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 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 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 Kant’s 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: quasi-
Aristotelian 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 Wolff’s perfectionism is developed by Karl von Dalberg,29 the last arch- chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire before its 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
Wolff’s 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 Dalberg’s 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
Kant’s 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 will’s capacity to be self-determining (spontaneity) and its capacity to be self-determining through the moral law
(autonomy). In Kant’s 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 Kant’s 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 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. Kant’s 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
Kant’s 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 Kant’s 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 Kant’s 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 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
Kant’s 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 meta-ethical and normative dimensions.39
1. Meta-ethically, 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 Kant’s 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 Kant’s 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, 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, Bauer’s post-Kantian perfectionism is an agent-centered 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 Bauer’s own position, to note the major disagreements between them. Meta-ethically, 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 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 act—politically—on 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 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 Wolff’s 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. Bauer’s 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 can now, with the advance of enlightenment, be reclaimed as finite spirit’s 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 Hegel’s 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 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 Vormärz 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, Fichte’s 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 Hegel’s death, he does not misunderstand Hegel’s 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 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, Bauer’s 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 [bürgerlichen 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 Bauer’s close circle of collaborators asserts in 1845, “At first, naturally, labor power can triumph only in the form of its alienation [Entäusserung], 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 question 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 post-revolutionary 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 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.
Bauer’s writings after the failure of the Revolutions of 1848 are highly problematic, and have no place in an account of perfectionist ethics.73 His Vormärz 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. Bauer’s perfectionism is not a blithe optimism, as Wolff’s 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, King’s
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), 2:197–226.
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), 29–52. Cf. 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), 497–99. 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), 249–59; but Cicero’s
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), 8–13. sentence of this note be changed to “See” or to “Compare”?> 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 (1742–98),” in Scotland in Europe, ed. Tom Hubbard and R. D. S. Jack (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 55–71; Douglas Moggach, “Schiller, Scots, and Germans: Freedom and Diversity in The Aesthetic Education of Man,” Inquiry 51 (2008): 16–36. Oz-Salzberger, “Scots, Germans,” 197–226, 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 Vormärz (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg, 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 (Düsseldorf: 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 Gérard Raulet, eds., Marx démocrate (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 révolution démocratique avant 1848, trans. and ed. Lucien Calvié (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 1750–1820, ed. Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 106–23. 14. On perfectionism or Vollkommenheit, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. L. W. Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 33–42; and Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 10–11. Paul Franks’s illuminating work on post-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), 146–200. 15. Norbert Waszek, “Eduard Gans on Poverty and on the Constitutional Debate,” in Moggach, New Hegelians, 24–49. 16. On Gans, see the texts by Myriam Bienenstock and Norbert Waszek in this volume. 17. On Feuerbach, see Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, 90–130; Daniel Brudney, Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 25–108; and David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 183–218. See also the text by Todd Gooch in this volume. 18. Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, 279–97; Brudney, Marx’s Attempt, 299–322; Leopold, Young Karl Marx, 218–45. Leopold does not sufficiently bring out the Kantian elements in Marx’s 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 Marx’s perfectionism. 19. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. H. Glockner, vol. 12 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1964), 88, 90–91. 20. Leopold, Young Karl Marx, 185. See also Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 21. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 33–42; Kant, Groundwork, 10–11. Cf. John Rawls, “Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), 97. In contrast to Aristotelian and Leibnizian perfectionisms, Bentham’s 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). “See also” or to “Compare”?> 22. Both these doctrines also include physical development among the conditions of perfection. 23. On Wolff’s political thought, see Emanuel Stipperger, Freiheit und Institution bei Christian Wolff (1679–1754) (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1984); on his ethics, J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 432–44. 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), 88–89. It is interesting to note that despite Wolff’s 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 BC, Mo Ti developed what might be called a proto-utilitarian perfectionism, arguing against Confucius’s rosy view of the past that it was a time of discord, because individuals (even within the family, the 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), 43–67, esp. 65–66. 25. Wolff, Institutiones, paragraphs 112–16; Wolff, Principes, 32, 36–39. See also Christian Wolff, Vernünftige Gedanken von dem gesellschaftlichen Leben der Menschen und insonderheit dem gemeinen Wesen (1721; Frankfurt: Athenäum, 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, 1750–1840 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 28. See, for example, Stipperger, Freiheit und Institution, 67–73; 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), 274–76. 29. On Dalberg, see Robert Leroux, La théorie du despotisme éclairé chez Karl Theodor Dalberg (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1932); Karl von Beaulieu-Marconnay, Karl von Dalberg und seine Zeit: Zur Biographie und Charakteristik des Fürsten Primas, 2 vols. (Weimar: Böhlau, 1879), 1:168–200; and Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 2:32–33. 30. Karl T. Dalberg, “Von den wahren Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats in Beziehung auf seine Mitglieder,” reproduced in Leroux, Dalberg, 45–54. 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 Kant’s 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, Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Reiss, 112–13. 37. On the imperative to extend the sphere of right, with quasi-perfectionist implications, see, in Herta Nagl-Docekal and Rudolf Langthaler, eds., Recht-Geschichte-Religion: Die Bedeutung Kants für die Gegenwart (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004): Paul Guyer, “Civic Responsibility and the Kantian Social Contract,” 27–47; and Luca Fonnesu, “Kants praktische Philosophie und die Verwirklichung der Moral,” 49–61. 38. Moggach, Bruno Bauer, identifies Bauer as a perfectionist, but does not develop the specifically post-Kantian dimensions of his thought. 39. Fonnesu, Dovere, 21–42. 40. Moggach, Bruno Bauer, 46–49. 41. For a critique of readings which stress perfectionist elements in Kant, 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), 286–88. 42. While also non-naturalist, Kant’s ethics are cognitivist in a different sense, based not on history as a record of struggles for liberation, but on an intuited fact of reason, which is timelessly available to imperfectly rational beings. Fonnesu, Dovere, 31–37. 43. Moggach, Bruno Bauer, 11–12. 44. See the text by Frederick Beiser in this volume. 45. That such a reference is not entirely anachronistic is evidenced by Bauer’s 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 Vormärz Germany,” in Moggach, New Hegelians, 114–35. 46. See, for example, Bruno Bauer, Der Fall und Untergang der neuesten Revolutionen (Berlin: Verlag von Gustav Hempel, 1850), II. Der Aufstand und Fall des deutschen Radikalismus vom Jahre 1842, Erster Band, 107. numerals here, “II” and “Erster Band” (First Volume) is confusing. Can you clarify what these mean, so we can style this entry correctly? (We also need to change “Erster Band to “vol. 1,” or some other English equivalent.)> 47. On die Masse and its problems, see Moggach, Bruno Bauer, 150–62. 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. 1840–1841,” Deutsche Jahrbücher, nos. 21–24 (January 25–28, 1843): 81–95; on Feuerbach, see Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs,” Wigands Vierteljahrschrift 3 (1845): 86–146. 49. Feuerbach’s perfectionism also retains markedly pre-Kantian elements. See Brudney, Marx’s Attempt, 25–108. 50. Bruno Bauer (anon.), Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über 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, 91–113. 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, 48–51. 54. Bruno Bauer, “Theologische Schamlosigkeiten,” Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst, nos. 117–20 (November 15–18, 1841): 465–79; (anon.), “Bekenntnisse einer schwachen Seele,” Deutsche Jahrbücher, nos. 148–49 (June 23–24, 1842): 589–96; “Rezension: Die Geschichte des Lebens Jesu von Dr. von Ammon,” in Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publizistik, ed. Arnold Ruge, vol. 2 (Zürich und Winterthur: Verlag des literarischen Comptoirs, 1843), 163. 55. Kant, “Theory and Practice,” 74–79. The status of women remains problematic in all these accounts. 56. J. G. Fichte, Der geschlossne Handelsstaat, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1/7 (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1988), 37–141. exactly does “1/7” denote?> 57. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §§ 241–46. 58. Waszek, “Eduard Gans,” 33–41. 59. Bruno Bauer, “Der christliche Staat und unsere Zeit,” in Feldzüge 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, 166–69. 61. (Anon.), “Das Wohl der arbeitenden Klassen,” Norddeutsche Blätter 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), 526–29. 64. Bruno Bauer, Geschichte der Politik, Kultur und Aufklärung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Charlottenburg: Egbert Bauer, 1843), 3:19–20. 65. Tomba, “Exclusiveness,” 110–11, stresses the importance of self-emancipation in Bauer, but links this to a pseudo-aristocratic disdain for the unfree. In contrast, I emphasize, as more consistent with Bauer’s 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 Aufklärung, 1:vi–vii. See also Bruno Bauer and Edgar Bauer, eds., Denkwürdigkeiten zur Geschichte der neueren Zeit seit der Französischen Revolution (Charlottenburg: Egbert Bauer, 1843–44). 67. See Norbert Waszek, “L’histoire du droit selon Edouard Gans: Une critique hégélienne de Formatted: French (Canada) F.C. von Savigny,” in Recht zwischen Natur und Geschichte, ed. Jean-François Kervégan and Heinz Mohnhaupt (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), 278. 68. Bauer, “Der christliche Staat,” 26. 69. (Anon.), “Das Wohl der arbeitenden Klassen,” 52–66. 70. Bauer, Geschichte der Politik, Kultur und Aufklärung, 1:vii. 71. Bauer, “Erste Wahlrede von 1848”; Bruno Bauer, “Verteidigungsrede vor den Wahlmännern des Vierten Wahlbezirkes am 22.2. 1849,” in Barnikol, Bruno Bauer, 525–31 and 518–25. 72. Bauer, “Erste Wahlrede von 1848,” 525. 73. For a brief discussion of these later views, see Moggach, Bruno Bauer, 180–87. 74. Bruno Bauer, “Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden,” in Sass, Feldzüge der reinen Kritik, 195.