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Post-Kantian Perfectionism Douglas Moggach 9 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 Vormärz (preceding the outbreak of revolution in March 1848) shared the view that a deep-seated opposition exists between virtue and commerce.1 They thus appear— at first sight—inattentive 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 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 upwards or downwards) 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 forward-looking, 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 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 pre-capitalist 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 Kant’s. 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 Vormärz, 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 Kant’s ethics, but, in its deliberation on the social question or the new problems of urban and political life, it goes beyond Hegel’s 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 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
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