caspar Schmidt. Because of Schmidts persistent penury, his
grave was modest: second-class, costing one Thaler, ten Silbergroschen. On
his last journey he was accompanied by only two friends, Bruno Bauer
and Ludwig Buhl, and one Madam Weiss, who had nursed him at his
deathbed and served as a witness. The friends attempt at a collection for
a gravestone failed; the grave was soon overgrown and forgotten.
Thus ended in utter obscurity the days of one of the most original,
radical, and provocative philosophers of the nineteenth century. Schmidt,
otherwise known by his school nickname, Max Stirner, was an apostle of
egoism, nihilism, and anarchism. Indeed, there has never been, in the
entire modern era, a more daring, outspoken, and extreme spokesman
for these doctrines. Stirners thought brings together, in one very heady
brew, some of the most radical doctrines of modern philosophy: Machiavellis amoralism, Hobbess voluntarism and nominalism, Mandevilles
egoism, and Nietzsches anti-Christianity. But all these appear without
their disclaimers and qualifiers: Stirner is Machiavelli without republicanism, Hobbes without a Leviathan, Mandeville without charity, Nietzsche without Dionysus. Nowhere in modern philosophy was there a more
amoral, asocial, and anti-religious vision of life. The only source of value
and authority in Stirners world is my will. What is right is whatever I have
the will and power to do. Stirner did not shirk from the consequences:
lying, incest, and even murder, if I have the will and power to do them,
are perfectly permissible. Belief in moral laws and commandments, apart
from my will, is only superstition, a ghost or spook to frighten us. We
find in Stirners philosophy all the inspiration for a novel, indeed the

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prototype of two of Dostoyevskys most bizarre characters, Raskolnikov

and Kirilov.
Stirner enjoyed only a brief moment of notoriety in the 1840s, and
then was virtually forgotten for the rest of the century. He was rescued
from oblivion by his first biographer, John Henry MacKay, a Scottish
anarchist, in the early twentieth century,1 and he eventually became a
hero among American anarchist circles. Although Stirner has now become staple fare in histories of Hegelianism and anarchism, his general
philosophical significance has not been sufficiently recognized or appreciated, in both the English- and German-speaking worlds. Stirner remains
largely unknown to philosophers, and he continues to be overshadowed
by Nietzsche, who was less radical and consistent. Stirner, not Nietzsche,
is the archetypal nihilist and egoist, the antithesis of all religion and morality. If he were only better known, he would serve as a more effective
gadfly of contemporary philosophers.
Perhaps the best way to formulate the challenge Stirner poses for
modern political philosophy is to see him in the light of his classical
model: Thrasymachus. Stirner is the Thrasymachus of modern political
thought. All the problems that Thrasymachus once posed for Socrates
in the Republic Stirner reposes for the modern moral and political philosopher. Whoever believes that there is some reason to be just has to
answer to Stirner, just as Socrates once did to Thrasymachus. Probably
deliberately, Stirner defends all the views of his classical hero: that justice is the right of the stronger, that only a fool or weakling acts justly
if it is to his disadvantage, and that everyone should strive to get more
than their share.2 We should imagine Stirner as a more cool- and clearheaded Thrasymachus, one who needs no Glaucon to speak for him, one
ready to counter all the twists and turns of Socrates dialectic.
But the interest and challenge of Stirners thought lies in more
than its revival of a classical prototype. For there is also something profoundly modern about Stirner, something that puts him at the cutting
edge of even contemporary thought. In defending Thrasymachus, Stirner
used all the tools, tricks, and techniques of modern philosophy. Stirners
philosophy is firmly grounded in the critical tradition of philosophy, the
tradition that begins with Kant, continues with Fichte and Hegel, and
culminates with Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Karl Marx. Stirner took
some of the basic themes of Kantian criticismthe demand that all beliefs submit to criticism, the thesis that hypostasis is the main fallacy of
reason, the priority of the I thinkto their radical conclusions. The
fundamental challenge and central thesis of Stirners thinking is this: that
the basic principles of Kantian criticism, if taken to their proper limits, end of necessity in egoism, nihilism, and anarchism. Stirner accepts the basic Kantian

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value of moral autonomy, but he pushes it to its limit. He accepts Kants

point that the source of all value lies in the will, and that the will is bound
only by those laws it would make. However, Stirner cannot accept that
these laws have any content other than what my will puts into them. The
rational will that legislates universal lawsthe very idea of moralityis
nothing more than another hypostasis. This might seem like a caricature
of Kantian doctrine. But if we accept the Kantian principle of autonomy,
and if we are skeptical of the power of the categorical imperative to provide content, it is difficult to avoid Stirners egoism. Contemporary neoKantians, who have done so much to revive the Kantian tradition in moral
philosophy, enjoy their dogmatic slumbers at the edge of a precipice.
The distance separating contemporary neo-Kantians from Stirner is very
small, if not imaginary: it lies only in the desperate hope that the categorical imperative has a content. If that hope proves illusory, it is possible to
avoid Stirners nihilism only by breaking with some of the fundamental
principles of Kants ethics (namely, voluntarism and autonomy).
Since Stirner is still so unknown to philosophers, the task of the
present chapter is not to discuss his relevance for contemporary philosophy but to provide an introduction to the basic themes of his thought.
While I do not want to defend Stirners principles, let alone his conclusions, I intend to put forward a systematic and sympathetic reconstruction of his philosophy. After all, since contemporary moral philosophers
talk only among themselves, someone has to play the role of advocatus
diaboli.
Before we proceed, a word about Stirners life and background. For
all his radicalism, Stirner had a perfectly normal and respectable education. After his Gymnasium years (181926), where he was constantly at
the top of his class, Stirner matriculated at the University of Berlin in
1826. From 1826 to 1828 he studied in Berlin, attending the lectures of
Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Boeckh. After a Wanderjahr and briefer stints
in Erlangen and Knigsberg, he returned to Berlin in 1832 and eventually received a Prfungs-Zeugniss (bedingte facultas docendi) in 1835, which
gave him the right to teach in state schools. There was, however, no position for him. Stirners life was bohemian. He never found secure employment; lived off his inheritance and wifes fortune; and spent most
of his time socializing in cafes and bars with other unemployable and
impoverished intellectuals. Stirner was a Stammgast (regular) with the
Left Hegelian group known as Die Freien, which included Bruno Bauer,
Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. Stirners philosophy was very much a
bohemian creation, the Weltanschauung of an outsider and neer-do-well.
Its basic spirit is pater le bourgeois.
Stirner is very much a single-book philosopher. He stated all his

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radical doctrines in a single book, The Ego and Its Own (Der Einzige und
sein Eigentum), which appeared at the end of October 1844.3 All his other
writings are minor and occasional articles and reviews.4 Stirners book
became something of a succs de scandale. His Left Hegelian friends
were surprised to find themselves the target of relentless criticism. Ludwig Feuerbach and Moses Hess wrote replies to it. The longest and most
thorough rebuttal appears in Marxs The German Ideology (Die deutsche Ideologie). Marx, for one, took Stirner very seriously: virtually two-thirds of
Marxs manuscript is devoted to a rebuttal of Sankt Max.5 After its brief
notoriety, though, Stirners book was quickly forgotten. When the Left
Hegelian circles disbanded by the mid-1840s, Stirner led an insecure
and pathetic existence. His attempt to start a business failed; he resorted
to occasional journalism; and he was in and out of debtors prison. He
died not yet fifty, the result of an allergic reaction to an insect bite.

The Meaning of Egoism

Stirner describes his central doctrine as egoism (Egoismus). What he
means exactly by this term, however, is far from clear. His account of it
is unsystematic and scattered throughout The Ego and Its Own. It is left to
the reader to pull together the various threads and make sense of them.
There are three basic elements to Stirners egoism: (1) individualistic voluntarism, that my individual will is the source of all value; (2) selfinterest, that I must lead my life only for my own sake and not for anyone
or anything else; and (3) hedonism, that my self-interest consists chiefly in
the pursuit of pleasure. Each element requires explanation.
We can define voluntarism very crudely as the doctrine that the
will is the ultimate source and basis of right and wrong. It holds that what
makes something right or wrong is an act of will or decision, and nothing
can be right or wrong independent of all such acts or decisions. Voluntarism in this sense is normally opposed to rationalism, the doctrine that
something is right or wrong by virtue of its rationality alone, independent of all acts or decisions of will. In the classical debate between voluntarism and rationalism Stirner takes an uncompromising stand in favor
of voluntarism. Hence he writes: One troubles oneself to distinguish a
law from a command; one says the former is issued from a legitimate authority. But a law over human action (an ethical law, the law of the state,
etc.) is always a declaration of will, consequently a command (213; 174).
Stirners voluntarism is a specific kind or variety: individual voluntarism, the thesis that my individual will determines what is right or wrong.

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The source and basis of the law is not the people, the state, or God, but
my own will alone, what I want or decide to do as an individual. That
Stirner is an individualist voluntarist is clear from many statements in The
Ego and Its Own. For example, he writes, I decide if right is in me; outside
me there is no right. If it is right for me, it is right (208; 170).6
The second element of Stirners egoism is the pursuit of selfinterest. Stirner defines egoism in terms of seeking ones own advantage:
But whom do you think of as an egoist? A person who, instead of living
for an idea . . . and sacrificing his personal advantage for it, lives only for
his personal advantage (31; 32). He constantly contrasts the egoist with
the idealist. While the idealist is someone who lives for the sake of ideals,
which require self-sacrifice, the egoist is someone who pursues self-interest.
The egoist is someone who values himself above all other things.
It is important to see that these elements, individual voluntarism
and ethical egoism, are distinct. It is possible to be an individual voluntarist and not an egoist. Even if I recognize my own will as the source of
value, I might value some cause or ideal more than my own advantage.
According to individual voluntarism, should I decide to sacrifice myself,
then the mere fact that I make that decision means that it is right. Hence
it would be a mistake to assume that because my will is the source of
all value, the only real value is self-interest. Conversely, it is possible to
be an egoist and not an individual voluntarist. Someone might seek his
personal advantage but not think his will alone the source of the law; he
might believe in a moral law higher than his own will and feel guilty for
his pursuit of self-interest.
In his own vague way, Stirner is aware of these distinctions. He
states that someone who values his autonomy above all things, who sees
his will as the source of law, can still choose to sacrifice his happiness
for someone else (32324; 257). Conversely, he writes that someone can
be an egoist, seeking his own advantage, but not recognize that his will
is the source of law; this person he calls an involuntary egoist (39; 37).
Although Stirner sees the distinction between these doctrines, his ultimate aim is to connect them. He wants involuntary egoists to become
voluntary ones, so that people will not only seek their self-interest but
also value it. The goal of philosophical criticism is to make people selfconscious of the source of the lawtheir personal will aloneso that,
in good conscience, they seek their self-interest. Once I see that my will
alone is the source of value, Stirner hopes, I will not sacrifice myself for
some cause or idea but I will only live for myself.
Stirner is not advancing psychological egoism, that is, the doctrine
that people necessarily act according to their self-interest, so that it is
the sole motive of all actions. If that were the case, preaching egoism

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would be pointless. What troubles Stirner is precisely that people all too
often sacrifice themselves for abstract and impersonal ideals. They have
a natural tendency to hypostatize abstract principles, and then to submit
to them, allowing themselves to be exploited and enslaved. Altruism is all
too human, all too common: Now is unselfishness unreal and nowhere
present? On the contrary, nothing is more ordinary! (65; 58). Since
Stirner is preaching egoism, which he thinks is rare and difficult, his position would seem to be more accurately defined as ethical egoism, that is,
the doctrine that we ought to seek our own self-interest.
It is necessary, however, to qualify this reading. Although Stirner
does not think that people necessarily seek their self-interest, and that
they all too often sacrifice themselves for ideals, he still holds that there
is something natural and instinctive about seeking our self-interest.
However much I attempt to restrain it, and however much I pretend to
be following selfless ideals, self-interest remains under the surface and
reasserts itself.7 Honesty and frankness demand that we acknowledge its
subconscious presence and power. So there is still some element of psychological egoism to Stirner after all, though it is a more modest version
of that doctrine, according to which people naturally, but not necessarily, seek their self-interest. The point of his ethical egoism is to get moral
command and nature in attunement when the voice of nature is all too
often repressed and stunted by false ideals.
For good reasons, ethical egoism has been the standard reading
of Stirner. Recently, however, David Leopold has challenged it.8 He argues that the fundamental concern of Stirnerian egoism is not really selfinterest but self-mastery or autonomy, and he goes so far as to say that
Stirnerian egoism should be distinguished from the individual pursuit
of self-interest. 9 To prove his point, Leopold claims that Stirner refuses
to endorse egoism in the usual sense, that is, the selfish pursuit of ones
own advantage,10 and he notes that Stirner disapproves of being enslaved
to ones own desires. Although Leopold is certainly correct to stress
Stirners concern with autonomy, it is necessary to stress that Stirner does
not think that self-mastery alone is sufficient for egoism. The purpose of
autonomy is to realize my own ends, to seek my own advantage. If this
were not the case, Stirner could not disapprove of those idealists who
sacrifice themselves for a cause they freely choose. Hence Stirners egoism demands both recognition of autonomy and pursuit of self-interest.
Neither is sufficient on its own: involuntary egoists pursue self-interest
but do not recognize autonomy; and idealists are autonomous but sacrifice themselves. So self-interest is integral to Stirners concept of egoism
after all. It is apparent not only from the connotations of Egoismus but
also from Stirners very definition of it (cited above).

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If we remove self-interest from Stirners concept of egoism, we miss

one of Stirners most radical and characteristic teachings: the importance of selfishness. True to the customary meaning of egoism as selfishness, Stirner, frankly, bluntly, and shamelessly advocates always placing my own interests first. The egoist does not treat others as ends in
themselves, equal to himself, but he regards them as means to his ends,
something to be used and consumed. I will recognize or respect nothing in you, neither a bourgeois, nor a pauper, nor even a human being,
but I will use you. . . . To me you are only that which is for me, namely,
my object, and because you are my object you are my property (153;
12425). Similarly, Stirner opposes the ethics of love because it demands
self-sacrifice and placing others alongside or above ourselves (320; 254).
The egoist is indeed allowed to fall in love, provided that he enjoys it
and gets something out of it for himself. There must be selfishness in all
love: The love of the egoist springs from selfishness, flows into a bed of
selfishness and returns again into selfishness (328; 261).
The third element of Stirners egoism is hedonism. Stirner thinks
the proper pursuit of self-interest should be a quest for pleasure. But
there is nothing of Epicurean moderation in his hedonism. The goal is
not to enjoy simple pleasures, but to indulge onself, to consume oneself
through excess. The best life is the decadent life. Stirners advocacy of
decadence appears in the following stunning passage, which would have
troubled Nietzsche himself:
Only then, when I am certain of Myself and no longer seek Myself,
am I really my property. I have myself and therefore use and enjoy
myself . . . I enjoy myself according to my pleasure. I am no longer
afraid for my life but squander it. From now on the question runs:
not how to acquire life but how to squander it, enjoy it; or, [it is] not
how one produces the true self in oneself but how one is to dissolve
oneself, to live oneself out. (359; 28384)

Of all pleasures, Stirner gives a special importance to physical pleasure. I develop a proper egoistic interest, he writes, only when I have
fallen in love with the corporeal self, when I take pleasure in myself as
a living flesh-and-blood person (13; 16). This hedonism comprises first
and foremost sexual satisfaction (59; 53). One of the great attractions
of egoism, Stirner believes, is that it gives sexual liberation, the freedom
to satisfy desires that have been repressed for ages by Christian moralizing. Some of the most passionate passages in The Ego and Its Own appear
when Stirner preaches against Christian chastity, which he accuses of
stunting normal and healthy human urges and feelings (59, 66; 53, 58).

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Stirners egoism, with all its emphasis on individuality, seems to

owe a great debt to the Romantics, who had stressed the importance of
individual self-realization. In places it is indeed reminiscent of Friedrich
Schlegels divine egoism or Schleiermachers individuality.11 Whatever inspiration Stirner might have received from the Romantics, it is
important to note the differences between his ethic and theirs, differences which unmistakably come to the surface in The Ego and Its Own
(360; 284). The Romantic ethic espoused an ideal of self-realization, according to which one should make ones life into a work of art, a unified whole. Stirner, however, distances himself from any ethic of selfrealization on the grounds that an ideal self is only another hypostasis,
another goal to which I surrender myself. For Stirner, my self is not my
ideal self, a goal to which I aspire, but what is given to me right here
and now; it consists in my present desires and needs, whatever they are,
which I should not forfeit for the sake of some abstract ideal. Here is
where Stirner proves himself much more radical than Nietzsche, whose
ideal of self-realization has more in common with the Romantics.

Stirner and the Critical Tradition

Stirners radical egoism has its roots in the critical tradition of philosophy. There are three fundamental characteristics traits of this tradition,
all of which appear in Stirner. (1) Critique. The main business of philosophy is critique, that is, the examination of all beliefs, institutions, and
practices according to reason. (2) Liberation. The purpose of critique is
liberation, that is, the realization of human autonomy. A critical philosophy makes us recognize that the human will is the main source of value
and law; its task is therefore the self-awareness of freedom. (3) Exposure of
hypostasis. To achieve liberation, philosophy must expose hypostasis, that
is, the reification of entities of our own making. When we hypostatize
concepts we treat them as objective entities or forces to which we must
submit, so that hypostasis is a source of heteronomy. Hence the critical
tradition saw hypostasis as the chief source of self-enslavement, that is,
we enslave ourselves by thinking that the source of laws is something
outside ourselves. Rousseau posed the riddle of self-enslavement in his
famous lines: Man is born free; everywhere he is in chains. The critical
tradition saw the exposure of hypostasis through criticism as the solution
to the riddle.
Stirners egoism is the culmination of the critical tradition, the ne
plus ultra of its development after Kant. This development consists in

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a trend toward progressive de-hypostatization. Each thinker in the critical

tradition accuses his predecessor of not taking de-hypostatization far
enough; he finds that his predecessor is still under the sway of hypostasis.
There are four central episodes to this development. (1) The tradition
begins when Kant declares in the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason that hypostasis is the fallacy of pure reason. He argues against the
rationalists (Leibniz and Wolff) that they commit this fallacy, and that
the only remedy against it is to formulate a constitutive principle, which
seems to refer to things, into a regulative principle, which prescribes a
task. (2) Fichte argues against Kant that we should make the ideal of
the highest goodthe ideal of perfect justice where people are made
happy in accord with their moral desertsa goal for action rather than
an object of belief. In making this ideal an object of belief, an entity in
whose reality we should believe, Kant himself had committed a form of
hypostasis. (3) Hegel argues against Fichte that it is a hypostasis to regard
the ego as a self-sufficient noumenon above and beyond society and history; the identity of the ego rather depends on its situation in a specific
culture and epoch. He further contends against Kant that it is a hypostasis to conceive of God as a supernatural entity above and beyond nature
and history; since God is a concrete universal, it realizes its identity only
through the actions of individual agents in history. (4) Feuerbach argues
against Hegel that his God is only a hypostasis of pure human thinking. We must perform reformative critique, making the Hegelian subject
(spirit, the idea) into the predicate of man himself, who is the true subject. All Hegels talk about a cosmic subject is really a disguised form of
talking about humanity.
Stirner takes this development to its end. Like all his predecessors,
he thinks that the critical tradition has not been radical and thoroughgoing enough. Rather than getting rid of all hypostases, as the critical
tradition demands, critical philosophers have, contrary to their own
ideals, still clung to remnants of hypostasis. Fichtes ego, Hegels spirit,
and Feuerbachs humanity are simply new forms of reification. The
result is that criticism has still not achieved its ultimate goal: liberation,
freedom for real existing individuals. Stirner could therefore claim to be
the culmination of the critical tradition, the true legitimate heir of the
tradition going back to Kant.
Within the critical tradition, Stirners central claim is that if we pursue the critique to its end, the result must be egoism. The program of
critique necessarily leads to egoism for two reasons. First, because the
fundamental reality, the concrete existing individual, is myself. The I
that accompanies all my representations (Kant), the I from which I
cannot abstract (Fichte), is not the transcendental ego but simply my

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own particular ego, the self that exists right here and now (167; 135).
The Kantian-Fichtean transcendental ego is simply an abstraction, and
to believe in its reality only a hypostasis. Second, because the will that is
the source of the law is only my individual will. Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and
Feuerbach are all correct to preach the ideal of autonomy, to proclaim
that the will is the source of moral value; but they go astray in thinking
that there is some universal or rational will above and beyond my individual will. The belief in a universal or rational will is only another form
of hypostasis. The final goal of critique, liberation, is realized only when
my individual will rules supreme, recognizing no laws whatsoever above
itself. Liberation means having the freedom to pursue my self-interest,
making it alone my law, whatever it might be.
Stirner takes to the end, then, two central principles of Kantian
criticism: (a) nominalism, i.e., that whatever exists must be determinate,
and (b) voluntarism, i.e., that the will is the sanction and source of all
value. If we hold a and b, Stirner claims, we must accept individualistic
voluntarism because there is no universal or rational will above and beyond my own individual will; any belief in such a will is hypostasis, faith
in ens rationis. It is ultimately only my individual will that counts because
(a) only individuals exist, only the determinate is real, and (b) anything
more than my individual will is only an abstraction, so that to live by it
would be to sacrifice my life for an idea.
Fundamental to Stirners critique of the critical tradition is his reformulation of its ideal of autonomy. Stirner accepts the basic Kantian
ideal, and indeed radicalizes it. But here again he thinks that his predecessors have not gone far enough, taking this concept to its ultimate
end. Kant, Fichte, and Hegel all think that the source of autonomy is my
rational will, which is the source of universal laws, which bind everyone
alike insofar as they are rational beings. Autonomy means for them making and acting on universal laws, which bind me to act on all occasions,
even if I do not want to do so. For example, if I lay down the universal
imperative never to lie, then I have to tell the truth even when it humiliates me. For Stirner, however, the idealist conception of autonomy as
the self-imposition of the law is still a form of hypostasis, of self-imposed
servitude, because it imposes a constraint upon my will. If we think the
concept of autonomy to the end, my will cannot be subject to the law. If
my will makes the law it can just as easily and rightfully break it. So, in
submitting their individual will to the law, past critical thinkers have still
not removed the last vestiges of heteronomy.
Autonomy means for Stirner, then, not making laws by my will and
imposing them on my will, but making laws simply according to what
suits my individual will. If it is my will that gives authority to the law, I can

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make whatever law I want. Furthermore, I can change the law whenever
I want, so that it is impossible for the law to impose a constraint upon my
will. Hence Stirner reminds us that if I were to give the law to myself,
it would be only my command, which I can refuse in the very next moment (214; 174).
Stirners central contribution to the critical tradition is that, long
before Nietzsche, he took criticism away from religion and into the domain of morality itself, claiming that moral laws too were a form of hypostasis. Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Feuerbach used criticism to defend
morality against religion and metaphysics; but they never turned criticism against morality itself. For Stirner, however, morality, no less than
religion, is a form of heteronomy, of self-surrender where I sacrifice myself for the sake of some abstract rules or ideals. Morality holds us prisoner, a rigid unbending master (68; 60). It is a form of internal slavery,
which is even worse than the external slavery imposed on us by the state,
because it demands not only the right actions but also the right intentions
(55; 50).
Stirner sees belief in moral laws as a residue of the Judeo-Christian
legacy. The attempt to separate morality from religion fails because belief
in moral laws ultimately involves belief in a divine lawgiver. The moralist
shudders at the thought of incest, bigamy, fratricide because he believes
in divine commands, because he has faith in their divine author. Stirner
writes of moral man: As much as he rages against pious Christians, so he
remains to the same extent a Christian himself, namely, a moral Christian. In the form of morality Christianity holds him prisoner, and indeed
as a prisoner under faith (4849; 45).
Anticipating Nietzsche, Stirner thinks that because he creates his
own values, the egoist is beyond good and evil.12 The moralist will regard
the egoist as an immoralist because he does not act on the principles of
morality, and because he seems to derive a special pleasure from vice. But
this is a mistake, Stirner tells us, because the egoist will do moral actions
if they suit his will and satisfy his needs; he will do moral and immoral
acts indifferently, depending on which suit him best or what fits his will
(59; 53). Morality demands fidelity or loyalty, that one stands by his party,
cause, ideal. But ownness acknowledges no such demand. Sometimes
one must commit immoral actions to act on ones own (261; 210).
Stirners claim to culminate the critical tradition has been contested by none other than Marx himself. It was Marxs chief criticism of
Stirner in The German Ideology that he too had fallen prey to hypostasis,
and that his ego was no less an abstraction than Hegels spirit or Feuerbachs humanity. Rather than getting rid of the concept of the divine,
Stirner had divinized his own individual ego. Although Stirner claimed

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to demystify religion and morality, he had made a cult out of himself.

Sankt Max, the great debunker of saints, had simply sanctified himself.
The individual ego is not really concrete reality, Marx argued, but an abstraction from someone whose identity depends on a whole complex of
social relations.13 We are not the divine, self-creating beings that Stirner
believes we are, because we are formed by the social and economic world
in which we live. Marx went on to charge Stirner with the same overintellectualism as Bruno Bauer. Like Bauer, Marx argued, Stirner thinks
that we can make ourselves free through criticism alone, as if the terrorism of pure theory will break down prison walls.
Although Marxists take their masters criticism as the final word
on Stirner, it really does fall far short of its target. Stirners nominalism did not permit him to retain the concept of the divine; and even if
Stirner sometimes seems to make a cult out of himself, it is not because
he believes in the metaphysical reality of the divine. All universal properties are simply forms of speech for talking about particular realities. In
his Replies (Entgegnungen) to the criticisms of Szeliga, Feuerbach,
and Hess, who made points like Marx, Stirner makes it very clear that
his ego is not the realization or instantiation of divine or human properties but a propertyless individual.14 It is indeed a bare particular that
cannot be adequately conceptualized or even referred to in language. It
would also barely trouble Stirner that his own individual ego was formed
and limited by the social, cultural, and political forces of his culture and
age. What mattered to him is only that this individual ego, no matter
how formed, lived by its own will. Though we do not know what Stirner
thought of Marxs critique, we can safely infer that he would have turned
the charge of hypostasis against it. For is not belief in historical laws, in
the inevitable triumph of communism, just another form of hypostasis?
Toward the close of The Ego and Its Own Stirner criticized the historicism
of Hegel and the socialists on just these grounds (401; 315).
Stirner is the culmination of the critical tradition not only in the
sense that he took its basic principles to their final conclusion, but also in
the sense that he transcended and ended it. It is noteworthy that Stirner
distances himself from this tradition. He never saw himself as the critical
philosopher par excellence. He uses radical criticism as a means to his
ends; but, once those have been achieved, he discards it. In a remarkable Note (Anmerkung) inserted into The Ego and Its Own after the
composition of the whole, Stirner defined his attitude toward the radical
criticism of Bruno Bauer and, in effect, the entire critical tradition.15
Here he explains that he is neither for nor against criticism. He is not
against it because he too eschews all dogma, and because he too does
not want to make any illegitimate assumptions; but he is also not for it

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because he does not think that criticism is an end in itself. Criticism is essentially a theoretical activity, and so remains in the realm of pure thinking alone; it is the most complete and radical form of such thinking; but
pure thinking alone does not achieve the ends of egoism. No less than
Marx, Stirner was skeptical of Bauers devotion to pure theory, because
it was impotent in the realm of practice. It was valid as a critique of the
ideology of the government; but by itself it could do nothing against the
power of government (164; 132). Since the critical philosopher believes
in the power of thinking, he makes a fetish out of criticism itself; criticism is the fetishists fight against festishism. If criticism is to be consistent, it must examine itself; and if it is truly self-critical, it must dissolve
itself, because the only ultimate reality that it leaves, the only presuppositionless principle, is my existence, the I am of the concrete existing
individual, the egoist. Once the egoist realizes that he is the only reality
beyond criticism, he will turn toward living like an egoist, because he
will see that there is no authority above himself (167; 135). So consistent
thought leads to the dissolution of thought itself. If I am committed to
reason, Stirner says, then I must, like Abraham, sacrifice what is closest
to me (165; 134).

Ownness and Property

The central concept of Stirners ethics is Eigenheit, a concept impossible to translate. We can best render it as ownness, as David Leopold
has done, but the term also has intended connotations of individuality.
Stirner goes to some pains to describe his ideal in the first chapter of the
second part of The Ego and Its Own, Die Eigenheit, though its precise
meaning is still far from clear. There are three essential components to
the concept. (1) Selfishness. Ownness involves the idea of selfishness, putting my own interests first, making myself the sole end in itself in my life,
the beginning, middle and end of all my actions (180; 148). (2) Selfdetermination or autonomy. It is not sufficient for ownness that I am simply
selfish, always putting myself first. This is what is done by involuntary
or unconscious egoists, who, Stirner thinks, have not gone far enough.
It is also necessary that I be a voluntary or self-conscious egoist, so that
I voluntarily and self-consciously make my interests the goal of all my
actions, the end of my life. Hence the concept of ownness also involves
the idea of self-determination or autonomy, where I self-consciously and
freely decide to make and follow my own interests apart from all authority. (3) Self-creation. Stirner thinks that ownness also involves self-creation,

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where I make myself who I am, so that I am only what I will to be and not
what someone else wills me to be. He associates self-determination with
self-creation. Hence he writes: I am only I insofar as I make Myself, i.e.,
that another does not make me but I must be my own work (256; 207).
Further: I do not presuppose myself, because I in every moment posit or
create myself . . . I am creator and creature in one (167; 135). The language of self-creation is strikingly reminiscent of Fichte, an association
that Stirner acknowledges (199; 163). He makes it clear, however, that
the I that he has in mind is not the transcendental I but the empirical
and individual I, namely, Max Stirner himself.
At first sight Stirners concept of ownness is a specific conception
of freedom. It seems to be an egoistic version of the existentialists concept of radical freedom, according to which the self is what it makes
itself. It is important to note, however, that Stirner goes to great pains to
distinguish his concept of ownness from the ideal of freedom. Freedom had been the rallying cry of the liberals of his day, their alpha
and omega. But Stirner is very eager to distinguish his ideal from theirs.
While he insists that only ownership brings true freedom, he also thinks
that ownership involves more than freedom, at least in its traditional liberal sense. Freedom for Stirner is an essentially negative value, that is, it
frees me from restraints, constraints, and obstacles; but it does not give
me anything, nor does it tell me what to do (171, 180; 141, 148). If I were
to achieve absolute freedom, I would still be left with nothing (172, 177;
142, 14546). So how, he asks, can freedom be the highest good, the sovereign value? Stirner explains that though ownness includes the idea of
freedom, it also involves something more: namely, the power to get what
I want (18384; 149). What distinguishes the free man (der Freie) from
the owner (der Eigner) is that the owner has power (173; 143). Power
takes priority over freedom, Stirner argues, because if I have power then
I can become free; but if I am free, then I do not necessarily have power
(18384; 149).
Stirner gives other interesting reasons why ownness is prior to freedom. Ownness is for him something like the ataxaria of the ancient sage,
the tranquility one enjoys whether on the throne or in chains (17374;
142). While freedom is a difficult ideal to achieve because I am often
caught in constraining circumstances, I always have ownness, which cannot be taken away from me. Even if I am enslaved, I still have myself.
Although my master might whip me, I am still myself because I will be
busy plotting how to take my revenge on him. Ownness is therefore a
more basic value than freedom itself. If freedom is to be a value, it must
be so for me (177; 145). Chasing after freedom as the highest ideal could

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indeed be dangerous for our ownness, Stirner argues, because we might

forget about ourselves, our interests, or what we really want (172; 142).
Closely connected with the concept of ownness is that of property
(Eigentum), an important concept for Stirner, one that appears in the
very title of his book. To have ownness (Eigenheit) the owner (der Eigner)
regards everything in the world (at least in principle) as his own or his
property (Eigentum). At first sight this sounds like solipsism or megalomania, and Stirner has even been read as a champion of this doctrine.16
Stirners point, however, is not metaphysical but moral, or (in Kantian
terms) not constitutive but regulative. More specifically, he is saying that
the self-determining or autonomous individual should see everything in
the world as belonging to him because it is (at least in principle) something that he can use as means for his ends. The contrary of ownership
is that I am the property of someone or something else, namely, God,
the nation, the community. If the individual is only their property, it
is subject to them and can be used by them. Stirner sees the individual
confronted with a stark choice: either I make the world my property, so
that I use it as I see fit; or the world makes me its property, and uses me
as it sees fit.
Part of the inspiration for Stirners concept of ownness and property is Feuerbachs method of reformative critique. This method, which
also inspired Marxs inversion of Hegels dialectic, demands reversing
the relationship between subject and predicate in Hegels philosophy.
Rather than seeing spirit as the subject and man as its property, Feuerbach recommends making man the subject and spirit as its property.
Stirner simply takes this method a step further, applying it against Feuerbach himself. Since the aim of this method is to avoid hypostasis, and
since Feuerbachs humanity is no less a hypostasis than Hegels spirit, the
method demands that we make the subject of Feuerbachs philosophy,
humanity, into the predicate of the individual himself, the sole concrete
existing reality. This means, in effect, that the world of humanity should
be seen as the property of the individual rather than conversely. We can
see here how Stirner connects property in the sense of what one owns
(Eigentum) with property in the sense of a characteristic or quality of a
thing (Eigenschaft).
Regarding the right of property, Stirner declares that my property
is whatever I have in my power. Property is absolute power over something, whatever I can direct and control according to my will, whether
it be a thing, animal, or human being (279; 223). My property does not
consist in a thing, because a thing has some existence independent of
me; rather, it is simply my power to appropriate the thing (307; 245).

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What is my own is not the tree but my power over it. For Stirner, there
is no instrinsic limit to how much I can own. I am entitled to whatever
property that I can appropriate (279, 284; 223, 227). Unlike the communists, Stirner is happy to recognize the value of having property, of getting and keeping what belongs exclusively to myself alone. However, he
does not accept a right to permanent ownership, that is, the right to possess a thing, to keep it and hand it down to others, even after I die and
have no power to control it. The idea of a right to property, independent
of my power to keep and control it, is just another spook (307; 245).
Stirner has his own egoistic solution to the problem of poverty,
which had so bothered his liberal and communist contemporaries. Poverty disappears when the poor learn to take what they need. They will
become free and owners themselves only when they rebel, refusing to respect laws of property. Their slogan should be: Greif zu und nimm, was
du brauchst! (Seize and take what you need) (286; 229). The rich will
lose their power over the poor whenever the poor begin to exercise their
own power and refuse them obedience. For their services they should
demand higher prices and better reward; if their masters or employers
threaten to hire someone else, they will find no one, because scabs will be
reckoned with. Stirners solution to the problem of poverty would seem
to lead to a war of all against all; Stirner not only admits but welcomes
this (286, 288; 229, 230). He especially refuses to accept socialist or communist solutions to the problem of poverty, because these will make the
individual dependent on the state. The communists were right to rebel
against the rich and the powerful; but they were even more cruel in
handing over property to the community (28687; 22930). This simply
replaced one tyrant (the rich) with another (the collective).

Anarchism
Stirner is notorious for his anarchism, and it is as such that he usually
appears in the history of philosophy. There can be little doubt that he
deserves the reputation. If we take anarchism to mean the view that
government or the state should be abolished, Stirner easily qualifies as
an anarchist. Like all anarchists, Stirner advocates the dissolution of the
state, and he enjoins disobedience to it. Stirner declares expressly in The
Ego and Its Own that the egoist and the state are utter enemies, and that
there will never be peace between them (214; 175). I am the mortal enemy of the state, who forever wavers between the alternatives: the state
or myself (284; 227). The source of their antagonism is simple. Since

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the egoist regards only his will as legitimate, the source of all value and
law, he cannot recognize any authority over himself. The state, for its
part, also sees only its will as legitimate, as the source of all value and law.
Hence the egoist and the state are locked in interminable, irreconcilable
conflict. The egoist declares war against the state, while the state regards
the egoist as a criminal (216, 219; 176, 179).
It is, however, a unique form of anarchism that Stirner puts forward in The Ego and Its Own. The voluntarist and individualist strands of
his thought make his anarchism distinctive. Stirners voluntarism means
that, unlike many anarchists, he does not appeal to a higher moral law
to judge the power of the state. Normally, anarchists do not equate right
with power, for the simple reason that such an equation seems to justify
the existence of the state, which usually has more power than the individual. Stirners individualism means that he has none of the faith in
communal life characteristic of most forms of anarchism. Stirner does
not want the community to replace the state because he fears that the
community will dominate the individual no less than the state. In his view,
the communists have abolished one form of tyrannythe stateonly to
create anotherthe collective or community (287, 347; 22930, 275).
Stirner envisages anarchic society as a collection of disparate individuals, each of whom pursues his own self-interest. These individuals join
together into a group whenever it serves their interest; but they will just
as soon abandon it whenever it ceases to do so. It is not that Stirner expects egoists to lead a completely isolated existence; he even stresses the
social nature of human beings (342; 271). But he limits the kinds of social life in which they participate. He makes a sharp distinction between
a society (Gesellschaft) and a union (Verein). A society makes a claim over
individuals and uses them for its ends, whereas a union is simply an instrument of individuals to serve their ends and it has no claim over them
(344, 35051; 27273, 277). What binds together a society is law, which
is enforced by the state; but what joins together a union is nothing more
than mutual self-interest (347; 275).
Behind Stirners anarchism lies a very grim view of the state. For
Stirner, the very essence of the state consists in power, and its structure
in lordship and servitude (214; 17475). This view follows straightforwardly from his voluntarism. Since law is only the will of the sovereign,
and since there is no intrinsic difference between law and command,
every state is a form of despotism (214; 174). There is no intrinsic difference between different forms of state: all attempt to tyrannize over the
individual. It makes no difference whether one, some, or all rule. If the
state is a republic where everyone rules, people simply despotize over
one another. The egoist cannot recognize even the laws of a republic; for

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even if he agrees with them and helps to create them, he binds his will,
making it impossible for him to change it (215; 175).
True to his voluntarism, Stirner rejects the theory of natural rights
(210211; 171). It is sheer hypostasis to assume such rights, he argues, as
if they exist and have authority apart from the will that makes or grants
them. All talk about natural rights is simply another lingering remnant
of the Christian tradition: the idea of the equality of all souls before
God (206; 168). Since right depends on law, and law upon the will, the
only rights are those permitted by the sovereign will. The only rights the
state permits are those that it bestows; and the only rights the anarchist
recognizes are those that he makes or takes. Since law depends on superior power, the only rights will be those that are effectively defended or
protected. Hence there are two conditions necessary for a right: a will
that commands, and power to enforce it. Stirner insists upon the second
condition as much as the first: What you have the power to be, that you
have the right to be. . . . I am entitled to everything for which I have the
power. I am justified in toppling Zeus, Jehovah, God, etc., if I can; but if
I cannot, these Gods would have a right against myself and would remain
in power (2078; 169). Stirner endorses explicitly the old adage that
might makes right: Who has power, he has right; if you do not have the
former, so you do not have the latter (211; 173).
Such a theory of right appears to have serious consequences regarding the justification for punishment. If might makes right, the sovereign loses his right to punish whenever he lacks power to enforce the law.
Hence if I commit a crime and successfully elude punishment, I have
done nothing wrong. Impunity is then the prerogative of every successful criminal. Such a consequence would be very problematic for someone like Hobbes, who is intent on justifying the power of the state; but
for Stirner, who is equally intent on undermining that power, such a consequence is eagerly embraced. He explicitly affirms a right to impunity:
One says that punishment is the right of the criminal. But impunity is
just as much his right. If his enterprise succeeds that is also his right; but
if it does not, that is also his right. Where you make your bed you must
sleep in it (213; 173).
But, given his voluntarist principles, one might well ask how Stirner
can be an anarchist at all. If right consists in nothing more than power,
and if the state is successful in keeping a grip on the means of power,
then ipso facto the state has the right to rule. The fitting conclusion of
Stirners voluntarism would then seem to be the Hobbesian Leviathan
after all. Stirner does not draw this conclusion, however, because he
thinks that the state, which exists only as one individual or group, has no
more legitimacy to rule than any other individual or group. If there are

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other individuals or groups, who also have power, the state cannot claim
any exclusive right to compel obedience. Arguably, the state has more
power than the individual, and therefore (since right is might) the right
to rule over him. It is striking, however, that Stirner does not believe
that states are such powerful entities, or that they can completely silence
individuals intent on disobeying them. Individuals too, if they only join
together, have effective power to resist the sovereign. The optimism behind Stirners anarchism comes not from any belief in the goodness of
human nature, still less the hope that there will be some utopia where
all men will love one another, but from his conviction that all individuals
or groups have it in their power, if they only act resolutely, to undermine
the authority, and eventually to topple governments. No government
can last for long, in his view, if the individuals who live under it withdraw
their obedience (237; 19192).
It is one of the salient features of Stirners anarchism that he constantly stresses the responsibility of the individual for his own fate. If he
is not free, that is because he has not demanded respect and because
he has allowed others to push him around; if he is poor, that is because
he has undervalued himself and not taken what he needs. The poor
are guilty that there are the rich (353; 279). The reason that the state,
church, nation have power over me, he claims, is that I disrespect myself (316; 252). To undermine the state, Stirner does not advocate active
rebellion but passive disobedience (354; 27980). The attitude of the
egoist toward the state should be one of constant rebelliousness and refractoriness (Widerspenstigkeit) (216; 176). The egoist will obey the laws
when it is in his interest; but when it is not, he will disobey them, at least
as long as he can avoid punishment (219; 179). He will do all in his
power to disobey and disrespect authority whenever doing so serves his
own interests.

Notes
1. John Henry MacKay, Max Stirner: Sein Leben und sein Werk (Berlin: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1914). MacKays biography is still the main source on Stirners life.
2. Though Stirner does not explicitly refer to Thrasymachus, he was well
trained in the classics, especially Platos Republic. According to MacKay (Max
Stirner, 40), Stirner studied the work mit vielem Fleisse with Boeckh in the Sommersemester of 1833.
3. The major modern edition of the work is Max Stirner, Der Einzige und
sein Eigentum, ed. Ahlrich Meyer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1972). The best and most
recent translation is by David Leopold, The Ego and Its Own (Cambridge, Eng.:

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Cambridge University Press, 1995). References in the text above are first to the
German edition, then to Leopolds translation. Though I have cited Leopolds
edition, all translations from the German are my own.
4. All Stirners other writings have been collected and edited by John
Henry MacKay in Max Stirners Kleinere Schriften (Berlin: Zack, 1914).
5. On the importance of Stirners challenge for Marxs intellectual development, see Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1980), 12574.
6. See also Der Einzige und sein Eigentum: Ist es Mir recht, so ist es recht
(208; 171); Recht ist, was Dir recht ist (226; 183).
7. See, for example, the passage on 201; 164.
8. See David Leopold, Stirners Anarchism, in The New Hegelians, ed. Douglas Moggach (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 18285.
9. Ibid., 182.
10. Leopold takes Stirners description of egoism in the customary sense
out of context. Stirner describes egoists in this sense as Eigenntzige auf ihren
Vorteil bedacht, nchtern, berechend, usw (81; 70). However, in this passage he
does not disapprove of egoists in this sense but simply describes Bauers attitude
toward them. Though he later disapproves of vulgar egoists, it is not because
they seek their self-interest but because they are possessed and make a fetish out
of money (82; 70).
11. Before Der Einzige und sein Eigentum Stirner shows a clear affinity for
some Romantic positions, specifically, the primacy it gave to art. See his early essay Kunst und Religion in Kleinere Schriften, 25868.
12. The concept appears explicitly in Stirners early essay Die Mysterien
von Paris, in Kleinere Schriften, 28889. Stirner writes that man is erhaben ber
Tugend und Laster, ber Sittlichkeit und Snde.
13. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol. 3 (Berlin: Dietz, 1973),
42223.
14. Stirner, Kleinere Schriften, 34550.
15. See Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, 15967; 12935. See also 393
440; 30614.
16. See, for example, William Brazill, The Young Hegelians (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), 219.

14

Ruge and Marx: Democracy,

Nationalism, and Revolution
in Left Hegelian Debates
Lucien Calvi
Translated from the French by Douglas Moggach

Despite a number of important recent publications in the field,1 studies of the Hegelian school continue to face formidable obstacles. The
philosophical and political language of the Young Hegelians seems perhaps dated and certainly complex. It is precise and technical, but also
difficult to render adequately in translation. Translations which might
serve students or a broader reading public are indeed rare. The works
of even the best known among the members of the Hegelian school,
like Bruno Bauer, remain largely inaccessible. Germanists who are interested in the history of ideas in the nineteenth century, but who are
intimidated by the gigantic scaffolding of the Hegelian system and its
critical appendages, often consider Young Hegelian texts too abstract,
too philosophical, while philosophers tend to view them as not philosophical enough, as too journalistic, or as too closely tied to a particular
intellectual context. It is assuredly the case that this intellectual context,
that of Germany and Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, is central to the
works of many on the Hegelian Left, and in particular to those of Arnold
Ruge. This historical rootedness should not be seen as a defect or a limitation. Reconstructing this intellectual and historical context is essential
to understanding the relevance of the Hegelian Left to current political
and theoretical debates.
If we take the example of France, research on the Hegelian Left
has appeared largely as a specialized subfield of work on either Hegel
or Marx. There is considerable dynamism in both these adjacent fields.
Numerous scholarly studies on Hegel have been produced,2 and translations of his works are frequent. These include recent retranslations3
which aim for greater fidelity to the original than the older, now canoni301

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cal versions, such as Jean Hyppolites Phnomnologie de lesprit.4 The once

powerful field of Marxology had suffered a serious decline, but is now reemerging on new foundations after the dislocation of the Soviet system.5
This renewed impetus has not yet been fully extended to the Hegelian
school. Perhaps there is reason to reconsider this situation.
An occasion to do so is provided by the recent publication, in
French translation, of two of Ruges texts of 1843 and 1844, Toward an
Entente Between the Germans and the French, and Patriotism.6 This
translation is part of a long-term project on the Left Hegelians in relation
to the history of political ideas in Germany from 1789 to 1848, including,
besides Hegel, the Rhineland Jacobins, Heine, Young Germany, and
the early Marx. These texts help us to situate Ruge, and the Hegelian
Left, in a German and European context of continuing actuality.

The year 1989 marked the bicentenary, both festive and solemn, of the
French Revolution. But it was also the beginning of the explosion, or
implosion, of the Soviet system and its offshoots in central and southeastern Europe. It marked the end of the system issuing more or less directly
from the 1917 Russian Revolution, which explicitly saw itself as a continuation, reproduction, and universal extension of the French Revolution. The collapse of the Soviet system had its European corollaries, of
which the two most apparent were the rapid disappearance of the German Democratic Republic, and in the opposite direction, the slow and
dramatic dismemberment of the socialist federation formerly made up
of the peoples of what was Yugoslavia.
These enormously important long-term developments draw our
attention to two closely linked phenomena: on the one hand, the revival
in Europe of the national, or nationalist, phenomenon, often incorrectly
called ethnic, or also communitarian, with all its attendant imprecision
and emotive charge; and on the other hand, the paradoxical situation of
that intellectual, social, and political international force called, in a simplifying fashion, Marxism; that is, all the diverse theoretical and practical
forms of Marxism-Leninism that had emerged since the Russian Revolution of 1917. This body of thought had, since the 1970s, fallen into
growing discredit, while at the same time, faced with what is known as
Western democracy, or liberal democracy (despite the contradiction
partial, at leastbetween democracy and liberalism), this discredit was
accompanied by a more theoretically than politically motivated return
to Marx, described by Raymond Aron in May 1968 as an inexhaustible7 theorist and critic of economic, social, political, and intellectual
modernity.8

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These historical phenomena of nationalism and the crisis of Marxism are decisive for understanding the contemporary importance of the
Hegelian Left. Grouped around Arnold Ruge, and adumbrated in his
texts of 184344, are the principal elements constitutive of a long-term
historical reality which culminated in 198990, and whose effects are
still being felt today. This reality is that of nationalisms that had long
been at odds in Europe, in confrontations which were either being surmounted, or which persisted or were even revived in dramatic military
and political conflicts. The reality is also that of democracy, with its principles and practices, as the result of a revolutionary process of which
1789 and 1792, 1830 and 1848, provide, if not the model, at least the
example. Finally, it is the opposition, at least partial, between revolutionary democracy, linked to the heritage of 1789, and Marxism, or what
became of Marxism with the Revolution of 1917 and its consequences:
in this sense, it has been said that the beginning of the implosion of the
Soviet system in 198990 was a victory of 1789 and of humanism over the
Russian Revolution.9
From the point of view of intellectual history, one should add to
the aspects already citednationalisms, the revolutionary sources of
democracy, and the historical fate of Marxisman additional consideration, at once intellectual and political: the thought of Hegel, and more
generally Hegelianism in all its different currents. On the one hand,
as was observed in the 1970s by the Germanist Pierre Bertaux, an early
member of the Resistance against the Hitlerian seizure of France and
much of Europe at the beginning of the 1940s, and a commissioner of
the republic at Toulouse with the Liberation, an important part of the
articulation between the Jacobin French Revolution and the MarxistLeninist revolution in Russia occurred in Germany, with the transition
from Hegel to Marx.10 In addition, it was especially around the thought
and the texts of Hegel that political discussion crystallized in Germany
during the Vormrz period (183048) among minority circles that could
be generally designated progressive, in contrast to the larger and more
powerful camp of conservatism and reaction. This discussion was given
impetus by the gradual completion, after Hegels death in November
1831, of his Berlin lectures by his former students, colleagues, and
friends.11 It involved thinkers from Heinrich Heine to the young Marx,
by way of Young Germany, the Hegelian Left, and true socialism, as
represented, for example, by Moses Hess.
Despite the vigor and asperity of their numerous and often obscure mutual polemics, the critical and progressive intellectual currents
and personalities of the Vormrz share more areas of agreement than
of divergence. The principal point of convergence of these diverse cur-

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rents and personalities is the double and partly contradictory character of their relation to Hegels thought on politics and history. On the
one hand, this thought was generally criticized as an intellectual prop of
the established order, or the order reestablished in 1815 and confirmed
after 1830. Hegel was taken to offer a theoretical justification for this
intolerable regime. On the other hand, it was within Hegelianism, reoriented or revised, that the bases of its own transcendence were to be
sought. This critical, even revolutionary transcendence implied ideally
the overcoming of the established order in Germany in all the various
spheres of intellectual, political, and social life.
To a great extent, Heine already in the early 1820s, Young Germany
in the 1830s, the Young Hegelians from the late 1830s to 1844, and true
socialism after 1845 largely shared this analysis. The critique of Hegel
and the reorientation of Hegelianism were effected to a considerable
degree through an opposition between the abstraction of philosophical
theory and the concrete immediacy of human existence. Philosophical
abstraction was held to be conservative by nature and function, because
of its proximity to its theological origins. Critical distancing in Hegelianism thus involves notions dealing with life and the right to life (das
Recht zu leben) or with the right to movement (Bewegung), a very frequent
term in Young German texts, or with youth and change. It is this eminently revolutionary right to life that Heine invoked in an important
text, long unpublished, from the early 1830s, on different conceptions
of history (Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung).12 It is this right to living,
this imprescriptible right to movement and change, that all these critical
intellectuals seek to introduce, reintroduce, or accentuate in Hegelian
thought, and through it, ideally, in the social and political reality of which
it presented itself as the simple description or theory. The critique of
Hegelianism in the name of life is thus an internal critique, an attempt
to turn Hegels thought, as it was understood, toward ends which, in its
public exposition at least, it often seemed to ignore, whether through
opportunistic prudence or conservative conviction: political life as the
realization of individual and collective liberty, the autonomous life of
the nation or the people, but also the human right to live a materially
decent life, as the condition of all intellectual and political freedom.

Against the background of the political realities of Germany in the 1830s

and 1840s, the case of Arnold Ruge is particularly significant from the
point of view of the Hegelian heritage and the discussions surrounding it. Born in 1802 on the Baltic island of Rgen, a former Swedish
possession ceded to Prussia in 1813, he was the son of the manager of

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a huge noble estate. Among the Young Hegelians, he was perhaps the
least theoretical, the most conscious of political and journalistic practice, and thus also the closest, in human and intellectual terms, to the
literary movement of Young Germany (especially Heinrich Laube and
Karl Gutzkow),13 which, it is too often forgotten, formed the other wing
of the critical movement issuing from Hegel.
Of all the Young Hegelians, it is undoubtedly Ruge who took
political reflection and activity most seriously. He served as a deputy from
Breslau in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, seated with the Donnersberg group representing the extreme Left of republicans and socialists.
In his case the term Hegelian Left has the most direct and least metaphorical meaning. Within the vast, conflictual, nebulous world of the
Young Hegelians, he was not always in the leading ranks, and was neither
the most powerful nor the most brilliant. Among the best-known figures,
he lacked Bruno Bauers theological, then anti-theological competence,
and his ferocious, slightly nihilistic polemical style.14 Bauer, the leading
figure in the group of the Free (die Freien) in Berlin in the early 1840s,
opposed to the widespread apathy of the masses, whether bourgeois
or proletarian, the extreme radicalism of an ultracritical philosophy of
self-consciousness (Philosophie des Selbstbewusstseins). Ruge was far from
possessing Marxs powerful erudition, theoretical depth, or diabolical
sarcasm. As the son of a small Rhenish industrialist, Moses Hess, who
would side with Marx against Ruge in the debates of 184344 on proletarian socialism (or communism) as the future of humanity, knew far
better the reality of economic life, but also the different currents and
representatives of socialism and the workers movement in France and
elsewhere. As for Feuerbach, the best known of all these figures after
Marx, he acted as the spiritual father of the entire Hegelian Left. Explicitly or implicitly, it was Feuerbachs innovative reflections on philosophy
and religion, particularly Christianity, that provoked and structured the
Young Hegelian debate. Everyone wanted to publish his articles, Ruge
especially in his Hallische Jahrbcher fr Wissenschaft und Kunst, from 1838
to 1841, then in his Deutsche Jahrbcher in Dresden from 1841 to 1843.
Ruges exposure to Hegel was belated and may appear quite superficial. He did not study directly under the master, nor under one of his
students, as Marx did, for example, with the jurist Eduard Gans in Berlin.
He began to read Hegel only from 1833 onward, with the posthumous
publication of the Berlin lectures. His early political education in the
first years of the post-Napoleonic Restoration was as a young German
patriot seeking national unity. As a student of theology, philosophy, and
philology at the Universities of Halle, Jena, and Heidelberg from 1821 to
1824, he joined the Youth League ( Jugendbund, also known as Jnglings-

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bund ), a clandestine organization founded in 1821. Compared with the

earlier Burschenschaft (Allgemeine deutsche Burschenschaft), which had been
banned by the repressive, anti-demagogic Carlsbad Decrees of 1819,
the Jugendbund represented more radical positions, including the republican unification of Germany.
In May 1822, during a secret meeting of the Youth League at Wrzburg, Ruge supported the creation of a unified German republic, if necessary by means of a violent revolution which would destroy the power
of the princes.15 This remained his position over a quarter of a century
later, in 1848, in the Frankfurt Parliament; it was the position of a small
minority. A Prussian government inquest into the activities of the Youth
League led to Ruges arrest in January 1824, and his condemnation to
fifteen years imprisonment in a fortress. Confined at Kpenick, near
Berlin, then at Kolberg on the Baltic, he undertook translations of passages from Thucydides Peloponnesian War, in particular Pericles famous
speech to the Athenians on the democratic foundations of their city.
Freed early, on January 1, 1830, Ruge saw in the July Revolution of that
year a confirmation of his long-standing political views.
In Ruges works we find the critique, frequent across the Young
German and Young Hegelian movements, as well as in Heine in the early
1830s, of the conservative element in Hegels thought. In 1843, for example, Ruge contrasted the richness of life and the innovative thought
of the novelist George Sand to Hegel, whom he described as an abstruse
political thinker tightly chained to the triumphal chariot of the Restoration, and as an openly declared theologian concerned above all to
keep his distance from the familiar terrain of humanity.16 Nonetheless,
the intellectual dependence of Ruge on Hegels thought is apparent. It
underlies his democratically inspired criticism of the conservative and
repressive Prusso-German order. It is against this order, reestablished
in 1815, reinforced by the Carlsbad Decrees and later by new repressive measures (Bundesbeschlsse) in the wake of the July Revolution of
1830 and the great liberal and radical festival at Hambach in spring
1832, that Ruge utilized Hegels thought in support of his own political
stancespatriotic, democratic, and unitarywhich he had already
adopted before his encounter with the philosopher. So, for example, in
his text of 1843, Toward an Understanding Between the Germans and
the French (Zur Verstndigung der Deutschen und Franzosen), he
insisted on the idea of a substantial link between the activity of thought,
especially philosophical thought, and historical and political reality. Just
as Hegel had considered that one should not object to the view that the
[French] Revolution received its initial impetus from [Enlightenment]
philosophy,17 so too Ruge explicitly presented radical Young Hegelian

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criticism as a prelude to profound political change, indeed, to a revolution in Germany.

From Hegel, Ruge also retained in this text the representation of
the history of humanity, and of the peoples who comprise it, as the site
of the realization of spirit, of reason and freedom. More concretely, in
the Germany of the 1840s this realization, for Ruge, had as a prerequisite
the expression of the free and living word (Rede or Wort), in a press finally emancipated from the hard and long-standing censorship that was
oppressing it in the various states of the German Confederation, with
Prussia at the head.
In 1843, Ruge described the aim of the political change envisaged
as a result of Young Hegelian criticism to be the creation of a unitary
state founded in the single and inalienable popular will; this result would
compensate for the failure of the wars of liberation of 181315, which
had been conducted exclusively for the benefits of the princes. Here
we observe the persistent weight, even within the Hegelian Left, of the
nationalist or patriotic heritage of 181315; Ruge does not distinguish
these two terms. He inflects in a democratic and revolutionary direction
the sense of nationalism originating in these wars, and prolonged by certain radical factions emerging from the Burschenschaft.
It is precisely this essential reorientation that fails in Germany in
184849. The failure is not only that of Hegelianism in its leftist version,
but of a powerful German philosophical tradition since Kant and Fichte,
marked by the close connection between philosophical or theoretical
research and political practice, or by the revolutionary idea in search of
realization.18

The political change envisioned by Ruge in 1843 tends to place Germany,

in a sense, on the same level as more advanced nations, especially neighboring France. It is France, newly revolutionized in 1830 after its more
profound revolutions of 1789, that provides Ruge, along with many other
German and European intellectuals since the end of the eighteenth century, with the most accomplished example, if not the model, of political
change based on the inalienable will of the people. It is to Paris that
Ruge went in summer 1843, after the Saxon governments interdiction
of the Deutsche Jahrbcher at the insistence of the Berlin authorities. The
Jahrbcher had been transferred to Dresden in 1841, because of heavy
Prussian censorship in Halle, where the publication had appeared under
the title of the Hallische Jahrbcher. For Ruge, the publication ban was the
most evident and palpable sign of the impossibility in the immediate
future of any effective political change in Germany.

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In June 1843, Ruge, still in Dresden, wrote to Moritz Fleischer, a

collaborator on both Ruges Jahrbcher and Marxs Rheinische Zeitung (also
banned simultaneously by Prussian censorship), that he was preparing
an introduction to the German translation of Histoire de dix ans (History
of Ten Years), by the French republican and socialist Louis Blanc.19 This
introduction became the text Toward an Understanding Between the
Germans and the French. Ruge added that this work of translation and
presentation would be a propaedeutic to a revolutionary intellectual and
political Franco-German alliance that he was hoping to establish during
his upcoming stay in Paris.
This project of a revolutionary alliance with France was not an absolutely new idea in German intellectual life, though it had probably
never before been formulated with such precision and radicalism. Some
of its elements were present among the Rhineland Jacobins of the
1790s, or in the thinking of the young Joseph Grres.20 It found expression in the idea that the moral and political philosophy of Kant and
his disciples constituted a kind of German intellectual equivalent to the
political practice inaugurated by the French in 1789. On the other hand,
informed public opinion in France after 1830 was intensely seeking information about political and intellectual life in Germany: its aspirations
for national unity and freedom, its Romantic literature, the works of the
Young German movement, and especially its philosophy, notably that of
Schelling, Hegel, and their schools.
It is exactly to this demand that Heinrich Heine actively responded,
particularly through the articles which, throughout the 1830s, came to
constitute the different parts of his book On Germany: 21 on Romantic literature up to the death of Goethe in 1832, on religion and philosophy,
on popular myths and beliefs. Heine was filled with the ideas and images
of the French Revolution. He was an early reader and admirer of Mignets magisterial two-volume History of the French Revolution (1824).22 The
brilliant and glorious memories of Napoleon were also, partly, those of
his Rhenish childhood and adolescence. As a Rhenish Jew, Heine, unlike
numerous Teutomaniacs, Francophobes, and Judeophobes, never ceased
to consider Napoleons actions in Germany as eminently liberating: the
introduction of the Civil Code, and with it of civic equality (in various
ways in the different states), and the civil emancipation of the Jews, especially in the Rhineland. Attracted by the magnificent July sun of 1830,
he settled in Paris as a press correspondent in spring 1831, and remained
there until his death in 1856. The concern with German political backwardness, compared to twice-revolutionary France, is strongly present in
a number of his texts. This is sometimes linked to an idea formulated at

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the same time by Edgar Quinet23 of a possible future revolutionary mission for German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, via Fichte and Schelling; this might compensate, at least in the realm of theory, for Germanys
deeply worrying political retardation.24
Plans for the Deutsch-franzsische Jahrbcher (German-French Annals)
were worked out, at least in outline, by Ruge and Marx in Dresden in
May 1843. The editor of the journal was originally to have been Julius
Frbel,25 a German of radical opinions then living in exile in Zurich.
Often in the company of Moses Hess (Marx being absent until October),
Ruge spent the summer of 1843 in Paris, trying to convince a broad spectrum of French writers, journalists, and politicians, from liberals, republicans, and socialists of varying stamp to communists, to participate in
the innovative venture of the Deutsch-franzsische Jahrbcher.
In early 1846, Ruge told the story of these numerous interviews,
right up to their final failure: there were no French contributors to the
sole issue of the Jahrbcher that appeared in 1844. This account fills the
first volume of a large two-volume retrospective, over 400 pages long, entitled Two Years in Paris (Zwei Jahre in Paris).26 It describes the various personalities whom Ruge encountered, and the discussions which he had
with them. Among these were Etienne Cabet, editor of the newspaper
Le populaire, and author of the famous Voyage to Icaria 27 (183839), which
went through five editions before 1848; Thodore Dzamy,28 whom Ruge
characterizes as clearly materialist; Flora Tristan;29 the Fourierist Victor Considrant,30 editor of the daily La dmocratie pacifique, whom Ruge
found sympathetic; the heterodox Catholic Lamennais, author of Words
of a Believer; 31 the republican socialist Louis Blanc, who in November 1843
warmly endorsed the Jahrbcher project and explained its importance in
a lengthy article published in Pierre Lerouxs Revue indpendante;32 the
anticolonialist and abolitionist Victor Schlcher;33 and the republican
Ledru-Rollin.34 For a time, Ruge had also hoped to secure the collaboration of the very active Pierre Leroux,35 but especially of Lamartine,36 with
whom he had been in contact, and probably also of George Sand,37 as
these two authors were the most prestigious of the possible recruits.
Following quickly upon the Franco-German crisis of 1840 over the
always contentious issue of the Rhine,38 the project of a Franco-German
alliance set out in Ruges 1843 text is conceived in a revolutionary sense.
France is to occupy the side of the effective revolution, of life, of practice, while Germany engages with thought, philosophy, and theory. On
the French side, the heritage of revolution begun in 1789 and reactivated in 1830 is enriched by a workers movement, of socialist or communist character, which was in full development. On the German side,

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the dynamic forces are those of critical thought derived from Hegel, that
is, of Young Hegelianism applied to the complementary domains of religion, philosophy, politics, and social life.
But for Ruge it is not simply a matter of juxtaposing or adding
French political and social practice to German critical thought. It is
rather a question of mutual enrichment: French practice is called upon
to vivify German thought, to endow it with concrete content and aims,
while German thought is to lead French activism finally to gain consciousness of what it truly is, and thus to come fully into possession of
itself, notably by divesting itself of the Christian elementsLamennais,
for examplewhich continue to encumber it, and which pose an obstacle to its more complete development.
What disinclined the French whom he consulted to collaborate in
the Deutsch-franzsische Jahrbcher was especially the anti-religious, even
atheistic attitude of Ruge and his German friends, all of whom were
strongly marked by Feuerbachs humanist anthropology. By a strange
misdirection, it was precisely around the banner of philosophical and
political humanism that Ruge thought he could unite the broad ideological spectrum among his French contacts, alongside the Germans who
would be participating in the journal. Most of these Germans were neoHegelians of Feuerbachian coloration: Engels, Marx, Hess, and Ruge
himself. In addition, there were Heine, who had himself had a partly
Hegelian education in Berlin in the 1820s, the poet Georg Herwegh,39
and Johann Jacoby,40 a very brave and tenacious democrat from East
Prussia.
It is precisely the definition of this humanism that posed the
greatest difficulties for the Franco-German synthesis which Ruge proposed. The French who were solicited for this project, even the socialists
and communists among them, found this Young Hegelian humanism
unacceptable because of its anti-religious implications.41 This was not
only for reasons of personal conviction, but because it was feared that
such a position would alienate the popular classes to whom these theorists appealed. It would lead to a loss of political efficacy.
The open attack on Christianity conducted by Ruge and the Young
Hegelians was thus one of the primary causes of the failure of the Jahrbcher project. It was not, however, the sole cause. Also at issue were the
definition of the republic (res publica, a term without an exact German
equivalent, as Ruge and Marx admitted) and the interpretation of the
clash of nationalisms in the 1840s.
What Ruge retains from the failure of his Franco-German synthesis
is the idea of an end to the confrontation of opposing nationalisms. His
text Patriotism (Der Patriotismus), written in spring 1844 and pub-

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lished only in 1846, in the second volume of his Two Years in Paris, radicalizes the argument developed in Toward an Understanding of 1843. Of
the humanism which he proposes to his French interlocutors, Ruge now
says essentially two things. First, he opposes humanism to patriotism,42
what we would today call nationalism. He explains this, in Feuerbachian
perspective, in exactly the same way as religion, namely as the result of
the alienation of human beings in favor of an abstract and imaginary
entity which they have created for themselves, and to which they are
prepared to sacrifice themselves intellectually and even physically, even
to the death in the case of war. Second, the objective of humanism is
the suppression of all possible alienations: of religion, of patriotism and
militarism, but also of labor in its miserable, deadening daily reality. The
aim of humanism is the liberation of humanity in general, of all human
beings, of all the classes of civil society, of all those, Ruge explains,
who are strictly speaking sacrificed to the devouring community (Gemeinwesen) of modern civil society.43 This aim is not restricted to any particular social group which might be intellectually favored on the grounds
that it is more alienated and even more miserable than the others. With
explicit reference to Hegels distinction between state and civil society as
the system of needs and labor, Ruge advances his proposal of a passage
from civil society, the site of generalized alienation and unhappiness, to
a humane society44 respectful of life and the right to life, and promoting harmonious development.
Thus, starting from Hegel and his theory of the state and civil society, Ruge proposes to counter both the unhappy political reality of
Germany and the difficulties of an alliance with the French, whom he
deems to be still too exclusively political and religious, but insufficiently
social and philosophical. Respect for human life, finally freed from the
various oppressions which weigh it down, is a means of liberation and a
condition of thriving, both for concrete individuals, and for humanity
as a whole.

Ruges proximity to the young Marx here is striking, even if the latter
speaks of the particular alienation of the proletariat in respect to labor,
while Ruge invokes a generalized alienation touching all classes of civil
society. It is, however, in March 1844, at the moment of their closest
intellectual proximity, especially on the subject of alienation, that there
occurs a personal and political break between Ruge and the still Feuerbachian Marx, on the issue of communism as the possible and desirable future of humanity.45
Superficially, the break was provoked by financial problems aris-

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ing from difficulties in the management of the Jahrbcher, whose sole

issue had appeared in February 1844. Marx, as is well known, always had
money problems, while Ruge had had scarcely any since the death of his
first wife in 1833. Among other superficial causes of the split were differences between Ruge and Marx over the moral and political character
of the poets Herwegh and Heine. Marx esteemed them highly, whereas
Ruge found them unreliable, too aesthetic.
But the essential cause of the break lies in what both protagonists
explicitly affirm in 184344. Fundamentally, the quarrel opposes two distinct visions: that of Ruge, a proponent of a democratic revolution in a
national framework, after the French model of 1789, but ascribing to
antinationalist and humanistic aims; and that of Marx, elaborating and
progressively radicalizing his theory after 1843, and espousing a social
or proletarian revolution of a new kind, going beyond the political or
bourgeois revolution of the French type, which was insufficient and illusory in his eyes.
If Ruges humanism, through its anti-religious radicalism, repels
the many French whom he solicited, this same humanism, taken quite
schematically from Feuerbach, appears insufficient, abstract, and imprecise to Marx. After 1843, and with growing frequency and clarity, Marx
invokes the proletariat, communism, and the transcendence of the
political in the social revolution, the revolutionary form of the future.
It is essentially the opposition between humanism and communism that
causes the rupture between Ruge and Marx at the beginning of 1844.
In May of that year, the rupture leads Ruge to write these definitive and
significant lines to Feuerbach, who can be considered as much his intellectual father as Marxs on the matter of alienation:
Neither the projects of the Fourierists, nor the suppression of property
that the communists advocate, can be formulated with any clarity. These
two tendencies end up with a police state and slavery. To liberate the
proletariat from the weight of physical and intellectual misery, one [i.e.,
Marx] dreams of an organization that would generalize this very misery,
that would cause all human beings to bear its weight.46

When we think of the intellectual proximity of Ruge and Marx

at the very moment of their break, it is the text written by Marx in late
1843, and published in the Deutsch-franzsische Jahrbcher early the next
year, that principally comes to mind. In this important and well-known
introduction to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, Marx develops a radicalized and politicized Feuerbachian criticism of religion as
the opium of the people. To negate religion, that illusory happiness

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of the people, is to demand its real happiness.47 He goes on to criticize

the historical and political misre of the Germans, who had participated
in the restorations of the modern peoples, without ever partaking of
their revolutions.48 He underlines, in still idealist or Young Hegelian
fashion, the necessarily theoretical or philosophical starting point of any
possible German emancipation: The revolutionary past of Germany
is theoretical; it is bound up with the Reformation . . . Just as the revolution began in the brain of a monk, so it begins today in the brain of
the philosopher.49
Marx affirms, finally, that a German and universal emancipation
will be the result of a radical revolution of a new kind, transcending by far
the partial, merely political revolution of 1789. But such a revolution
can only be brought about by a social class bearing radical chains . . . because of its universal sufferings.50 Only the proletariat, armed by radical
critical philosophy with its spiritual weapons, can, by virtue of its own
abolition, serve as the basis for the emancipation of the German, which
will also signal the emancipation of man and of humanity in general.
The opposition between Ruge and Marx in 1844 is thus not concerned with the Young Hegelian idealism which they both share: this
theory emphasizes the role of radical philosophical critique in the transformation of the objective world. Nor does it concern the concept of
alienation, first applied to the religious domain, then extended to other
fields: patriotism or nationalism, militarism, daily labor. The debate is not
about the will to revolutionary change, faced with the historico-political
misre of Germany; for both Ruge and Marx, this revolution would be at
once German and universal, going beyond the political revolution of the
French type, which is considered humanly and socially insufficient. Both
Ruge and Marx concur in a positive assessment of various socialist and
communist tendencies in France and England.51 Ruges little-known text
Patriotism is ample testimony to this proximity.
Thus the opposition between Ruge and Marx focuses on the reference, present in the former, especially in his 1843 text, but absent from
the early Marx, to a democratic revolution in a national framework. Second, it concerns what we may call the possible material support for the
political and social transformation which is envisaged. While Ruge speaks
of alienation among human beings in general in religion, nationalism,
and daily labor, with all social classes combined, Marx clearly focuses on
the absolute alienation of a particular class, the proletariat, whose emancipation, and with it that of humanity in general, necessarily entails the
negation of private property, and thus communism.
Given the breadth of agreement, this difference seems relatively
slight, but it is fundamental. For Ruge, the disagreement has two im-

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portant corollaries whose consequences may still be felt in the twentieth

century and today. The first of these is a certain hesitancy, including a
terminological one, at the prospect of revolution itself. Sometimes, in
paragraph 11 of Patriotism, for example, the new revolution, which
Ruge supposes as transferring liberty, the essential content of 1789,
from the state to civil society, is conceived as a vast reform extended
throughout the civilized world, beyond all decaying state borders. In this
respect, it is not without interest to note that from 1843 onward, Louis
Blanc, linked to Ruge by mutual political and intellectual interests, began to collaborate with the republican Ledru-Rollin on a journal entitled La rforme, with a democratic and socialist orientation. At other
times, for example in paragraph 27 of the same text, Ruge criticizes the
abstract, inaccessible, dangerous ideals of the French Revolution, such
as Rousseaus and Robespierres virtue. In these cases, he assigns to
the future supranational revolution the task of rationalizing and humanizing the whole of civil and industrial society. The new revolution becomes then, quite imprecisely, a new revival of humanity. This universal
rationalization beyond all state borders and abstract political ideals, including those of 1789, seems to be an anticipation of what comes to be
called much later the era of managers or technocracy. Certain theoretical aspects of Saint-Simonianism already pointed in this direction,
first around 1830, and then, more practically, in the railroads and industrialization of the Second Empire.52
The second corollary is, in appearance at least, more surprising,
and even paradoxical. Ruge criticizes nationalism as alienation or sacrifice of the free human being, as a vast deceptionthe model being
furnished by the anti-Napoleonic wars of 181315, falsely (as Ruge sees
it) called wars of liberationand as the murderous confinement of humanity within borders and conflicts that destroy it. He favors, moreover,
a revolution that would be universally human, technical (or industrial),
and supranational, transcending the limits of the strictly political or juridical revolution like the French, which he often describes as the old
revolution. But at the same time, Ruge seems neither willing nor able
to detach himself from the strictly national framework of the German
fatherland, as though the liberation of humanity had to be first of all the
liberation of German nationals, that is, the emergence of Germany from
the confines of the ancien rgime from which France had freed itself in
1789. Thus, political revolution, like that of 1789, appeared to be the
precondition for the constitution of the German people and nation as
truly autonomous, sovereign, and free.
The critique of German nationalism which Ruge outlines in Toward an Understanding of 1843, and which he expresses much more

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systematically and radically in Patriotism of 1844, consists essentially

in the fact that this nationalism is not politically revolutionary, or that it
very rapidly ceased to be so, and that it is in no way capable of changing
the structures of political power in the German states, especially in Prussia, the object of Ruges most virulent criticisms, but also throughout the
German Confederation. Hence the striking formula of paragraph 19 of
Patriotism, which Ruge casts in the face of Teutomaniacs and Francophobes of all kinds who, he states, increasingly set the tone in Germany
after 1840, and control the organs of the press: There is no German
people, and only a revolution can create one.53
Developing one of the central themes of his 1843 text on the
Franco-German alliance, Ruge expresses the view in Patriotism that
only a political revolution on the (ultimately definitive) model of 1789
could bring into historical existence an autonomous and sovereign German nation. According to Ruge, a patriotic movement is a sham if it is
not simultaneously and fundamentally a revolutionary movement. The
task of this patriotic and revolutionary movement is to suppress the antiquated political power of the fathers of the country (Landesvter) and
of their Austro-Prussian instructors, and to overthrow the German Confederation itself, placed, as Ruge insists, under the reactionary and despotic tutelage of the Russian tsar, the real master of the Holy Alliance
founded in 1815 to hold in check both France and revolution.
This persistence, resistance, and recrudescence of the national
idea in its revolutionary variantthe only one acceptable to Rugeis
a particularly important aspect of his political thought, and characterizes, in general, the reflections of many other German democrats and
revolutionaries on the eve of 1848. Such a patriotismand Ruge notes
that French patriotism of 1789 is closer to humanism as he understands
it than is any other varietyretains its place within an expressly antinationalist discourse, tending toward a supranational socioeconomic
revolution marked with early traits of technocracy.
Perhaps it is this persistence, this resistance, this recrudescence,
which constitutes a possible explanation of one of the phenomena
evoked earlier: the rise and deployment of patriotisms and nationalisms
in Europe since the dislocation of the Soviet system. This process is occurring at the very moment when a united Europe, in which these various nationalisms, and the old and new states underlying them, seek (or
once sought) to meld, is tending to evolve a technocratic and supranational policy, first in the economic field, then in other areas touching
national sovereignty. Are these developments to be construed as a grave
new contradiction, heralding future conflicts, or as the progressive pacification of old national rivalries in a framework which is finally unified,

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prosperous, and rationalized? The answers to these questions are not

apparent, but for clarifying the problem in historical perspective, the
reflections of the Young Hegelians, in their very contradictions, retain
much of their value and their relevance.

Notes
An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the German Historical
Institute in Paris.
1. See, for example, Solange Mercier-Josa, Thorie allemande et pratique franaise de la libertDe la philosophie la politique et au socialisme (Paris: LHarmattan,
1993); Jean-Marie Paul, Dieu est mort en Allemagne: Des Lumires Nietzsche (Paris:
Payot, 1994) (esp. 157216 on the Hegelian heritage); and Douglas Moggach,
ed., The New Hegelians: Philosophy and Politics in the Hegelian School (Cambridge,
Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
2. See, for example, Gwendoline Jarczyk and Pierre-Jean Labarrire, De
Kojve Hegel: 150 ans de pense hglienne en France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996);
Andr Stanguennec, Hegel: Une philosophie de la raison vivante (Paris: Vrin, 1997);
Jacques DHondt, Hegel: Biographie (Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1998); Jean-Franois
Kervgan, Hegel et lhglianisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005);
and Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron, Hegel, penseur du politique (Paris: Le Flin, 2006).
3. See, for example, G. W. F. Hegel, Phnomnologie de lesprit, trans. JeanPierre Lefebvre (Paris: Aubier, 1991); G. W. F. Hegel, Cours desthtique, 3 vols.,
trans. Jean-Pierre Lefebvre and Veronika von Schenk (Paris: Aubier, 199597);
and G. W. F. Hegel, Principes de la philosophie du droit, trans. Jean-Franois Kervgan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998; new revised and expanded
edition, 2003). There are older translations of these texts: by Jean Hyppolite for
the Phnomnologie de lesprit (see note 4, below); by Samuel Janklvitch for the
Leons sur lesthtique (Paris: Aubier, 194445); and by Andr Kaan, with a preface
by Jean Hyppolite, for the Philosophie du droit (Paris: Gallimard, 1940).
4. G. W. F. Hegel, Phnomnologie de lesprit, trans. Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Aubier, 193941).
5. See, for example, Isabelle Garo, Marx, une critique de la philosophie (Paris:
Seuil, 2000); tienne Balibar and Grard Raulet, eds., Marx dmocrate: Le Manuscrit de 1843 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001); and in a less scholarly
genre, Jacques Attali, Karl Marx ou lesprit du monde (Paris: Fayard, 2005; reissued,
Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2007).
6. Arnold Ruge, Aux origines du couple franco-allemande: Critique du nationalisme et rvolution dmocratique avant 1848, ed. and trans. Lucien Calvi (Toulouse:
Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2004).
7. Raymond Aron, Equivoque et inpuisable, UNESCO Conference,
May 1968, on the 150th anniversary of Marxs birth, published in Arons Dune
Sainte Famille lautre: Essais sur les marxismes imaginaires (Paris: Gallimard, 1969),
277307.

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8. See Lucien Calvi, Leffondrement du systme sovitique signifie-t-il la

fin du marxisme comme pense critique? conomies et socits 28 (1994), tudes
de Marxologie series, nos. 3031, pp. 24958.
9. Edgar Morin (interview), Lhumanisme et la Rvolution franaise ont
battu la Rvolution russe, Le monde, December 2324, 2001, pp. 1213.
10. Intervention, in October 1979, by Pierre Bertaux, research supervisor, at the thesis defense, for the degree of doctorat dtat, of Lucien Calvi, Les intellectuels allemands, les ralits politiques allemandes et lide de rvolution
(17891844)de la Rvolution franaise aux dbuts du marxisme (doctorat dtat,
Universit Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1979), microfiche, 821 pp.
11. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke: Vollstndige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten, 18 vols. (Berlin: Dunker und Humblot, 183245); reissued as
Werke in 20 Bnden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 197071).
12. Heinrich Heine: Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung, in Smtliche Schriften in zwlf Bnden, ed. Klaus Briegleb (Munich and Vienna: Hanser,
1976), 5:2123.
13. On the critique of Hegelianism as a theory of conservatism and reaction, but also on the important Hegelian influences on Young Germany, see Lucien Calvi, Le renard et les raisins: La Rvolution franaise et les intellectuels allemands:
17891845 (Paris: DI, 1989), chaps. 6 and 7, and La Jeune Allemagne, critique
de lcole historique et de lhistoriographie allemandes, Cahiers dtudes germaniques 40 (2001): 15567.
14. On Bauer, see Massimiliano Tomba, Crisi e critica in Bruno Bauer: Il principio di esclusione come fondamento del politico (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2002); German
translation Krise und Kritik bei Bruno Bauer (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2005); and
Douglas Moggach, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
15. See Karl Obermann, Deutschland von 1815 bis 1849, 3rd ed. (Berlin:
Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1967), 46.
16. Ruge, Aux origines, 107.
17. Man muss sich also nicht dagegen erklren, wenn gesagt wird, dass die
Revolution von der Philosophie ihre erste Anregung erhalten habe (G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Geschichte [Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989], 592).
18. On the relation between German philosophy and the French Revolution, see Lucien Calvi, Die Franzsische Revolution in der deutschen Philosophie, in Zeitdiskurse: Reflexionen zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert als Festschrift fr
Wulf Wlfing, ed. Roland Berbig, Martina Lauster, and Rolf Parr (Heidelberg:
Synchron, 2004), 31934.
19. Arnold Ruge to Moriz Fleischer, Dresden, June 18, 1843, in Die Hegelsche Linke: Dokumente zu Philosophie und Politik im deutschen Vormrz, ed. Heinz Pepperle and Ingrid Pepperle (Frankfurt am Main: Rderberg, 1986), 876.
20. Lucien Calvi, Jacobinisme et ide nationale en Allemagne lpoque
rvolutionnaire: Le cas de Grres, Annales historiques de la Rvolution franaise 282
(1990): 40421.
21. Heines text, appearing in French as De lAllemagne (Paris: Renduel,

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1835), corresponds to three different German titles: Zur Geschichte der Religion
und Philosophie in Deutschland (1835), Die Romantische Schule (1833 and 1836), and
Elementargeister (1837). Heinrich Heine, Smtliche Schriften, 5:357703.
22. Franois Mignet, Histoire de la Rvolution franaise depuis 1789 jusquen
1814, 2 vols. (Paris: Perrin, 1824).
23. Edgar Quinet, De la rvolution et de la philosophie, Revue des deux
mondes, December 1, 1831.
24. Lucien Calvi, Le soleil de la libert : Henri Heine (17971856), lAllemagne,
la France et les rvolutions (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 2006).
25. Since 1841, Julius Frbel (18051893) had been editor of the Literarisches Comptoir in Zurich and Winterthur. In the 1830s and 1840s the Swiss Confederation, like Paris and France, was a place of refuge and of publication for
German liberals and radicals.
26. Arnold Ruge, Zwei Jahre in Paris: Studien und Erinnerungen, 2 vols.
(Leipzig: Wilhelm Jurany, 1846).
27. tienne Cabet (17881856), French republican and socialist, was
elected to the Assembly after July 1830, and in 1833 he founded the journal Le
populaire. Besides his Voyage en Icarie, translated into German in 1847, he published many other works, particularly an 1842 booklet with the significant title Le
dmocrate devenu communiste malgr lui.
28. Thodore Dzamy (18031850) was secretary to Cabet and a collaborator on the Populaire. He criticized Lamennais and the retention of Christian references in socialism and communism (M. Lamennais, rfut par lui-mme, 1841).
29. Flora Tristan (18031844), socialist and feminist militant whose name
is often associated with George Sand.
30. Victor Considrant (18081893), a student at the cole Polytechnique
in 1826, was leader of the Fourierist school after Fouriers death in 1837. In 1832
he founded the journal La phalange, and in 1843, La dmocratie pacifique.
31. The abb Flicit de Lamennaisor La Mennais(17821854), initially a traditionalist, distanced himself from Restoration conservatism, especially
after 1830. The founding of the liberal Catholic journal Lavenir in 1832 was disavowed by the pope, but Lamennais continued to radicalize his position, even
adopting socialistic formulas in his Paroles dun croyant, a work of 1833, translated
into German in 1834. He was elected to the Assembly in 1848.
32. On this article, see Lucien Calvi, Prsentation, in Ruge, Aux origines
du couple franco-allemande, 4451. Louis Blanc (18111882) was a brillant republican journalist, opposed to the July monarchy. He was a member of the provisional government in 1848, an admirer of Robespierre and of Jacobinism, and
a partisan of a state socialism. He published Lorganisation du travail in 183940,
a work reissued nine times up to 1850, and translated into German in 1847. His
Histoire de dix ans: 18301840 was published between 1841 and 1844.
33. Victor Schoelcher (18041893), a republican member of the grande
bourgeoisie, was minister of the marine at the beginning of the Revolution of
1848, and deputy for the Antilles. He belonged to the left and extreme left group
referred to as the Mountain.
34. Alexandre-Auguste Ledru-Rollin (18071874), a Parisian lawyer, had

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been a deputy since 1841, and was a member of the provisional government in
1848. In exile for twenty years under Napoleon III, he was a member, along with
Ruge and the Hungarian patriot Kossuth, of the European Democratic Central
Committee, founded in London in 1850 by the Italian republican Mazzini.
35. Pierre Leroux (17971871), a Saint-Simonian autodidact, had espoused republicanism since the 1820s, and was among the first to use the word
socialism in its modern sense. He helped reorient the journal Le globe from
liberalism to Saint-Simonianism after July 1830, and in 1843 set up the Revue indpendante. He was a deputy in June 1848.
36. Alphonse de Lamartine (17801869), renowned poet since the early
1820s, served as a diplomat in Italy, became a member of the Acadmie Franaise
in 1830, and a deputy in 1834. He was a very popular member of the provisional
government in 1848. He effectively defended the tricolor flag against the red
flag, but was eliminated from the political scene by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte,
the future Napoleon III.
37. George Sand, pseudonym of Aurore Dupin (18041876), was a successful novelist and pioneer of womens emancipation. She had links with republican, humanitarian, and socialist circles, especially with the Revue indpendante
and with Pierre Leroux. Her novels were quickly translated into German and left
their mark on Young Germany, and afterward on the Hegelian Left. Ruge wrote
an introduction to a translation of her works published by Wigand in Leipzig
between 1843 and 1846 (ber George Sand und die Tendenzpoesie, in Arnold
Ruge, Smtliche Werke, 2nd ed. [Mannheim: J.P. Grohe, 184748], 3:35878).
38. This crisis also originated in the Eastern Question, that is, the fate of
the Ottoman Empire, and in the isolation of France on this subject, faced with
the coalition of victorious powers in 1815: Russia, the United Kingdom, Austria,
and Prussia. See Calvi, Prsentation, 5863.
39. Georg Herwegh (18171875) was a German democratic poet who published several works in exile, for example his Poems of a Living Man (Gedichte eines
Lebendigen) in 184143 with Frbel in Zurich. Moving to Paris in 1844, like Ruge
and Marx, he organized a corps of volunteers there in 1848 to assist the revolutionaries in Baden.
40. Johann Jacoby (18051877) published in 1841 a pamphlet entitled
Four Questions Answered by an Inhabitant of East Prussia (Vier Fragen, beantwortet von
einem Ostpreussen). This was in response to the refusal by the new king of Prussia,
Friedrich Wilhelm IV, to permit evolution toward a constitutional system of government, as his father had promised in 1813.
41. In November 1843, Louis Blanc wrote in La revue indpendante, on the
subject of the Deutsch-franzsische Jahrbcher project and Young Hegelian atheism,
the doctrine of Hegel bordered on atheism; and . . . it was atheism that the most
fervid disciples of Hegel retained from his heritage . . . Atheism in philosophy
corresponds to anarchy in politics . . . The liberty that came from philosophy
[of the Enlightenment: Blanc cites Diderot and dHolbach] was only a false liberty . . . and individual right, and what is absolute about it, is not, cannot be the
basis of democracy. This was well understood by the immortal adversary of Voltairianism, the great Jean-Jacques [Rousseau]. Rousseau, according to Blanc,

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was not an atheist, seeing democracy as the application of the principles of

the Gospel (cited in Calvi, Prsentation, 4649).
42. On the idea of patriotism in Germany, see Lucien Calvi, Le patriotisme en Allemagne de 1770 au Vormrz, in Dictionnaire des usages socio-politiques
(17701815), ed. Jacques Guilhaumou and Raymonde Monnier (Paris : Champion, 2006), fasc. 8, Patrie, patriotisme, pp. 191218.
43. Ruge, Aux origines du couple franco-allemande, 163.
44. Ibid., 155.
45. On the split between Ruge and Marx, see Calvi, Prsentation, 7185.
46. Arnold Ruge, Briefwechsel und Tagebuchbltter aus den Jahren 18251880,
ed. Paul Nerrlich (Berlin: Weidmann, 1886), 1:346.
47. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz, 1970), 379.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 385.
50. . . . die teilweise, die nur politische Revolution . . . (Marx and Engels,
Werke, 1:388); [eine] Klasse mit radikalen Ketten . . . durch ihre universellen
Leiden (ibid., 390).
51. Ruges critique of the Fourierists is immediately subsequent to his
break with Marx on communism as the future of humanity. This later development should not obscure the earlier agreement between the two on the positive
aspects of French socialism and communism.
52. On the role of former Saint-Simonians (Paulin Talabot, the brothers
Isaac and mile Pereire, and Michel Chevalier) in French economic growth
under the Second Empire (railroads, industry, banking, the Suez Canal Project,
etc.), see Sbastien Charlty, Histoire du saint-simonisme (18251864) (Paris: Gonthier, 1965), 24752. This volume takes up a thesis already defended and published by Charlty (18671945) in 1896, and reissued in 1931 in Paris by Paul
Hartmann (here cited after the 1965 edition).
53. Ruge, Aux origines, 167.

15

Marx, German Idealism,

and Constructivism
Tom Rockmore

This chapter is on Marx and constructivism. Constructivism is a central

theme in German idealism, which lends unity to this tendency, starting
with Kant, and continuing through all the later German idealists, specifically including Marx. This assertion is obviously controversial. The claim
that Marx is a constructivist in a manner similar to German idealism is
rarely suggested and even less rarely argued. To make out this claim, it
is necessary to reread Marx differently than he is usually read, that is, to
see him not as opposed to, but rather as a central figure within, philosophy, including German idealism. Since the interpretation of Marx is
solidly embedded in the traditional Marxist approach, the problem of
rereading Marx consists first in freeing him from interpretation complicated by his political relation to Marxism, and second in understanding
his relation to post-Kantian German idealism from the perspective of
constructivism.

Marxism and Marx Redux

Philosophical constructivism is not a main theme in the discussion of
Marx, who is usually interpreted through Marxism. The conventional approach consistently insists on drawing attention to a distinction between
philosophy on the one hand and Marx and Marxism on the other.
Before discussing the relation between Marx and constructivism, it will
be necessary to show that Marx can be read from a non-Marxist angle of
vision. There is no shortage of interpretations of Marx. Most of them are
Marxist, by which I mean they generally follow a paradigm suggested
by Engels, who invented what has become known as Marxism. For present purposes, we can leave to one side specific forms of Marxism associ-

321

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ated with the various Internationales, Soviet Marxism, Western Marxism,

and so on, in concentrating on Marxism in general.
Marx, who with Engels invented a theory of ideology, is a victim
of an ideological reading of his position in a way that obscures its legitimate resources while unfairly reducing it to its expected political consequences. Marxism relates to Marx as false consciousness relates to the
world. Ideology is no more than a false image of the true state of the
case. Elsewhere I have made the case in some detail that Marx is well
worth recovering. We can begin to see why this is the case when we free
his position from some of the many ideological comments that have
been made about it.1 I will limit myself here to some more general remarks intended to prepare the way to recovering Marx as an important
idealist philosopher.
The Marxist view of Marx derives from Engelss uninformed, tendentious interpretation of classical German philosophy. Marxism, in Engelss formulation, consists of three interrelated claims, including (1) a
general claim about the single overriding problem of philosophy, (2) a
proposed solution to that problem, and (3) a characterization of Marxs
relation to this solution, hence to philosophy through his relation to
Feuerbach.
According to Engels, there is a so-called central problem of all philosophy, which he describes as the relation of thinking and being.2
This approach presupposes that philosophy concerns the interaction of
two factors, which he designates in different ways as subject and object,
or thinking and being. There are two and only two ways of analyzing this
relation, which Engels calls idealism and materialism. Idealism, which he
rejects, asserts the primacy of spirit over nature; and materialism, which
he favors, is the converse view, which asserts the primacy of matter over
spirit.
Engels believes that idealism mistakenly inverts the relation between subject and object, thought and being, spirit and nature, in offering a fantastic derivation of the world, or nature, from spirit. The correct, or materialist, approach consists in understanding spirit on the basis
of nature, and not conversely. Feuerbach offers a materialist critique of
Hegel, hence of idealism. Marx, who criticizes Feuerbach, supposedly improves materialism, which is the correct solution to the central problem
of philosophy, from an extra-philosophical stance.
This or a closely related schema is followed throughout Marxism.
Engelss schema is the basis of Lukcss claim that Marx solves the problems of classical German philosophy from a perspective situated outside
of, and hence beyond, philosophy. This claim implies that Marx is neither a German idealist nor a philosopher in any recognizable form. It

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prevents, or at least inhibits, us from understanding Marx as finally another philosopher, as someone who contributes to, but does not finally
resolve, the problems of philosophy.
Engelss uninformed analysis is wrong on all the main points,
and hence misleading as concerns an interpretation of Marx. Here I
will simply pass over in silence details in Engelss discussion, such as his
notorious view that Kants problem of the thing in itself can be solved
through praxis and industry.3
Engels, who was impressed by Darwin, mistakenly thinks philosophical questions can be solved through scientific discoveries in such
fields as biology. He conflates the evolutionary problem of the origin
of human beings from nature with the very different problem of knowledge in general. As concerns the relation of thought and being, Engels
is doubly in error. On the one hand, merely to accept the Darwinian explanation of biological evolution casts no light at all on the problem of
knowledge. On the other hand, a materialist approach to knowledge as
Engels depicts it is problematic. For as Fichte already showed,4 there is no
way to explain knowledge on the basis of an object lying outside experience but allegedly known within it. Further, if Marx favored materialism
as Engels understands it, then his position would be of no conceivable
interest.
Engelss account of the role of Feuerbach in the formulation of
Marxs position should also be challenged. Engels would only be correct in this regard on two conditions: (1) if Marxs position were in fact
significantly influenced by his reading of Feuerbach, and (2) if Marxs
position were a form of materialism. Both claims are, I believe, false.
Marxs position took shape unusually quickly. Though it later develops, the development works out insights at which Marx had already
arrived before he entered into contact with Engels and before he begins
to discuss Feuerbach. The most important remarks on Feuerbach occur
in the Paris Manuscripts (1844) and in the Theses on Feuerbach, which
were both written only after Marx entered into contact with Engels. Elsewhere I have argued in detail that Marxs position includes three fundamental elements, including a critique of Hegel, especially the latters
Philosophy of Right; a critique of contemporary capitalism as it existed
toward the middle of the nineteenth century; and a revised theory of
modern industrial society.5 The basic outline of Marxs critique of Hegel was initially worked out in two papers written in 1843.6 The critique
of capitalism, which is already emerging in these papers, very rapidly
assumes a form whose outline never later changes as early as the Paris
Manuscripts, where Marx also sketches his own alternative model of modern industrial society.

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The appreciative but critical remarks on Feuerbach in the Paris

Manuscripts do not concern either Marxs critique of Hegel, which has
already taken shape before the Paris Manuscripts, or his critique of orthodox political economy, or his alternative model of modern industrial
society. The Marxist interpretation of Marx simply exaggerates Feuerbachs importance for Marx. Though Marxs enthusiastic remarks about
Feuerbach in the Paris Manuscripts are often interesting, that does not
justify according Feuerbach a central role in the development of Marxs
position. In fact, in later writings and letters, Marx seems to suggest that
his early enthusiasm for Feuerbach was misplaced. Lukcs, a leading student of Marx, also considers the Marxist view of Feuerbachs role to be
exaggerated.7

German Idealism and Epistemological

Constructivism
Freeing Marx from the well-known Marxist interpretation enables us to
detect a genuinely philosophical commitment, especially to constructivism. By constructivism, I will understand an approach to knowledge of
all kinds, based on the insight that we can only reliably claim to know
what we in some undefined sense, which varies widely according to the
position, can be said to construct.
There are many different forms of constructivism, which seems to
have arisen in ancient Greece in the constructivist approach to geometry. At the end of the nineteenth century, this gave rise to a general constructivist approach to mathematics. Philosophical constructivism was
independently introduced into modern philosophy by Hobbes, who influenced Vico, and then again by Kant. There are many different forms
of constructivism in modern philosophy,8 especially in the philosophy
of science. Philosophers of science interested in constructivism include
selected figures from the Vienna Circle, as well as Poincar, Mittelstrass,
Dingler, and others. Here I will be concentrating on epistemological
constructivism as it arose in the modern philosophical tradition.
Kant was concerned with the general solution to the problem of
knowledge. The German idealist philosophical tradition can be understood as an ongoing effort by different hands to work out a constructivist
solution to the problem of knowledge as it was initially formulated in German idealism by Kant and then later restated by a series of post-Kantian
German idealists. The ongoing concern with this theme provides con-

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ceptual unity to German idealism in a way which is not provided by the

German language, or by German nationality, which did not exist at the
time these thinkers were active.
Philosophical constructivism is an alternative, or second-best,
strategy for knowledge. A short list of other approaches might include intuitionism, foundationalism, and representationalism. In the famous discussion of the divided line in the Republic, Plato describes direct intuition
of the real as it is. Intuitions, for instance religious intuitions, are notoriously private, not available for the intersubjective scrutiny on which the
modern discussion insists. Foundationalism is a philosophical strategy
which goes back to the ancient Greek tradition, but is best known in connection with Descartes. Descartes insists on an unshakeable foundation
for knowledge. Yet there does not appear to be any principle, known beyond doubt to be true, and from which the remainder of the theory can
be rigorously deduced, which is also rich enough to support a reliable
inference from ideas in the mind to the world. Representationalism is a
well-known, widely popular modern epistemological strategy, which still
has many supporters.
In the critical philosophy Kant is simultaneously committed to two
incompatible strategies for knowledge, which, for purposes of this discussion, we can call representationalism and constructivism. In the famous letter to Marcus Herz (February 21, 1782) at the beginning of the
critical period, Kant formulates the problem of knowledge as requiring
the analysis of the relation of the representation to the object. What Kant
calls representation is his version of rationalist and empiricist views of
what is often depicted as an idea in the mind, which under appropriate
conditions can be said to reliably depict the mind-independent external
world as it is beyond mere appearance, hence, in other words, to know
the world in itself.
There are different kinds of realism, including ordinary, metaphysical, scientific, empirical, and aesthetic forms. Ordinary realism is the
view of the ordinary, philosophically unsophisticated person, who believes
that we know the world as it really is. Metaphysical realism is the view of
the philosophically sophisticated individual who believes there are compelling philosophical arguments that lead to roughly the same conclusion expressed in more technical language, that is, we can reliably claim
to know the mind-independent world as it really is beyond appearance.
Scientific realism is the view featured in scientism, namely, the conviction
that science is the main and perhaps only source of knowledge, which
is often understood on the model of metaphysical realism. Empirical
realism is the view that we can never reliably claim to go beyond experi-

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ence to know the world as it really is. Aesthetic realism is an artistic style,
which is employed in artistic production, and which is sometimes said, for
instance by Marxist writers on aesthetics, to be cognitively preferable.
Kants form of representationalism presupposes a commitment to
metaphysical realism, or to the claim to know the mind-independent
world as it really is. This commitment, which goes all the way back at least
to Parmenides, remains popular. But no argument has ever been devised
to show we can reliably claim to know the mind-independent world as
it is. If a representation is the only access to the object, then we cannot
know that a representation corresponds to it, for instance, through comparison, direct intuition, or in any other way. In fact, if the object really
were mind-independent, then there would be no epistemological link to
it and it could not be known. Kant arrives at a similar conclusion through
his concept of the thing in itself. Since the thing in itself, which can without contradiction be thought but cannot be given in experience, is by
definition beyond cognition, we cannot successfully claim to represent
it. Hence, on strictly Kantian grounds there is in fact no prospect of solving the problem of knowledge through a representationalist strategy.
There are two consequences of the failure of a representationalist
approach to knowledge. One concerns Kants relation to the venerable
representationalist epistemological strategy, which is common to rationalists like Descartes and empiricists like Locke. This strategy reaches
a peak in Kant. Though representationalism is still popular, after Kant
there is no reason to be a representationalist. The other concerns the
alternative. If there is no way to know a mind-independent object as it
is, if we can never credibly claim to correctly represent it, then, on pain
of falling into skepticism, the other alternative appears to be to argue we
can know a mind-dependent object.
Kants Copernican revolution is frequently mentioned but not
often studied in detail. The available literature is confused and confusing. The most comprehensive recent discussion comes to the conclusion
that there is no relation, none whatsoever, between Kant and Copernicus.9 In this respect, it is at least interesting to note that Kants contemporaries Reinhold and Schelling understood Kant in terms of a proposed
Copernican revolution in philosophy.
This is not the place to develop a full-scale analysis of this key part
of the critical philosophy. Suffice it to say that Kant, like such other antiCartesians as Hobbes and Vico, argues in effect that knowledge is possible if and only if the subject can in some sense be said to construct
what it knows as a condition of knowing it. For these and other thinkers,
construction of the object becomes a necessary condition of any reliable
claim to know it.

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Kants position is officially a priori, that is, worked out prior to

and in independence of experience. But his argument in favor of his constructivist thesis is a posteriori, dependent on the development of modern science. He insists that modern empirical science emerged through
a revolutionary change in the way of thinking, that is, in the scientific
approach to natural phenomena. According to Kant, such modern scientists as Galileo, Torricelli, and Stahl understood that reason has insight
only into what, as he famously says, it itself produces according to its
own design.10
Kants claim suggests that discovery of the constructivist approach
successfully transformed empirical science into a secure source of knowledge similar to mathematics, which had already become a certain science
in ancient Greece. Kant goes on to link the proposed revolution to Copernicus, to whom Kant attributes a revolutionary insight, which he takes
over into philosophy.
All of this is controversial. It is by no means clear that Kant correctly understands such modern scientists as Galileo. Vico denied knowledge of nature on the grounds that we could only know history, which
we create. Galileo, on the contrary, believed that he could read the book
of nature as it in fact was, and hence grasp the world as it is beyond
mere appearance. It is also not clear that Kants comparison between his
own philosophical position and Copernican astronomy is correct. Much
ink has been spilled on this very point; but the discussion, which I will
not summarize here, is inconclusive. For our purposes, it is sufficient to
note that Kant thinks that, drawing on the example of natural science,
he is justified in introducing a philosophical revolution, with an analogy to Copernican astronomy, and which depends on a constructivist
approach.

Idealism, the Copernican Revolution, and

the Theory of Identity
Part of the difficulty in acquiring clarity about philosophical constructivism lies in the complex terminology in which it is discussed. So far, I have
mentioned Kants Copernican revolution. I will now mention idealism.
Kant is officially a transcendental idealist as well as an epistemological
realist, whose idealism consists, as I have noted above, in his Copernican
revolution. There are different forms of idealism. Elsewhere I have discussed Platonic idealism, the new way of ideas, German idealism, and
British idealism.11 Kant is a German idealist. German idealism concerns a

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nonstandard form of identity. Kants Copernican revolution exemplifies

this nonstandard identity, which underlies the claim for knowledge.
There are various kinds of identity, including personal identity, the
identity of indiscernibles, identity over time, and identity in all possible
worlds. For our purposes, it will be useful to distinguish between numerical identity, or the sense in which something is identical with itself, and
qualitative identity. Numerical identity is what Leibniz has in mind in
the identity of indiscernibles. Kant exploits this concept in maintaining
against Hume, who advances a so-called bundle theory of the subject,
that the same subject persists through time. Qualitative identity refers
to the way in which two or more things share the same property. In the
theory of ideas, Plato points out that if we abstract from any differences
of shade, two or more things which are both red are in that respect qualitatively alike.
The concept of identity, which underlies German idealist claims
for knowledge, is a nonnumerical, nonqualitative unity in difference,
which is brought about by the subject between the subject and the object that it in some unspecified sense constructs through its activity. This
type of identity seems to be well anchored in ordinary experience. A
well-known example is the German poet Schillers discussion of the play
instinct (Spieltrieb). In observing that in a sense the sculptor is his statue,
Schiller was merely reformulating a popular belief, which is sometimes
stated in the form of a claim that the sculptor expresses himself in his
art. The key insight here is that since the sculptor is crystallized, as
it were, in the objet dart, one can say that in a sense the object is the
sculptor under the form of externality. In other words, the object is both
numerically distinct from, as well as the same as, and hence in that sense
identical to, the subject.
Kantian idealism turns on a claim for identity in difference. Kant in
effect argues that a cognitive object is transparent to, and hence knowable by, a subject, who in some sense constructs it. The obvious difficulty
lies in making sense of the insight that the subject can meaningfully be
said to construct what it knows as a condition of knowing it. For Kant,
the possibility of knowledge requires the subject to construct its cognitive object, but he fails to explain how this is practically possible. In the
schematism chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, where he describes this
constructive activity as a hidden art in the depth of the human soul,12
he suggests we do not and in fact cannot know how this activity occurs.
Kants idealist theory of knowledge founders on his inability to explain the activity through which the subject constructs the cognitive object. His entire approach to the problem of knowledge comes down to
the important claim, basic to his entire position, but which he finally can-

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not justify, that knowledge is possible if and only if we construct what we

know, but for which he does not and cannot furnish an account. Indeed,
he suggests that such an account simply cannot be given.
It is fair to say that the result of the critical philosophy is mixed.
Kant points to a problem as well as to the nature of its solution, which he
does not provide and which, he insists, cannot be provided. The logic of
Kants argument leads him to claim that the solution of the problem of
knowledge lies in understanding the way in which the subject constructs
its cognitive object. His inability to elucidate this construction suggests
that, with respect to its intrinsic goal, Kants critical philosophy remains
an unfinished project.

Post-Kantian German Idealism

and Constructivism
The reaction to the critical philosophy in the post-Kantian debate divides
roughly into two main forms with respect to a potential solution of the
problem of knowledge. Those who believed Kant had failed and nothing
further could be done along Kantian lines included those who believed
his project ended in or at least failed to defeat skepticism (Schulze),
those who thought the project was in principle impossible to carry out
(Hamann), those who believed, like Kant, that his position simply could
not be improved or otherwise changed without worsening it (Maimon),
and so on. On the contrary, a number of other contemporary thinkers,
all of whom were in some way associated with what became known as
post-Kantian German idealism, believed the critical philosophy needed
to and in fact could be improved to reach its intended goal.
The post-Kantian effort to revise the critical philosophy was partly
inspired by Kants reference to the biblical distinction between the spirit
and the letter concerning the interpretation of his position.13 The postKantian German idealists, who were interested in reformulating the
critical philosophy, felt authorized to ignore its letter in respecting a version of its spirit. In practice, this effort followed different lines. One was
the concern with system, which already interested Reinhold, the first to
undertake to restate the conclusions of the critical philosophy. Another
was the concern with constructivism, which runs throughout all postKantian German idealism, starting with Fichte and including Marx.
Post-Kantian idealist efforts to improve his constructivist approach
to knowledge carry further and develop his idea of identity in the form
of difference. This constructivist insight runs throughout German ide-

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alism, from Kant at least through Marx. Since Hegel, who emphasized
identity in difference, post-Kantian German idealism has been known as
philosophy of identity (Identittsphilosophie).
The history of post-Kantian German idealism is composed of a series of efforts to reformulate and develop the concept of constructivism,
hence the position to which it belongs. In the process, Kants original
theory, which is resolutely a priori, anti-psychologistic, nonsocial, and
nonhistorical, is transformed into a very different theory, inspired by
Kants position, but which, unlike it, is a posteriori, psychologistic, social, and historical. The result is to extend and complete Kants critical
philosophy not according to its letter but rather according to different
interpretations of its spirit at the evident cost of turning it inside out, so
to speak.
As post-Kantian German idealism is usually described, the main figures are Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, each of whom, in ways consistent
with his own interests, contributes to the later development of Kantian
insights, including constructivism.
Since this is neither a history of idealism, nor of German idealism,
nor of constructivism, it is not necessary to describe the post-Kantian
evolution of German idealism in any detail. In the present context, it will
be sufficient to limit the discussion of thought in this period to several
rapid remarks.
We can begin with Fichte, who is in some ways a pivotal figure. At
a time when many observers claimed to be the only ones to read Kant
correctly, all the main post-Kantian idealists read Kant through Fichtes
eyes. Fichte represented himself as an orthodox Kantian; and Schelling
was, until he broke with Fichte, a self-described Fichtean.
Fichte claims to be a transcendental philosopher precisely in the
Kantian mode. He further describes his own position as transcendental
philosophy. Yet he leaves transcendental philosophy, at least as Kant understands it, behind. For Kant, transcendental philosophy is by definition
a priori. Fichte effects the transition from the a priori to the a posteriori
plane through rethinking the Kantian subject as finite human being.
In terms Husserl later popularized, we can say that Kant is opposed to
psychologism. Unlike the British empiricists, who are concerned with
human knowledge, Kant is concerned with the transcendental logic of
knowledge in general. The Kantian subject, which is not a human being,
is a mere epistemological construct, which performs a particular role in
Kants theory of knowledge at the obvious cost of opening a gap between
the conditions of knowledge and whatever human beings are capable
of doing. Fichte, who rethinks the subject as finite human being, closes
this gap. He rejects representationalism in favor of the view that experi-

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ence, which he understands as the contents of consciousness, must be

explained from the angle of vision of human activity. This is the same
activity through which the subject can at least theoretically be said to
construct what it knows.
Fichte transforms Kants theoretical constructivism in a theory of
practical activity. As post-Kantian idealists interested in carrying the critical philosophy beyond Kant, Schelling and Hegel are both Fichteans. A
theory of the subject as basically active can concern either self-realization,
for instance in objective form, that is, as an object in which we know ourselves, or again the cognitive grasp of the other as oneself through the
device of rendering it cognitively transparent. The former approach is
worked out by Schelling, and the latter is developed by Hegel.
As concerns idealism, Schelling reaches a peak in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) at a time when he still considered himself to
be a Fichtean. His System is intended to extend idealism to all possible
topics. The central theme is a progressive history of self-consciousness,
for which experience serves as a document. The theory is based on a supposed harmony between nature and intelligence, philosophy of nature
and transcendental philosophy, neither of which is adequate by itself.
Proof of the existence of external things is based on intuition, that is,
the construction of the objects themselves. Art has priority over empirical consciousness and theoretical-reflective activity as the locus of the
unconscious activity of self-constitution and the means to ascend to the
absolute. The deduction of history leads to the junction of the subjective
and objective, purpose and mechanism, in action in the absolute.
Hegel approaches the problem of knowledge as a problem of the
construction not of cognitive objects but rather of conceptual frameworks adequate (or inadequate) to their cognition and on which they
depend. Knowledge arises within a historical process featuring experience leading to the formulation of a conceptual framework. This framework is tested and, if necessary, reformulated to overcome any difference
between the theory and its conceptual object. Hegels approach to knowledge differs from a standard approach to knowledge through a process
of trial and error in several ways. First, knowledge based on a conceptual
framework is different from truth, which is something that is reached
only at the term of the cognitive process in which the theory of the object and the object of the theory coincide. Second, the cognitive object
is not invariant but variable, dependent on the conceptual framework.
As the theory changes, the objects also change. Third, this process works
itself out in historical time, since the cognitive process is intrinsically
historical. Fourth, we do not and cannot know the mind-independent
world as it is. Hence, it is not possible to analyze the relation of our

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theories to the world. Our knowledge is limited to objects of experience,

which depend on theories we ourselves construct. Since knowledge concerns dependent cognitive objects, which in turn depend on the cognitive subject, in knowing, in a sense, we know only ourselves.

Marxian Constructivism and

Human Activity
To understand the role of constructivism in Marxs position, we need
to characterize it. Marxs position, which encompasses philosophy and
political economy, as well as such allied disciplines as history and political
science, is based on philosophical anthropology, or a conception of
human being as the root of human reality. The simplest way to describe
the key insight in Marxs overall position is in terms of his theory of finite
human beings. Marxs theory of the human subject depends on a series
of basic distinctions encompassing the difference between work or labor
(Arbeit) and what I will be calling free human activity, a form of activity
that can only occur beyond constraints imposed by the capitalist economic process.14 The basic distinction between work or labor and free
human activity is reflected in further distinctions between capitalism and
communism; history and human history; reproductive needs and species
needs; alienation and fulfillment.
Marx is a rigorously systematic thinker entirely in the mold of
classical German idealism. As part of his reaction to Hegel, Marx, like
other young Hegelians, such as Feuerbach, was led in the direction of
Fichte.15 A simple way to describe this attraction is to say that Marx criticizes Hegel for supposedly failing to provide a theory of finite human
being, whose basic outlines, outlines on which he builds, he finds in
Fichte. Marx shares with Fichte the fundamental thesis, which underlies
both positions, that human beings must be understood as basically active
beings, that is, in terms of their activity.
Activity, not work, is Marxs basic interpretive category. His overall
position can be sketched in terms of his Fichtean theory of human activity. Like Fichte, like Aristotle, Marx approaches human being through
human activity. As early as the Paris Manuscripts, we find him asking, For
what is life but activity?16 and he answers his rhetorical question: My
own existence is a social activity.17
Marxs entire position turns on a distinction between two types of
activity, which are linked to the developmental stages of society. Work
or labor (Arbeit) is the form of activity manifested by a person within

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the productive process characteristic of modern industrial capitalism. It

requires the use of preexisting material, which is acted upon and transformed by finite human beings as part of the process. Work is productive, as opposed to creative; quasi-physical as opposed to mental; and basically active as opposed to passive. It is only passive activity in capitalism,
a form of society where it is not under the control of the worker.
Work is epoch-specific to capitalism. It is a fundamental tenet of
the position that when capitalism is replaced by communism, work in the
traditional sense will cease to exist. Marx occasionally stresses this point,
as in the following passage from The German Ideology: In all revolutions
up till now the mode of activity always remained . . . whilst the communist revolution [which] is directed against the preceding mode of activity,
does away with labor.18 It follows that in communism there will be a different form of activity. But, unfortunately, just as Marx is rarely explicit
in reference to communism, he only occasionally refers to this second
form of activity, which is in a sense the goal of human history as Marx
understands it, though its real possibility is everywhere presupposed as
the perspective from which to criticize capitalism.

Marxian Social Ontology

Marxian social ontology and Marxian theory of knowledge are both
based on Marxs Fichtean approach to human beings as basically active.
Both are also constructivist, but in different ways.
Ontology, which is an alternative term for metaphysics, has a dubious
reputation in our time. Heidegger attempts, but later abandons, the effort to renew metaphysics. The positivists, led by Carnap, simply ridiculed
any concern with metaphysics. At present, the concern with ontology is
mainly confined to analytic philosophers, and traditional Thomists.
Marxian social ontology is closely related to the German idealist
tradition. In an enormous, sprawling, unfinished work entitled The Ontology of Social Being, Lukcs followed Marx in working out an ontology
based on history.19 Lukcs believes we can construct a social ontology on
the basis of Marxs insights.20 Instead of following Lukcs beyond Marx,
it will suffice here to describe Marxs own social ontology.
In general terms, Marx formulates a theory of finite human beings
who construct or produce objects, themselves, the surrounding social
world, consciousness and self-consciousness, the conditions of the transition from capitalism to communism, and finally human history. In working out his analysis of modern industrial society, Marx applies a specifi-

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cally Hegelian analysis of objectification through productive activity in

an economic setting. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel describes the selfobjectification of workers in and through the economic process, in the
course of a wider account of the basic concepts of political economy.21
He draws attention to the fact that individual products concretize human
activity in external form.22
In working out his analysis of capitalism, Marx builds on Hegels
own account of basic economic categories. Hegel provides the basis for
Marxs theory of alienation in his description of an economic process
in which products and individuals are alienated.23 Marx brings together
Hegels analyses of objectification through work of all kinds and modern
industrial capitalism in a general model of modern industrial society.
We can reconstruct Marxs position in outline as follows. Finite
human beings have needs, which can be divided into two main types.
Reproductive needs typically include food, clothing, shelter, and other
necessities of life. There are also human needs, which must be satisfied
in order to develop as an individual human being. According to Marx, in
capitalism, which is typified by private ownership of the means of production, most human beings do no more than meet their reproductive
needs, but cannot develop in ways necessary to meet their human needs.
Human beings meet their reproductive needs in capitalism through
work, which is accordingly the master interpretive category for the capitalistic stage of human development. Humans produce a series of products including at least commodities, social relations, society, themselves,
and human history. A commodity is a product produced within the
production process, and which is destined for sale in the marketplace.
Human beings, who work within the economic process, produce relations between individuals and, more generally, the entire social context.
By social relations we understand the cooperation of several individuals,
no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end.24
Social relations take various forms, including, at a minimum, relations
between people and things, and further between people. Society as a
whole is merely the ensemble of different social relations of which it is
constituted. A given person has a distinct role within the social world as
identified by a given economic function, or form of work, such as a bricklayer, head of the household, university professor, or capitalist. Human
history is a further product composed of the actions of human beings
within the social context over time.
One of the most interesting aspects of Marxs position is his emphasis on historical change. We are used to nonhistorical accounts of
historical change, which account for history without an account of historical change. Recent examples include Heideggers view that human

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history emerged out of an earlier turn away from being, Foucaults positivistic account of history as composed of disconnected epistemes, and
Lyotards idea that postmodernism differs from modernism in the rejection of overarching explanations. Marx advances a historical account of
the same phenomena based on economic development. His account is
based on two related theorems. The first is contained in the model of
modern industrial society in terms of a fundamental distinction between
superstructure and base.25 The base refers to the economic organization
of the means of production, and the superstructure refers to all other,
noneconomic, cultural phenomena, including philosophy, law, and so
on. The well known relation of superstructure and base is interpreted in
two main ways. One is as a unilateral relation, in which the base is said
to determine the superstructure. And the other is as an interaction in
which each determines the other. In both cases, Marx holds that changes
in the economic base lead eventually to changes in its superstructure.
The second theorem is a claim about social conflicts and social crises, which transform society and, as a direct result, human history. Marx,
who defines social relations in general fashion, at least leaves the door
open to a form of society lying beyond modern industrial capitalism,
hence beyond the influence of the economic process. He famously
claims that human history only begins when, in the transition to communism, capitalism is left behind. This conviction derives from an analysis
of the underlying economic structure of society. In this respect, Marx
identifies two economic mechanisms ingredient in historical change.
One is due to the variable relation between material productive forces
and the existing relations of production. By the term conflict Marx,
following Hegel, endeavors to think social contradictions. According to
Marx, social conflicts arise when the development of productive forces
comes into conflict with the existing relations of production, leading to
social revolution. By revolution, Marx means adaptive social change,
which stops short of deeper social transformation, for instance in the
transition from capitalism to communism. Marx is realistic in suggesting
that a social order, which is based on a particular constellation of social
forces, never disappears before all its productive forces have developed.
The other mechanism is due to periodic crises resulting from underconsumption. Marx sometimes romantically suggests that capitalism will
finally founder on such a crisis. One cannot rule it out, but there seems
no particular reason to support such an inference.
Marxs theory of capitalism is in effect a theory of the modern
world. In the many discussions of modernity, there seems little awareness that capitalism is so to speak the main motor, even the driving force,
of the modern world. It would be a mistake either simply to accept or to

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reject Marxs theory of capitalism without criticism. There are numerous questionable points in Marxs theory of capitalism. One, which has
attracted much attention, is his theory of surplus value and his general
theory of value.26 Another is his theory of economic crisis. I think these
and other points should be discussed. Suffice it to say here that this is
the most wide-ranging theory of capitalism, and hence the most wideranging theory of the modern world. As long as capitalism remains central to modern life, I suspect Marxs theory will remain the most useful
theory we are likely to have.

Marxian Epistemological Constructivism

and Social Knowledge
Marxian social ontology is expounded in Marxs theory of capitalism.
This theory extends and transforms Kants constructivist conception
of epistemological activity through a constructivist theory of the social
world. Marx also proposes a related constructivist theory of knowledge,
which is very different from the Marxist approach to knowledge.
Marxs theory of knowledge is not often understood. Marxism,
which claims to speak in Marxs name, advances a so-called reflection
theory. Cognition, according to Engels, consists in a correct reflection of
independent reality. In his study of Feuerbach, Engels asks rhetorically if
we can produce a correct reflection of reality and answers that in philosophy this question is called the question of the identity of thought
and being. Dialectical philosophy, he maintains, is the reflection on the
level of mind of the transitory processes of successive historical systems.
For Engels and for Marxism in general, to know requires a reliable reflection of mind-independent reality on the level of mind.
The reflection theory of knowledge has remained popular over
many years. It was adopted as early as Francis Bacon, was restated in
different form by Wittgenstein, and was recently criticized by Rorty. The
basic difficulty of the reflection theory of knowledge lies in the ability to
demonstrate a reliable reflection of mind-independent reality.
Marx does not and cannot hold a reflection theory of knowledge.
A reflection theory belongs to empiricism in general. Marx, who rejects
an empirical approach to knowledge, as empiricism is ordinarily understood, hence implicitly rejects a reflection theory of knowledge. He defends instead a form of the identity theory of knowledge, espoused by
idealist thinkers from Kant through Hegel. Unlike empiricism, which
features different claims for the direct or indirect relation of the cog-

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nitive subject to experience, German idealism approaches experience

through different categorial frameworks. The single most useful passage
in Marxs writings for his approach to knowledge occurs in the introduction to the Grundrisse, a connected series of texts outlining an enormous
project only partially realized in Capital.
Marx here formulates his approach to knowledge in the course
of examining Hegels complex approach. Though Marx claims to have
thoroughly mastered Hegel as a teenager,27 his remarks about his predecessor are not always accurate. In his comments on Hegels approach to
knowledge, Marx here seems to attribute to Hegel and refute a position
that the latter does not hold in sketching an approach finally very similar
to Hegels.
Marxs reasoning is based on the difference in meaning in the terms
abstract and concrete as concerns the categories we use to grasp the
social world. Marx, who departs from standard usage, has in mind the
function of abstract and concrete in a categorial framework. From
this angle of vision, concrete means the combination of many determinations, as distinguished from abstract definitions. The concrete appears through a process of synthesis as a result, not as a starting point,
although it is the real starting point of observation and conception.
I believe Marx is claiming, very much like Hegel, that we cannot
grasp economic (or indeed other) phenomena directly. We can, on the
contrary, only grasp them indirectly through the economic categories
utilized in modern political economy, that is, against the background of
a conceptual framework. On this basis, Marx rejects abstract identities,
as well as ordinary empiricism, for which he substitutes categories, which
mediate the relation to experience. Categories, which depend on and
serve to grasp the historical context, are not fixed, but historical variables. Complex categories refer to simpler categories, and the simplest
categories, which appear as relations, imply a concrete substratum.
Though it seems best to begin from population, since this is the
real and concrete prerequisite of political economy, this is, according to
Marx, a mistake. Population, which is an abstraction, depends on classes,
which in turn depend on exchange, division of labor, and so on. To begin with population is to begin with a general idea of the whole, or a
merely imaginary concrete, which is analyzable into simpler ideas. The
correct approach is illustrated by recent political economists, starting
with Adam Smith, who began from simple conceptions such as labor,
demand, exchange value, and so on before concluding with state, international exchange, and world market. The category of labor, which was
only discovered by modern political economy, implies the existence of
highly developed forms of concrete labor, independent of the individ-

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ual, and hence in need of explanation. According to Marx, Smith made

a great advance in defining labor in general as the source of wealth.
This simple abstraction, which is used by modern political economy as its
starting point, is truly realized in the most modern society.

Marxs Epistemological Critique of Hegel

My claim about Marxian epistemology is twofold. First, Marx partly misinterprets Hegel in working out his own view. Second, the view he works
out is very close to the one he misreads in Hegel. It is, then, plausible
to see Marx and Hegel as holding very similar categorial approaches to
experience.
One might object that I am simply conflating the differences
between Hegel and Marx in ignoring the latters criticism of his predecessor. Engels suggests that philosophy comes to a peak and an end
in Hegelian idealism, which is sublated by Marxist materialism. Lukcs
complains that Hegel substitutes an analysis of history based on a mythological absolute for the real social process.28
Marx is more careful in his criticism of Hegel and more modest
in his claims for his own achievement. Marx typically objects to what he
regards as Hegels tendency to substitute abstract analysis for the concrete social world. This objection can be compared to the difference
between Hegels Logic, which discusses the movement of categories
within thought, and the Phenomenology, in which he considers different,
alternative conceptual frameworks. In the latter, he argues that there
can be no immediate knowledge, or sense certainty. What we comprehend (now using the words abstract and concrete in ways opposite
to normal usage, in which thought is abstract and direct experience of
the world is concrete) is concrete since it is mediated through the conceptual process. In rejecting the view he identifies with Hegel, Marx in
fact only rejects his view of Hegels Logic in favor of his view of Hegels
Phenomenology.29
According to Marx, the approach leading from the abstract to the
concrete, or the same approach described by Hegel in the Phenomenology,
is the way thought in fact unfolds. But since the conceptual process does
not generate the concrete object, Hegel supposedly conflates what happens within a persons mind, in other words, mere thought, with what
happens in the mind-independent, external world. Marx, who observes
that it is a mistake to take the movement of categories for the real act of
production, apparently mistakenly attributes this confusion to Hegel. Yet

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Marx follows Hegel in claiming that what we know when we know is the
product of the mind, which reconstructs its cognitive object as a condition of knowing it.
It has already been pointed out that Marx, like all the German idealists, bases his approach to knowledge on an identity between subject and
object, knower and known. The differences between Marx and Hegel
as concerns knowledge are mainly a question of emphasis. Hegel studies knowledge in general, but Marx is solely concerned with knowledge
of the social world. Hegel turns away from mind-independent reality as
even a potential object of knowledge in focusing on the phenomenal
content of experience. Marx desires to cognize the social world we in
fact experience, or, as he says, what is given in the head as well as in
reality.30
Marx takes up the same problem, in almost the same words, in
the famous afterword to the second German edition of Capital. Here he
stresses the need to describe social development not in terms of the historical sequence of economic categories, but rather in terms of the relation among categories in modern bourgeois society.31 One seeks to describe the subject matter as if it followed from an a priori construction.32
In treating the cognitive object as if it were an a priori construction, Marx
is close to the position Fichte outlines in the Wissenschaftslehre. Marx, like
Fichte, treats the a priori and the a posteriori as two perspectives on
the same object.33 Yet in equating reality with what we experience, he
overlooks the distinction, basic to all the German idealists, between the
mind-independent external world and phenomena, in a word, the basic
difference between what is in itself and what we in fact experience. Marx
simply conflates one with the other in failing to note that there is no way
reliably to know that we know the world, or even the social world, as it
is. To think otherwise is to think, as Kant is sometimes read, that the observer constructs a representation of the mind-independent world as it
is.34 For a representationalist approach, in which there is no other access
to reality, there is no way reliably to know that representations correctly
represent. In reacting to Kant, Hegel, the phenomenologist, stresses this
point in his description of knowledge as a process of trial and error.
Marx, who overlooks the difference between his project and Hegels, is
doubly incorrect. First, he incorrectly accuses Hegel of transforming the
real world into an idea. Second, he incorrectly contrasts our conception
of the world with the material world, which, through a categorial framework, he seeks to translate into, or again to grasp through, thought. Yet
if the world as we experience it depends on our categorial framework,
then categories and cognitive objects are interdependent and a clear
distinction between them cannot be drawn.35

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Marx and Idealist Constructivism

Marxs explicit embrace of philosophical anthropology ends for German
idealism the movement begun in Kants a priori concept of constructivism. Kant objects to Lockes supposed physiology of the human understanding.36 In Kants wake, a number of thinkers, including Hegel, turn
to an anthropological reformulation of the constructivist approach to
knowledge.
Attention is sometimes drawn to the anthropological element in
Marxs position. In writing that in all the universe man cannot find a
well so deep that, leaning over it, he does not discover at the bottom
his own face,37 Kolakowski suggests that for Marx we inevitably perceive
and know from a human point of view. It follows that the Kantian project
of isolating the transcendental logical conditions of knowledge from its
psychological conditions simply fails.
Fichte replaces the austere Kantian transcendental subject, the
subject of a theory of the conditions of knowledge in general, with one
of more finite human beings, concerned with practical themes, with
concerns which arise in the course of human existence. Marx carries
Fichtes anthropological approach farther in working out a more developed conception of the social context, focused on modern industrial
capitalism. In German idealism, the only comparable conception of the
social context is Hegels discussion in the Philosophy of Right.
In developing Fichtes anthropological conception of the subject,
Marx implicitly returns to views expressed earlier than Kant. In this respect, Vico is an important predecessor. In Capital, Marx refers in passing
to Vicos conviction that human history differs from nature in that we
have made the former but not the latter.38 Marx follows Vicos conviction that we know history but not nature because we make the former
but not the latter. Marx, like Vico, thinks that human beings literally
make history. He further thinks, like Vico, that we can only know what
we make, according to Marx by reconstructing it on the level of mind.
If there is no prior object to be known, then it cannot be reconstructed,
and construction is not a priori. Rather, it takes place on the a posteriori
and social planes, in the context of an interaction between human beings and between human beings and nature. This cognitive claim presupposes that since we construct human history, it is presumably transparent to mind, so to speak, hence we can claim to reconstruct it in
reliable fashion.
Marxs specific form of this claim is problematic. If the social context were in fact wholly transparent to mind, then we could indeed
reliably claim not only to construct it through the actions of men and

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women in the social context, but also to reconstruct it reliably within

the cognitive process on the level of mind, and hence in fact to know it
as it is. Marx unquestionably provides a powerful conceptual model of
modern industrial society. Though often criticized, the Marxian model
of modern industrial society is arguably the broadest and best one we
currently have, a model that will remain useful as long as capitalism persists. Yet even on a charitable interpretation, Marx cannot reliably claim
to grasp the social world as it is for at least two reasons. First, at most he
grasps no more than what at any given time appears to us in experience.
Second, Marx proposes one among a series of possible reconstructions
of the social world. At least implicitly, there is always a distinction, which
cannot be measured or otherwise evaluated, between what we experience and the social world as it is. Since we cannot reliably claim to encounter the social world as it is in itself, we also cannot reliably claim to
reconstruct it. To think otherwise would be to conflate the subjective
and the objective, what we seek to know with what is. At the limit it may
sometimes appear as if the subject matter we seek to know were ideally
reflected as in a mirror, as if it were only a mere a priori construction.
But since we cannot reliably claim to know the world as it is, we cannot
reliably claim to know this is the case.

Conclusion: Marx and Constructivism

This chapter describes constructivism in Marxs position. Constructivism
runs like a red thread throughout German idealism. Kant, who insists that
the condition of knowledge is to construct the cognitive object, cannot
give an account of the activity, hence of the construction of the object.
Marx maintains and develops the constructivist approach to knowledge.
He further develops the anthropological turn in post-Kantian German
philosophy, and extends constructivism in the form of social ontology.
Not for the first time, but perhaps more clearly than Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel, he argues in favor of an anthropological version of the central constructivist insight that we can reliably claim to know only what we
construct. Since we construct the human world through our activity, we
can also claim to know it.
Three conclusions follow as concerns Marxs relation to philosophy,
his constructivism, and the social utility of his position. First, at least as
concerns constructivism, Marx is a German idealist. There is confusion
about the relation of Marx to philosophy. Though Marxism contends that
Marx leaves philosophy behind, since constructivism is a central German

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idealist doctrine, and since Marx is a constructivist, at least in this sense

he is a German idealist.
Second, Marxian constructivism makes a clear but limited contribution to the problem of knowledge. It contributes in providing a plausible way of understanding the constructivist conviction that we can reliably claim to know only what we construct, which Marx clearly identifies
with the productive activity of men and women who meet their needs in
modern society. Yet Marx goes too far in claiming through the distinction between productive and reproductive activity to know the mindindependent social context as it really is.
This point casts light on the Marxist distinction between what
Marxists call bourgeois philosophy and Marxism. This distinction distantly echoes the Platonic distinction between appearance and reality.
According to its Marxist restatement, bourgeois thought stops at mere
false appearance, whereas Marxism proceeds beyond it to grasp reality.
Yet if reality as it is in itself cannot be grasped, then it is also not grasped
by Marxism. Marxs theory finally remains only a theory, a theory of modern industrial society constructed by, and for that reason cognizable by,
finite human beings.

Notes
1. See Tom Rockmore, Marx After Marxism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
2. Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, ed. C. P. Dutt (New York: International, 1941), pt. 2.
3. This view is criticized by Lukcs. See Georg Lukcs, History and Class
Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971),
13133.
4. See J. G. Fichte, First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge
(1797), in The Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 328.
5. See Rockmore, Marx After Marxism.
6. See Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and
trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1967), Critique of Hegels Philosophy of the State, 151202, and Toward
the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Law: Introduction, 24964.
7. See Georg Lukcs, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, trans.
Nicholas Jacobs (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970).
8. See Tom Rockmore, On Constructivist Epistemology (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).
9. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).

343
MAR X ,

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10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Allen W. Wood and Paul
Guyer (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B181, p. 273; Bxiii,
p. 109.
11. See Tom Rockmore, Kant and Idealism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007).
12. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Bxiii, p. 109.
13. Ibid., Bxliv, p. 123.
14. For want of a better term, I shall designate the second form of activity, which will occur under communism, as free human activity. See Karl Marx,
Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 3 (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2000), 257: But free
time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product,
partly for free activity whichunlike laboris not dominated by the pressure of
an extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the fulfillment of which is
regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty, according to ones inclinations.
15. See chapter 7, Aspects of the Historical Relation, in Tom Rockmore,
Fichte, Marx, and the German Philosophical Tradition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1980), 12044.
16. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. and ed. Tom Bottomore (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1964), 158.
17. Ibid., 126.
18. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Part 1, trans. and
ed. Chris Arthur (New York: International, 1970), 94.
19. Georg Lukcs, Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins (Darmstadt and
Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1986), vol. 14, p. 739.
20. He identifies three elements as necessary to reawaken a genuine Marxian ontology at this time. These include a critique of contemporary bourgeois
ideology, a critique of the Stalinist approach to Marxism, and a study of the
Hegelian residue in Marx. See Lukcs, Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins, vol.
13, pp. 11213.
21. See G. W. F. Hegel, System of Needs, 189208, in Philosophy of Right,
trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 22739.
22. See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 67, pp. 9798.
23. See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 67, pp. 9798.
24. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 50.
25. See the Preface in Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya, ed. and intro. Maurice Dobb (New York: International, 1970), 1923.
26. See Karl Marx and the Close of His System (by Eugen Bhm-Bawerk) and
Bhm-Bawerks Criticism of Marx (by Rudolf Hilferding), edited with an introduction by Paul M. Sweezy (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949), 3118.
27. See Marxs letter to his father (1837), in Writings of the Young Marx on
Philosophy and Society, 4050.
28. See Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, in Lukcs,
History and Class Consciousness, 83222.

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29. This criticism is independently developed by Lukcs. See Georg Lukcs,

The Ontology of Social Being, vol. 1, Hegel, trans. David Fernbach (London: Merlin,
1978).
30. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated with a foreword by Martin Nicolaus
(Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), 1w06.
31. See ibid., 107.
32. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally
reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori
construction. Karl Marx, Capital, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and
Edward Aveling (New York: International, 1967), 1:19.
33. See Fichte, First Introduction, 28.
34. For a recent instance, see Robert Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of
Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 22: Kants Copernican Revolution of 17817 is in this way an all-things considered answer to the fundamental semantic question he raised in 1772: how can mental representationsand
more specifically necessary a priori mental representationsrefer to their objects. And the answer is that mental representations refer to their objects because
objects must conform to our cognitions; hence our true a priori judgments are
necessarily true independently of all sense experience because they express just
those cognitive forms or structures to which all the proper objects of human cognition automatically conform.
35. This point is sometimes made by observers. Lukcs, for instance, rejects a false and rigid duality between thought and being in favor of a dialectical
view of both as aspects of a real historical process. See Lukcs, History and Class
Consciousness, 204.
36. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Aix, p. 100.
37. Leszek Kolakowski, Karl Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth,
in his Toward a Marxist Humanism, trans. Jane Zielonko Peel (New York: Grove,
1968), 66.
38. See Marx, Capital, 1:372, fn. 3.

Index

absolute spirit: and art, 2056, 213;

contention among Hegelians, 1516;
definition, 78; and God, 62n13, 72;
and private property, 109; in Schelling,
99100
abstract and concrete in Marx, 337,
33839
aesthetics: Gans on, 21112; in Hegel,
23132, 245n10; Hotho on Hegel, 21,
2069; and immortality, 72; in Kant,
205; and Romanticism, 21, 205, 208;
Rosenkranz on, 2122, 23153; and
self-reflexivity, 2056, 21213. See also
beautiful, the; ugliness
alienation: Bauer on, 18990; and Christian message, 81; in Feuerbach, 133,
135; and importance of Hegelians in
diagnosis of problem of, 10; as issue,
87; in Marx, 334; and realization of
reason in history, 9; Ruge on, 311, 313,
31415; selfhood as cause of / religious
belief as cause of, 112; in Stirner,
199n52
Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, 35, 37
altruism, in Stirner, 285
anarchism, in Stirner, 23, 28283, 29699
anti-Hegelianism and reassertion of personal God, 9798
anti-modernism, response of Hegelianism to, 15
Aristophanes, 234, 242
Aristotle: on civil society, 169; on comedy,
23738; on happiness, 18283; influence on Kant, 54; Left Hegelians break
with, 180; on wealth, 179
art, role of: debated by Hegelians, 9; empirical treatment of, 207; as political
instrument, 213, 21415, 217; and
religion, 8

artistic depictions of absolute spirit, 7

artistic realism, 23940
associations: in Gans, 173, 174, 175; of
workers, 19192
atheism: Feuerbach on, 275; French
response to, 310; and Hegels idea of
God, 60; in Leo controversy, 267; and
Ruge, 23, 310; and Young Hegelian
school, 2728, 35, 277. See also pantheism
Athenum fr Wissenschaft, Kunst und Leben, 33, 34, 35
Augustine, 5758
autonomy: as aim of philosophy, 288;
Bauer on, 18890; development of
idea of, 12; focus of Hegelian school
on, 13; in Kant, 183, 184; in political
institutions, 182; as principle of
choice, 8; in Stirner, 286, 29091, 293,
29596
Awakening religious movement, 22,
26263, 267
Bachmann, Carl Friedrich, 73, 7778, 85
Bauer, Bruno: on art and religion, 2021;
in Berlin circle, 30, 31, 33, 3435, 36,
42n2627; in Christology debate / on
Strauss, 83; on civil society, 19395;
on freedom, 18890; and Freien, 283;
on Hegelianism as revolutionary philosophy, 104; on law and religion,
13132, 144n52; leaves Berlin Young
Hegelians, moves to Bonn, 32; on opposition, 159; in pantheism debate,
80; on perfectionism, 18182, 18790;
on personalism, 16, 26n19, 130, 132;
on poverty / social question, 192; and
Rosenkranzs aesthetic views, 22; and
Ruge, 40, 305; self-consciousness in,

345

346
I N DE X

106; on split between Fichtean and

Spinozist axes, 8; Stirner on, 29293;
on universality, 9, 99, 18788, 190
Bauer, Edgar: in Bauer faction, 36; and
Berlin circle, 30, 3435; on opposition,
159; and Ruge, 40
Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 38, 78, 79, 82
beautiful, the, 2122, 2089, 219, 231,
23536
Bentham, Jeremy, 197n21
Berkeley, George, 15, 5154, 56, 63n24,
64n27
Berlin (capital of Prussia): differences in
response of Hegelians, 14; significance
of as place of editorship, 3738
Berliner Bltter, 37
Berliner Monatsschrift, 37
Berlin faction of Young Hegelians,
3037, 42n29
Blanc, Louis, 308, 309, 314
Blasche, Bernhard Heinrich, 70
Bohtz, August Wilhelm, 248n50
Bolingbroke, Lord, 148
Bonald, Louis de, 122
bourgeois society in Marx, 16768
British model of political opposition,
14850
Bucer, Martin, 140n4
Buchholz, Friedrich, 174
Buhl, Ludwig, 31, 33, 35, 37
Cabet, tienne, 309, 318n27
capitalism and human activity in Marx,
138, 323, 33336. See also mercantile
society
Carganico, K. A., 70
caricature: as liberation from ugliness,
22, 24142, 243; and recognition
of the ugly, 232; satiric function of,
24243; and ugly as comic, 23536
Carlsbad decrees (1819), 154, 228n83,
306
Carov, Friedrich Wilhelm, 97, 107,
222n8
Carriere, Moriz, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 209
Catholic political Romanticism, critique
of, 215
censorship: and Deutsche Jahrbcher, 30,
267; in East Prussia, 39; and Feuerbach, 257, 262; on Gans, 154; and He-

gel, 154; of Marx, 278n18; Rosenkranz,

22, 234, 244; and Ruge, 3078
Center Hegelian, Rosenkranz as, 22.
See also Hegelianism: divisions within
Christian Neoplatonism, 5758
Christian philosophy in Feuerbach,
26773
Christology, 16, 8084, 86
Cieszkowski, August von, 111, 211
citizenship: Bauer on, 193; development
of idea of, 12122; as opposite to accumulation of wealth, 20, 179; and
paradox of the state, 13639; in Young
Hegelians, 135
civil servants, role of, 155
civil society: in Bauer, 193; in Gans, 173;
in Kant, 185; and Left Hegelians, 191;
relation to state, 167, 16869; Ruge on,
311; in Wolff, 183
cognitivism in Bauer, 189
collective essence, 112
Cologne troubles and Young
Hegelians, 29
comedy as liberating force: in Hegel,
238; in Rosenkranz, 22, 233, 240, 241,
243
communism: and human activity in
Marx, 333; in opposition to humanism,
312; and Ruge, 113
comparative republicanism, 13
competition, in Gans, 167, 169
Comte, Auguste, 171, 174
Confucianism, 197n24
Conradi, Kasimir, 7475, 85
Considrant, Victor, 309, 318n30
constitutional government: in Bauer,
194; debate on in Prussia, 29, 38; in
Feuerbach, 134; in Hegel, 126, 15051;
and Stahl, 100101, 122; in theology
of personal sovereignty, 100101, 132;
Wrttemberg as, 3839
constructivism: and German idealism,
32427, 32932; in Marx, 24, 33638,
34041; overview, 324; vs. representationalism, 24
Copernican revolution in Kant, 32627,
328, 344n34
Cornelius, Peter von, 33, 102, 239
Creuzer, Georg Friedrich, 38
critique as role of philosophy, 28893

347
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Dalberg, Karl von, 18384

decadence, in Stirner, 287
democracy: as disembodiment of power,
9697, 101, 110; against monarchy,
111; in theology of personal sovereignty, 100101, 1067; victory over
Marxism, 303
demystification of political power, 136
demytholologizing Christianity, 81,
8687
determinacy in Bauer, 18788
Deutsche Jahrbcher: aesthetic theory in,
204, 214, 221n4; Athenaum circle excluded from, 34; criticism of Strauss in,
104; and Feuerbach, 305; role of, 14;
suppression of, 24, 30, 40, 307; as unifying force among Young Hegelians,
36. See also Hallische Jahrbcher
Deutsch-franzsische Jahrbcher, 2324, 37,
113, 30910, 312
Dzamy, Thodore, 309, 318n28
dialectic of the will, 8
diremption, dangers of, 25
diversity and division of labor, 13, 20
division of labor: Gans on, 166; Left
Hegelians on, 13, 20, 181, 182, 183;
and population, 337
Doktorklub, 31
domination, resistance to, 13, 19
Droysen, Johann Gustav, 222n8
Duncker, Max, 31
Dutch art, Hegel on, 23839
East Prussia, 14, 39
Echtermeyer, Theodor: aesthetic theory,
221n4; as coauthor with Ruge, 29,
31, 37, 209; manifesto on Protestantism and Romanticism, 204, 21518,
227n72
Eckhart, Meister, 58, 65n47
economics and politics: in Marx, 24,
13639, 31116, 33336, 337; and social question, 910; and virtue, 17982
effects of action in post-Kantian ethics,
182
egoism: criticism of by radicals, 108;
Feuerbach on, 260, 27374; in Stirner,
23, 28291
Eichler, Ludwig, 33
Eliot, George, 26162, 277

end of art thesis: and Hotho, 211; and

Ruge, 23940; transformation of idea
of, 21, 208; and Young Hegelians,
21314, 219, 226n56
Enfantin, Barthlemy Prosper, 173
Engels, Friedrich, 180, 283, 310, 32124,
336
Enlightenment: as root of Young Hegelianism, 7, 12, 29; and understanding
of reason project, 8; virtue and wealth
in, 179
Erdmann, J. E., 66
Eschenmayer, Carl August, 78, 82
Europe: abandonment of Scholastic
political perspectives, 11819; context
of Hegelian debates, 19, 14850; rise
of nationalisms in, 315
Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, 267
exclusion and social question, 191
existentialism, Hegelians as forerunner
to, 87
facts (Faktum / Tatsachen), meaning of,
17172, 271
fallenness of man in Schelling, 99100
family, role of opposition in, 158
Faucher, Julius, 36
Feldmann, Christian, 106
Ferrand (contributor to Athenum), 33
Feuerbach, Ludwig: on alienation, 9,
133, 135; Bauer on, 188; on Christian philosophy, 26773; critique of
religion, 15, 2223, 4748, 25781;
on egoism, 27374; and freedom of
philosophical inquiry, 27677; on
God as species-being, 269; on hypostasis, 289; on immortality, 70, 84,
1034, 274; as Left Hegelian, 30, 36,
222n8; on Leo controversy, 26768;
and Marx, 32324; method of reformative critique, 295; on morality, 291;
perfectionism in, 182; on personalism, 16; political stance of, 25961;
on positive philosophy, 1056, 262;
on practical applications of theory,
25859; on private property, 1089,
266, 274; Rosenkranz parody of, 234;
and Ruge, 305; in Spinozist route
from Hegel, 8; and Stirner, 11213,
284; and Strauss, 39; on theological

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personalism, 106, 111, 13035,

27273
Fichte, Immanuel Herman (younger):
as critic on pantheism debate, 77; as
Hegelian, 66, 69, 85; on immortality,
73, 74; on personality debate, 78, 98
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (elder): on constructivism, 24, 33031; Hegel on, 59;
on hypostasis, 289; and Marx, 332, 339,
340; on morality, 291; on rational will,
290; on singularity and autonomy, 8;
on social question, 191
Fischer, Carl Philipp, 7980
Fleischer, Moritz, 30, 308
Flottwell, Eduard, 33, 35
foundationalism, 325
Fourier, Charles, 173
Fox, James, 148
France: German influences on, 308;
influences on Ruge, 307; response to
Hegels atheism, 23, 310, 319n41; studies on Hegel in, 3012. See also French
Revolution, influence of
Frankfurt Parliament (184849), 113,
132, 305, 306
freedom: and art, 213; in Bauer, 18890,
192, 194; development of idea of, 12;
in Feuerbach, 266; human and divine
freedom, 131; and importance of
Hegelians, 910; in Kant, 185; and Left
Hegelians, 21112; in Marx, 13639;
and personality of state, 12122; and
poverty, 20, 181; and rationality, in
Hegel, 129; in Ruge, 307; and spirit, 7;
in Stirner, 29495
freedom, divine: and critique of identity,
99; in Feuerbach, 271; and Gods
personality, 131; and laws of rational
freedom, 119; Stahl on, 26566
freedom of philosophical inquiry, effect
of theology on, 268, 27677
freedom of the press: in Gans, 15657; in
Hegel, 154
Freien, Die, 3536, 283, 305
French Revolution, influence of: on
Bauer, 193; on critique of religion, 97,
100101; on development of political
theory, 121; on Hegelianism, 11; on
Heine, 308; on implosion of Soviet
system, 303; on Ruge, 314, 315; self-

reflexivity in responses to, 122; on

Stahl, 263. See also France
Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia,
38, 101, 155
Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia:
cathedral project of, 1023; and freedom of expression in East Prussia, 39;
opposition to Hegelians, 67, 29, 262;
and personal political theology, 101,
273; and Ruge, 106
Frbel, Julius, 309, 318n25
Gans, Eduard: aesthetics and concept
of freedom, 21112; argumentative
strategy of, 159; on associations, 173,
175; influence on Young Hegelians,
28; perfectionism in, 182; on political
opposition, 19, 15558; on populace,
16970, 172; on poverty and exclusion,
19192; and Saint-Simonism, 1920,
164, 17071, 174, 178n26; on social
question, 910
genetic-critical analysis of Feuerbach,
26970, 272
Gentz, Friedrich von, 217, 228n83
Gerlach, Ludwig von, 101, 108, 267
Gerlach, Otto von, 267
German idealism. See idealism,
German
God: in Augustine, 57; among conservatives, 6; God and humanity as
dialectical concepts, 81; in Hegels
system, 15, 60; idea of, and reason,
56; and Left Hegelian critique of religion, 97; nature of the divine, 7580;
as projection of human creative
activity, 26970; as rational-volitional
personality in medieval Europe,
119. See also pantheism; personalism,
theological
good: and Left Hegelians, 191; in Stirner,
187
Grres, Joseph, 308
Gschel, Friedrich: in Christology debate, 8384; defense of Hegel, 68; on
immortality, 7273, 74; in Right Hegelian camp, 66, 85; on Strauss, 103
Grimm, Jacob, 222n8
group formation among Hegelian
school, 14

349
I N DE X

group identity in Hegelian analysis of

society, 13
Gutzkow, Karl, 305
Halle, symbolic importance of, 3738
Haller, Carl Ludwig von, 101, 108, 270
Hallische Jahrbcher: aesthetic theory in,
204, 214, 221n4, 222n8; audience for,
218; banning of, 217, 267; and Berlin
circle, 31, 32; and Feuerbach, 305; and
Leo controversy, 3132, 267, 270; as
literary center of Young Hegelianism,
14, 29, 212; on Prussian state, 29, 38;
renaming of, 30, 37; on Romanticism,
21517; on Rosenkranz, 234; Ruges
abandonment of, 3334, 42n22. See
also Deutsche Jahrbcher
happiness: in Kant, 18485; in preKantian perfectionism, 183; role of
religion in, 16566
Harless, Gottlieb Christoph Adolf von, 82
hedonism, in Stirner, 23, 287
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: on
aesthetics of the ugly, 23132, 245n10;
aesthetic theory of, 2056, 21213,
21920, 223nn2122; on associations,
17576; authenticity of students
notes on, 15354; on caricature, 234,
235, 247n32; on civil society, 176;
on comic in Dutch art, 23839; on
economic process, 334; end of art
thesis, 21920; on hypostasis, 289; on
identity, 330; influence on European
politics, 303; interest in Great Britain,
149; Marx on, 32324, 337, 33839;
on morality, 291; new sources on, 11;
nonorthodox theism of, 15, 5758,
68, 70, 76; on pantheism, 51, 7677;
on personal monarchy, 100101;
on political opposition, 15055; on
the populace, 17172; on problem
of knowledge, 33132; and Prussian state, 304; on rational will, 290;
religious thought of, 5051, 56, 59,
6770, 8084, 8687; on Romanticism, 215; self-reflexivity of political
philosophy, 12529; on spirit, 78, 15,
6061, 125; on state and civil society,
311; and transcendental idealism, 56;
on voluntarism, 5859

Hegel critics vs. Left and Right Hegelians, 85

Hegelianism: divisions within, 14, 237;
failure of distinction between left and
right, 84; origin of terms, 67; relation
of Saint-Simonism to, 166, 176n8. See
also Left Hegelians; Right Hegelians;
Young Hegelians
Heine, Heinrich: and aesthetics, 21;
on Christian dualism, 107; on Hegel,
304; influence of France on, 3089;
influence on Young Hegelians, 28; on
pantheism and politics, 106; and Ruge,
204, 234, 310; on Saint-Simonism, 19,
16466; and Young Germany movement, 218
Hengstenberg, Ernst, 9798, 234
Henning, Leopold, 109
Herwegh, Georg: as editor, 37; as neoHegelian, 310, 319n39; poetry of, 214,
224n32, 227n61, 312; Ruge and Marx
on, 312
Hess, Moses: on pecuniary egoism, 274;
on political theology, 257; on private
property, 1078, 111; and Ruge, 303,
305, 309, 310; on Stirner, 284, 292
Hinrichs, Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm,
222n8
historical change in Marx, 33435
historicism, 87, 292
history, idea of, and aesthetics, 21112
Hobbes, Thomas: and constructivism, 24,
324, 326; and Stirner, 54, 281, 298
Hobhouse, John, 149, 158
Hoffmann, Wilhelm, 83
Hotho, Heinrich Gustav: on end of art,
21011; on Hegels aesthetics, 21, 206
9; as Right Hegelian, 10; on Romanticism, 218; and Rosenkranz, 231
Hlsemann (critic of Hegel), 7677
human authenticity in Feuerbach,
13435
humanism, in Ruge, 311, 312
human nature: dialectical nature of, in
Gans, 15758; God and humanity as
dialectical concepts, 81; God as projection of, 17, 99100, 104, 107, 135,
26970; in Marx, 138, 323, 33336;
universality of, 82, 99, 190; value of as
human beings, 169

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humor: Rosenkranz on, 232; in Ruge, 240

hypostasis: as aim of philosophy, 288;
Kantian critique of, radicalized by
Stirner, 23
idealism: in Engels, 32223; in Hegel, 48;
in Kant, 32728; relation to religious
belief, 5154
idealism, German: accommodating to
religious belief, 5154; background,
510; and constructivism, 15, 32932;
and identity, 328
immanence: of God, 7879; in Hegel, 71,
97; and Strauss, 81; as universal human
essence, 104. See also Incarnation; personalism, theological
immortality: absolute spirit and, 72; debate over Hegels views on, 16, 7075;
Feuerbach on, 70, 84, 1034, 274;
inadequacy of distinction between left
and right, 8485
Incarnation: critique of by Left Hegelians, 97, 104; as divine in human social life, 17, 99100, 107, 135; in Hegel,
61, 1056; and nature of sovereignty,
110; species-being as, 106, 269. See also
pantheism; personalism, theological
individualism: and Christian personalism, 98, 108, 109; focus of Hegelian
school on, 13; and modernity, 109; in
Stirner, 28485, 297, 299
industrialization, movement towards, 12
institutional reform movement, 12
intuitionalism, 325
intuition in Romanticism, 216
irony: in Romanticism, 21617; in Rosenkranz, 22, 234, 235
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 22, 98,
26364, 268
Jacoby, Johann, 39, 310, 319n40
Jahrbcher fr wissenschaftlich Kritik, 27, 37,
6869, 105, 109
journals, role in development of Young
Hegelians, 14, 28. See also names
of specific journals (e.g., Hallische
Jahrbcher)
July Revolution. See Revolution of 1830
( July Revolution)
Jungnitz, Ernst, 36

Kant, Immanuel: on aesthetics, 205;

and Berkeley, 5354; on civil society,
169; on constructivism, 24, 327, 341;
on freedom of the press, 154; on hypostasis, 289; on idealism, 15, 5152,
5456, 55, 32728; on immortality, 70;
on morality, 291; on perfectionism,
20, 18486; and Plato, 58; on rational
will, 290; religious thought of, 4950;
on representationalism, 32627; and
Saint-Simonians, 171; on the state, 120,
121, 141n6
Kierkegaard, Sren, 8788
Klaiber, Christoph Benjamin, 82
Klein, Julius Leopold, 35
Klpfel, Karl August, 38
knowledge, problem of: and German
idealism, 32425; in Kant, 32829; in
Marx, 33338, 342
Kppen, Friedrich, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35
Kstlin, Reinhold, 38
labor and capital in Bauer, 192
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 309, 319n36
Lamennais, Flicit Robert de, 309, 310,
318n31
Lange, Johann Peter, 83
Laube, Heinrich, 222n8, 305
law: and attacks on religious personalism,
13132; dialogical person as subject
of, 13435; in Marx, 13738; need for
contingency, 119; and state as legal
personality, 12425; in Stirner,
29798
Lechevalier, Jules, 173
Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre-Auguste, 309,
314, 318n34
Left Hegelians: aesthetics and concept of
freedom, 21112; on citizenship and
wealth, 18081; civil society and, 191;
on collective rights, 18; critique of religion, 97; definition, 6, 1011, 67; freedom and, 21112; good and, 191; and
Hegelian critics, 85; incarnation, 97,
104; on pantheism, 85; particularity in,
181, 18788, 190; on personality and
private property, 1617; social question
and, 20, 180, 181; as youth movement,
28. See also Young Hegelians; specific
members of group (e.g., Feuerbach, Ludwig)

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legal personality: development of idea

of, 18, 11920; in Marx, 13738; in
Stahl, 123
legal positivism in Puchta, 12425
Leibniz, Gottfried, 54, 120, 182, 183
Leo, Heinrich: and Feuerbach, 22,
26770; and Haller, 270; and Hallische
Jahrbcher, 3132; as Right Hegelian,
237, 249n63; and split among Young
Hegelians, 2728, 26768
Leroux, Pierre, 176n8, 309, 318n32,
319n35
Lessing, G. E., 235, 240
liberalism: Bauers critique of, 193, 194;
Stahl on, 263
Litterarische Zeitung (Meyen, ed.), 31
Luther, Martin, 140n4
Maistre, Joseph de, 122
Marheineke, Philipp, 66, 69, 70, 71,
80, 85
Marx, Karl: and Bauer, 192; and Berlin
circle, 31, 33, 34, 36; censorship of,
278n18; on Christian personalism, 16,
10910, 11314; and constructivism,
33233, 34041; and Feuerbach, 273,
27576, 295, 32324; and Fichte, 339,
340; on Friedrich Wilhelm IV, 103;
and Gans, 19, 176; as German idealist,
24, 34142; on Hegel, 337, 33839; on
human activity, 138, 323, 33336; perfectionism in, 182, 197n18; on philosophers, 260; and politics of contingency,
13639; on religion, 276, 31213; and
Ruge, 2324, 305, 310, 31116; and
Rutenberg, 34; on Saint-Simonism,
165, 168, 177n14; on the state, 16768;
on Stirner, 284, 29192; theory of
knowledge, 33638; on transformation
of theological idealism, 48; as Young
Hegelian in exile in France, 30. See
also Deutsch-franzsische Jahrbcher
Marxism: and bourgeois philosophy,
342; and Marx, 32124; as theory, 302;
theory of knowledge in, 336
materialism in Engels, 32223
Melanchthon, Philipp, 140n4
Mendelsohn, Felix, 102
mercantile society: market forces in
Bauer, 193; and virtue, 20, 17982

metaphysics: of Hegel and the idea of

God, 15, 6061; in Kant, 15, 55
Meyen, Eduard: in Berlin circle, 30, 31,
32, 33, 35; as editor, 37; publication opportunities limited, 34; and Ruge, 40
Michelet, Carl Ludwig: on immortality,
75; in pantheism debate, 79, 80; in
personality debate, 8586, 97
modernity: Bauer on, 190; as culture of
diremption, 89; Hegelians analysis
of, 13
Mller, Poul Martin, 75, 85
monarchy. See personality of monarch
morality: Hegels criticism of Kant, 56; in
Kant, 184; in Stirner, 283, 291
motives for action in post-Kantian ethics,
182
Mgge, Theodor, 31, 33, 35
Mller, Adam, 270
Mller, Arthur, 33
mythology, incarnation of, in Strauss, 104
nationalism: since end of Soviet system,
315; and Marx and Ruge, 24, 313;
revival of, 3024; in Ruge, 307, 31012,
31415
Nauwerck, Karl, 30, 32, 33, 3536, 37
Newton, Isaac, 5253
nihilism, 87, 28283
nominalism, Stirner on, 290, 292
non-cognitivism, in Stirner, 23, 187
Norddeutschen Bltter, 35, 37
Norddeutsche Revue, 37
objective spirit, 7, 8
Ockham, William of, 54, 58
Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph, 58
Old Hegelians: Ruge and Echtermeyer
on, 218; on subjectivism in art, 21,
20911. See also Right Hegelians
opposition, theory of, 14763; and art,
214; background, 1819, 14850; in
Gans, 15558; in Hegel, 15055
ownness, concept of, in Stirner, 23,
29396
pantheism: in anti-Hegelianism, 97;
failure of categories, 8586; Hegel accused of, 51, 7677; implications for
democracy, 1067; issues in, 16, 7580;

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and Jacobi, 22, 26364; Left and

Right Hegelians on, 85; and Swabian
theological thought, 58. See also God;
personalism, theological
parliamentary government, movement
toward, 12
parody, Rosenkranz on, 22, 240, 242
particularity: in Bauer, 193; in Left Hegelians, 181, 18788, 190; vs. universal
principles, 12, 99, 113
Paul, Jean, 21617
Paulus, Karl Heinrich Ernst, 70
perfectionism, post-Kantian, 20, 181,
18688
perfectionism, pre-Kantian, 18286
personal communications, role of, 14, 35
personalism: as expressed through actions, 265; in Feuerbach, 22, 13436;
as fiction of political self-causality,
128; and furor over Strauss, 106;
Hegels critique of, 12529; history
of, 112; in Marx, 10910, 137, 13839;
and self-reflexive theory, 12229;
Young Hegelian critique of, 12, 130,
135
personalism, human: and Christian
personhood, 112; grounded in divine
personality, 9899, 13031, 27273
personalism, theological: among conservative Hegelians, 103; in Cornelius
fresco, 102; as criticism of pantheism,
265; debate over, 7580, 86; in Feuerbach, 106, 111, 13334, 135, 27172; in
German conservatives, 110; as ideal of
human personality, 13031, 27273; as
metaphor, 11112; and political sovereignty, 9798, 123, 258; and Schelling,
98100; in Stahl, 123, 26365
personality of monarch: in Bauer, 194;
and personal God, 100101; as power
invested in a person, 96; in Restoration
political theology, 100101, 106; in
Stahl, 12225
personality of state: attempt to define,
17; in Bauer, 132; in Feuerbach,
13334; in Hegel, 12526, 127, 128; as
human freedom, 131; as legal personality, 11920; and paradox of rational
freedom, 12122; Young Hegelians
attempt to dismantle, 12936. See also

popular sovereignty movement and

democracy; state
philosophical theory: and political
change, 304, 3067, 310, 313; and religious knowing, 81; role of, in Engels,
322
physical pleasures, in Stirner, 287
Pitt, William, 148, 158
Plato, 54
Platonism and Swabian variant on Christianity, 57
poetry, role of: as opposition, 21, 214;
Ruge on, 226n57, 239; supremacy of,
in Hegel, 232
political institutions. See opposition,
theory of; personality of state
political power: in democracy, 9697,
101, 110; and development of political
theory, 18, 11820; in Hegel, 12829;
in Marx, 13738; and persistence of
unfreedom, 129; in Puchta, 12425;
in Stahl, 123; theologically bolstered
claims of, 12
political theory, evolution of, 120, 121
political virtue in Bauer, 18788
populace (proletariat): in Gans, 166,
17071, 17273, 174; in Marx, 313; and
opposition theory, 151
popular sovereignty movement and democracy, 12, 17, 100101, 1067, 111
positive philosophy: and the Christian
state, 26167; and personality, 98100,
105
poverty: and exclusion, 910, 20, 191;
Gans on, 910, 19, 16667, 170; in
Hegel, 172; in Left Hegelians, 181; in
Stirner, 296. See also social question
power. See political power
practical activity, theory of, 331
private interests and political virtue, 182
proletariat. See populace (proletariat)
property: attacks on idea of, 17, 107;
Feuerbach on, 1089, 266, 274; Gans
on, 192; in Marx, 334; and personality, 108; in Saint-Simonism, 17374,
19192; in Stirner, 23, 29596
Protestantism and Romanticism manifesto, 204, 21517, 227n72
Prussian state: critique of Christian personalism in civil society, 108; political

353
I N DE X

situation under Friedrich Wilhelm IV,

1617, 2930, 1012; significance of
Young Hegelians in Berlin, 14, 3738
Prutz, Robert Eduard, 34
psychologism, 21, 330
public access to debates: in Gans, 156,
157; in Hegel, 154
public opinion, role of, 154
Puchta, Georg, 12425
punishment, in Stirner, 298
Quinet, Edgar, 308
rationalism, Stahl on, 263
rational will: states personality as, in Hegel, 12627; in Stirner, 283, 290
realism, 32526
reason: Feuerbach on, 258, 27172; in
German idealism, 56; in Hegel, 129;
in Leo, 268; in Schiller, 5657; and
spirit, 7; and theism, 61
reflection theory of knowledge, 336
Reformation, 29, 140n4, 313
Reiff, Friedrich, 38
Reinarz, Friedrich, 33
relativism, 87
religion: and art, 1516; in Bauer,
13132, 144n52, 190; and division
among Hegelians, 6695; in Feuerbach, 2223, 4748, 104, 25781, 269;
as form of alienated spirit, 8; Hegelian
humanism as, 111; and philosophy,
50; and politics, 1617, 23, 310; Young
Hegelians critique of, 2728
representationalism, 24, 32527, 339
republicanism: and Bauer, 193; in
France, 23; impact of social question
on, 181; Kants critique of, 18485;
and Marx, 24, 110; and popular sovereignty, 1819, 20; in Rome, 17980; in
Young Hegelians, 101, 180, 181
Restoration politics, 17, 19
revolution, in Marx, 312, 335
Revolution of 1830 (July Revolution),
267, 303, 306, 308, 309
Revolutions of 1848: dreams collapsed
after, 208; and failure of theory, 132;
and Feuerbach, 258, 276; and Rosenkranz, 236
Rheinische Zeitung, 30, 34, 308

Richter, Friedrich, 7172, 84

Riedel, Karl, 3233, 34
right, philosophy of: Bauer on, 187, 188
89; and Christian belief, 26667; Gans
on, 19; in Kant, 18485; and virtue in
post-Kantian perfectionism, 190
Right Hegelians: inadequacy of classification, 1011; origin of, 6, 67; on
pantheism, 85. See also Old Hegelians;
specific members of group (e.g., Marheineke,
Philipp)
rights: in Marx, 13738; as participatory
claims, 13; in Stirner, 298
rights, human: and attacks on religious
personalism, 131; as part of state,
12122
rights of citizens: in Hegel, 127; in Young
Hegelian critique of Hegel, 18, 304
Rodrigues, Olinde, 173, 178n31
Roman republicanism, 17980, 195n5
Romanticism: and aesthetics, 21, 205,
208; critique of, 11, 21518; Hegelian
defense of rational political order
against, 19; and Stirners egoism, 288;
and Young Germany movement, 218
Rosenkranz, Karl: on aesthetics of the
ugly, 2122, 23153; on Aristotle,
23738; on art, 214; as author, 39, 69,
222n8; background, 23233; on caricature, 24243; as Center Hegelian,
23334, 235, 237, 24344, 246n20,
247n35; comedy by, 23334, 235; on
the comic, 240; defense in pantheism
debate, 77; and distinctions within
Right Hegelian camp, 10, 85, 210; on
immortality, 73; on opposition, 19, 159
Rotteck, Carl von, 150
Ruge, Arnold: aesthetic theory of, 204;
on art, 21, 207, 211, 212, 213; background, 221n4, 3046; and Berlin
Young Hegelians, 14, 32, 3334, 36,
3940; on comedy, 234; on end of art,
23940; exile of, 30, 39; on Feuerbach, 270; and French social thought,
314, 315; on German-French alliance,
30910; on Hegel, 3045; on humanism, 113; on Leo controversy, 267;
and Marx, 113, 31116; and nationalism, 303; on opposition, 19, 159; on
personal sovereignty, 106; Protestant-

354
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ism and Romanticism manifesto,

21, 204, 21517, 227n72; on religion
and democracy, 111; repudiation of
old Hegelian principle, 27; and
Rosenkranz, 22, 233, 23637, 246n28,
249n59; and unified German republic,
306; on universality of interests, 9;
and Young Hegelians, 29. See also
Deutsche Jahrbcher; Deutsch-franzsische
Jahrbcher; Hallische Jahrbcher
Russian Revolution of 1917, 302
Rutenberg, Adolf, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 40
Saint-Simonism (Saint-Simonianism):
and civil society, 167; and Gans, 9,
19; Marx on, 168, 177n14; as political
program, 107; and poverty, 17071; on
property, 17374, 19192; as religious
doctrine, 16466, 173; and technocracy, 314
Sand, George, 304, 309, 319n37
Sass, Friedrich, 35
Schadow, Wilhelm von, 239
Schaller, Julius, 7879
Schasler, Max, 209
Schelling, F. W. J.: on Christian philosophy, 268; on end of art, 219;
Feuerbach on, 22, 261, 262, 271; and
Friedrich Wihelm IV, 103; and Haller,
270; on idealism, 331; influence on
anti-Hegelianism, 98100; on Jacobi,
26364; and Romanticism, 216,
228n74, 228n76; and Stahl, 263; on
state and Gods personality, 122
Schiller, Friedrich, 5657, 216, 219, 328
Schlegel, Friedrich von, 217, 228n81,
235, 247n35, 270
Schleiermacher, F. D. E., 50
Schlcher, Victor, 309, 318n33
Schn, Theodor von, 39
Schubarth, Karl Ernst, 70, 85
secularization of political theory, 120
self-consciousness of political theory,
12122
self-creation, in Stirner, 29394
self-determination in post-Kantian perfectionism, 186
selfhood. See personalism
self-interest, in Stirner, 28586
selfishness, in Stirner, 287, 293

self-mastery, 13
self-realization: in Fichte, 331; in Marx,
114, 138; in Schelling, 331; in Stirner,
288
self-reflexivity: and aesthetics, 2056,
21213; in art, 211; and political personalism, 12229; of political theory in
modern period, 119, 12021; in Young
Hegelians, 118, 135
sexuality, in Stirner, 287
social conflict, in Marx, 335
socialism: critique of Hegel, 304; difference from republicanism and Marx,
24; and Feuerbach, 25960
social ontology, 33334, 341
social question: and Feuerbach, 259;
and freedom, 19095; in fulfillment of
Enlightenment program of emancipation, 9; Gans on, 19, 165, 16667, 174;
and incomplete rationality of modern
life, 910; and Left Hegelians, 20, 180,
181. See also poverty
sovereignty: popular sovereignty movement, 12, 17, 100101, 1067, 111; and
theological personalism, 9798, 110,
123, 258
Soviet system, implosion of, 302, 315
space and time, 5253
species-being: and alienation, 110; as
collective immortality, 16; democratic
implications of, 106; in Feuerbach,
13435, 259, 27071; as incarnation,
106, 269; in Marx 8, 105, 113; and
theological personalism, 130; and universality, 188
Spinoza, Baruch, 8, 16, 7677, 105, 107
spirit: in Berkeley, 54; as freedom, 12;
in Hegel, 78, 15, 6061, 125; and
immortality, 16, 70; non-metaphysical
readings of, 2425; in pantheism debate, 75, 80; and personal monarchs,
101. See also absolute spirit
spontaneity: and autonomy, 8; in Kant,
184, 185; in post-Kantian perfectionism, 186, 18889, 191, 193, 200n65; in
pre-Kantian perfectionism, 182
Springer, Anton, 209
Stahl, Friedrich Julius: background,
26263; Feuerbach on, 22, 261, 277;
on freedom of God, 26566; and

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Friedrich Wilhelm IV, 103; on personalism, 108, 12225, 263, 26465;

on political theory, 18, 12225; on
rationalism, 265; on Schelling, 26465;
on state as disciplinary institution,
100101
Stahr, Adolf, 222n8
state: in Hegel, 12728; legal personality
of, 12425, 126; in Marx, 13639; as
object of political theory, 120; in Ruge,
307; in Saint-Simonism, 17374; in
Schelling, 100; in Stirner, 296, 29799.
See also personality of state
Staudenmaier, Franz Anton, 69
Steudel, Johann Christian Friedrich, 82
Stirner, Max: on alienation, 9, 199n52;
anarchism in, 23, 29699; in Athenaum circle, 35; autonomy in, 286,
29091, 293, 29596; background,
281, 28384; as culmination of
critical tradition, 28283, 29293;
egoism in, 23, 28291; on Feuerbach,
11213; freedom in, 29495; good in,
187; on hypostasis, 23, 289; individualism in, 28485, 297, 299; law in,
29798; morality in, 283, 291; and
perfectionism, 187; poverty in, 296;
rational will in, 283, 290; rights in,
298; Romanticism and, 288; as Sankt
Max, 292; self-interest in, 28586;
state in, 296, 29799; as Thrasymachus, 282; voluntarism in, 23, 290,
293, 297
Strauss, David Friedrich: and Bauer,
105, 188; in Berlin circle, 28, 29, 30,
38, 222n8; and Christology debate,
81, 86; criticism of by conservative
Hegelians, 103, 104; on democracy,
106; as forerunner of demythologizing Christianity, 8687; on human
personality, 130; response to critics, 83;
and Right / Center / Left terminology
for Hegelians, 6, 16, 27, 67, 233, 268;
and Ruge, 34; in Spinozist route from
Hegel, 8
strong transcendental idealism: Hegels
critique of, 59; in Kant, 15, 55; and relation of metaphysics to reason, 60
subjective thinking (Kierkegaard),
8788

subjectivism: and activity of spirit, 25; in

art, 21, 209, 216; and critique of identity, 99; as issue of study, 87; religion
split with philosophy, in Feuerbach,
269; in Ruge and Echtermeyer manifesto, 216; and science and religion,
8788
Swabian Christian belief, 62n14. See also
Wrttemberg, Duchy of, theological
tradition in
theism, relation in Hegel to idealism,
15, 61
theological rationalism and opposition to
Hegelianism, 97
Tholuck, Friedrich August Gottreu, 76,
8283, 9798, 267
trade unions in Gans, 175
transcendence: in German idealism,
33031; of God, 67, 17, 98; as immanent human community, 11112;
in Kant, 59; and personality of state,
13334; of politics, 111, 304, 312;
Young Hegelian rejection of, 130
transcendental idealism, 15, 5152, 53
Trinity, Hegels interpretations of, 16,
7576
Tristan, Flora, 309, 318n29
ugliness: and the beautiful, 2122, 231,
241; development of idea of, 235,
247n42; in Rosenkranz, 23153
universality: Bauer on, 99, 18788, 190;
development of idea of, 89, 12; of
God, 76; in Hegel, 15; of humans,
82, 99, 190; in Stirner, 23, 199n50; in
Wolff, 189
Vico, Giambattista, 24, 340
virtue: in Bauer, 18788, 193; in Kant,
185; and mercantile society, 20, 179
82; in post-Kantian perfectionism, 190
Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 38, 209, 210,
222n8
voluntarism: Hegels criticism of, 15,
5758; in Kant, 57, 64n33; in medieval thought, 54, 5758; in Stirner, 23,
28485, 290, 293, 297
Vormrz period, role of Hegelians in,
67

Contributors

FREDERICK BEISER has been a major contributor to work on the history o f m odern philosophy, especially the history o f German philosophy
(Kant and German idealism) and the English Enlightenment. His book
The Fate ofR eason: German Pltilosophyfrom Kant toFichte won the Thomas].
Wilso n Prize for the Best First Book. His other publications include Enlightenment, R evol:ution, Romanticism: The Genesis of German P olitical Thought,
1790-1800; German Idealism: The StrugglAgainst Subjectivism; The Romantic
i mperative: Tlte Concept of Early German Romanticism; Sc/tiller as Pltilosoplter:
A Re-Examination; and, as edito r, The Cambridge Companion to H egel.
MYRIAM BIENENSTOCK holds the c hair of German philosophy at the
U niversite Fra rn;:ois Ra belais in Tours, France . For m a ny years she taught
at the H ebrew University in J erusale m, and sh e h as h eld the Ma rtin Euber Chair a t th e Goe the Unive rsity in Frankfurt, Ge rma ny. H e r p rincipal
publications include H egel, 1 preinier systhne: La philosopltie de l'esp'rit; Politique dujeune H egel; a nd La raison pratique au XXe siec/: Trajets et figures, coedited with Andre Tosel. She has also published on Kant, H erder, Fichte,
Sch elling, Ma rx, a nd political philosophy a nd J e wish tho ught. Among
h er articles in English are contributions to the R. S. Cohe n Festschrift
Science, Mind and Art, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Knowledge and Politics: Case Studies in the R elationship Between ~Epistemology and
Political Philosophy a nd Modern Judaism.
WARREN BRECKMAN is an associate professor of m o d ern European
in tell ectual histo ry a t the University o f Pennsylvania . H e is the a uth or of
Marx, the Young H egelians, and tlte Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Seif a nd European Romanticisin: A Brief H istory with Documents. H e is
curre ntly writing a book e ntitled "Adve ntures of the Symbolic: Postmarxism and Democra tic Theory." H e is the executive edito r of the Journal of
the Hist01)' of Ideas.
WOLFGANG BUNZEL teach es m od ern Germa n literature at the Institut fiir d e utsch e Philologie at the U niversity of Munich and is coeditor
of the I nternationalesj ahrbuch der Bettina-von-A rnim Gesellschaft. H e coedited (with Pe ter Stein and Florian Vassen ) Romantik und Vormiirz; edited
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Be ttina von Arnim 's Briefwechsel; and coedited (with Lars Lambrecht)
antru1n und Perip!terie: Arnold Ruge im Briefwecltsel '11tit Jungltegelianern in
Berlin.
LUCIEN CALVIE is a professor o f G erma n language a nd litera ture at the
University of To ulo use 11-Le Mirail, h aving ta ught previo usly in Nancy,
Montpellie r, a n d Gre n oble. His r esearch d eals with Ge rman receptions
of the Fre n ch Revo lutions o f 1789 , 1830, a nd 1848;Jaco binism, Rom anticism, and liberalism; a nd the German Vonniirz pe riod a nd th e origins
of Marxism. His publication s include Marx et la Revolutionfran(aise (with
Fra n <;:ois Furet); Le renard et /,es raisins: La Revolution fran(aise et Les intellectuels alk11tands, 1789-1845; a nd "Le Soleil de la liberte": Henri H eine (1 7971856), l'Al/,emagne, la France et les revol:utions. H e translated and edi ted Arn o Id Ruge's A ux origines du couple.franco-alle11tand: Critique du nationalis11te
et revolution democratique avant 1848.
BERNADETTE COLLENBERG-PLOTNIKOV studied art history, Latin
languages, and philosophy a t the U niversities of Bochum, Paris, Ko nstanz, and Berlin. Sh e is currently private d ocent (Priva tdozentin) in the
Institute of Philo so phy of the Fe rnUniversitat, Hagen, and lecturer at
the Fo lkwang University o f Arts, Essen. She is the a utho r of Klassizismus
und K arikatur: Eine Konslellalion der Kunst am Beginn der Moderne and the
editor of H einri ch Gustav H o tho 's Vorstudien fur Leben und Kunst and
H o tho 's Vorksungen uberAsthetik oder Philosophie des Schonen un d der Kunst.
She coedited (with Anne m arie Ge thma nn-Siefert) H egel's lectures on
Philosophie der Kunst oder Asthetik (afte r th e lecture n otes of Ke hler in
1826); (with A. Gethma nn-Siefert a nd Lu De Vos) Die geschichlliche Bedeutung der Kunst und die Bestim11tun g der Kunste; a nd (with A. Ge thmannSiefert) Zwisclten Pltilosopltie u nd Kunstgesclticltte.
TODD GOOCH is an assistant p rofessor o f philoso phy a nd r eligion at
Eastern Kentucky U niversity. H e is th e auth o r of T he Nu11tinous and M odernity: An Interpretation ofRudolf Otto's Philosophy of Religion and has published a rticles o n Max Stimer a nd Max Sch ele r. H e is currently interested in the relatio nship be tween Fe u e rbach 's earlie r a nd later views o n
religion.
LARS LAMBRECHT teach es p olitical socio logy a nd social theory in th e
Departme nt of E con o mics a nd Po litics a t the U nive rsity of H amburg.
He also teach es philosophy at the Unive rsity of Bre m e n, in coo peration
with the Germa n section of the European U NESCO Chair of Philosophy. H e is editor of the series }orscltungen zum j ungltegelianismus. His

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publications include Arnold Ruge (1802-1880): Beitriige win 200. Geburtstag and ]ungltegelianismus als antifascltistiscltes Forsclmngsprograimn. He h as
edited issues o f Foruin Vonniirz Forschung a nd the lnternationales ] ahrbuch
der Bettina-von-Arnim Gesellscltafl. H e h as recently edited Hegemoniale Weltpolitik und Krise des Staates a nd coedited Osteuropa in der Sicht der 1848er
Revolutionen und des j ungltegelianismus: L iteratur, P ltilosopltie und Politik a nd
(with Wolfgang Bunzel) Zentrum und Peripherie: Arnold Ruge iin Bri.efwechsel mit jungltegelianern in Berlin a nd Entstehen des Offentliclten-Eine andere
Politik.
DOUGLAS MOGGACH is Distinguish ed U niversity Professor a nd Research Chair in Political Thought a t the U niversity of Ottawa and is a n
h on ora ry professor of philosophy at the University o f Sydney. His visiting
appointm e nts include Clare H all, Sidney Sussex, a nd Kin g's Colleges,
Cambridge; the Centre for History and Economics, Cam bridge; an d the
Scu ola Normale Sup erio re di Pisa. H e h as published exte n sively in German philosoph y and aesthetics. Among his books are The Pltilosoph')' and
Politics of Bruno Bauer and, as editor, The New llegelians: Politics and Philos0/Jh')' in the H egelian School. H e also publish ed , with Winfried Schultze, the
first edition of a m anuscript by Bruno Bau er on Kant's aesth etics (Bruno
Bauer: Uber die Prinzipien des Schonen: De pulchri principiis: Eine Preisschrift,
1nit einem Vorwort von Volker Gerhardt).
PAUL REDDING is a p rofessor of philosophy a t the Unive rsity of Sydney.
H e is the auth or of H egel's H ermeneutics, The Logic ofAffect, Analytic Philos0/Jh')' and the R eturn of Hegelian Thought and Continental Idealism: L eibniz to
Nietzsche. In 2004 h e was elected as a fellow to the Australia n Academ y of
the Humanities for his conU'ibution s to the study of post-Kantian idealist
philosophy.
TOM ROCKMORE is a professor of philosophy at Duquesn e University.
H e has taught a t Yale, Fordh am, and Wesleyan universities. His recen t
boo ks include In Kant s Wake: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century; H egel, ldealisin and Analytic Philosophy; On Constructivist Epistemowgy; On Foundationalism: A Strategy for Metaphysical Realism; Before and After Hegel: A H istorical
l ntmduction to H egel s Thought; a nd Marx After Marxism: An Introduction
to the Philosophy of Karl Marx; and h e coedited (with Da niel Breazeale)
Rights, Bodies and Recognition: New Essays on Fichte's Foun dations of Natural
Right.
MARGARET A. ROSE h as h eld university teaching posts and r esearch
fellowships in Ge rma n studies as well as the histo ry of ideas, including the

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Ashworth Readership in Social Theory a t the University of Melbourne.

Her earlier publicatio ns include Die Parodie: Eine Funktion der biblischen
Sprache in H eines Lyrik; Reading the Young Marx and Engels: Poetry, Parody
and the Censor; Parody!/Meta-Fiction: A nAnalysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror
to the Writing and Reception ofFiction; Marx's Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the
Visual Arts; The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial: A Critical Analysis; and
Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern. H e r most recent books are Parodie, Intertextualitiit, Interbildlichkeit a n d Flaneurs & Idlers. H er current work
is on the visual arts and aesth e tics of nineteenth-century Germany.
JON STEWART is a n associa te r esearch professor at the S0ren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen. His r esearch
monographs include The Unity of H egel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Syste11tatic Interpretation a nd K ierkegaard's Relations to H egel Reconsidered. H e has
edited th e following volumes: The H egel Myths and L egends; The Phenomenolog;1 of Spirit Reader: Critical and Interpretive Essays; The Debate Between
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; Kierkegaard and H is Contemporaries: The Culture
of Golden Age Denmark; and Miscellaneous Writings by G. W F H egel. H e
has uanslated H eiberg's On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age
and Other Texts and H eiberg's Speculative Logic and Other Works. He is the
general ed itor of the transla tion se ries Texts from Gold.en Age Denmark and
the series K ierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources.
CHRIS THORNHILL is a professor of European p o litical thou gh t at the
University of Glasgow, and h e h as previously h eld positions at the University of Su ssex and at King's College London. His recent books include
Political Theory in Modern Germ.an')'; Karl j aspers: Polit'ics and Metaphysics;
German Political Philosophy: The Metaphysics of Law; as co author, Niklas Luhu1.ann 's Theory of Politics and Law; and, as coeditor, Luhmann on Law and
Politics; a nd L egality and Legiti'lltacy: Normative and Sociological Approaches.
NORBERT WASZEK h as h eld teaching and research positions at Auckland, Hanover, Bochum, and Erlangen and is currently a professor of
German a t the Un iversity of Pa ris VIII. His principal publicatio ns in clude
The Scottish Enlightenment and H egel's Account of "Civil Society"; Eduard Gans
(1797-1839): Hegelianer-Jude-Europiier; and L'Ecosse des lumieres: H ume,
S'lltith, Ferguson . H e h as edited Kant: Philosophie de l'histoire; H egel: Droit, histoire, societe; and (with Reinhard Bliinkner and Gerh ard Gohler) Eduard
Gans (1797-1839): Politischer Professor zwischen Restauration und Vonniirz.