Arnold Ruge and the Machiavellian Moment

WARREN BRECKMAN Arnold Ruge and the Machiavellian Moment The question of the Left Hegelians and democracy is not as clear as it might first seem. To be sure, as many scholars have shown, the radical students of Hegel be- came critical of Hegel’s theory of the rational state. And they grew increasingly skeptical that the Prussian state was moving toward that ideal, let alone already actualizing it, a claim, at any rate, that Hegel had never made. As their skepticism toward both Hegel and Prussia grew, they embraced words like republicanism and democracy. This much is clear. Yet, just as quickly, many of the radical Hegelians rejected what one might call bourgeois democracy in the name of socialism and the organization of society around the needs of the most numerous class. Of course, socialism could be presented as the consummation of democracy, not its antithesis. Making the question of Left Hegelian politics difficult is the fact that hovering over the entire trajectory of Left Hegelianism was Hegel’s rationalist philosophy of history, which sits uncomfortably with democracy, insofar as one takes seriously the notion that democracy contains a contingent, indeterminate dimension that ex- ceeds any specific institutional framework. This seems as true of Hegel’s absolute state as it does of Marx’s theory of history. It seems true also of much Hegelian republicanism, which roughly speaking took two different, if interrelated directions: on one side, a Jacobin-inspired ideal of a nation-state that fully embodies the pou- voir constituant of the sovereign people and on the other side, an ethical idealism in which morality and right merge and republicanism comes to mean the triumph of universalism over all forms of particularism.1 In a book titled La démocratie contre l’État. Marx et le moment machiavélien, the French historian and political philosopher Miguel Abensour develops a provocative new framework for assessing the place of democracy in Left Hegelian thinking. The book is, as its title underscores, focused on Karl Marx; but Abensour suggests that the Left Hegelian movement as a whole might be explained in these terms. Or, at least up to a point. While Abensour sees the Left Hegelians all making certain moves in common, he argues that the young Marx went further than the others in embracing a vision of what Abensour calls “insurgent democracy,” a vision that haunted Marx throughout his career despite the repression of this dimension in his mature thought. In what follows, I propose to apply Abensour’s scheme to Arnold Ruge. As the editor of the Hallische and Deutsche Jahrbücher, Ruge’s place in any 1 The exemplification of the latter tendency is Bruno Bauer, whose brand of “republican rigorism” is discussed in depth by Moggach (2003). It is striking that in Moggach’s lengthy and rich treatment, the concept of democracy finds almost no place, other than as a synonym for the potential of rational intersubjectivity within the “sovereign people”. F5495_Quante_Mohseni.indd 127 07.05.15 07:37 128 WARREN BRECKMAN account of Left Hegelianism is assured. Yet he is treated more as the movement’s impresario and less as an original thinker. Indeed, he is typically presented as a derivative thinker who merely translated the pathbreaking religious and philosoph- ical ideas of figures like David Friedrich Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Bruno Bauer into directly political terms. This act of translation, however, was already an original contribution, as was Ruge’s ability to force radical Hegelian ideas into the glaring light of public debate. But his contribution went deeper than this, for Ruge represents perhaps the most striking example of the connection between Young Hegelian theological critique and the articulation of a unique Left Hegelian form of democratic republicanism.2Abensour’s model allows an even clearer appreciation of Ruge’s originality as a radical political thinker in the Vormärz. But employing Abensour also necessitates challenging him on a crucial point, namely his sharp division between Marx and the other Left Hegelians. Contrary to Abensour, I will argue that Ruge’s thought opened toward an idea of radical democracy that ex- ceeded the terms of both the Hegelian philosophy of the state and also the emerg- ing idea of socialism. Like Marx, Ruge had a “Machiavellian moment” and at roughly the same time, in 1843. And, like Marx, this moment proved shortlived for Ruge. Nonetheless, Ruge’s exit from radical democracy took a different path, and likewise, the specter that haunted his subsequent thought was a different one than Marx’s. Marx and the Machiavellian Moment Miguel Abensour was a student of Claude Lefort, the co-founder of the group So- cialisme ou Barbarie in the late 1940s and an influential theorist of democracy in the wake of Marxism’s collapse in France. Whereas another of Lefort’s prominent students, Marcel Gauchet, took the ideas of his teacher in a more conservative di- rection, Abensour based an anarchist theory of radical democracy upon them.3 That is to say, Abensour built upon Lefort’s seminal description ofdémocratie sau- vage, an account that recognizes democracy’s lack of firm foundation and hence the uncertainty and indeterminacy of the democratic condition. Stressing that democracy must involve permanent contestation both in and beyond the form of the State if it is not to atrophy, Abensour’s work from the beginning sought to recap- ture the utopian imperative in modern democracy. Unlike so many theorists shaped by the collapse of Marxism, Abensour never shied away from insisting on Karl Marx’s place within the utopian tradition. This means that Abensour reads Marx’s disavowals of utopian socialism themselves through a form of utopian self-criticism and within a revolutionary movement that at once includes and transcends Marx.4 2 This claim is at the heart of my earlier work on Ruge. See Breckman 1999, chapter 6. 3 See Abensour (1993, 225-241). I have discussed Abensour and Gauchet in (Breckman 2013, ch. 4). 4 See Blechman and Breaugh (2011, vii). F5495_Quante_Mohseni.indd 128 07.05.15 07:37.

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