(the Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought) Cooper, Ian_Adams, Nicholas_Walker, John_Jamme, Christoph_Ameriks, Karl - The Impact of Idealism_ the Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought VOL 2 Historical

The Impact of Idealism
Volume II. Historical, Social and Political Thought
The first study of its kind, The Impact of Idealism assesses the impact of classical
German philosophy on science, religion and culture. This volume explores
German Idealism’s impact on the historical, social and political thought of the
nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Each essay focuses on an idea
or concept from the high point of German philosophy around 1800, tracing
out its influence on the intervening period and its importance for
contemporary discussions. New light is shed on key developments of Idealist
thought, such as Marxism, critical theory and feminism, and previously
unexamined areas of Idealism’s influence are discussed for the first time. This
unique, interdisciplinary collection traces the impact of Kant, Hegel,
Schelling, Fichte and others in Britain, Europe, North America and beyond.
Its insights represent vital contributions to their respective fields, as well as to
our understanding of German Idealism itself.
Nicholas Boyle is the Schröder Professor of German Emeritus in the

University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and former President of Magdalene
College.
Liz Disley is a Research Associate in the Department of German and Dutch
at the University of Cambridge.
John Walker is Senior Lecturer in German in the Department of European
Cultures and Languages at Birkbeck College, University of London.
The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought
General editors Nicholas Boyle and Liz Disley
Associate general editor Ian Cooper
Volume I. Philosophy and Natural Sciences

Edited by Karl Ameriks
Volume II. Historical, Social and Political Thought
Edited by John Walker
Volume III. Aesthetics and Literature
Edited by Christoph Jamme and Ian Cooper
Volume IV. Religion
Edited by Nicholas Adams
German Idealism is arguably the most influential force in philosophy over the past two
hundred years. This major four-volume work is the first comprehensive survey of its
impact on science, religion, sociology and the humanities, and brings together fifty-two
leading scholars from across Europe and North America. Each essay discusses an idea or
theme from Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte or another key figure, shows how this
influenced a thinker or field of study in the subsequent two centuries, and how that
influence is felt in contemporary thought. Crossing established scholarly divides, the
volumes deal with fields as varied as feminism, architectural history, psychoanalysis,
Christology and museum curation, and subjects as diverse as love, evolution, the public
sphere, the art of Andy Warhol, the music-dramas of Wagner, the philosophy of
Husserl, the novels of Jane Austen, the political thought of fascism and the foundations
of international law.
The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought
volume ii
Historical, Social and Political Thought
General editors Nicholas Boyle and Liz Disley

Edited by John Walker
University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.
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c Cambridge University Press 2013
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First published 2013
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

The impact of idealism.
volumes cm. – (The Legacy of post-Kantian German Thought)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-03982-7 (v. 1) – isbn 978-1-107-03983-4 (v. 2) –
isbn 978-1-107-03984-1 (v. 3) – isbn 978-1-107-03985-8 (v. 4)
1. Idealism, German. I. Ameriks, Karl, 1947– editor of compilation.
b2745.i47 2013
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isbn 978-1-107-03983-4 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of

urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of contributors page vii

Acknowledgements ix
List of abbreviations xi
Introduction: Idealism in historical, social and political thought 1

John Walker
1 From transcendental idealism to political realism 12

Onora O’Neill
2 The public of the intellectuals – from Kant to Lyotard 26

William Rasch
3 Idealism and the idea of a constitution 51

Chris Thornhill
4 German Idealism and Marx 82

Douglas Moggach
5 Ethos, nature and education in Johann Erich von Berger and Friedrich
Adolf Trendelenburg 108
Steffen Wagner
6 The concept and philosophy of culture in Neo-Kantianism 136

Stephan Nachtsheim
7 After materialism – reflections of Idealism in Lebensphilosophie: Dilthey,

Bergson and Simmel 161
David Midgley
8 ‘Rationalisation’, ‘reification’, ‘instrumental reason’ 186

Fred Rush
v
vi Contents
9 Freedom within nature: Adorno on the idea of reason’s autonomy 208

Brian O’Connor
10 German neo-Hegelianism and a plea for another Hegel 232

Andreas Grossmann
11 Idealism and the fascist corporative state 260

Irene Stolzi
12 Love and recognition in Fichte and the alternative position of

de Beauvoir 277
Marion Heinz
13 Hegel’s concept of recognition and its reception in the humanist

feminism of Simone de Beauvoir 300
Sabine Doyé
14 Giving an account of oneself amongst others: Hegel, Judith Butler and

social ontology 312
Liz Disley
15 Idealism in the German tradition of meta-history 331

J örn R üsen
Bibliography 344
Index 373
Contributors
Liz Disley
University of Cambridge
Sabine Doyé
University of Siegen
Andreas Grossmann
Technical University Darmstadt
Marion Heinz
University of Siegen
David Midgley
Douglas Moggach
University of Ottawa
Stephan Nachtsheim
RWTH Aachen University
Brian O’Connor
University College Dublin
Onora O’Neill
William Rasch
Indiana University
J örn R üsen
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Essen
vii
viii List of contributors
Fred Rush
University of Notre Dame
Irene Stolzi
University of Florence
Chris Thornhill
University of Manchester
Steffen Wagner
University of Naples
John Walker
University of London
Acknowledgements
This series of studies of the influence on the humanities of German Idealist

philosophy results from the work of an International Research Network
sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust, with additional support from the New-
ton Trust and the Schröder fund of the University of Cambridge. The editors
would like to thank the Trusts and the Schroder family for their financial
assistance.
Planning for the Network began in 2006, with Ian Cooper as the first
Project Manager. Liz Disley took over as Project Manager in May 2010. For
invaluable help and support in the early stages of the project, the General
Editors are grateful to the Steering Committee of the Network, whose mem-
bers include: Ian Cooper, Nicholas Adams, Karl Ameriks, Frederick Beiser,
Vittorio Hösle, Stephen Houlgate, Christoph Jamme, Martin Rühl, John
Walker, and our patron, Onora O’Neill. A grant from Cambridge Univer-
sity’s Department of German and Dutch enabled the Committee to meet in
Cambridge in 2008. Throughout the project the staff of the Department and
of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages have been generous with
their time and prompt with their help. Thanks are due in particular to Sharon
Nevill and Louise Balshaw, and to successive Heads of the Department of
German and Dutch, Christopher Young and Andrew Webber. We are also
most grateful to Regina Sachers for some crucial and timely advice, and to
Rosemary Boyle who has acted throughout as management consultant, and
has more than once intervened decisively to keep the show on the road.
The General Editors owe special thanks to the leaders of the four groups
into which it was decided to divide the Network, who are also the editors of
the individual volumes in this series. They agreed themes with the General
Editors, assembled teams to study them, and led the workshops in which
ix
x Acknowledgements
they were discussed. The work of the Philosophy and Natural Science group
in the University of Notre Dame was supported by the Nanovic Institute
for European Studies, and that of the Aesthetics and Literature group in
Leuphana University, Lüneburg, by the Thyssen-Krupp-Stiftung. For this
support, and for the hospitality of both universities, the General Editors
would also like to express their gratitude.
Workshops met in Notre Dame, Lüneburg and Cambridge in 2010, and
again in Lüneburg and Cambridge in 2011. A concluding plenary conference,
open to the public, was held at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in Septem-
ber 2012. On all these occasions staff and students at the host institutions
provided help and advice, generously and often anonymously, and to them
too we express our thanks.
While we hope that our contributors feel that participation in the Net-
work has been rewarding in itself, we thank them for giving us the benefit
of their thinking, for attending the workshops and the conference, and par-
ticularly for presenting their work within the constraints of a very tight
timetable. For invaluable editorial support in preparing all four volumes for
the press we are especially indebted to Jennifer Jahn. Only her intensive and
always cheerful commitment to the project allowed us to meet the deadlines
we had set ourselves.
The General Editors and the Volume Editor of this volume would like
to thank Magdalene College, Cambridge for hosting two workshops which
formed part of the International Network, in December 2010 and 2011.
Abbreviations
DI Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, ed. Frédéric Worms
and Arnaud Bouaniche, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007
EC Henri Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice, ed. Frédéric Worms and Arnaud François,
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007
GNR i and GNR ii Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien
der Wissenschaftslehre, vol. i, and vol. ii: Angewandtes Naturrecht, in J. G. Fichte-
Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. R. Lauth et al.,
Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1966
GS Immanuel Kant, Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich preussische Akademie
der Wissenschaften, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900–
GS (Adorno) Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann,
20 vols., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970
GS (Dilthey) Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, 26 vols, i–xii, Leipzig and
Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1921–36 and 1958; xiii–xxvi, Göttingen: Vanden-
hoeck & Ruprecht, 1970–2005
GSG Georg Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996
HW G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus
Michel, 20 vols., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–71
KW Immanuel Kant, Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, Wiesbaden:
Insel, 1956–62
Translations
CPR Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen
Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998
CPrR Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor, introduction
by Andrews Reath, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997
xi
xii List of abbreviations
FNR Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, trans. and ed. Frederick
Neuhouser and Michael Baur, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000
ND Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, London:
Routledge, 1973
PP Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, introduction by Allen Wood, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996
PR G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans. H. B.
Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991
PS G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1979
Introduction: Idealism in historical, social and
political thought
John Walker
There is no clearer indication that Idealism is a tradition, and that the

tradition is still alive, than the current condition of historical, social and
political thought in the English- and German-speaking worlds. Through its
intellectual idiom as much as its characteristic philosophical themes – the
tension between individual freedom and political authority; the relationship
between personal and social identity; the competing claims of universal
human rights and particular cultural allegiance – that tradition continues
to inform a vast spectrum of political, cultural and philosophical debates in
an increasingly globalised world. Indeed it offers one of the most powerful
idioms for understanding the phenomenon of globalisation itself. We can
understand this continuing legacy only by grasping Idealism as a continuous
tradition. The impact of Idealism is a hermeneutic conversation which
defines its own terms and, at least in part, the social and cultural values, pro-
cedures and institutions which make that conversation possible. A common
theme of these essays is that the trajectory of German Idealist philosophy in
its classical age; the uneven but still effective transmission of that philosophy
to the present; and our current engagement with what we have received,
can only be understood in relation to each other and as part of a continuing
debate. To separate the content of the legacy from the terms of the bequest,
to abstract any particular emphasis of the Idealist heritage from the whole,
is to risk turning truth into ideology: a living tradition into a dead letter.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Benedetto Croce famously
asked ‘What is living and what is dead of the philosophy of Hegel?’ He
concluded that Hegel’s philosophy of history, politics and the state, which
he took to be the logical conclusion of the political and historical thought of
German Idealism, exemplified what was most dead: that is, most constrained
by the cultural idiom of its time, and therefore least relevant to the most
1
2 John Walker
urgent concerns of the modern world.1 The political, social and historical
insights of German Idealism are now widely recognised to be very much alive.
But that living presence can be realised only if we see the Idealist tradition
as a continuous dialectic: one whose idea continues to be relevant only if it is
never reified, as its terms are constantly redefined through actual experience.
That is what ‘Idealism’ means.
No part of the reception of German Idealism more exemplifies both the
continuing relevance and the danger of reification than its historical, social
and political strand. In 1992 Francis Fukuyama argued in The End of History
and the Last Man that the fall of communism, and the apparent ease with
which the American model of global capitalism spread across the world, rep-
resented the global triumph of a brand of Western liberalism that could also
be described in Hegelian terms.2 The Hegelian idea of the end of the story
of Spirit could be taken to mean that the End of History had actually been
achieved in the capitalist West. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The history of the last two decades has shown nothing more clearly than the
inadequacy of such a model to contemporary politics, both globally and in
the industrially developed West. The political and cultural history of the last
twenty years has revealed that questions of cultural, linguistic, religious and
ethnic allegiance are more relevant than ever to international history: espe-
cially so, perhaps, in regions where a dramatic expansion of technological
civilisation clashes with a multiplicity of culturally specific and yet glob-
ally present narratives of human identity. It is to questions such as these –
what Axel Honneth has called ‘The Struggle for Recognition’ (Der Kampf um
Anerkennung)3 and Kwame Anthony Appiah ‘The Ethics of Identity’4 – that
the legacy of German Idealism remains most centrally relevant.
The most recent work of Jürgen Habermas, for example, highlights the
tension between his concept of discourse without domination (herrschafts-
freier Diskurs) – communication which constantly seeks to acknowledge its
own cultural presuppositions, and to avoid imposing them on participants
in intercultural dialogue – and the recognition that the very idea of such a
discourse might itself involve presuppositions which belong to the secular
liberal West. In a series of recent books,5 Habermas addresses the percep-
tion, crucial to intercultural dialogue, that the idea of ‘discourse without
domination’ can be only procedurally, but never substantively defined: it
is a regulative ideal in the Kantian sense. By the same token, the voices
which encounter each other in intercultural dialogue are never the product
of reflection alone, but emerge from the complex systems of human ethical
life which Hegel called Sittlichkeit: culturally specific forms of practice and
Introduction 3
argument which underlie even the idea of Enlightenment itself. Thus inter-
cultural communication involves a constant dialectic between the universal
and the particular. Our aspiration to a global ideal of unprejudiced dialogue
between cultures must also recognise that such an ideal can itself only be
culturally embodied, and that no culture is without its founding presuppo-
sitions. Therefore all attempts at intercultural communication involve the
interplay of what Michael Walzer calls ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ descriptions:6 the
universal principles which inspire and legitimate dialogue, and the concrete
cultural contexts from which dialogue actually proceeds. Walzer’s crucial
insight is that moral consciousness moves from ‘thick’ to ‘thin’ description
rather than the other way round – that, even as philosophers, we can never
begin with the language of moral philosophy but only with the articulation
of our actual moral life. Yet the universal principles of human freedom and
reason, and therefore human rights, remain the central concern of moral phi-
losophy. Whilst pursuing those principles, we must in other words attend
to what Axel Honneth calls ‘The I in the We’ (‘Das Ich im Wir’):7 the way in
which our reflective subjectivity is inseparable from inherited and constantly
renewed cultural traditions.
No problem is more central in the thought of German Idealism, its legacy
or its current impact. From Kant’s concern with the criteria of practical rea-
son and the conditions of intersubjective judgement, through Fichte’s anal-
yses of self-consciousness and Schelling’s concern with the cultural presence
of myth and religion to Hegel’s philosophy of embodied Spirit, the German
Idealist legacy directly addresses the central concerns of modern political
and social philosophy. Through Herder’s and Humboldt’s philosophies of
language and culture, that legacy continues to inform the cultural sciences
and indeed what has often been called the ‘cultural turn’ itself.
The most important reason why the Idealist philosophical tradition con-
tinues to be relevant to the study of society, history and politics is that it
insists on the connection, but can never accept the reduction, of philosophy
to the particular cultural sciences which that study requires. For Croce, the
Idealist synthesis which he saw epitomised in the Hegelian system was defec-
tive precisely because it contained only the informing principle – in other
words, the ‘idea’ – but never the actual content of a philosophy of history,
politics or society which could be relevant to the modern world.8 That is not
an objection to Idealism but its very point: the axis around which the future
of the Idealist tradition must now turn. Idealism does not entail the claim
that philosophy can or should constitute a master science or Wissenschaft
prior to its engagement with the actual sciences of experience. That is an
4 John Walker
engagement that must, at least in part, mean the incorporation into philos-
ophy of those sciences’ terms. However, Idealism equally insists that those
particular sciences can never be wholly coherent without the universal kind
of knowledge which only philosophy can bring. No philosophy of history,
politics or society can be intellectually complete or fully culturally relevant
if it implies that there is a ‘metaphysical’ domain that is real but absolutely
beyond the scope of philosophical articulation. For the Idealist tradition, the
universal claim of philosophical knowledge can be made coherent only by its
particular application.
However, the generically Idealist claim that what we call the absolute
or ultimate truth can only be conceived in relation to the truth of history,
society or politics does not in itself entail any more specific claim about how
that relationship is to be conceived. Hence (as the essays in this volume will
show) the concern of the neo-Kantian tradition in German sociology with
the objective validity (Geltung) of social norms, Dilthey’s and Weber’s sharply
differing understandings of the understanding (Verstehen) of human values in
society, and Habermas’s Kantian ideal of intercultural dialogue as discourse
free from cultural presuppositions are no less part of the Idealist tradition
than the Hegelian discourse about culture and society as embodied Spirit. All
these discourses are part of the ‘impact of Idealism’ because, although they
proceed from different cultural presuppositions and reach very different
conclusions, they share the same transcendental condition of possibility.
That is the central Idealist postulate that we cannot know the objective truth
of human culture and society without also knowing the subjective truth
of human consciousness by which that reality is always informed; and vice
versa. Philosophy in the Idealist mode can never be separated from, although
it can never be identified with, our historically immanent understanding
of ourselves as products of human culture and society. By the same token,
the Idealist discourse insists that historical and cultural understanding must
also be connected to those ultimate questions of human meaning with which
philosophy is concerned.
The tradition (and therefore the impact) of Idealism is therefore neither
singular nor uniquely progressive, nor free from the ideological pressure of
the cultural contexts in which it has been expressed. The contributions to
this volume will therefore be concerned with the vulnerability as well as
the vitality of the Idealist tradition in social and political thought, and in
particular with the strength and weakness of its resistance to the ideological
temptations to which it has been exposed. The chapters will address (with
different emphases) at least three different kinds of dialectic: the debate
Introduction 5
within the original movement of German Idealism, conceived as a distinctive

philosophical movement inaugurated by the Kantian critique and lasting
(at least) until the aftermath of Hegelianism and the early work of Marx;
the transmission and application of the characteristically Idealist idiom in
social and political philosophy through a variety of intellectual and cultural
contexts from the end of the classical Idealist period to the present day; and
the relevance of the Idealist tradition to some crucial issues in contemporary
social and political thought. In the nature of the case, these three perspectives
will often interact with each other.
Onora O’Neill appropriately begins the volume with a robust defence,
based on a lifetime of scholarship, of the Kantian and Idealist project in
political practice, the theory of international relations and the idea of an
international community. O’Neill’s chapter ‘From Transcendental Idealism
to Political Realism’ clearly demonstrates the link between the critique of
knowledge and the principled advocacy of political justice within a ratio-
nal public domain, which is one of the most impressive achievements of
the Idealist tradition. For O’Neill, the most significant conclusions of Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason are the twin theses of transcendental idealism and empiri-
cal realism. O’Neill argues persuasively that the Kantian critique of knowledge
provides the foundation for a political philosophy which is both profoundly
realist in its recognition that we neither can nor should seek immediately
to realise political ideals in our actual practice of politics; and yet equally
idealist in its insistence that legislation, at both national and international
levels, can be guided by ideals which are regulative in the Kantian sense. That
is to say, politics can be guided by principle only if we acknowledge that
our political principles are transcendental ideals that we must never consider
to be definitively realised in an existing polity, and which we can approach
only by our necessarily imperfect efforts at political reform in the empirical
world. Kant’s political philosophy is therefore informed by both an idealist
philosophical perspective and an acute empirical realism about the pitfalls of
all ideological attempts to translate ‘ideals’ into immediate political practice.
For O’Neill the impact of Idealism remains an unfinished project, but one
eminently worth pursuing in the globalised, twenty-first-century world.
William Rasch’s piece on ‘The Public of the Intellectuals – From Kant to
Lyotard’ presents a rigorous critical engagement with this project which is
itself profoundly influenced by the Kantian critique. Rasch takes up Tony
Judt’s plea, in his last published book,9 for the regeneration of a liberal public
domain on the classical Enlightenment model, with the ‘public intellectual’
as a key figure between the governors and governed, who speaks truth to the
6 John Walker
powerful and powerless alike and so links intellectual to political progress.

The crucial condition for the emergence of the enlightened public sphere
was the separation, enjoined by Kant in 1784 in his famous essay ‘What Is
Enlightenment?’, of the private from the public sphere. This is a develop-
ment of which Habermas traced the social origins and consequences,10 and
which Kant’s modern successors, like Habermas and Onora O’Neill, wish to
sustain today. As Rasch shows, this idea was always conceived as a political
desideratum, not as politics per se. Taking up Carl Schmitt’s idea of the edu-
cational dictatorship (Erziehungsdiktatur) which accompanies some forms of
‘democratic’ thought, Rasch asks hard questions about what might be the
price to be paid for the realisation of this ideal. What are the consequences
for Habermas’s ideal of ‘discourse without domination’ for those who are
excluded (or who exclude themselves) from it? What are the consequences
for the moral and political integrity of the intellectual if he or she takes on
such a role, and is the idea of the intellectual as an educator leading society
to social and political maturity morally and politically defensible?
Chris Thornhill, in an essay on ‘Idealism and the Idea of a Constitution’,
argues that the trajectory of German Idealism from Kant via Fichte and
Schelling to Hegel represents a move from a socially and culturally evacu-
ated, ‘pure’ philosophical construction of the sources of legitimacy in public
law to a hybrid form of discourse, both philosophical and sociological in kind.
Focusing on constitutional theory, Thornhill argues that the later thought of
German Idealism must be understood as an intellectual movement located on
the margin between philosophy and sociology; as such, it provides a model
for comprehending public legal norms as both sociologically engendered and
normatively necessary. By contrast, Douglas Moggach’s chapter on ‘German
Idealism and Marx’ highlights the indebtedness of Marx’s thought not only to
Hegel but also to his earlier Idealist predecessors, especially Kant. For Mog-
gach, Marx’s early writings before 1848 contain a decisively Kantian and
therefore critical element which provides a counterbalance to what Mog-
gach sees as the predominantly mechanistic and ideological interpretation
of Marx’s later writings, especially Capital. The Kantian heritage in Marx is
thus the source of a liberal emphasis in the Marxist tradition, which finds its
echo a century later in the attempt of the Frankfurt school to reclaim Marx
for the libertarian project of the Enlightenment.
Stephan Nachtsheim’s chapter on ‘The Concept and Philosophy of
Culture in Neo-Kantianism’ and David Midgley’s on ‘After Materialism –
Reflections of Idealism in Lebensphilosophie: Dilthey, Bergson and Simmel’
address two major responses to the Idealist tradition in social and cultural
Introduction 7
thought in late nineteenth-century Germany. Stephan Nachtsheim considers

the idea of culture and the cultural philosophy of neo-Kantianism, in which
the late Idealist and especially Hegelian tradition of social thought is chal-
lenged by a strenuous attempt to renew the Kantian critique of metaphysics
and therefore (as the neo-Kantians understood it) all speculative knowledge.
The Kantian doctrine of the categories as the conditions of the possibility of
knowledge modulates into the idea of culture, conceived as an anthropolog-
ically given but historically evolving framework which is the precondition of
our knowledge of society, because it is also the precondition for the validity
(Geltung) of social norms. By contrast, David Midgley’s chapter shows how,
for the Lebensphilosophen or ‘philosophers of life’ like Dilthey, Simmel and
Bergson, the idea of culture cannot be reified in this way, because it always
presupposes an abstraction from the world of lived experience. That world
cannot be understood ‘critically’ or reflectively in the Kantian sense, but
only through a hermeneutic approach to meaning (Verstehen) which is both
imaginative and empathetic. Despite their very different conceptions of
the possibility of a philosophically based study of human society, both the
neo-Kantian philosophers of culture and the Lebensphilosophen employ the
language and concepts, and so continue the debate, of Idealist epistemology.
Fred Rush and Brian O’Connor both take up a central concern in the
twentieth-century reception of Idealism, especially in the interpretation
of the Idealist and Enlightenment heritage known as critical theory and
associated with the Frankfurt school. Brian O’Connor’s chapter critically
examines Theodor Adorno’s attempt to account for reason as at once part
of the worlds of freedom and nature. Adorno, whilst profoundly indebted
to Kant, nevertheless rejects Kant’s a priori account of reason’s autonomy
and argues that reason has evolved from the force of human desires. Draw-
ing on the arguments of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and his reception of
Freud, O’Connor offers a critical assessment of both Adorno’s reading of
Kant and his appropriation of Kant’s arguments in the service of his project
of a critique of Enlightenment rationality. Fred Rush’s chapter on ‘“Ratio-
nalisation”, “Reification”, “Instrumental Reason”’ assesses the impact of
Idealism in the formulation of these three interrelated concepts in modern
European social thought. The first emerges chiefly from Max Weber’s soci-
ological analysis of the rise of capitalism and its link to Protestantism, the
second from Marx’s and later Lukács’ critique of the alienation of labour, and
the third from Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the Dialectic of Enlight-
enment: their attempt to develop a critical philosophical theory of society,
free from what they see as the entanglement of Enlightenment reason in
8 John Walker
the instrumental reason of modern technology and the societies it serves.

Rush challenges Horkheimer and Adorno’s interpretation of the heritage
of German Idealism, especially the work of Kant. For Rush, the Idealist
interpretation of Enlightenment rationality is itself a profoundly critical
act, which anticipates the idea of critical theory in a way which its modern
exponents sometimes fail to acknowledge.
The essays by Steffen Wagner, Andreas Grossmann and Irene Stolzi are
exercises in the historical reconstruction of the Idealist tradition, which raise
profound as well as critical questions about its modern reception. Steffen
Wagner traces the transmission of Idealist theories of education and social
obligation from Johann Erich von Berger, teaching at the University of Kiel
in the classical age of German Idealism, to Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg,
one of the leading philosophers of education in nineteenth-century Germany
and a practical educationist who had a major influence on the development of
the Prussian educational system at both school and university level. Wagner
demonstrates one of the prime sources of the impact of the Idealist tradi-
tion which is often forgotten today: that tradition had a real and practical
influence in the culture and society which it informed. Andreas Grossmann
and Irene Stolzi focus on the philosophy of law and examine the use of Ide-
alist concepts to justify authoritarian and corporatist legal doctrine in Nazi
Germany and fascist Italy. Andreas Grossmann’s chapter explores the highly
ambivalent attempt to develop a neo-Hegelian philosophy of law in the years
following the German defeat in the First World War. He examines the abuse
of Hegel’s concepts by neo-Hegelian legal scholars who attempted to create a
pseudo-Idealist philosophy of law in line with the political and racial agenda
of National Socialism. After the Second World War a quite different, liberal
and constitutional reception of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right emerged in the new
Federal Republic of Germany. Grossmann analyses this development, associ-
ated especially with the leading postwar legal philosopher and constitutional
jurist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, and concludes with a powerful ‘plea for
a new Hegel’, who can be read as a thinker of freedom and human rights in
legal theory as well as philosophy. Irene Stolzi considers the appropriation
of Idealist concepts in the formation of corporatist doctrines of the state in
Mussolini’s Italy. A particular focus of her chapter is the abuse of (especially
Hegelian) doctrines of the relationship between the state and civil society
in the work of fascist ideologues like Giovanni Gentile, Cesarini Sforza and
Ugo Spirito, for whom the idea of personal identity has no meaning outside
the political organisation of the state in its corporations.
Introduction 9
Marion Heinz’s and Sabine Doyé’s chapters present feminist critiques

of the theory of recognition (Anerkennungslehre) in the work of Fichte and
Hegel, respectively. Heinz and Doyé reveal the emancipatory potential of
this theory, especially as Hegel’s doctrine of recognition is applied to gender
theory in the work of Simone de Beauvoir. However, they also highlight a
major paradox in Fichte’s and Hegel’s idea of a phenomenology of recogni-
tion, which is highly relevant to modern debates about the construction of
gender and the oppression of women and yet remains constrained by the ide-
ological construction of womanhood characteristic of its time. They argue
that the emancipatory import of the Idealist theory of recognition now needs
to be liberated from the cultural and ideological context of the reception of
German Idealism by which it has persistently been obscured. Liz Disley’s
chapter on ‘Giving an Account of Oneself amongst Others: Hegel, Judith
Butler and Social Ontology’ focuses on the concept of recognition in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit, which she shows to be directly relevant to contempo-
rary discussions of recognition in both analytic and Continental philosophy.
Disley explains that the idea of recognition developed in the Phenomenology
has epistemological, ontological and ethical dimensions. As such, it not only
informs the idea of intersubjectivity developed in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
but also has wide implications for contemporary political philosophy. The
impact of Hegel’s philosophy of recognition continues to be felt not only in
contemporary debates about the nature of human selfhood, especially but
not exclusively in the context of gender, but in the questions about the nature
and legitimacy of human institutions to which those debates give rise.
Jörn Rüsen’s concluding chapter on ‘Idealism in the German Tradition
of Meta-history’ traces the origins of the German tradition of philosophical
or meta-history in the work of thinkers such as Kant, Herder and Schiller.
For Rüsen, the decisive preconditions for this kind of philosophical history
are a specific hermeneutic of historical experience, for which Wilhelm von
Humboldt’s essay of 1821, ‘On the Historian’s Task’, provides the model; and
the idea of the constitutive role of human subjectivity in history which later
philosophical Idealism expounds. Rüsen’s essay concludes with an analysis
of the reasons for the broken continuity of historical Idealism in the tradition
of meta-history, the end of its traditional form and the present challenge to
create a new one.
The greatly varied contributions to this volume testify to the range, the
internal dialectic, and above all the contemporary relevance of the ‘impact of
Idealism’ in social, historical and political thought. That impact cannot be
10 John Walker
reduced to any one of the binary oppositions which have clouded its inter-
pretation and continue to distort its contemporary reception. The Idealist
legacy informs equally powerfully a wide range of intellectual disciplines
and positions: the Kantian tradition of reflection on public constitutional
law and international relations as much as a philosophy of culture, informed
by thinkers like Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Hegel, in which a
plurality of forms of ethical life demand recognition as insistently as the
universal claim of human rights. However, perhaps one emphasis in the
Idealist tradition and its interpretation stands out most clearly: its intrinsic
opposition to the reification of the truth about politics and society, and the
reification of our social and political practice themselves. The core of the
Idealist tradition is the thesis that truth must always be understood not only
as substance, but as subjectivity.11 There is no sphere of human knowledge
in which this affirmation is more needed, or more actually relevant, than our
knowledge of history, society and politics. However vulnerable it has been
(as several of the following chapters document) to ideological distortion,
the philosophical centre of the Idealist tradition is a critique of all ideology
through the articulation of human selfhood. That is the demonstration that
our social and political knowledge, like our social and political experience, is
not ‘given’ by God or History, but the product of human self-consciousness
working in a concrete social and political environment. At its best – that is,
when it is most conscious of its history and its roots – Idealism opposes to the
logic of reification a logic and ethic of recognition. Idealism is a philosophical
discourse which liberates us by making us remember how the truth of our
humanity has been made to appear as if it were a thing: the passive object of
our experience, and the dead object of our minds.
By remembering that process, we can perhaps recover from it.12 But that
effort at recovery can only be an unending quest. The true impact of Idealism
in social, historical and political thought is less a particular position than a
language of intellectual exchange. The ultimate object of that conversation is
what Wilhelm von Humboldt called die Mitte: the objective truth of human
experience to which all articulations of culture and society aspire, as all lan-
guages aspire to a universal meaning.13 In the human sciences (as Humboldt
clearly saw) the ideal of objective knowledge can only be regulative: it can
be approached only subjectively, and never definitively realised at any one
point in historical time. But that is why the ‘Idea’ in the Idealist tradition
continues to be real: to have a meaning and relevance which are not limited
by the cultural context from which it emerged.
Introduction 11
Notes
1. Benedetto Croce, What Is Living and What Is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel?, trans. Douglas
Ainslie (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), first published 1906, 134–49.
2. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).
3. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: the moral grammar of social conflicts, trans. Joel
Anderson (Cambridge: Polity, 1995).
4. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2005).
5. See Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge:
Polity, 2008), 101–47; 251–70; also The Divided West, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge:
Polity, 2006), and Jürgen Habermas et al., An Awareness of What Is Missing: faith and reason
in a post-secular age, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, Polity, 2010).
6. Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994),
1–19.
7. Axel Honneth, Das Ich im Wir: Studien zur Anerkennungstheorie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010).
8. Croce, What Is Living and What Is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel?, 174–91.
9. Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: a treatise on our present discontents (London: Allen Lane, 2010).
10. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an inquiry into a category
of bourgeois society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press and Cambridge: Polity, 1989), first published 1965.
11. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer
and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–71), iii, 22–3.
12. For a powerful defence of this interpretation of Idealism in relation to critical theory,
see Axel Honneth, Reification: a new look at an old idea, ed. Martin Jay (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 17–94.
13. See Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheit der Sprachen und ihren Einfluss auf die
geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, in Werke, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel
(Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1979), iii, 389.
1
From transcendental idealism to political realism
Onora O’Neill
The central arguments of the Critique of Pure Reason distinguish four funda-
mental metaphysical and epistemological claims, of which Kant rejects two
and accepts two. However, the combination of empirical realism and tran-
scendental idealism that he endorses seems at first sight to sit ill with the
political realism that he endorses in some of his later writings on politics,
history and human destiny. And yet, I shall argue, the combination makes
good sense.
1 Basic Kant
Kant rejects transcendental realism1 – traditional metaphysical realism –
arguing that its claims to show that we can have knowledge about things
as they are in themselves, of that which transcends or lies beyond our expe-
rience, cannot be sustained. In denying transcendental realism he gives up the
enterprise(s) of proving theism or atheism, freedom or fatalism. We have and
can have no knowledge of these or other matters that lie beyond experience.
However, he also rejects empirical or Berkeleian idealism, and its claims that
we cannot know anything other than our own mental states.
These moves leave him asserting the conjunction of empirical realism and
transcendental idealism. Empirical realism is the claim that we can know aspects
of the natural world. Transcendental idealism is the claim that this knowledge
of the natural order does not stand alone, but relies on certain indispensable
presuppositions that are not themselves matters of empirical knowledge.2 If we
are to have empirical knowledge and to act in the world we come to know,
This chapter is very much an essay rather than a comprehensive treatment of its large topics. I have
learned a great deal about these topics from Katrin Flikschuh, Pauline Kleingeld and K. R. Westphal.
12
From transcendental idealism to political realism 13
we must do so on the basis of a range of indispensable presuppositions. We

must deploy the categories of the understanding that are indispensable for
organising any experience of the natural world; we must draw on a range
of regulative ideas that are needed if we are to seek or to have systematic
knowledge; and we must accept certain practical postulates that are required
for ethics, politics and religion. Kant’s account of these presuppositions,
and of the varying reasons why they are indispensable, is complex. Here I
shall offer enough by way of reminders of his positions to provide a basis for
considering how and why he endorses political realism in his later work.
2 Limiting knowledge
From the start of the critical enterprise Kant insists that we are faced with a
deep predicament, and that the perennial aspirations of metaphysicians and
theologians are doomed to disappointment: ‘[human reason] is burdened
with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as prob-
lems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since
they transcend every capacity of human reason.’a,3 Consequently, despite
centuries of endeavours, they must face up to the fact that they can prove
neither theism nor atheism, neither human freedom nor fatalism. They can
offer no proofs of God’s existence, and ‘no one will be able to boast that he
knows that there is a God and a future life’.b,4 Nor can they offer a proof or
explanation of human freedom, since ‘reason would overstep all its bounds if
it took upon itself to explain how . . . freedom is possible’c,5 and ‘it is impossible
for us to explain . . . how pure reason can be practical.’d,6
Kant does not see these limits of human reasoning as a disaster and claims
that we can attain empirical knowledge, systematic scientific inquiry, practi-
cal and moral commitments and even a vision of human destiny. Famously he
asserts in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that
a. ‘[D]aß sie [die menschliche Vernunft] durch Fragen belästigt wird, die sie nicht abweisen kann;
denn sie sind ihr durch die Natur der Vernunft selbst aufgegeben, die sie aber auch nicht
beantworten kann, denn sie übersteigen alles Vermögen der menschlichen Vernunft’. I. Kant,
Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. W. Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1956–62) (hereafter KW), ii, Avii
b. ‘[S]ich niemand rühmen können: er wisse daß ein Gott und daß ein künftig Leben sei’. KW ii,
A828–9/B856–7
c. ‘[W]ürde die Vernunft alle ihre Grenze überschreiten, wenn sie es sich zu erklären
unterfinge . . . wie Freiheit möglich sei’. I. Kant, Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich
preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1900–) (hereafter GS), iv,
458.36–459.2
d. ‘[W]ie reine Vernunft praktisch sein könne, das zu erklären, dazu ist alle menschliche Vernunft
gänzlich unvermögend’. GS iv, 461.32–4
14 Onora O’Neill
‘Thus I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith [Glaube].’e,7
But what does limiting knowledge leave us with? One answer might be: scep-
ticism about everything. Another might be random credulity. The use of the
term faith (Glaube – also confidence, perhaps trust) might be read as suggesting
that Kant is drawn more to credulity.
But he is in fact much more circumspect, and rejects both scepticism and
credulity. He denies that reasoning is directed only at knowledge claims, let
alone empirical knowledge claims, and asserts that knowledge claims require
a range of non-empirical assumptions. Empirical inquiry cannot be the whole
story. Neither action nor politics, nor the enterprises of knowledge and
science, can be taken forward unless we rely on propositions that cannot be
verified or proven: these assumptions are not optional.
The fact that Kant does not think of Glaube as credulity is borne out
by his claim that it is a type of propositional attitude that is neither mere
opinion nor knowledge, but one that relies on reasons that are objectively
insufficient but subjectively unavoidable.8 For the claim that they are ‘sub-
jectively unavoidable’ is not a claim that they are or may be unshakable
illusions. That would make no sense, since Kant holds that the very contrast
between knowledge and illusion would collapse without these indispensable
assumptions. The sense in which they are ‘subjectively unavoidable’ is that
subjects who claim to know or to act must accept these assumptions. They
are presuppositional and necessary ideas – in that sense transcendental ideas –
for knowledge and action.
3 The postulates of pure practical reason

Probably the best-known discussions of the objects of Glaube are in the sec-
tion on the Postulates of Pure Practical Reason of the Critique of Practical Reason,
where Kant explains what he means by a postulate: ‘a theoretical proposition,
though one not demonstrable as such, insofar as it is attached inseparably
to an a priori unconditionally valid practical law’.f,9 The ‘postulates’ that he
discusses in the Critique of Practical Reason are assumptions we must make
if we are to combine commitment to knowledge of the natural order with
commitment to freedom and the claims of morality, and so keep open the
possibility of inserting moral intention into the world, or advancing the
e. ‘Ich mußte also das Wissen aufheben, um zum Glauben Platz zu bekommen.’ KW ii, Bxxx; cf.
A745/B773
f. ‘[E]inen theoretischen, als solchen aber nicht erweislichen Satz . . . so fern er einem a priori
unbedingt geltenden praktischen Gesetze unzertrennlich anhängt’. GS v, 122:23–5
good within the natural order. In the Critique of Practical Reason he articulates
these postulates in traditional theological terms: ‘These postulates are those
of immortality, of freedom considered positively (as the causality of a being
insofar as it belongs to the intelligible world), and of the existence of God.’g,10
Consequently we must assume:
the existence of a cause of all nature, distinct from nature, which

contains the ground of this connection, namely of the exact
correspondence of happiness with morality . . . the highest good in the
world is possible only insofar as a supreme cause of nature having a
causality in keeping with the moral disposition is assumed.h,11
And also that:
This endless progress is, however, possible only on the presupposition

of the existence and personality of the same rational being continuing
endlessly (which is called the immortality of the soul). Hence the
highest good is practically possible only on the presupposition of the
immortality of the soul.i,12
And that ‘[we] may hope for a further uninterrupted continuance of this
progress . . . even beyond this life’.j,13
4 Ideas of reason
The sections of the Critique of Practical Reason that present the postulates
discuss forms of Glaube that bear on the way in which we may regard what
have traditionally been religious claims. However, the postulates are but a
subset of the claims we must assume, that are not theoretically provable, yet are
indispensable if we are either to know or to act. Kant thinks that there are also
regulative principles that are practical assumptions that we must make if we are
g. ‘Diese Postulate sind die der Unsterblichkeit, der Freiheit, positiv betrachtet (als der Causalität
eines Wesens, so fern es zur intelligibelen Welt gehört), und des Daseins Gottes.’ GS v, 132.19–21
h. ‘[D]as Dasein einer von der Natur unterschiedenen Ursache der gesammten Natur, welche den
Grund dieses Zusammenhanges, nämlich der genauen Übereinstimmung der Glückseligkeit mit
der Sittlichkeit, enthalte . . . ist das höchste Gut in der Welt nur möglich, so fern eine oberste
Ursache der Natur angenommen wird, die eine der moralischen Gesinnung gemäße Causalität
hat.’ GS v, 125.5–16
i. ‘Dieser unendliche Progressus ist aber nur unter Voraussetzung einer Unendlichen fortdaurenden
Existenz und Persönlichkeit desselben vernünftigen Wesens (welche man die Unsterblichkeit der
Seele nennt) möglich. Also ist das höchste Gut praktisch nur unter der Voraussetzung der
Unsterblichkeit der Seele möglich.’ GS v, 122.17–21
j. ‘[E]ine fernere ununterbrochene Fortsetzung desselben . . . selbst über dieses Leben hinaus zu
hoffen’. GS v, 123.17–18
16 Onora O’Neill
to undertake either scientific investigation of the natural world or practical

activity within that world. Such activity includes the experimental work that
is needed for systematic scientific investigation of the natural world, as well
as activity that seeks to change the human world and its political institutions
for the better.
I doubt whether it is possible to list Kant’s Ideas of Reason exhaustively.
They include ideas as diverse as those of human freedom, of the purposive
unity of nature and of the social contract. So I offer the briefest of
illustrations:
freedom is only an idea of reason, the objective reality of which is in

itself doubtful . . . Philosophy must therefore assume that no true
contradiction will be found between freedom and natural necessity in
the very same human action, for it cannot give up the concept of nature
any more than that of freedom.k,14
‘[T]he moral law, and with it practical reason, [has] come in and forced this
concept [freedom] upon us’;l,15 ‘reason has in view only a systematic unity
to which it seeks to approximate the empirically possible unity [my italics]
without ever completely reaching it’;m,16 and finally:
[The social contract is] . . . only an idea of reason, which, however, has
its undoubted practical reality, namely to bind every legislator to give
his laws in such a way that they could have arisen from the united will of
a whole people.n,17
The most difficult thing to understand about Kant’s Ideas of Reason is

not his claim that they are indispensable assumptions, but his grounds for
calling them ideas of reason. I do not propose to go far into the elaboration
or vindication of that thought here, since it would demand a large excursion
into Kant’s conception of reason and its vindication.18 At this point I turn
to Kant’s work on history, politics and the future of mankind.
k. ‘Ist Freiheit nur eine Idee der Vernunft, deren objective Realität an sich zweifelhaft ist . . . Diese
[Philosophie] muß also wohl voraussetzen: daß kein wahrer Widerspruch zwischen Freiheit und
Naturnothwendigkeit ebenderselben menschlichen Handlungen angetroffen werde, denn sie
kann eben so wenig den Begriff der Natur, als den der Freiheit aufgeben.’ GS iv, 455.24–456.6
l. ‘[W]äre nicht das Sittengesetz und mit ihm praktische Vernunft dazu gekommen und hätte uns
diesen Begriff [Freiheit] nicht aufgedrungen’. GS v, 30.19–21
m. ‘[D]ie Vernunft hat dabei nur eine systematische Einheit im Sinne, welcher sie die empirische
mögliche Einheit zu nähern sucht, ohne sie jemals völlig zu erreichen’. KW ii, A568/B596; cf.
A643/B671ff.
n. ‘[E]ine bloße Idee der Vernunft, die aber ihre unbezweifelte (praktische) Realität hat: nämlich
jeden Gesetzgeber zu verbinden, daß er seine Gesetze so gebe, als sie aus dem vereinigten
Willen eines ganzen Volks haben entspringen können’. GS viii, 297.15–18
5 Human destiny
In a number of works on religion, history and human destiny, written across
the last two decades of his life, Kant claimed that certain ideas of reason are
indispensable for our picture of human history and destiny. This point was
already signalled clearly in his choice of the title for his 1784 essay, ‘Idea for
a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, and is the basic
move behind his arguments to show that we have reason to assume that
humankind is capable of progress, despite lack either of metaphysical proof
or of consistently encouraging empirical evidence.
I think it is important here to see how radically Kant departs from many
Enlightenment views of human progress. ‘Idea for a Universal History’ has
often been read as a rather conventional eighteenth-century account of the
dynamics by which conflict can produce human progress: unsocial sociability
is the dynamo of progress; things may look bad, but we can be sure that every-
thing is for the best. Seven of its nine sections indeed follow that pattern.
But the last two sections disrupt this view and claim that human freedom
means that we cannot know anything about the far future of mankind. Any
trends we observe may be no more than short term, so we can make no
knowledge claims about the destiny of mankind:
Since human beings in their endeavours do not behave merely

instinctively, like animals, and yet also not on the whole like rational
citizens of the world in accordance with an agreed upon plan, no
history of them in conformity to a plan (as e.g. of bees or of beavers)
appears to be possible.o,19
However, if human freedom prevents us from knowing or predicting the far

future, it undermines knowledge claims, including both optimistic and pes-
simistic knowledge claims, about human destiny. The evidence available to
us underdetermines claims about our far future. It points reliably neither
to progress nor to decline, nor to indefinitely prolonged oscillation, and we
cannot find empirical evidence or proof that tells us whether the human race is
progressing.20
The available evidence leaves matters open, but in Kant’s view we may
nevertheless reasonably hope, trust or have confidence in progress. Such hopes
o. ‘Da die Menschen in ihren Bestrebungen nicht bloß instinctmäßig wie Thiere und doch auch
nicht wie vernünftige Weltbürger nach einem verabredeten Plane im Ganzen verfahren: so
scheint auch keine planmäßige Geschichte (wie etwa von den Bienen oder den Bibern) von
ihnen möglich zu sein.’ GS viii, 17.27–31
18 Onora O’Neill
are reasonable, not because we can know that everything is for the best,
but because we have no evidence against them, but rather have reason to
hope that progress can be achieved, both because it is possible and because
it is something at which we can aim in our practical activity. Claims about
human destiny are disciplined by the demands of possibility, rather than of
probability, let alone of certainty:
One can regard the history of the human species in the large as the completion
of a hidden plan of nature to bring about an inwardly and, to this end, also an
externally perfect state constitution, as the only condition [Zustand] in which
it can fully develop all its presuppositions in humanity.p,21
This passage does not assert that it is known that human progress is likely
or inevitable, but merely that, given that matters are underdetermined by
our knowledge, we may, and ought to, assume that we can work for a better
future:
I shall therefore be allowed to assume that, since the human race is

constantly advancing with respect to culture . . . it is also to be
conceived as progressing toward what is better with respect to the
moral end of its existence, and that this will indeed be interrupted from
time to time but will never be broken off. I do not need to prove this
presupposition; it is up to its adversary to prove [his] case. For I rest my
case on my innate duty . . . so to influence posterity so that it becomes
always better (the possibility of this must, accordingly, also be
assumed) and to do it in such a way that this duty might be legitimately
handed down from one member [in the series of] generations to
another. It does not matter how many doubts may be raised against my
hopes from history, which, if they were proved, could move me to
desist from a task so apparently futile; as long as these doubts cannot
be made quite certain I cannot exchange the duty . . . for the rule of
prudence not to attempt the impracticable ( . . . since it is merely
hypothetical); and however uncertain I may always be and remain as to
whether something better is to be hoped for the human race, this
cannot infringe upon the maxim, and hence upon its presupposition,
necessary for practical purposes, that it is practicable.q,22
p. ‘Man kann die Geschichte der Menschengattung im Großen als die Vollziehung eines verborgenen Plans
der Natur ansehen, um eine innerlich- und zu diesem Zwecke auch äußerlich vollkommene
Staatsverfassung zu Stande zu bringen, als den einzigen Zustand, in welchem sie alle ihre Anlagen in der
Menschheit völlig entwickeln kann.’ GS viii, 27.2–7
q. ‘Ich werde also annehmen dürfen: daß, da das menschliche Geschlecht beständig im Fortrücken
in Ansehung der Cultur . . . ist, es auch im Fortschreiten zum Besseren in Ansehung des
In this passage, too, Kant sees human progress as something for which we
may hope and work: not as something that we can know or predict.
Even if this position does not support claims to know that human progress
will continue, it seems on the surface to assert a position that sits ill with the
tradition of political realism, which claims that baser motives of self-interest
dominate human affairs and must be taken as fundamental by anybody who
seeks to take a realistic view of human progress. Political realists typically
take a dim view of the prospects of seeking any but limited improvement in
human affairs, or of attempts to moralise politics.
6 Human destiny and political realism

Political realism is a family of views that recognises the limitations (the inad-
equacy, the silliness, the riskiness) of thinking that political action can or
should be directed at moral aims.23 It takes many forms, but typically takes
what is depicted as a realistic view of the motivation of states or rulers (and of
other agents) as the pursuit of self-interest or raisons d’état, and regards moral-
ism or idealism in politics as suspect, self-deluding and often dangerous. It
has been particularly influential in international relations. It would seem
that if Kant thinks that we have an ‘innate duty . . . so to influence posterity
that it becomes always better (the possibility of this must, accordingly, also
be assumed),r,24 he must reject political realism and espouse some version of
political idealism. Unsurprisingly, many of Kant’s admirers have seen him as
a political idealist, pointing particularly to his writings on perpetual peace,
to his anticolonialism and to his vision of a just political order. But this view
of Kant as a political idealist does not sit easily with other parts of his political
philosophy.25
moralischen Zwecks seines Daseins begriffen sei, und daß dieses zwar bisweilen unterbrochen,
aber nie abgebrochen sein werde. Diese Voraussetzung zu beweisen, habe ich nicht nöthig; der
Gegner derselben muß beweisen. Denn ich stütze mich auf meine angeborne Pflicht . . . so auf
die Nachkommenschaft zu wirken, daß sie immer besser werde (wovon also auch die
Möglichkeit angenommen werden muß), und daß so diese Pflicht von einem Gliede der
Zeugungen zum andern sich rechtmäßig vererben könne. Es mögen nun auch noch so viel
Zweifel gegen meine Hoffnungen aus der Geschichte gemacht werden, die, wenn sie beweisend
wären, mich bewegen könnten, von einer dem Anschein nach vergeblichen Arbeit abzulassen;
so kann ich doch, so lange dieses nur nicht ganz gewiß gemacht werden kann, die
Pflicht . . . gegen die Klugheitsregel aufs Unthunliche nicht hinzuarbeiten ( . . . weil es bloße
Hypothese ist) nicht vertauschen; und so ungewiß ich immer sein und bleiben mag, ob für das
menschliche Geschlecht das Bessere zu hoffen sei, so kann dieses doch nicht der Maxime, mithin
auch nicht der nothwendigen Voraussetzung derselben in praktischer Absicht, daß es thunlich
sei, Abbruch thun.’ GS viii, 308.35–309.20
r. ‘[M]eine angeborne Pflicht . . . so auf die Nachkommenschaft zu wirken, daß sie immer besser
werde (wovon also auch die Möglichkeit angenommen werden muß)’. GS viii, 309.4–9
20 Onora O’Neill
In other passages it is apparent that Kant writes as a political realist, who

cautions against the pursuit of moral aims in public affairs, and emphasises
the need for prudence in politics. He takes a steely eyed and highly realistic
view of the pursuit of self-interest by states. He not merely links justice to
a right to coerce, but limits it to what is enforceable.26 He is critical of a
right to revolution, even in the face of injustice and oppression. He takes a
circumscribed view of free speech, especially in institutional life.27 He offers
a more limited account both of international and of cosmopolitan justice
than most political idealists find acceptable.
When one starts looking closely at Kant’s political arguments, there is
a lot at which most political idealists will balk. Consider for example his
version of the social contract, which seems particularly weak:
if a public law is so constituted that a whole people could not possibly

give its consent to it (as, e.g., that a certain class of subjects should have
the hereditary privilege of ruling rank), it is unjust; but if it is only
possible that a people could agree to it, it is a duty to consider the law
just, even if the people is at present in such a situation or frame of mind
that, if consulted about it, it would probably refuse its consent.s,28
This is just one of many passages in Kant’s writing on politics and history,
especially in the Doctrine of Right, that throws cold water on the idea that
we can or should pursue moral aims in politics, or that we may disregard or
resist the demands of states, even when they are unjust, or that states can or
ought to set aside self-interest.
7 Kant and political realism

There is a surprising amount of disagreement in current writing on Kant’s
politics – much of it outstanding – on whether he is, as has generally been
thought obvious, an idealist about politics, or whether he is to a large extent
a realist. Some see him as a slightly disappointing idealist, at least in some of
his later writings:
Kant’s final account of political morality, though rightly seen as a
riposte to a certain kind of political brinkmanship, is almost
s. ‘Ist nämlich dieses so beschaffen, daß ein ganzes Volk unmöglich dazu seine Einstimmung geben
könnte (wie z. B. daß eine gewisse Klasse von Unterthanen erblich den Vorzug des Herrenstandes
haben sollten), so ist es nicht gerecht; ist es aber nur möglich, daß ein Volk dazu zusammen
stimme, so ist es Pflicht, das Gesetz für gerecht zu halten: gesetzt auch, daß das Volk jetzt in
einer solchen Lage, oder Stimmung seiner Denkungsart wäre, daß es, wenn es darum befragt
würde, wahrscheinlicherweise seine Beistimmung verweigern würde.’ GS viii, 297.21–8
disappointingly sober and dispassionate. The moral ardour that

characterises some of Kant’s earlier cosmopolitan writings gives way
to a stringent analysis of Right and a correspondingly narrow
conception of the politically achievable in the Doctrine of Right.29
Others present him as trying to ‘bridge’ the difference between realism and
idealism in politics:
For Kant, the goal must always be to strengthen the prospects for a
lasting peace. Neither idealism nor realism must be allowed to
dominate foreign policy. A careful, critical balance must be struck
between them so as ‘to prevent precipitation which might injure the
goal striven for’ (PP, 8, AA 347).30 In other words, modern states
should not allow their confidence in the democratic peace to blind
them to the verities of international relations. Likewise, they must not
allow their skepticism to deny and undermine what contemporary
political science has affirmed. The ideological passions of idealism and
the cold calculations of realism are the necessary means to the end of
achieving peace.31
Or is Kant ultimately a realist at least in politics, because he takes instrumental

reasoning, prudence and the dangers of misplaced moralism in public life
so seriously? There is a parallel but more narrowly focused debate about
Kant’s claims about international and cosmopolitan justice. Does he aspire
to a league of free states (the idealist option) or to a federal state of states –
effectively a world state (the realist option)?32
8 Any solution?
Do these positions reflect changes in Kant’s views? Is he ultimately a political
idealist, or is he a political realist below the surface? The answer may depend
on the time frame. His conclusions about what we may reasonably hope and
work for are conclusions about the indefinitely far future of mankind. They
cannot be otherwise if the ample evidence of recurrent dark times is not to
undermine hope. By contrast, his conclusions about what we can prudently
do must be based on at least some evidence of means–ends relationships – so
will only be available for nearer times, for which we have at least some grasp
of what will work and what is prudent.
By distinguishing the time frame of Kant’s more idealist and his more
realist remarks on politics, we can make at least some sense of Kant’s reasons
for thinking that the changes that are needed to bring about justice within
22 Onora O’Neill
states, or peace between them, are not enactable every time. For example,
Kant argues that there are
permissions, not to make exceptions to the rule of right but to postpone

putting these laws into effect, without however losing sight of the end;
he may not postpone to a nonexistent date . . . putting into effect the
law . . . he is permitted only to delay doing so, lest implementing the
law prematurely counteract its very purpose.t,33
Moreover, ‘permissive laws of reason . . . allow a situation of public right

afflicted with injustice to continue until everything has either of itself become
ripe for a complete overthrow or has been made almost ripe by peaceful
means’.u,34
Prudence in action, idealism in outlook; prudence for the near future,
idealism and hope for the far future. This combination offers a way to com-
bine realistic prudence with idealistic hopes. Both prudence and hope are a
matter of orientation to action. Kant’s wider philosophy bars the way either
to a metaphysical defence or to an empirical vindication of the perfectibility
of man and of human progress. But we can make sense of his claim to combine
hopes for the long future with prudence for the here and now, since they are
compatible practical commitments.
It is this combination of time frames that Kant argues must be understood
if we are to have an account of history that is not merely a retelling of what
has happened, but a harbinger of human destiny: ‘How is it possible to have
history a priori? The answer is: it is possible when the one who foretells
events shapes and creates them.’v,35 History of the far future, of the destiny
rather than the past of mankind, is possible, but only in so far as it is taken as
a practical rather than as a theoretical task, as a matter of adopting a specific
commitment or attitude to the future, and of working towards that future,
rather than of looking for proof or evidence to support a prediction. On
this account the achievement of peace and justice are tasks ahead, and not
historical inevitabilities:
t. ‘[D]ie zwar nicht als Ausnahmen von der Rechtsregel, aber doch in Rücksicht auf die Ausübung
derselben . . . Erlaubnisse enthalten, die Vollführung aufzuschieben, ohne doch den Zweck aus
den Augen zu verlieren, der diesen Aufschub . . . nicht auf den Nimmertag . . . auszusetzen,
mithin die Nichterstattung, sondern nur, damit sie nicht übereilt und so der Absicht selbst
zuwider geschehe, die Verzögerung erlaubt’. GS viii, 347.20–9
u. ‘Erlaubnißgesetze der Vernunft, den Stand eines mit Ungerechtigkeit behafteten öffentlichen
Rechts noch so lange beharren zu lassen, bis zur völligen Umwälzung alles entweder von selbst
gereift, oder durch friedliche Mittel der Reife nahe gebracht worden’. GS viii, 373 n.
v. ‘Wie ist aber eine Geschichte a priori möglich? – Antwort: wenn der Wahrsager die
Begebenheiten selber macht und veranstaltet, die er zum Voraus verkündigt.’ GS vii, 79.23–80.2
If it is a duty to realize the condition of public right, even if only in

approximation by unending progress, and if there is also a
well-founded hope of this, then the perpetual peace that follows upon
what have till now falsely been called peace treaties (strictly speaking,
truces) is no empty idea but a task that . . . comes steadily closer to its
goal.w,36
Notes
1. Transcendent rather than transcendental might have been the apt term here, given Kant’s
definitions, since he is denying that we can know a reality beyond human experience, not
that experience has no non-experiential presuppositions.
2. Transcendental rather than transcendent is apt here because Kant is talking about necessary
presuppositions, not about a reality inaccessible to human knowledge.
3. P. Guyer and A. Wood (trans. and ed.), Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998) (hereafter CPR), 99.
4. Ibid., 689.
5. M. J. Gregor (trans. and ed.), Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996) (hereafter PP), 104.
6. Ibid., 107.
7. CPR, 117; cf. 646–7.
8. Cf. CPR, 684ff. (KW, A820/B848ff.), as well as P. Guyer (ed.), Critique of the Power of
Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 140ff.
9. PP, 238. Indeed, Kant suggests that transcendental realism would end in moral dis-
aster: ‘if God and eternity with their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our
eyes . . . Transgression of the law would, no doubt, be avoided: what is commanded would
be done. But . . . because the spur to activity in this case would be promptly at hand and
external . . . most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, only a few from
hope, and none at all from duty, and the moral worth of actions . . . would not exist at
all . . . human conduct would thus be changed into mere mechanism’ (PP, 258). ‘Würden
Gott und Ewigkeit mit ihrer furchtbaren Majestät uns unablässig vor Augen liegen . . . Die
Übertretung des Gesetzes würde freilich vermieden, das Gebotene gethan werden;
weil . . . der Stachel der Thätigkeit hier aber sogleich bei Hand und äußerlich ist . . . so
würden die mehrsten gesetzmäßigen Handlungen aus Furcht, nur wenige aus Hoffnung
und gar keine aus Pflicht geschehen, ein moralischer Werth der Handlungen . . . würde
gar nicht existiren. Das Verhalten der Menschen . . . würde also in einen bloßen Mechanis-
mus verwandelt werden’; Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich preussische Akademie
w. ‘Wenn es Pflicht, wenn zugleich gegründete Hoffnung da ist, den Zustand eines öffentlichen
Rechts, obgleich nur in einer ins Unendliche fortschreitenden Annäherung wirklich zu machen,
so ist der ewige Friede, der auf die bisher fälschlich so genannte Friedensschlüsse (eigentlich
Waffenstillstände) folgt, keine leere Idee, sondern eine Aufgabe, die, nach und nach aufgelöst,
ihrem Ziele . . . beständig näher kommt.’ GS viii, 386.27–33
24 Onora O’Neill
der Wissenschaften (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1900–) (hereafter GS), v, 147.9–24. This is a

debatable argument, but makes Kant’s position very clear.
10. PP, 246.
11. Ibid., 240.
12. Ibid., 238.
13. Ibid., 239.
14. Ibid., 102.
15. Ibid., 163.
16. CPR, 551, translation altered; cf. 590ff.
17. PP, 296.
18. I have explored this topic in various papers, including ‘The public use of reason’, Political
Theory 14 (1986), 523–51; ‘Enlightenment as autonomy: Kant’s vindication of reason’, in
P. Hulme and L. Jordanova (eds.), The Enlightenment and Its Shadows (London: Routledge,
1990); ‘Vindicating reason’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992); ‘Kant’s conception of public reason’, in V. Gerhardt,
R.-P. Horstmann and R. Schumacher (eds.), Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des
ix. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), i, 35–47; ‘Kant:
rationality as practical reason’, in A. J. Mele and P. Rawling (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of
Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 93–109.
19. G. Zöller and R. B. Louden (eds.), Anthropology, History, and Education (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 108–9.
20. For more detail see O. O’Neill, ‘Historical trends and human futures’, Studies in History
and Philosophy of Science Part A 39 (2008), 529–34.
21. Zöller and Louden (eds.), Anthropology, History, and Education, 116.
22. PP, 306.
23. The founding fathers evidently include Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes, and their
thinking flourishes in contemporary life.
24. PP, 306.
25. But see recently P. Kleingeld, ‘Approaching perpetual peace: Kant’s defence of a league of
states and his ideal of a world federation’, European Journal of Philosophy 12 (2004), 304–25.
26. Cf. in the Doctrine of Right, in the Metaphysic of Morals: ‘Right is connected with an authoriza-
tion to use coercion’ (title of § D, PP, 388) and ‘[right] should not be conceived as made up
of two elements, namely an obligation in accordance with a law and an authorization . . . to
coerce’; PP, 388–9. ‘Das Recht ist mit der Befugniß zu zwingen verbunden . . . das Recht
darf nicht als aus zwei Stücken, nämlich der Verbindlichkeit nach einem Gesetze und der
Befugniß . . . zu zwingen, zusammengesetzt gedacht werden’; GS vi, 231.23–232.6–9.
27. E.g. in What Is Enlightenment?
28. PP, 297.
29. K. Flikschuh, ‘Hope or prudence: practical faith in Kant’s political thinking’, in Jürgen
Stolzenberg and Fred Rush (eds.), Faith and Reason, International Yearbook of German
Idealism 7 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 109.
30. Here the Cambridge translation is rather obscure, running ‘lest implementing the law
prematurely counteract its very purposes’; PP, 321. ‘[D]amit sie nicht übereilt und so der
Absicht selbst zuwider geschehe’; GS viii, 347.27–8.
31. G. P. Henderson, ‘Idealism, realism, and the categorical imperative in Kant’s “Perpetual
peace”’, Commonwealth 12 (2003), 22–3.
32. See Kleingeld, ‘Approaching perpetual peace’, 304–25, and P. Kleingeld, Kant and Cos-
mopolitanism: the philosophical ideal of world citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011).
33. PP, 320–1.
34. Ibid., 341.
35. Translation O.O’N.
36. PP, 351.
2
The public of the intellectuals – from Kant to Lyotard
William Rasch
Democracies corrode quite fast . . . They corrode because most people

don’t care very much about them. The difficulty of sustaining
voluntary interest in the business of choosing the people who will rule
over you is well attested. And the reason why we need intellectuals, as
well as all the good journalists we can find, is to fill the space that grows
between the two parts of democracy: the governed and the governors.
– Tony Judt1
Tony Judt’s vision of democracy is justifiably bleak; not only because he was
dying when he composed these words but also because, despite its apparent
near universal victory, democracy seems to be dying as well. Referring to
the ‘business of choosing the people who will rule over you’ and identifying
the ‘two parts of democracy’ as ‘the governed and the governors’ certainly
falls far short of the democratic ideal. Are not the ruled also the rulers,
the rulers the ruled, temporarily elevated? Admittedly, direct democracy in
which all the people are assembled to make collective decisions has become
impossible for all but the smallest of communities (the cynic might say: for
all but the solitary individual); but even within representative democracy
are not the representatives said to be of the people, carrying with them the
trust and good will (or even a specific mandate) of the majority? What then is
the ‘space that grows’ between the people and the people’s representatives?
Some have pointed to the routinised business of politics as a profession,
creating the politician who lives less (if at all) for politics (as a calling) and
more from politics, as a job like any other.2 Others have emphasised political
parties and the oligarchic machinery that eventually transforms them.3 Both
claims could easily be seen as the necessary result of the vast complexity
of modern society, a complexity that precludes overview and transparency
26
The public of the intellectuals 27
and therefore calls for blind trust in ‘expert’ knowledge.4 These and other,
similar symptoms point to the fundamental structural divide that inheres
in modern, liberal democracy, namely the welcome severance of the private
from the public sphere. No longer participating actively in the public duty
of collective decision making, the people dissolve into people, a collection of
individuals pursuing private interests.
What surprises, at first glance, is the claim that intellectuals and jour-
nalists have it as their vocation to fill this space between. More famous, and
surely more pleasing, more flattering, is the view that the link between the
private individual and those who govern should be the voice of the masses
themselves. The attempt to formulate a modern, ‘deliberative’ democracy,
in which reason, as a universal medium and cosmopolitan force, will govern
the governors, finds in the reception and elaboration of Kant its main tool.
Indeed, Kant has become the universally celebrated champion of the public
use of reason. Jürgen Habermas and others exhibit as evidence passages from
a wide array of Kant’s texts from 1780 on, including all three critiques and a
fair sampling of his essays.5 Here one sees Kant argue for a public sphere in
which all questions may be deliberated in a dispassionately rational manner.
Ideally – that is, projected into a hypothetical future that may never come
about – open public discussion will eventually find its most fitting home in
a pacified confederation of European republics. Peace will have become the
norm, and reason, because of its unfettered public use, will be continuously
self-perfecting.
Kant’s notion of the intellectual, though, is bound up in the enlighten-
ment doctrine of human perfectibility and the philosophy of history that
enables the counterfactual faith in that doctrine. It is, therefore, the ‘cun-
ning of history’ that is the main concern of this essay. The axe I grind has
the following edge: when one turns ‘humankind’ as a species into a des-
tiny or a never-ending project, one deliberately or accidentally denigrates
and demeans the historically situated human individual, who must always
be found deficient. Even though one cannot know concretely what history
has in store for humanity, belief in perfectibility requires that one act as if
humankind were moving along a progressive course. If that course of history
is in turn supposed to be accelerated by deliberate human actions, if we are in
some way said to be able to discern a meaning in Clio’s whisperings, making
progress a cultural (designed) and not merely a natural (evolutionary) arte-
fact, then the individual can be credited with abetting, or held accountable
for retarding, the species’ advancement. Those who claim greater vision than
the masses thus see themselves entrusted with the task of coaxing along or,
28 William Rasch
if necessary, disciplining the less able. The dark shadow that this enlightened
view casts, however, is the possibility that the very desire to advance the
course of history in fact causes the opposite, history’s greatest depredations.
Is the human race as a whole to be loved, or is it an object such that one

must regard it with vexation, for which one indeed wishes everything
good (so as not to become misanthropic) but of which one must never
expect this, so that one must avert one’s eyes from it?a,6
Is this not a strange question? First, who poses it? The simple answer is
Immanuel Kant. Since we assume Kant to have been a human being, this
initial answer does not get us very far, for the real question is: what does
it mean for an individual human being to profess love or distaste for the
race (Geschlecht) to which he or she belongs? Is love for the human race a
type of self-love, and contempt a form of self-hatred? This seems not to be
the case, because the ‘we’ – apparently Kant speaks for more than himself –
clearly think of themselves as able to root for the human team or turn their
backs on them with a measure of detachment, even studied indifference.
Moved by misery, yet also capable of utter complacency, ‘we’ are apparently
of the Geschlecht and yet above or outside it as well, situated so as to view
it as a whole. Furthermore, viewing it as a whole would appear to involve a
necessary self-exemption, for the observer distances herself from the actions
of those who are subject to observation. There are still more questions to
be asked. Does a spectator really become a misanthrope when the team
she would like to cheer for loses? Does love come only with the eventual
prospect of victory? And what are humanity’s efforts anyway? If individual
humans compete nastily with each other, how do we arrive at the view that
there is some collective purpose to their actions? That question, Kant tells
us, can be answered only when we answer this one: ‘Are there in human
nature predispositions from which one can gather that the race will always
progress toward what is better and that the evil of present and past times will
disappear in the good of future times?’b,7 Judging the success or failure of
humanity’s efforts is postponed, measured by historical standards, by the
a. ‘Ist das menschliche Geschlecht im ganzen zu lieben; oder ist es ein Gegenstand, den man mit
Unwillen betrachten muß, dem man zwar (um nicht Misanthrop zu werden) alles Gute wünscht,
es doch aber nie an ihm erwarten, mithin seine Augen lieber von ihm abwenden muß?’ I. Kant,
Werke in sechs Bänden, W. Weischedel (ed.), (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1956–62) (hereafter KW), xi, 165
(A270–1)
b. ‘Sind in der menschlichen Natur Anlagen, aus welchen man abnehmen kann, die Gattung werde
immer zum Bessern fortschreiten; und das Böse itziger und vergangener Zeiten sich in dem
Guten der künftigen verlieren.’ KW xi, 165 (A 271)
knowledge or well-grounded assumption that humanity as a whole has

the ability to perfect itself, even if, now and here, singular human acts are vile
and brutish. ‘For in that case’, Kant goes on to say, ‘we could still love the
race, at least in its constant approach to the good’. If, however, we can dis-
cern no such inclination toward the good in the human animal, ‘we should
have to hate or despise it, whatever might be said to the contrary by the
affectations of universal philanthropy (which would then be at most only a
love of benevolence, not of delight)’.c,8 This seems a harsh judgement. Why
should this mysterious ‘we’ despise human beings for their imperfections in
the face of our lack of sure knowledge of, or projected hopes for, the future?
But Kant is adamant. ‘For, however one may try to exact love from oneself,
one cannot avoid hating what is and remains evil, especially in deliberate
mutual violation of the most sacred human rights; not exactly so as to inflict
troubles upon human beings but still so as to have as little as possible to
do with them.’d,9 The choice to be made is stark and unremitting. Either
the human race can make use of a capacity to improve its status morally, or
there is nothing left for ‘us’ to do but thoroughly and completely despise the
loathsome, slithering, individual creatures that comprise it.
The passage quoted above opens the third section of Kant’s famous essay
on the relationship between theory and practice. In essence it asserts the fol-
lowing: Should one wish to devise a practical (moral, legal, political) philoso-
phy of human communal life, one must presuppose a teleological philosophy
of universal history, or else refuse to be complicit in the deeds humans inflict
on fellow humans. Without the ideal of human perfectibility, it asserts, the
human being is not worth bothering with. Kant drives this home by way of
contrast. Section 3 of the essay was aimed at remarks about human nature
made by Moses Mendelssohn. The spectacle of the human animal going
about its daily round throughout the course of history, Mendelssohn wrote,
reveals ‘roughly the same level of morality, the same measure of religion
and irreligion, of virtue and vice, of happiness and misery’.e,10 Incremen-
tal progress is followed invariably by setback. When the alternating peaks
c. ‘Denn so können wir die Gattung doch wenigstens in ihrer beständigen Annäherung zum Guten
lieben, sonst müßten wir sie hassen oder verachten; die Ziererei mit der allgemeinen
Menschenliebe (die alsdann höchstens nur eine Liebe des Wohlwollens, nicht des Wohlgefallens,
sein würde) mag dagegen sagen was sie wolle’. KW xi, 165 (A271)
d. ‘Denn was böse ist und bleibt, vornehmlich das in vorsetzlicher wechselseitiger Verletzung der
heiligsten Menchenrechte, das kann man – auch bei der größten Bemühung, Liebe in sich zu
erzwingen – doch nicht vermeiden zu hassen: nicht gerade um Menschen Übels zuzufügen, aber
doch so wenig wie möglich mit ihnen zu tun zu haben.’ KW xi, 165 (A271–2)
e. ‘[U]ngefähr dieselbe Stufe der Sittlichkeit, dasselbe Maß von Religion und Irreligion, von
Tugend und Laster, von Glückseligkeit und Elend’. In KW xi, 166 (A272–3)
30 William Rasch
and valleys are averaged out, we are left with the flat-line horizon as seen
from a desert. For the moral philosopher, so Kant believes, such a view is
intolerable. If the actors in this ‘farce’ (Possenspiel) never tire of their roles
as alternating victors and victims, it is because they are ‘fools’ (Narren); but
the philosophical ‘spectator’ (Zuschauer) cannot allow himself to believe that
such a world can be reconciled with the ‘morality of a wise creator’ and
must therefore ‘be allowed to assume’ that the human race is ‘progressing
toward what is better with respect to the moral ends of its existence’.f,11
Kant defends this assumption – which, as his language indicates, is all it can
be, a necessary assumption, an Idea, not an object of knowledge – by denying
that the burden of proof lies with him. Rather, it is the negative that must be
proven. That is, one need not prove that human existence has a purpose; one
assumes it and challenges the sceptic to prove otherwise. Nevertheless, for
those whom this version of Pascal’s wager does not convince, Kant adduces
evidence that ‘the human race as a whole has actually made considerable
moral progress’, based on the fact that ‘its judgment about what one is as
compared with what one ought to be, hence our self-reproach, becomes all
the more severe the more levels of morality we have already climbed during
the whole of the course of the world we have become acquainted with’.g,12
Our increased dissatisfaction with the ways of the world gives negative proof
that we have indeed progressed to such a degree that we now at least may
triumph over complacency. We humans (of the better sort, at least) torture
ourselves because we know we have become superior to what we were in the
past, yet are also convinced that we could be so much better in the future
than we are now.
The philosophy of history that is here called for had already been articu-
lated in Kant’s 1784 essay on ‘The Idea for a Universal History from a Cos-
mopolitan Point of View’. There Kant starts from the paradox of random,
chaotic, unforeseeable, singular empirical events (birth, marriage, death),
each irremediably contingent; yet, when taken as a statistical aggregate,
these human activities form thoroughly predictable and reliable patterns. In
the same way, he suggests, ‘what meets the eye in individual subjects as con-
fused and irregular yet in the whole species can be recognised as a steadily
f. ‘Moralität eines weisen Welturhebers . . . werde also annehmen dürfen . . . im Fortschreiten zum
Besseren in Ansehung des moralischen Zwecks seines Daseins’. KW xi, 167 (A274)
g. ‘[D]as menschliche Geschlecht, im ganzen, wirklich in unserm Zeitalter . . . ansehnlich moralisch
zum selbst Besseren fortgerückt sei . . . sein Urteil über das, was man ist, in Vergleichung mit
dem, was man sein sollte, mithin unser Selbsttadel immer desto strenger wird, je mehr Stufen
der Sittlichkeit wir im Ganzen des uns bekannt gewordenen Weltlaufs schon erstiegen haben’.
KW xi, 168–9 (A277)
progressing though slow development of its original predispositions’.h,13

That is, the larger statistical pattern of actions and events we discern when
looking at humanity as a whole leads us to believe a similar moral regular-
ity, a slow but steady progress, can be found in the species as well. Kant,
starting with the teleological axiom that ‘[a]ll natural predispositions of a crea-
ture are determined sometime to develop themselves completely and purposively’,i,14
notes that in the case of the human being, such a destiny has not been
granted to each individual but to the species as a whole, and therefore con-
cludes that human history is a more or less continuous (if possibly end-
less) ascending path to moral harmony protected by appropriate, humanly
contrived political and legal institutions. Reason, which allows humans to
separate themselves from the compulsion of instinct and attain autonomy,
is of course involved in the solution to the problem; but the real mecha-
nism that pushes us forward is our own flawed nature itself, our ‘unsocial
sociability’.j,15 That is, the evils we so deplore, the ones that lead us almost to
despair, are the means by which the eventual good will arise. ‘Just as omni-
lateral violence and the need arising from it must finally bring a people to
decide to subject itself to the coercion that reason itself prescribes to them
as means, namely to public law, and to enter into a civil constitution, so too
must the need arising from the constant wars by which states in turn try
to encroach upon or subjugate one another at last bring them, even against
their will, to enter into a cosmopolitan constitution’, or at least into ‘a rightful
condition of federation in accordance with a commonly agreed upon right
of nations’.k,16 The pattern of this mechanism is easily recognisable. Private
vices lead to public good, and human nature itself becomes the ‘invisible
hand’ that drives us on to perfection, as the eighth proposition of ‘Idea
for a Universal History’ states explicitly: ‘One can regard the history of the
human species in the large as the completion of a hidden plan of nature to bring
about an inwardly and, to this end, also an externally perfect state constitution,
h. ‘[W]as an einzelnen Subjekten verwickelt und regellos in die Augen fällt, an der ganzen Gattung
doch als eine stetig fortgehende obgleich langsame Entwickelung der ursprünglichen Anlagen
derselben werde erkannt werden können’. KW xi, 33 (A386)
i. ‘Alle Naturanlagen eines Geschöpfes sind bestimmt, sich einmal vollständig und zweckmäβig
auszuwickeln.’ KW xi, 35 (A388)
j. ‘[U]ngesellige Geselligkeit’. KW xi, 37 (A392)
k. ‘So wie allseitige Gewalttätigkeit und daraus entspringende Not endlich ein Volk zur
Entschließung bringen mußte, sich dem Zwange, den ihm die Vernunft selbst als Mittel
vorschreibt, nämlich dem öffentlicher Gesetze zu unterwerfen, und in eine staatsbürgerliche
Verfassung zu treten: so muß auch die Not aus den beständigen Kriegen, in welchen wiederum
Staaten einander zu schmälern oder zu unterjochen suchen, sie zuletzt dahin bringen, selbst
wider Willen, entweder in eine weltbürgerliche Verfassung zu treten . . . ein rechtlicher Zustand
der Föderation nach einem gemeinschaftlich verabredeten Völkerrecht.’ KW xi, 169–70 (A278–9)
32 William Rasch
as the only condition in which it can fully develop all its predispositions in
humanity.’l,17
The striking phrase ‘can be regarded’ (‘Man kann . . . ansehen’) implies that
such a way of looking at history is not necessary but conditional. If one does
not share Mendelssohn’s fatalism, if one does not wish to get lost in the thicket
of good and evil individual deeds, if one looks for reassurance that the future
promises us a better world, then one can look for evidence and interpret signs
that point to nature’s ‘hidden plan,’ nature’s guiding hand, which urgently
and none too gently pushes us, as a whole, toward the goal that a ‘wise creator’
has designed for us. Even here, in his careful reference to a creator (whom he
refrains from calling ‘God’), we are in the presence of a subtle caution. Our
natural impulses, which are the sources of the unsociability that indirectly
drives us toward the improvement of our capacities, these impulses ‘thus
seem [wohl] to betray the ordering of a wise creator; and not the hand of an
evil spirit who might have bunglingly intervened in his splendid undertaking
or enviously ruined it’.m,18 There is a good deal of theology packed into this
sentence – the denial of Gnosticism and the affirmation of human freedom
as a mechanism of salvation (here, albeit, of temporal salvation) – all of it
delicately rendered hypothetical by a single word, wohl. We are in fact placed
before a choice: beneficent creator or malignant demon. Would we not prefer
the former? Lurking behind this choice is an alternative to be avoided at all
cost, namely the denial of a ‘lawful nature’ that would leave us with nothing
but ‘a purposelessly playing nature’, a ‘desolate chance’, not the ‘guideline of
reason’.n,19 If, therefore, we wish to uphold the dignity of the human being as
an autonomous, rational, self-directed creature, then we ought to believe that
nature ‘had been more concerned about his rational self-esteem than about his
well-being’.o,20 All these qualifiers – kann, wohl and a host of others scattered
throughout these texts on history and progress – redirect attention from the
history narrated to the narration itself. Again, if we wish to view nature as
purposive, then the image of a ‘wise creator’ is appropriate, encouraging and
l. ‘Man kann die Geschichte der Menschengattung im großen als die Vollziehung eines verborgenen Plans
der Natur ansehen, um eine innerlich- und, zu diesem Zwecke, auch äußerlich-vollkommene
Staatsverfassung zu Stande zu bringen, als den einzigen Zustand, in welchem sie alle ihre Anlagen in der
Menschheit völlig entwickeln kann.’ KW xi, 45 (A403)
m. ‘[V]erraten also wohl die Anordnung eines weisen Schöpfers; und nicht etwa die Hand eines
bösartigen Geistes, der in seine herrliche Anstalt gepfuscht oder sie neidischer Weise verderbt
habe’. KW xi, 39 (A394)
n. ‘[S]o haben wir nicht mehr eine gesetzmäßige, sondern eine zwecklos spielende Natur; und das
trostlose Ungefähr tritt an die Stelle des Leitfadens der Vernunft’. KW xi, 35 (A388)
o. ‘[G]leich als habe sie es mehr auf seine vernünftige Selbstschätzung, als auf sein Wohlbefinden
angelegt’. KW xi, 36–7 (A391)
qualifiedly necessary. Structured hypothetically within an if/then structure,

purposiveness cannot be simply supposed because it requires the prior ‘if’.
There is no straightforward, metaphysical or empirical claim that such a
hidden plan of nature exists or that we could possibly and positively know
what this plan entailed, even if it did exist. Rather, we are presented here with
an invitation: please consider human history as if it progressed according to
a beneficent blueprint.
Kant is anything but naive, and the coyness of his narrative does not
escape his notice and comment. ‘It is, to be sure, a strange and apparently an
absurd stroke, to want to write a history in accordance with an idea of how the
course of the world would have to go if it were to conform to certain rational
ends; it appears that with such an aim only a novel could be brought about’.p,21
Indeed, it is a novel that Kant writes, a ‘just so’ story with a practical and cos-
mopolitan purpose. And he goes on to give what he takes to be a good reason
for composing such a novel, utilising the if/then structure we have by now
become accustomed to. ‘If, nevertheless, one may assume that nature does not
proceed without a plan or final aim even in the play of human freedom, then
this idea could become useful.’q,22 His aesthetic model is not so much didac-
tic as it is pragmatic, or even ‘performative’. The assumption of purposiveness
allows us to view random acts as if they fit neatly into a plot, the coherence
of which becomes gradually revealed as we continue to ‘read’ the unfolding
of providential history. His account of this historical narrative is meant to
provide the morally concerned spectator with an interpretive framework
for understanding the conditions of possibility for a future community (the
famed ‘Kingdom of Ends’) of rationally autonomous, self-governing human
beings. Thus, the ninth proposition reads: ‘A philosophical attempt to work out
universal world history according to a plan of nature that aims at the perfect civil
union of the human species, must be regarded as possible and even as furthering
this aim of nature.’r,23 With this final step, the composition of the universal-
historical novel becomes a necessary if self-conscious (‘must be regarded’)
supplement to nature. Minimally, nature’s plan works only – or at least works
p. ‘Es ist zwar ein befremdlicher und, dem Anscheine nach, ungereimter Anschlag, nach einer
Idee, wie der Weltlauf gehen müßte, wenn er gewissen vernünftigen Zwecken angemessen sein
sollte eine Geschichte abfassen zu wollen; es scheint, in einer solchen Absicht könne nur ein
Roman zu Stande kommen.’ KW xi, 47–8 (A407)
q. ‘Wenn man indessen annehmen darf: daß die Natur, selbst im Spiele der menschlichen Freiheit,
nicht ohne Plan und Endabsicht verfahre, so könnte diese Idee doch wohl brauchbar werden.’
KW xi, 48 (A407)
r. ‘Ein philosophischer Versuch, die allgemeine Weltgeschichte nach einem Plane der Natur, der auf die
vollkommene bürgerliche Vereinigung in der Menschengattung abziele, zu bearbeiten, muß als möglich,
und selbst für diese Naturabsicht beförderlich angesehen werden.’ KW xi, 47 (A407)
34 William Rasch
better, more quickly – when humans are aware of the plan and cooperate with
it. More radically, nature’s plan is the ‘fictive’ narrative of nature’s purposive-
ness, which, then, is called into being by way of deliberate human action.
Either way, the key word of this ninth proposition is ‘must’ (muß), which
intensifies the ‘can’ (kann) of Proposition 8. We are no longer invited to con-
sider history under the aspect of progress and imagine what that might look
like; rather, it has become imperative to do so, because, in so doing, we at the
very least accelerate, if not in fact initiate, the process of civic betterment.
Kant’s account, whether we think progress to be propelled primarily by
nature or freedom, is both tolerable and pleasing because counterfactual.
It does not purport to describe the way things are or even the way things
necessarily will be, but the way things could be if certain rules of thought
were properly ascertained and correctly practised, at first by the few, and
then adopted by the many. In other words, the unfinished, perhaps never
ending, but nevertheless necessary Enlightenment project of modernity gives
us something to hope for. Though initiated by the ‘cunning of nature’ –
which uses the human animal’s ‘unsocial sociability’ to drag the nomad out
of the state of nature and into civil society, into, that is, settled agricultural
communities based on private property guaranteed by state-enforced law24 –
further progress can be accomplished only with the complicity of human
reason. Yes, such accounts please us, but may also carry with them a heavy
if often unacknowledged burden. If nature is purposive and history has a
providential meaning and ultimate purpose, and if the human being has a role
(through the free exercise of reason) in the fulfilment of that purpose, then
failure or setback might – no, must – be due to a moral failure for which the
human should be held accountable. Kant is therefore explicitly concerned
about the causes for human performance anxieties. The ‘sorrow’ that the
‘thoughtless’ human may feel when witnessing the seemingly chaotic and
purposeless events of history may become a ‘moral corruption’. Therefore,
Kant urges us to be ‘content with providence’ and not blame fate for our toils and
troubles, so that we ‘not lose sight of our own responsibility which perhaps
might be the sole cause of all these ills, and avoid the remedy against them,
which consists in self-improvement’.s,25 Kant appears here to be dispensing
pastoral care. But behind the reassurances and promise of meaning lies a
distinct threat. Would failure to think the coming good impede its arrival?
If so, can one who fails to write or affirm such a narrative live with the guilt?
s. ‘Mit der Vorsehung zufrieden zu sein . . . indem wir die Schuld davon aufs Schicksal schieben, nicht
unsere eigene, die vielleicht die einzige Ursache aller dieser Übel sein mag, darüber aus dem
Auge zu setzen, und in der Selbstbesserung die Hülfe dagegen zu versäumen’. KW xi, 99 (A23)
More importantly, should others tolerate such a misprision? For providence

to fulfil its mission, mandatory human self-correction is required; and since
the majority, who are lazy, foolish or simply rendered incompetent by inertia,
suffer from a self-incurred intellectual immaturity (Unmündigkeit), the project
of modernity needs supervision. Here, then, inserting themselves between
the governed and the governors, enter the intellectuals, those charged with
correcting the masters when their measures prevent free intellectual inquiry,
and educating the mastered on how to think for themselves, so that the
human race may eventually cross or, like the runner who forever travels half
the remaining distance, at least infinitely approach its historical finish line.
Kant’s finely structured answer to the question of Enlightenment is justly
praised for its advocacy of the public use of reason, no matter the almost
Byzantine qualifications of what counts as the public and who has access to
it. Whatever constrictions Kant felt necessary to impose because of his own
political beliefs (advocacy of republicanism, contempt for democracy) and
the political situation of his time and place (eighteenth-century, absolutist
Prussia), later commentators feel that Kant’s public is infinitely expandable,
fit to include any and all who agree to abide by clearly defined rules. My
interest here is not the notion of public reason per se, but the role of the
intellectual – the Gelehrte, or, later, the philosopher – in supervising the use
of public reason. In this way we will return to the questions I asked at the
beginning of this essay and to the place assigned intellectuals by Tony Judt,
namely between the ruled and the rulers. The answers to all these questions
depend in part on how one chooses to narrate history.
Perhaps the most famous opening line in modern philosophy is Kant’s
answer to the question: what is enlightenment? ‘Enlightenment is the
human being’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity [selbstverschuldeten
Unmündigkeit]’.t,26 Not surprisingly, the German original is more powerful.
The blame, the guilt, the debt (all found in the root – Schuld) to be paid for
one’s legal and moral minority is one’s own. Why? Because ‘so great a part
of humankind’ are too lazy, too cowardly to use their rational capacities to
think for themselves. Even ‘after nature has long since emancipated them
from other people’s direction’, this great proportion of humanity submits
only too willingly to the authority of self-appointed guardians – preachers,
teachers, bureaucrats, well-meaning know-it-alls.u,27 How is one to regard
t. ‘Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.’ KW xi, 53
(A481)
u. ‘[E]in so großer Teil der Menschen, nachdem sie die Natur längst von fremder Leitung frei
gesprochen’. KW xi, 53 (A481)
36 William Rasch
this band of lazy and cowardly ne’er-do-wells? With sarcasm: ‘It is so com-
fortable to be a minor!’v,28 And how should one respond? With a challenge:
‘Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the
motto of enlightenment.’w,29 In short, Kant’s answer to the famous question
opens with a swift kick in the pants and unmistakable marching orders.
In his January, 1983, lecture on Kant’s text, Michel Foucault discusses the
opening passage in ways that warrant further elaboration. That our tutelage
is ‘self-incurred’, he notes, is due to human error. A ‘flaw, a shortcoming, or
a form of will’30 deflects us from our task, makes us incapable of thinking for
ourselves. Our culpability is not some sort of ‘natural powerlessness’,31 for it
is assumed that we are able to overcome it and are urged resolutely to do so.
Kant’s providential narrative of history, in other words, is neither a simple
Christian homily about imperfection nor a customary Enlightenment tale of
the stages of human development from infancy to full maturation. Rather,
we have always had the potential to act autonomously. Failure is a failure of
will, thus self-incurred. Zeroing in on Kant’s ‘motto’, Foucault asserts:
The Wahlspruch is actually a maxim, precept, or order given to others

and to oneself, but at the same time – and this is what makes the
precept of the Wahlspruch a motto, a blazon – it is something by which
one identifies oneself and enables one to distinguish oneself from
others. The use of a maxim as a precept is therefore at once an order
and a distinctive mark.32
It is unclear just what distinction Foucault has in mind, but surely one
possibility is to assume that what distinguishes the ‘we’ here from the greater
proportion of humanity is the same as what separated the reflective spectator
above from the foolish actors in life’s petty dramas. The narrative that offers
the reader a larger trajectory of human history provided by a providential
nature is not just a novel that one may choose whether or not to read, it is an
obligatory assignment, though far too many lack the courage and energy to
carry it out.
How, then, to encourage them? Kant has no answer. Rather, he focuses
on how to carve out a public space for the educated and literate few to occupy.
We know the model: Argue but Obey.x,33 Within the Prussian state governed
by the monarchy, everyone obeys of course, but the directive here is meant
v. ‘Es ist so bequem, unmündig zu sein.’ KW xi, 53 (A482)

w. ‘Sapere aude! Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist also der Wahlspruch
der Aufklärung.’ KW xi, 53 (A481)
x. ‘Räsonniert . . . aber gehorcht’. KW xi, 55 (A484)
for the educated elite, especially those who are functionaries of the state.
While performing their civic duties, servants of the state – professors, teach-
ers, lawyers, military officers, preachers, tax collectors, civil servants of all
stripes – remain within state and church-sanctioned limits, preaching dogma,
giving orders, teaching nothing that would subvert the prescribed divine or
secular order. In their own time, however, and as ‘scholars’, they may enter
the literary public sphere to debate the truth of the various disciplinary and
professional dogmas, from religion to military strategy and taxation policy.
Nothing is said here about how such scholarly debate could directly provoke
the il- or barely literate to begin to think for themselves. Yes, there could
be a precocious country lad or lass who hungrily learns to devour learned
journals and thereby raises him- or herself to the rank of mature autonomy
(Fichte comes to mind), but this is no programme of emancipation. Rather,
Kant introduces here a division of labour by segregating two functions of
the intellectual, a specialised ‘private’ (meaning civic) and general ‘public’
(meaning exempt from narrow civic duty) activity. This division of labour
is a self-division; all functionaries may wish to publish as public scholars, as
well as to serve king and country. The intellectual is both civil servant and
potential independent scholar.
With Kant’s famed public/private distinction, we have one model
answering to the demand that intellectuals insert themselves between the
rulers and the ruled. On the one hand, intellectuals (as functionaries) act
as the guardians of those who have not accepted the Sapere aude challenge,
preaching and teaching the state’s verities to the lazy and cowardly multi-
tude, the ruled. Having served their civic duty in exemplary fashion, they
then may turn to their duty as autonomous, reasoning beings and publish
their independently arrived-at views in the public sphere of learned read-
ers. In so doing, they in effect preach and teach reason’s truth to their own
functionary selves and, more importantly, to those who rule – ultimately
the king. The intellectual as functionary serves the rulers in their rule over
the ruled, while that same intellectual, now as free and independent scholar,
serves the interests of the ruled in articulating well-reasoned and reason-
able forms of rule to the ruler. This picture of the Janus-faced intellectual,
however, becomes greatly complicated a decade later, as revealed in Kant’s
compilation of essays published under the title The Conflict of the Faculties.
The death of Frederick the Great, marking an end to a degree of tolerance
in intellectual matters, clearly had an effect; but what we see in this text is
not so much a break as a further elaboration of the role of the scholar – now
concentrated in the figure of the philosopher.
38 William Rasch
Whereas in ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ the intellectual was bifurcated

into the public pedagogue and the independent scholar, in Conflict we find
a trifurcation: functionary, disciplinary scholar and, as final authority, the
philosopher. Kant begins with the familiar division between scholars and
functionaries, now referred to as ‘businessmen’ (Geschäftsleute) or ‘tech-
nicians of learning’ (Werkkundige der Gelehrsamkeit). These technicians are
literally ‘tools [Werkzeuge] of the government (clergymen, magistrates and
physicians)’ and thus ‘are not free to make public use of their learning as
they see fit, but are subject to the censorship of the faculties . . . , for they
deal directly with the people, who are incompetent [Idioten]’.y,34 This revi-
sion of the functionaries’ role represents a restriction of access to the public
sphere. The businessman or technician of learning can no longer shed his
civic persona and take on the public role of scholar, for scholars are now
seen as a separate professional class with no direct contact with the unedu-
cated people, comprising ‘incorporated scholars’ (meaning university-trained
university professors) or ‘scholars at large’ (either amateurs or those working
in academies and scientific societies).z,35
This brings us to the titular conflict of the university faculties, which in
the eighteenth century were still divided into the higher faculties of theology,
law and medicine, on the one hand, and, on the other, the remaining lower
faculties, including philosophy. Not among the ‘higher’ faculties, philoso-
phy nevertheless is clearly the greatest authority for Kant. Unlike the lofty
triumvirate, philosophy is independent of any specific civic duty (like preach-
ing, for instance), and therefore its legitimacy is not lodged in its pragmatic
function, but resides purely and simply in reason and the pursuit of truth.
Because reason entails the capacity ‘to judge autonomously – that is, freely
(according to the principles of thought in general) –’, the function of phi-
losophy is ‘to control’ the other faculties by adjudicating their disputes.aa,36
Philosophy is thus the apex of a hierarchy that works something like this.
The clergy, lawyers and doctors perform their daily tasks in accordance with
government regulations. They are forbidden to contradict openly their var-
ious dogmas in any way lest they ‘incite the people to rebel against the
y. ‘Werkzeuge der Regierung (Geistliche, Justizbeamte und Ärzte) . . . nicht frei sind, aus eigener
Weisheit, sondern nur unter der Censur der Facultäten von der Gelehrsamkeit öffentlichen
Gebrauch zu machen, müssen, weil sie sich unmittelbar ans Volk wenden, welches aus Idioten
besteht’. KW xi, 280
z. ‘Zünftigen . . . zunftfreie Gelehrte’. KW xi, 279
aa. ‘[N]ach der Autonomie, d.i. frei (Principien des Denkens überhaupt gemäß), zu urtheilen . . . zu
controlliren’. KW xi, 290
government’.bb,37 Within academia, these dogmas may be investigated and

the various controversies that arise within the higher faculties concerning
what is taught or practised among the people may be debated. However,
these disputes must be confined to the faculties within the university, for
if the ‘businessmen of the faculties (in their role of practitioners) bring the
conflict before the civil community . . . they drag it illegitimately before the
judgment seat of the people (who are not competent to judge in scholarly
matters), and it ceases to be a scholarly debate’.cc,38 If the conflict cannot be
resolved within one or all of the higher faculties, then it must be presented
before the court of reason represented by philosophy. The strife occasioned
by disagreement within the higher faculties becomes, metaphorically, a legal
one. ‘This conflict cannot and should not be settled by an amicable accom-
modation (amicabilis compositio), but (as a lawsuit) calls for a verdict, that is,
the decision of a judge (reason) which has the force of law.’dd,39 For instance,
a biblical theologian believes in the divine revelation and the authority of
scriptural teachings. The philosopher claims (actually: knows) that ‘religion
does not differ in any point from morality . . . Its distinction from morality
is a merely formal one: that reason in its legislation uses the Idea of God,
which is derived from morality itself, to give morality influence on man’s will
to fulfill all his duties.’ee,40 Therefore, when the biblical theologian derives
dogma from scripture, philosophy has the right to intervene if such dogma
distorts the true nature of religion.
For the higher faculty, being concerned primarily for theoretical

biblical knowledge, suspects the lower faculty of philosophizing away
all the teachings that must be considered real revelation and so taken
literally, and of ascribing to them whatever sense suits it. On the other
hand the lower faculty, looking more to the practical – that is, more to
religion than to dogma – accuses the higher of so concentrating on the
means, dogma, that it completely loses sight of the final end, inner
bb. ‘[G]egen die Regierung aufwiegeln’. KW xi, 292

cc. ‘[W]enn der Streit vor dem bürgerlichen gemeinen Wesen . . . geführt würde, wie es die
Geschäftsleute (unter dem Namen der Praktiker) gern versuchen, so wird er unbefugterweise
vor den Richterstuhl des Volks (dem in Sachen der Gelehrsamkeit gar kein Urtheil zusteht)
gezogen und hört auf, ein gelehrter Streit zu sein’. KW xi, 298 n.
dd. ‘Dieser Streit kann und soll nicht durch friedliche Übereinkunft (amicabilis compositio)
beigelegt werden, sondern bedarf (als Proceß) einer Sentenz, d.i. des rechtskräftigen Spruchs
eines Richters (der Vernunft).’ KW xi, 297
ee. ‘Religion unterscheidet sich nicht . . . in irgend einem Stücke von der Moral . . . ihr Unterschied
von dieser ist blos formal, d.i. eine Gesetzgebung der Vernunft, um der Moral durch die aus
dieser selbst erzeugte Idee von Gott auf den menschlichen Willen zu Erfüllung aller seiner
Pflichten Einfluß zu geben.’ KW xi, 301
40 William Rasch
religion, which must be moral and based on reason. And so, when
conflict arises about the sense of a scriptural text, philosophy – that is,
the lower faculty, which has truth as its end – claims the prerogative of
deciding its meaning.ff,41
Philosophy appears as both the plaintiff and the judge in the court of reason.
The plaintiff wins the case.
With Kant the Enlightenment leaves court and coffee house to go to
college. The university-trained and university-employed scholar becomes
the final arbiter of all things rational. In the name of universal publicity the
public sphere cloisters itself. The reader may feel that this overstates the
case, but it points to the realm of the academic scholar (der Gelehrte) as
‘the source of the self-evident legitimacy of the modern intellectual’s “ulti-
mate supervision” of public affairs’.42 Since it was Fichte who explicitly
defined the vocation of the scholar, it is to Fichte that I briefly turn.
According to Fichte’s Some Lectures concerning the Scholar’s Vocation, the
vocation of the singular human being is to achieve perfect self-harmony or
autonomy. Were we all such autonomous, harmonious human beings, expe-
riencing no self-contradictions, no external determination, then no state
would be necessary because all humans ‘would be totally equal to each
other’ and thus ‘would constitute but one single subject’.gg,43 Alas, ‘myr-
iads of myriads of years’ may need to pass before ‘all civic bonds will become
superfluous’;hh,44 therefore, until then ‘our social vocation consists in the
process of communal perfection, that is, perfecting ourselves by freely mak-
ing use of the effect which others have on us and perfecting others by acting
in turn upon them as upon free beings’.ii,45 Instead of pure identity, we strive
ff. ‘[I]ndem die erstere [obere Facultät] als für die theoretische biblische Erkenntnis vorzüglich
besorgt, die letztere [untere] in Verdacht zieht, alle Lehren, die als eigentliche
Offenbarungslehren und also buchstäblich angenommen werden müßten,
wegzuphilosophieren und ihnen einen beliebigen Sinn unterzuschieben, diese aber, als mehr
aufs Praktische, d.i. mehr auf Religion als auf Kirchenglauben, sehend, umgekehrt jene
beschuldigt, durch solche Mittel den Endzweck, der als innere Religion moralisch sein muß
und auf der Vernunft beruht, ganz aus den Augen zu bringen. Daher die letztere, welche die
Wahrheit zum Zweck hat, mithin die Philosophie, im Falle des Streits über den Sinn einer
Schriftstelle sich das Vorrecht anmaßt, ihn zu bestimmen.’ KW xi, 303
gg. ‘[W]ären sie alle einander völlig gleich; sie wären nur Eins; ein einziges Subjekt’. J. G. Fichte,
Von den Pflichten der Gelehrten: Jenaer Vorlesungen 1794/95, ed. Reinhard Lauth, Hans Jacob and
Peter K. Schneider (Hamburg: Meiner, 1971), 19
hh. ‘Myriaden von Myriaden Jahren . . . alle Staatsverbindungen überflüßig seyn werden’. Fichte,
Von den Pflichten der Gelehrten, 16
ii. ‘[G]emeinschaftliche Vervollkommnung, Vervollkommnung seiner selbst durch die frei
benutzte Einwirkung andrer auf uns: und Vervollkommnung anderer durch Rückwirkung auf
sie, als auf freie Wesen ist unsere Bestimmung in der Gesellschaft’. Fichte, Von den Pflichten der
Gelehrten, 20
for perfect complementarity; we receive with grace the external determina-

tion that fits us all into communal harmony. Yet, such communal harmony
presupposes social stratification into estates or classes. It could be said that
social inequality compensates for natural inequality.
Everyone has the duty not only to want to be generally useful to

society, but also the duty, according to the best of his knowledge, to
bend all of his efforts toward society’s final end: the constant
improvement of the human species . . . And thus, from this new
inequality there arises a new equality: the equitable advancement of
culture in every individual.jj,46
The work of perfectibility is facilitated by the division of labour.

Fichte’s step-by-step, lecture-by-lecture, clarification of the duty of the
individual, the individual in society, introduces in the fourth lecture the
estate of the scholar, who is responsible for the all-important domain of
knowledge. Unlike Kant, Fichte places his faith not in nature but sci-
ence (Wissenschaft). Because the ‘whole progress of the human race depends
directly upon the progress of science’, it follows that ‘the true vocation of the
scholarly class is the supreme supervision of the actual progress of the human race
in general and the unceasing promotion of this progress’.kk,47 Nicholas Boyle has
drawn our attention to the phrase ‘supreme supervision’ (oberste Aufsicht).
‘[I]n the eighteenth century’, he writes, ‘it is a normal bureaucratic phrase
for a supreme administrative body in a particular area of government’. By
metaphorical extension, then, ‘Fichte sees the intellectuals as the supreme
officials of the human race.’48 Whereas Kant anointed scholars (more pre-
cisely, philosophers) supreme judges in the court of reason, Fichte trades the
judge’s robe for other vestments by making them missionaries of science,
‘the priests of a post-religious and post-clerical society’.49
Kant’s universal history has nature, both physical and human, as its agent.
Personified, this main character propels the narrative action of his finely
constructed novel, the composition of which even a Wise Creator might
have been proud to claim as His own. The governing plot device, ‘unsocial
jj. ‘Jeder hat die Pflicht, nicht nur überhaupt der Gesellschaft nützlich seyn zu wollen; sondern
auch seinem besten Wissen nach alle seine Bemühungen auf den lezten Zweck der Gesellschaft
zu richten, auf den – das Menschengeschlecht immer mehr zu veredeln . . . – und so entsteht
denn durch diese neue Ungleichheit eine neue Gleichheit, nemlich ein gleichförmiger Fortgang
der Kultur in allen Individuen’. Fichte, Von den Pflichten der Gelehrten, 30
kk. ‘Von dem Fortgange der Wissenschaften hängt unmittelbar der ganze Fortgang des
Menschengeschlechts ab . . . die wahre Bestimmung des Gelehrtenstandes: es ist die oberste
Aufsicht über den wirklichen Fortgang des Menschengeschlechts im allgemeinen, und die stete
Beförderung dieses Fortgangs’. Fichte, Von den Pflichten der Gelehrten, 37
42 William Rasch
sociability’, follows a common eighteenth-century pattern: ‘private vices,

public virtue’. Perhaps the most common example of this motif is economic.
Here one talks of public welfare arising from a multitude of actions executed
out of self-interest (or, more bluntly, greed). Kant assumes that the collective
effects of ‘private vices’ (violence) will one day become so intense and painful,
that the human race will allow itself to be coerced by law to live peacefully
and harmoniously in well-governed republics. Fichte too follows this pattern
of thought. The ‘private vice’ of social differentiation into estates or classes
actively enhances human cooperation, leading eventually to the ‘public good’
of true equality, namely true self-identity. In both cases, imperfection serves
as the mechanism that drives perfectibility.
The philosopher Odo Marquard has referred to this figure as the ‘bonum-
durch-malum-Gedanke’ (bonum-through-malum principle) and attaches it to
what he considers to be the dominant mode of doing philosophy in the eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries: theodicy.50 Leibniz of course initiated
the form (and invented the word) by attempting to answer the question why
a benign creator would allow so much evil in the world. Marquard reads the
posing and answering of this question in terms of a tribunal. Human beings
put God on trial, accusing him of capriciously and wilfully allowing avoid-
able malignancies. The defence pleads innocence, either through claiming
that the good balances out the bad or – bonum-durch-malum – a higher good
necessarily arises from unavoidable evil. During the course of the century
and especially with the arrival of transcendental idealism, God is exoner-
ated, either because he is relegated, with man, to co-authorship of the moral
world, or because he simply vanishes from the scene altogether. In his stead,
humanity becomes the accused and forced to sit in the defendant’s seat. That
is, with Kant’s insistence on human autonomy the human being assumes
responsibility for the world and thus becomes both prosecutor (who is also
judge and jury) and prosecuted.
The apparent paradox of humanity being both prosecutor and prosecuted
is easily resolved by the invention of Geschichtsphilosophie, the philosophy of
history. Transcendental philosophy exonerated God by shifting responsibil-
ity to morally autonomous humans, beings who share the moral universe
with God, or simply displace him, because they have the capacity to make
the moral law and impose it on themselves. Combined with the assumption
of infinite perfectibility, human autonomy becomes the absolute ‘tribunali-
sation’ of theodicy as universal history. Among humans, there are those who
stand in the vanguard and those in the rear. To the extent that the intended
realisation of human perfectibility remains unfulfilled, to the extent that the
engine of history wheezes and sputters, ‘evil’ remains in the world. Since
evil arises within the world as the result of human (not divine) action or
inaction, those responsible for the persistence of evil must be hunted down,
tried and, if found guilty, punished. Clearly, those in the vanguard, by virtue
of their greater vision concerning the trajectory of universal history, are in a
position to apprehend – understand and seize – the culprits, those laggards
who retard progress, whether intentionally as saboteurs or out of sheer indif-
ference. We can give names to the vanguard: Robespierre, for instance; the
Hegel who hears Napoleon pass through Jena in the night; the proletariat,
or their spokespersons (Lukács, Lenin, the Vanguard Party); the critics of
ideology. The role of the prosecutor never remains unfilled.
One may chafe at the sweeping inclusiveness of Marquard’s use of the
term theodicy. Similarly, one may find the tu quoque response readily slip-
ping its moorings, for it seems that Marquard himself dons the prosecutor’s
garb. It would be fairer, however, to view Marquard as the defence attor-
ney, for he seeks to relieve the burden placed on the individual’s shoulders
by denying infinite perfectibility. No offence has been committed, for the
prosecution wilfully misrepresents history, making of it a weapon to be used
against the ‘lazy’ and ‘cowardly’, the ‘fools’ or Idioten, who stand accused of
retarding progress. Marquard thereby stands in a line of postwar European
intellectuals who reject the tyranny of perfectibility by rejecting the phi-
losophy of history that imposes it: Arnold Gehlen, who adopted Henri de
Man’s notion of posthistoire; Niklas Luhmann, who replaced teleology with
contingency and history with evolution; and Jean-François Lyotard, who
served the final rites over the metanarratives of Bildung and emancipation.
Who, then, stands opposite Marquard? Who is the contemporary prosecutor
who still raises the charge and demands a verdict? Marquard points explicitly
and implicitly to Jürgen Habermas (and the tradition he and his followers
represent).51
Habermas displays a similar ambivalence as Kant: deep concern for
liberal-democratic governance coupled with a sense of the executive func-
tion of the critical intellectual. In his enormously influential study of the rise
of the eighteenth-century public sphere, the normative ideal of public opin-
ion, expressed as the private (male, property-holding, educated) individual’s
public use of reason, was meant to govern the governors. This – the public
use of reason – was to fill the growing space between the rulers and the ruled;
it was to restore agency to the people, even as they remained cloistered in
their private pleasure domes; it was to be the new agora, the virtual sovereign
assembly of citizens in our modern, mass democracy. Habermas charts not
44 William Rasch
just the rise but also the historical decline of normative Öffentlichkeit, from
the bustling, buzzing London coffee houses and the public discourse of their
Spectators and Tatlers, through the growth of mass media during the nine-
teenth century, down to the death knell tolled by the mid-twentieth-century
culture industry. His aim of course is to resurrect the corpse. Even in the face
of its empirical demise, he steadfastly holds, the public use of reason must
survive as a norm, and norms must be policed.
Like Kant’s, Habermas’s normative public sphere is open only to the
qualified. That there is a mass public sphere, open to all who read, watch
television, surf the internet, etc., is unavoidable. This mass public sphere,
referred to contemptuously as the public sphere of the Stammtische, must be
supervised by the intellectual, or, as he has put it, must be censored (Zensur)
by ‘official opinion’ (offizielle Meinung), when necessary.52 Explicitly prais-
ing his own postwar re-education and the allegiance to ‘American ideals’
(amerikanischen Idealen) it fostered, he seems both to champion American
(certainly Western) exceptionalism and a type of political education that
takes Anglo-American self-descriptions not only as official history, but as
the norm for all to follow. With what we might want to call a self-incurred
naiveté, Habermas claims that with the exception of the George W. Bush
administration, the US has, since Wilson, acted out of international and
not self-interest, and thus – again with the exception of the embarrassing
President Bush – is the motor of historical perfectibility.53 Those who do
not toe the line should not voice their opinion to a mass audience, and if
they do they must be chastised. For example, it was not merely the legiti-
mate difference of opinion regarding Nolte’s thesis about the relationship of
the Shoah and Soviet gulags that inspired Habermas’s interventions in the
famous Historikerstreit of the 1980s, but the very fact that Nolte’s thesis was
discussed in the mass public sphere at all. ‘In the public sphere’, he wrote
then, ‘in connection with political education, museums, and the teaching
of history, the question of the apologetic production of images of history
is a directly political one’. What exercised Habermas at the time was the
fact that the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published what he took to be a
‘macabre reckoning of damages’ that he associated with the radical right. He
then hastily added that what he complains about ‘certainly has nothing to
do with forbidding scholars to discuss certain questions. If the dispute that
began with the rejoinders of Eberhard Jäckel, Jürgen Kocka . . . and Hans
Mommsen . . . had taken place in an academic journal, I could not have been
offended by it – I would not even have seen it’.54 We verge here on what could
almost be seen as an unintended parody of Kant. The servants of the public
sphere (which replaces the Kantian absolutist state) may dispute accepted
historical opinion as ‘scholars’ in the academic public sphere (Kant’s Lesewelt);
but in their functions as public educators they must preach dogma. Further-
more, the added factor that Habermas could or could not be ‘offended’ by
what leaches into the unofficial public sphere seems to place him in the
position of the Kantian philosopher as supreme judge regarding matters of
reason. None of this is inherently wrong or absurd. Perhaps the intellectual
who sits between the state and the masses should serve as de facto censor.
Perhaps the people are Stammtisch-Idioten who deserve the intellectual’s con-
tempt. But it is more than a little odd that such a view of public debate
is uttered in the name of ‘the political morality of a polity which . . . was
founded in the spirit of the occidental understanding of freedom, responsi-
bility and self-determination’.55
Is there another way of figuring the Kantian intellectual? Jean-François
Lyotard thought so. In the fickle world of contemporary ‘theory’, Lyotard
has become largely ignored, relegated to obligatory citations (and derision)
whenever the terms ‘postmodern’ or ‘metanarratives’ arise. Yet, of the so-
called French post-structuralists, Lyotard was the most vested in the work
of Kant. All but ignoring Kant’s practical philosophy and rejecting both the
imperatives of the system and the philosophy of history, he was nevertheless
concerned with reconstructing a plausible ‘critique of political reason’ based
on reflective judgement and the notion of the sublime. Above all, he saw the
philosopher’s role as the opposite of that of the judge. Rather than turning
disputes into litigations, he wished, in the spirit of his age, to nullify verdicts,
rekindle disagreement and navigate the passages from one language game (or
‘phrase’) to another.
The demise of the metanarratives of knowledge and emancipation entails
a critique of universal history and modern forms of political legitimation.
The question Lyotard asks is, ‘can we today continue to organize the mass
of events coming from the human and nonhuman world by referring them
to the Idea of a universal history of humanity?’56 The word ‘continue’ in the
question implies a tradition – modernity – in which a ‘we’, as the subject
of history, has the capacity to effect and direct the course of progress. The
answer Lyotard gives to his question is ‘no’. The emancipation of humanity
from the shackles it has cast for itself has been a failure; it has even led to the
universal exercise of terror. Modernity derives its legitimacy from narratives
of emancipation that ‘ground this legitimacy . . . in a future to be brought
about, that is, in an Idea to realise. This Idea (of freedom, “enlightenment,”
socialism, general prosperity) has legitimating value because it is universal. It
46 William Rasch
gives modernity its characteristic mode: the project, that is, the will directed
toward a goal’.57 Terror is initiated when a particular instance – the French
people (1789), say, or the proletariat (1917) – dons the mantle of the universal
‘we’. Acknowledging Hegel’s ‘dialectic of the particular and the universal’,
he writes that ‘[f]or the ideal of absolute freedom, which is empty, any given
reality must be suspected of being an obstacle to freedom’. Thus: ‘Terror
acts on the suspicion that nothing is emancipated enough – and makes it
into a politics. Every particular reality is a plot against the pure, universal
will . . . The suppression of reality through the death of suspects satisfies a
logic that sees reality as a plot against the Idea.’58 The self-selected guardians
of the Idea prevail by destroying the ‘they’.
Lyotard, then, presupposes the collapse of universal history. Like Kant,
indeed modelled on him, Lyotard claims a series of ‘signs of history’ that
corroborate the failure of the various narratives that legitimate the project
of modernity. In Part ii of Conflict, Kant raises the question of human
progress again and declares that ‘[t]here must be some experience in the
human race which, as an event [Begebenheit], points to the disposition and
capacity of the human race to be the cause of its own advance toward the bet-
ter, and . . . toward the human race as being the author of this advance.’ll,59
The event itself – in this case the French Revolution – is not the cause
of historical progress but, rather, an ‘intimation’ (hindeutend), a ‘historical
sign’ (Geschichtszeichen).60 This sign of history is perceived not by the actors
of history or even by the observers of the actors, but by the observer of
the observers. What the second-order observer sees is ‘simply the mode
of thinking of the spectators’ which ‘manifests such a universal yet disin-
terested sympathy for the players on one side against those on the other’
(namely for the revolutionaries), that it demonstrates ‘a moral character of
humanity . . . which not only permits people to hope for progress toward the
better, but is already itself progress in so far as its capacity is sufficient for the
present’.mm,61 Based on this ‘sign’, Kant feels empowered to ‘claim to be able
to predict to the human race . . . its progress toward the better . . . For such a
phenomenon in human history is not to be forgotten, because it has revealed a
tendency and faculty in human nature . . . which nature and freedom alone,
ll. ‘Es muß irgend eine Erfahrung im Menschengeschlechte vorkommen, die als Begebenheit auf
eine Beschaffenheit und ein Vermögen desselben hinweiset, Ursache von dem Fortrücken
desselben zum Besseren und . . . Urheber desselben zu sein.’ KW xi, 356
mm. ‘[B]loß die Denkungsart der Zuschauer . . . eine so allgemeine und doch uneigennützige
Theilnehmung der Spielenden auf einer Seite gegen die auf der andern . . . einen Charakter des
Menschengeschlechts . . . der das Fortschreiten zum Besseren nicht allein hoffen läßt, sondern
selbst schon ein solches ist, so weit das Vermögen desselben für jetzt zureicht’. KW xi, 357–8
united in the human race in conformity with inner principles of right, could
have promised’.nn,62 Kant sees confirmed in the reaction to the French Rev-
olution what he has already presupposed, the inevitability of moral progress,
which means the power of human freedom to (co-)determine the future.
Lyotard is drawn to the sign because of the form of reflective judgement
it elicits and its affinity with the structure of the Kantian sublime. But he
is not drawn to what Kant sees the sign say. Yet, he cannot directly falsify
Kant’s claims for the same reason that Kant cannot directly prove his Idea
of moral progress. Rather, to be able to claim that there is no teleology
of history (a presupposition), Lyotard also has to find signs and then read
them correctly. He names a few. ‘Auschwitz’ refutes the speculative doctrine,
‘namely that all that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real’. A series
of events from ‘Berlin 1953’ to ‘Berlin 1989’ refutes historical materialism,
‘namely that all that is proletarian is communist, and all that is communist
is proletarian’. ‘May 1968’ refutes liberal-democratic discourse, ‘namely that
all that concerns the political community can be said within the rules of the
genre of representation’. And a series of economic crises refute the general
prosperity promised by post-Keynesian economic liberalism, ‘namely that a
harmonious regulation of needs and the means to satisfy them in work and
in capital . . . is possible and on the way to being achieved’.63 What he makes
these signs say is that we live not in an age of counterfactual optimism but
in one of an all too apparent disappointment. The temptation of course is to
turn the refutation of the metanarrative of progress into a metanarrative of
decline and decadence, of which Lyotard is aware and which he avoids.
The issue here is the contingency of the linkage to the situation that I
have described as the failing of modernity . . . Politics always rests on
the way one phrase, the present phrase, is linked to another
phrase . . . From the different phrases that are actually possible, one
will be actualized, and the actual question is, which one? The
description of this failing does not give us any clue to the answer.64
What – to ask the classic question – is to be done?

To be done, Lyotard tells us, is to respect these signs of twentieth-
century history and not heal the wounds they open up. The true Kantian
nn. ‘Nun behaupte ich dem Menschengeschlechte nach den Aspecten und Vorzeichen unserer
Tage . . . [das] Fortschreiten desselben zum Besseren . . . Denn ein solches Phänomen in der
Menschengeschichte vergißt sich nicht mehr, weil es eine Anlage und ein Vermögen in der
menschlichen Natur zum Besseren aufgedeckt hat . . . welches allein Natur und Freiheit, nach
inneren Rechtsprincipien im Menschengeschlechte vereinigt . . . verheißen konnte’. KW xi,
361
48 William Rasch
critical philosopher would therefore not be the one who tries to complete
the project of modernity, but the one who recognises the ‘fission affecting the
unity of the great discourses of modernity’.65 Lyotard transforms the Kantian
judge who magisterially presides over the court of reason into the critical
philosopher who practises a kind of Kantian reflective judgement. And what
the philosopher now reflects on cannot be the ‘event’ (Begebenheit) of 1789,
but the subsequent ‘events’ that demolish the legitimacy of the modern
narrative. This is what Lyotard calls postmodernity, not the movement past
or beyond modernity, but the splintering and multiplication of the tales we
tell ourselves. In effect, Lyotard tells us to focus our gaze not on the Idea
of a putatively manifest destiny of humanity, but on the fate of individual
humans; not on the ‘“realization” of a single purpose’, but on the ‘infinity of
heterogeneous finalities’.66 At the very least, as we wait for nature to push us
down a path that does not exist to a goal that is not there, we – the same
‘we’ that Kant spoke for, the academic intellectuals squeezed not so much
between ruler and ruled as between fellow citizen and fellow citizen – should
refrain from asking the question whether ‘the human race as a whole’ is ‘to
be loved’ and quit turning our backs on the im-perfectible creature standing
next to us.
Notes
1. Tony Judt, with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin,
2012), 306–7.
2. Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 40.
3. Robert Michels, Political Parties: a sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern
democracy, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (New York: Free Press, 1962), esp. 333–71.
4. Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford
5. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an inquiry into a category
of bourgeois society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (1965; Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press and Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 102–17. See also the essays collected in
Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992);
and David Midgley and Christian Emden (eds.), Beyond Habermas: democracy, knowledge,
and the public sphere (New York: Berghahn, 2012).
6. Immanuel Kant, ‘On the common saying: that may be correct in theory, but it is of no use
in practice’, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 279–309, at 304–5.
7. Ibid., 305.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid. (translation corrected). The Mendelssohn passage can be found in Moses
Mendelssohn, Schriften über Religion und Aufklärung, ed. Martina Thom (Darmstadt: Wis-
senschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 415.
11. Kant, ‘On the common saying’, 305, 306.
12. Ibid., 307.
13. Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan aim’, trans. Allen
Wood, in Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günther Zöller and Robert B. Louden
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 108–20, 108.
14. Ibid., 109.
15. Ibid., 111.
16. Kant, ‘On the common saying’, 307–8.
17. Kant, ‘Idea for a universal history’, 116.
18. Ibid., 112 (translation altered).
19. Ibid., 109.
20. Ibid., 110.
21. Ibid., 118.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. See Allen Wood, ‘Kant’s historical materialism’, in Jane Kneller and Sidney Axinn (eds.),
Autonomy and Continuity: readings in contemporary Kantian philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press,
1998), 15–37.
25. I. Kant, ‘Conjectural beginning of human history’, trans. Allen Wood, in Anthropology,
History, and Education, ed. Günther Zöller and Robert B. Louden, 163–75, at 173.
26. I. Kant, ‘What is enlightenment?’, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor,
17–22, at 17.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: lectures at the Collège de France 1982–
1983, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011),
29.
31. Ibid., 28.
32. Ibid.
33. Kant, ‘What is enlightenment?’, 18.
34. I. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties: Der Streit der Fakultäten, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln:
Nebraska University Press, 1992), 25. ‘Incompetent’ is Gregor’s rendering of Idioten,
which nicely takes some of the sting out of the phrase while still acknowledging what
makes an idiot an idiot – mental incompetence.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 43, 45.
37. Ibid., 47.
38. Ibid., 57 n.
39. Ibid., 55.
40. Ibid., 61.
50 William Rasch
41. Ibid., 65.

42. Nicholas Boyle, ‘Inventing the intellectual: Schiller and Fichte at the University of Jena’,
Publications of the English Goethe Society 81, no. 1 (2012), 39–50, at 50.
43. J. G. Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1988), 159.
44. Ibid., 156.
45. Ibid., 160.
46. Ibid., 167–8.
47. Ibid., 172.
48. Boyle, ‘Inventing the Intellectual’, 49.
49. Ibid., 50.
50. The following overview rests on Odo Marquard, Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphiloso-
phie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982); Transzendentaler Idealismus, Romantische Natur-
philosophie, Psychoanalyse (Cologne: Verlag für Philosophie Jürgen Dinter, 1987), 77–83.
In English, ‘Unburdenings: theodicy motives in modern philosophy’, in In Defense of
the Accidental: philosophical studies, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 8–28; ‘Indicted and unburdened man in eighteenth-century philosophy’,
in Farewell to Matters of Principle: philosophical studies, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1989), 38–63.
51. See, for example, Odo Marquard, ‘Das Über-Wir: Bemerkungen zur Diskursethik’, in
Individuum und Gewaltenteilung: philosophische Studien (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004), 39–67.
52. Jürgen Habermas, Der gespaltene Westen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 110.
53. Ibid., 108. See especially the pre-Bush ‘Kant’s idea of perpetual peace, with the benefit
of two hundred years’ hindsight’, in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (eds.),
Perpetual Peace: essays on Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997),
113–53.
54. Jürgen Habermas, ‘On the public use of history’, in The New Conservatism: cultural criticism
and the historians’ debate, ed. and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1989), 229–40, at 238.
55. Ibid., 240.
56. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: correspondence 1982–1985, ed. and trans.
Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993), 24.
57. Ibid., 50.
58. Ibid., 54–5.
59. Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 151.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 153.
62. Ibid., 159.
63. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sign of history’, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 393–411, at 393. ‘Berlin 1989’ added by author.
64. Lyotard, Postmodern Explained, 30.
65. Lyotard, ‘Sign of history’, 394.
66. Ibid., 409.
3
Idealism and the idea of a constitution
Chris Thornhill
The Enlightenment and sociological formation of power

The Enlightenment, observed both as a historical and as a conceptual event,
had its centre in the conviction that the European state needed to be con-
structed as a state under law. As a result, the legitimating function of the
constitution was a matter of intense political concern for the Enlightenment.
Most essentially, the Enlightenment converged around the view that a state
could only be seen as legitimate if it was defined by a legal personality (a con-
stitution), which distinguished acts of public will from acts of factual bearers
of political authority and from all transient and particular interests seeking
access to state power.1 Underlying the politics of Enlightenment, thus, was
the general normative insistence that the state had to be constructed as a
categorically public order, whose primary laws distinguished its power from
all privately owned and exercised power, and constructed its authority as a
sui generis resource, clearly separated from other spheres of social exchange.
This emphasis on constitutional formation was expressed in the polit-
ical theories of the Enlightenment. Gaining momentum after Hobbes, the
attempt to separate the state, under the public-legal order of a constitution,
from mere acts of government unified all the diverse stances broadly cate-
gorised as reflecting the Enlightenment. Yet this emphasis was also evident
in the practice of the Enlightenment. The most important reflection of this
was in the tendency towards the codification of the legal system that was
prevalent throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. The drive to codifi-
cation was also motivated by the idea that the state could only be legitimate
if it was framed by a single legal corpus, through which it ordered its rela-
tions with other societal actors. Indeed, the core Enlightenment concept
All translations C.T.
51
52 Chris Thornhill
of natural rights played a vital role in this process of codification, and the
construction of natural rights became the basis for the formation of the state
as an abstracted legal person.2
The rise of the political concepts of the Enlightenment can be interpreted
as a historically embedded and even socially reflexive occurrence. These con-
cepts played a crucial role in securing the institutions characteristic of a
differentiated society and in configuring modern society in its distinctive
political form. Needless to say, state-like institutions existed in one form
or another in Europe before the Enlightenment. However, the century of
Enlightenment was the primary century of European state building. This
century saw a dramatic increase in penetration of state power into the estate-
based or corporate patterns of social inclusion and patrimonial jurisdictions,
which had determined the political structure of early modern societies.3
As a result, this century witnessed an unprecedented convergence of society
around centralised political institutions. It was in the eighteenth century that
in the more advanced European societies the political system began to oper-
ate as a relatively specialised apparatus, able to utilise political power across
all spheres of society at a reasonable level of internal abstraction and auton-
omy, and it was at this juncture that political actors and institutions acquired
the lineaments of modern statehood. The Enlightenment and its theoretical
constructs did not stand outside this process. On the contrary, the core con-
ceptual paradigms of the Enlightenment, especially those addressing legal
order and constitutional rule, interlocked with the underlying evolutionary
trajectory of European society, they provided templates for the growth of
state authority as a distinct phenomenon, and they actively promoted the
expansion of the political system as a differentiated aggregate of exchanges.
Most particularly, the norm of constitutional order promoted in the Enlight-
enment, stipulating that the state needs to be categorically designated as a
public actor under law, able to include social agents as bearers of rights,
played a most substantial role in enabling the European state to consolidate
itself functionally and procedurally. This was a vital element in the process
through which the state began to mark out its boundaries in relation to other
areas of society, and – above all – to produce power from within itself as a
resource that could be transmitted easily, positively and extensively across
society.
The idea of the constitution in the Enlightenment often proposed itself as
a principle of solely prescriptive legitimation, and it was typically imagined as
a concept that either restricted the authority of already established monarchi-
cal states or constructed new states with specifically limited and enumerated
Idealism and the idea of a constitution 53
powers.4 From a contemporary vantage point, however, the normative con-

ception of constitutional rule contributed primarily, not to a constraining of
political power, but instead to a rapid intensification of the volume of power
held in society. Political power as a distinctively abstracted and socially gen-
eralised phenomenon scarcely existed before the eighteenth century.5 Prior
to this point, political power was barely separated from other – private, cor-
porate or ecclesiastical – interests and organisations, and it did not pertain
to a specifically defined realm of social practice. The rise of the constitution,
conceived as a normatively desirable model of political order within the dif-
ferent strands of the Enlightenment, formed an aspect of reflexivity, internal
to the emergent sphere of political power, which allowed political power
to reflect itself as detached from highly privatised milieux and associations,
and to create preconditions for its transmission across society itself at a level
of general inclusivity. The intellectual-historical examples of early constitu-
tional thinkers help to illustrate this point. In France, for example, theorists
such as Voltaire and Holbach deployed constitutional principles based in
natural law to attack the weak and semi-privatised state of the late Bourbon
monarchy, and their primary theoretical objective was to concentrate state
power in more delineated judicial procedures and effectively to intensify the
categorically political structure of public power.6 In Germany, analogously,
Svarez employed principles of natural law to define the state as a powerful
centralised set of institutions, and to designate strict procedures for the even
penetration of political power into society.7 In each case, the constitutional
idea clearly diminished the power of local or corporate actors and solidified
the authority of central state institutions.
On one hand, therefore, the Enlightenment and its constitutional doc-
trines can be examined as a mass of external theoretical inquiries, conducted
within a realm of normative conceptual abstraction. Yet the Enlightenment
can also be analysed as an objective event occurring within the political
system of European societies, enunciating a conceptual form in which the
political system was able to articulate its emergent form and to extract
its basic characteristics at a sustainable level of autonomy. In its political
attitudes, the Enlightenment provided a theoretical account of how political
order ought to appear. In so doing, however, it contributed to the distillation
of the political system as a distinct social arena, it provided a conceptual
design to underpin the differentiated use of political power, and it helped
to abstract political power as a distinctively articulated phenomenon in
modern European society. In the idea of the constitution, the process of
functional differentiation already underscoring the form of European social
54 Chris Thornhill
structure reflected itself in a clearly defined and adequately constructed

fashion.
Sociology after the Enlightenment

In the wake of the great political upheavals induced by the ideals of Enlight-
enment (that is the French and American revolutions), the complex interde-
pendence between the constitutional theories of the Enlightenment and the
formative processes underlying modern society was often ignored. Indeed,
invectives against the revolutionary constitutional activities in France in
1789–91 were widely shaped by the allegation that the constitutional designs
of the Enlightenment expressed an attitude of social forgetfulness. It was com-
monly argued that the legal doctrines of the Enlightenment arrived at their
normative model of the constitutional state by imputing the source of all
legitimate legal order to single acts of a pouvoir constituant.8 In this respect,
it was observed, the Enlightenment merely transposed originally metaphys-
ical constructions of legal authorship into a secular, positive-legal context,9
reductively projecting evacuated and ahistorical norms on to the complex
form of society. This view gave rise to much of the more obviously reac-
tionary theory of the counter-Enlightenment. Examples of this can be found
first, in France, in the works of de Maistre, Bonald and later, in Germany,
in the writings of Adam Müller. This view was expressed most clearly in
historicist political reflection, which opposed the metaphysical abstraction
of revolutionary constitutionalism in favour of historically mediated ideas
of law, right and legal order.10 Analogously, and more enduringly, different
lines of more progressive sociological theory were also stimulated by a simi-
lar, also essentially historicist, critique of the constitutional doctrines of the
Enlightenment.11 Arguably, in fact, sociology as a distinct body of theoretical
inquiry was first defined by its dismissal of the Enlightenment as a corpus of
thought marked by ahistorical political reductivism and culminating in a sim-
plistically generalised or residually metaphysical projection of a normative
constitutional order as the sole model for the legitimate exercise of power.
Early or proto-sociological theories habitually defined themselves in critical
reference to a definition of the Enlightenment as a group of naively ‘ius-
naturalist’ political outlooks, centred on a strict and essential facts/norms
dichotomy, and consequently lacking comprehension of the local, historical
and inner-societal forces impacting upon political order and its legitimacy.12
Like their counterparts in the Enlightenment, thinkers with an early socio-
logical disposition were committed to defining institutional conditions for
the legitimate use of power, and they often showed a measure of sympathy
for the ideal of the constitutional state.13 Yet they dismissed the supposed
political abstraction and monadicism implied in revolutionary accounts of
constitutional legitimacy, and they typically denounced the universal norma-
tive presumptions expressed in revolutionary constitutional texts.14 In the
wake of the Enlightenment, in fact, the concept of constitutional legitimacy
became the term around which different scientific methodologies positioned
themselves, and the approach to the question of legitimacy became a dividing
line between sociological and philosophical reflection. Theorists promoting
philosophical methods for assessing legitimacy preserved the basic impulse
of the Enlightenment, and they opted for accounts of legitimacy based in
deductive analysis of norms, rights and obligations. Theorists promoting
sociological methods for describing legitimacy reacted against this, opting
for accounts of legitimacy based in descriptive analysis of social facts, con-
crete structural motivations, and practical expressions of collective volition.
As a result, the question of the constitutional form of legitimacy became
the dividing line between normative/deductive philosophical analysis and
descriptive/attitudinal sociological analysis; and this intellectual partition,
over a longer period of time, led to the formation of sociology as a distinct
theoretical discipline.15
Viewed closely, the sociological account of the Enlightenment as a
normatively distilled or historically evacuated set of political outlooks is
rather difficult to authenticate. In fact, it seems to be a myth. Different
Enlightenments examined the question of legitimate political order and its
constitutional form in different ways, and in many respects the Enlighten-
ment itself was the precursor of the more distinctively sociological analyses
of the political system that became widespread in the later nineteenth
century.16 The sociological dimension to the analysis of constitutional
legitimacy was already clear enough in Montesquieu.17 It is self-evident
in the evolutionary constitutionalism proposed by Adam Smith and David
Hume in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment.18 Even Locke’s
contractarian account of the three powers of state as correlated with
needs for standing laws and impartial judges expressed in the state of
nature was not strictly distinct from sociological principles.19 To be sure,
it is possible to find examples of theories proposing abstractly universal
principles of legitimacy in the Enlightenment. One example might be the
formulaic theory of natural law that characterises the work of Holbach.20
Yet, despite the founding self-definition of sociology as positioned against
the political ethics of the Enlightenment, the line between Enlightenment
56 Chris Thornhill
and sociology was never clear, and the sociological description of the
Enlightenment, against which sociology first defined itself, involves a deep
simplification.
This ambiguity is clearest perhaps in the works of Rousseau. Of all
accounts of constitutional order in the eighteenth century, Rousseau elabo-
rated what was surely the most clearly (proto-)sociological theory of the state.
This is the account of the rise of the modern state proposed in the Discourse
on the Origin of Inequality. Here, Rousseau examined the state as produced by
relations of private antagonism and material inequality prevailing through
society, he argued that the natural human capacity for equal freedom was
obliterated by the modern state, and he formulated a strong opposition to
the classic Enlightenment idea of the state as a socially detached actor under
public law.21 No lesser authority than Durkheim, consequently, was keen to
recruit Rousseau as a primary forerunner of the sociological method.22 Sub-
sequently, then, Rousseau, responding to the questions about potentials for
legitimacy that he himself posed in the Discourse, arrived at the seminal proto-
sociological theory expressed in the Social Contract, that the state obtains
constitutional legitimacy if it is sustained by the will of all society: if the will
of all members of society assumes a norm-giving position entirely internal to
the state.23 In describing this will and the conditions of its internalisation in
the state, however, Rousseau, again in the Social Contract, also proposed what
was perhaps the least sociological concept of the constitution of this era. In
particular, in the Social Contract Rousseau began to imagine the legitimate
state as a state constitutionally founded in the self-legislative acts of a pure
will: the state, he claimed, only secures natural human freedoms if it reflects
and facilitates the pursuit of those freedoms elected, not by people in society
as they factually or historically exist, but by people as the virtuous or even
rational/metaphysical abstractions of their everyday selves.24 This resulted
in an account of the legitimate state as defined by an externally abstracted
hypothetical criterion, close in some respects to a formal ‘ius-natural’ the-
ory of the will or to an account of legitimate statehood as second nature. In
the Social Contract, the Rousseauian principle, in essence, is that the state is
legitimate if its laws enshrine freedoms exercisable equally by all members of
society. A state fulfilling these criteria assumes legitimacy as an embodiment
of the general (natural) will of society in its entirety. On Rousseau’s own
account, however, this will is – in the final analysis – a hypothetical will,
which need not factually be willed at all, so that, on this principle, a state can
enact the will of all society without any reference to society in its materially
given form.25 The principal contents and injunctions contained in this will
can be simply extracted from an ideal notion of equal freedom, which can
then be held against the state as a measure of its legitimacy.
This analysis raises the paradox that the moment in the Enlightenment in
which philosophy detached itself most radically from objective description
and observation was in the later work of Rousseau, which formulated a
highly abstractive and generalised formula of constitutional legitimacy. At
the same time, this construct emerged as the response to deeply sociological
questions regarding the formation of a total societal will, the preconditions
of equality and freedom, and the overcoming of the private corruption of
state power, which Rousseau himself originally posed in the Discourse on the
Origin of Inequality.
On these grounds, the early sociological rejection of the Enlightenment
missed two distinct conceptual and historical dimensions of the Enlighten-
ment. On one hand, very obviously, it missed the point that, in its method-
ological dimension, the Enlightenment was already implicitly a brand of
sociology: this was especially pronounced in its theory of the constitution,
for which early sociological thinking reserved particular scepticism. Rather
more implicitly, however, it missed the point that the political theories of
the Enlightenment produced descriptions of the constitutional state, which,
despite their claims to deductive abstraction, were integrally interlaced with
a process of evolutionary articulation and transformation within the politi-
cal form of European society in the eighteenth century. Indeed, in arguing
that the political outlooks of the Enlightenment simply projected a theo-
retical realm of norms that remained external to society’s political system,
early sociological theories took their own construction of Enlightenment
theory somewhat too literally. Falling into the same trap into which they
saw the theories of Enlightenment falling, they accepted a highly literal and
profoundly unsociological view of theory as a practice capable of extracting
itself from the sociological realm of positive facts, and they chose to ignore
the deep, reflexive embeddedness of the Enlightenment in the formative
processes of European society.26
In consequence, there exists a founding miscomprehension at the origins
of European sociology. The reaction against the strict facts/norms dichotomy
in the Enlightenment, which stood at the methodological source of sociol-
ogy, resulted from the fact that sociology itself accepted too straightfor-
wardly the normative definition of theory that it imputed to the Enlighten-
ment. Despite this, the construction of the Enlightenment as a conceptual
movement centred on a facts/norms dichotomy represents a defining point of
polarisation between sociology and philosophy. A gradual division of labour
58 Chris Thornhill
between sociological and normative thinking evolved thereafter, and this

division remains prominent today. This polarisation, however, remains very
questionably founded.
Idealism and the late Enlightenment

At an immediate level, the political strands of German Idealism formed the
most obvious object for sociological critique, and, as sociology developed
as a discipline, much sociological inquiry organised itself, quite specifically,
as a critique of Idealism. Indeed, it was from Rousseau’s later notion of the
legitimate constitution as the embodiment of the pure or general will that
early German Idealism first took its political point of departure. Political Ide-
alism initially assumed clear contours through the translation of the more
abstracted elements of Rousseau’s thought into a body of reconstructed
metaphysical norms. It endeavoured, originally, to articulate a comprehen-
sively rationalistic construction of constitutional legitimacy based in the idea
of a state reflecting the acts of self-legislation of a pure political will. This
was clear above all in Kant’s analysis of the constitution of the legitimate
state.
It is barely necessary to trace the ways in which Kant’s idea of the legiti-
mate constitutional state deviates from the more sociotheoretical aspects of
the earlier Enlightenment. In particular, Kant founded his account of the
legitimate state on a doctrine of singular and spontaneous human rational
autonomy – that is, on an analysis of the potential for formal-moral freedom,
self-causality or legal self-authorship inhering in individual faculties of human
reason.27 From this position, Kant claimed that the single rational person
creating abstractly generalised ideas of freedom and legal obligation (of laws
equally applicable to all) could be taken both as a formal measure for deter-
mining the legitimacy of public laws and as a formal analogy to the state in
possession of a legitimate constitution. To be sure, there is great controversy
in Kant scholarship concerning the extent to which Kant saw the objective
legal conditions of the just constitutional order as resulting directly from
the moral maxims of subjective reason.28 The distinction in Kant’s thought
in this respect is quite clear. He argued that morality refers to the inner life
of human beings. Morality is a state of inner virtue presupposing only acts
of human ‘self-compulsion’a for its realisation. In contrast to this, he exam-
ined law as referring to the outer life and the conditions of outer freedom of
a. ‘Selbstzwange’. Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, in Werkausgabe, ed. W. Weischedel, 6 vols.
(Wiesbaden: Insel, 1956−62) (hereafter KW), iv, 512
human beings, and so as requiring ‘external compulsion’,b i.e. the application

of objective or even heteronomous laws, in order to have validity. Ethical
duties, in consequence, are enforced by an inner subjective law, and they
have a higher status than objective legal duties, which must be guaranteed
by an outer law.29 Despite the endlessly controversial distinction between
‘juridical’ and ‘ethical’ legislation in Kant’s view of the condition of human
autonomy, however, it seems clear that Kant identified (at the very least) a
close and necessary correlation between the inner maxims of human virtue
and externally necessary or legitimate laws.30 If ethical maxims with the
power of obligation express duties by which all people adequately exercis-
ing their faculties of reason are bound, external laws possessing the power of
legitimate obligation – and so forming the constitution of a legitimate state –
also express duties possessing the attribute of universality, to which all peo-
ple adequately exercising their rational faculties must of necessity accede.31
As a result, for Kant, the precondition of a legitimate constitution is that
the ‘highest legislator’ is obliged to pass objective laws in conformity with
the ‘true duties’ resulting from ethical maxims.32 A legitimate constitution
is one that applies laws across society, which reflect the rational and ethical
will and the rational and ethical freedoms both of each single person and of
the entire people at the same time. Publicly enforced laws to which categor-
ical validity can be imputed are laws that facilitate the rationally necessary
‘restriction of the freedom of each person’,c so that one person’s freedom
does not exclude or violate the freedom of others, and all freedom is exer-
cised without variation induced by place, time or social status. Where such
laws apply, the people, as the autonomous or noumenal distillation of its
factually and socially existing self, will recognise laws as the objective form
of its rational freedom.
In the Kantian state legitimised by a rational republican constitution,
consequently, the power of the state is only exercised in a legitimate fashion
if it arises from the ‘pure source of the concept of law’,d which each mind can
produce for itself as the ground of its rational life choices and autonomous
freedoms. In the Kantian state, legitimate laws are natural-rational laws,
determined by absolute principles of reason, and they cannot contravene
the noumenal conditions of freedom deduced by the operations of practical
reason. In fact, for Kant, the ‘republican constitution’ of the legitimate state
appears as the objective or external form of singular experiences of human
b. ‘Der äußere Zwang’. Ibid., 325 c. ‘Einschränkung der Freiheit eines jeden’. KW vi, 144
d. ‘Dem reihen Quell des Rechtsbegriffs’. KW vi, 205
60 Chris Thornhill
autonomy, in which reason gives a general and objective substance to the

idea of its necessary freedom: constitutional rule under a legitimate state
is a condition of ‘highest agreement’ between the objective laws regulating
collective life and the singular categorical imperatives of practical reason.
Where a state realises this condition of constitutional rule, the state itself
acquires ‘autonomy’, and it internally organises all its actions in accordance
with a generally purified will.33
The Kantian idea of the legitimate state thus projects the state as the
self-causing condition of moral personality, or personality formed under
autonomous law. In the same way that, for Kant, the moral personality
of the singular person is categorically different from the factual personality
of the singular person, the moral personality of the state is categorically dis-
tinct from the factual personalities of the many persons that it comprises.
Indeed, as for Rousseau, the Kantian state may be wholly indifferent to the
specific dispositions of these factual persons, and it may have an obligation
to legislate without any material regard for these dispositions. As a moral
personality, Kant concluded, the legitimate state is always a legal state or
Rechtsstaat: moral personality and Rechtsstaat are direct correlatives. A state
assumes the quality of a Rechtsstaat where it defines itself as a moral person-
ality under public law, where it recognises itself and other moral persons
(factual and juridical) as bound by practical and universal norms, and where
it formalises this recognition in a clear constitutional order. A Rechtsstaat,
definitively, will treat its subjects as citizens, that is, as bearers of inviolable
rights and entitlements. The citizens of a Rechtsstaat are recognised as having
rights of legal redress against other citizens where their innate freedoms are
violated, as having subjective rights on which the state itself cannot encroach,
and – most importantly – as having, in their quality as human beings, the
right to be treated as ends in themselves under law. As such, they command
respect and dignity, and they have the inalienable right not to be utilised
by the state or by other persons to fulfil purposes to which they do not, in
rational spontaneity, accede.34
Underlying the ideally constituted Kantian Rechtsstaat, in sum, is a highly
purified reconstruction of Rousseau’s notion that the general will is the
inner source of the state’s constitutional legitimacy. On this view, the gen-
eral will, divested of all social facticity, forms a pure or natural-legal norm to
define the legitimacy (or otherwise) of the state. At the origins of political
Idealism, the ‘ius-natural’ abstraction of the concept of the legitimate state,
already pre-charted in the long decade between Rousseau’s two major politi-
cal works, was extended and reinforced. This gained particular force in Kant’s
intuition, echoing Rousseau, that the state could embody the will of society
by representing the people in their second nature, that is, without repre-
senting or even recognising members of society as they factually exist.35 As
discussed, Kant clearly constructed the general will as an analogue to the
singular will of the rational person, and he posited a homology between the
pure will of the rational subject and the general will expressed through a
legitimate state. The specifically social dimension to the state’s personality
was thus evacuated. In Kant’s political writings, the reaction of political the-
ory against descriptive or sociological method, the construction of theory as
noumenal norm against societal fact, and the foundation for a later distinc-
tion of method and object between philosophy and sociology, assumed the
clearest expression. Kant’s extended purification of Rousseauian principles
became the basis for the separation of sociology and philosophy through the
nineteenth century and beyond.36
Idealism and the origins of sociology

Despite this historical opposition of idealism and sociology, however, the
birth of Idealism as the most advanced position in the metaphysical, anti-
sociological Enlightenment contains a striking paradox. No sooner had Kant
established the formally ideated principle of constitutional legitimacy than
Idealism began both to qualify this account of legitimacy, and gradually to
reconvert Kantian insights into the groundwork for a more clearly socio-
logical analysis of political power and the legal order of the legitimate state.
Central to this was a more intrinsically sociological reconfiguration of the
Kantian (and, at one remove, Rousseauian) notion that the legitimate state
must give constitutional expression to shared ideas of freedom.
Fichte
The works of Fichte, for example, reflect an immediate attempt to separate
the model of the constitutional state as an ethical person or person under
general laws from its original Kantian purism. Fichte clearly endeavoured
to capture and elucidate the formative social dimension of human agency in
constituting law and the law-based state, and he sought to conceive the legal
structure determining the legitimacy of public authority as resulting from
concrete and socially enmeshed processes of human interaction. Fichte’s
analysis of the sources of the legitimate constitution revised the Kantian
approach in a number of ways. In general, he followed Kant and Rousseau in
62 Chris Thornhill
claiming that a state acquires legitimacy by giving constitutional expression

to the idea of general freedom. However, he claimed that the idea of freedom
objectivised in public laws needed to be envisioned, not as pure principle
of natural law, but as resulting from concrete or substantial anthropologi-
cal foundations. In this respect, he indicated that legitimate laws, i.e. laws
of constitutional freedom, are socially produced laws, whose sources were
embedded in acts of will that are both practical and collective.
To explain this, first, Fichte proceeded by extending Kant’s own very
cautious privileging of practical reason over pure reason.37 On this basis,
he argued that all primary acts of reason have a concrete legislative compo-
nent, and all such acts possess an integrally normative structure and generate
objective laws of freedom for social interaction. The concept of law, Fichte
concluded, is an ‘original concept of pure reason’:e each single act of self-
positing conducted by human reason entails a self-positing of the human
being as a free agent under objective law, and each such single act neces-
sarily articulates a legal form, and objectivises legal relations, for shared
conditions of human freedom.38 Through this fusion of pure and practical
rational functions, Fichte began to outline an account of the general forma-
tion of law, not – in the Kantian sense – as formal deduction, but rather as a
practical-rational process in which the rational will of legitimate public order
is gradually formed through a multiplicity of concrete cognitive/legislative
acts.
In addition to this, second, Fichte modified the Kantian perspective by
arguing that the human subject can posit itself and autonomously produce
laws only insofar as it reflects itself as an active and volitionally engaged
member of a concrete and plurally formed community.39 Laws, he argued,
are deducible from the fact that the person is irreducibly a person with
others, that it encounters other persons in each act of its self-positing, and
that its own freedom is only fully rational where it positively incorporates,
and reflects itself through, ‘the freedom of the other’.f Rational laws, con-
sequently, are generated not, as for Kant, through formal self-legislation of
the pure will, but through the active recognition that rational subjective
freedom is regulated by, or in fact always concretely co-implies, the objec-
tive existence of other wills seeking freedom. The laws of legitimate public
order, in consequence, are laws based in acts of reflexively other-including
law production in which the mind thinks and enacts its freedom as rationally
e. ‘Ein ursprünglicher Begriff der reinen Vernunft’. Fichte, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte,
8 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971) (hereafter FSW), iii, 8
f. ‘Freiheit des Anderen’. Ibid., 120
reliant on the freedom of others. In this respect, Fichte began to propose

a concept of public-legal formation as an intrinsically social phenomenon.
A state acquiring legitimacy, from this view, is a state whose constitution
is formed through the processually constructed will of a rationally formed
community, expressing shared, and in fact collectively engendered, ideas of
freedom through rational institutions.
On Fichte’s account, in consequence, the creation of the legal order of a
rational state is not, as for Kant, a subjective process residing in the deductive
accounts of freedom proportioned to a formal will. On the contrary, the legal
order of the rational state is an objectively and socially elaborated condition,
in which a number of existing wills rationally recognise each other as free.
Indeed, although Fichte accepted Kant’s assertion that autonomy is the
source of rational law, he defined autonomy, neither as a static attribute nor as
a formal moment of self-causality, but as a sphere of action constructed through
multiple rational acts of self-positing in which a plurality of rational agents
participate, and which they progressively form through a dynamic/normative
process of recognition. Central to Fichte’s approach was the view that the
externalised normativism or the fact/norms distinction underlying Kant’s
constitutional purism could not offer a meaningful account of the legitimate
constitutional state. The state needed to be comprehended as legitimised by
a fully internal constitutional will, through which the state incorporates and
gives constitutional form to all rational-legal acts of society.
This socio-anthropological shift in the works of Fichte gave rise to cer-
tain important differences of emphasis in the institutional character of the
state endorsed by Kant and Fichte. In many respects, Kant’s conception of
the legal person as a centre of formal self-causality led to a minimal account
of the state as a legal-moral personality, whose legitimacy is defined by the
existence of invariable universal laws, and which enacts a unity of law and
freedom as its own function, in relative closure against the subjects whose
will it incorporates and represents. In contrast to this, Fichte’s construct of
the legal person as an active and interactive agent was shaped by a much more
expansive account of the legal sources of legitimacy in politics, of the politi-
cal content of the law, and of the constitutional expression of the freedoms
which law communicates. He claimed that each citizen of the state is commu-
nally and inevitably engaged in the free production of laws necessary for the
legitimacy of the state. In fact, for Fichte, the practical self-fulfilment of each
person relies on his or her engagement as a member of a political collective,
within which the laws are actively constituted. Fichte rejected the account
of law, legitimacy and freedom as deducible from the formal autonomy of
64 Chris Thornhill
subjects protected by overarching and pre-agreed laws, formally applied by

the state. Instead, he thought of law, legitimacy and freedom as constituted
by actively autonomous subjects, who play an active role in shaping the
laws and founding the state, and for whom the withdrawal into formal or
purely subjective autonomy is not possible. Consequently, he refused to
affirm the Kantian doctrine of a limited constitutional state, guaranteeing
for its citizens a thin stratum of rights, and a maximum of autonomy, thus
separating citizens out from the strictly political formation of the state, and
depoliticising legislative and executive processes. As alternative, he proposed
a rather distinct Rousseauian account of the state, focusing on the elements
of collective right and rational participation also (ambiguously) projected
by Rousseau. Notably, Fichte tentatively intimated that people under legit-
imate laws obtain rights, not, as in Kant’s account, as formal subjective
attributes, but as objective or socially elaborated institutions – that is, that
rights become real through the recognition of these rights by other wills seek-
ing freedom, and through the common acceptance of rights as elements in an
objectively structured social arena.40 This doctrine viewed the state as evolv-
ing ceaselessly and objectively from the concrete interactions and the claims
to rights between many rational wills, and it imagined the general will of the
state as present and concentrated in a close and obligatory relation between
legislature and executive. Fichte’s political doctrine defined the legitimate
state, not as protecting the formal-private interests of autonomous subjects,
but as subordinating all private interactions to publicly acceded laws and as
limiting the sphere of private or individual autonomy outside the political
operations of the state.41 Under the rule of the general will, Fichte argued, all
legal judgement must be made subordinate to the ‘judgement of the state’,g
formed by mediated agreements between rational citizens. The constitution
of the state, he affirmed, resides in the ‘absolute unanimity’h of the people
and it allows no divergence from its prescriptions.
Underlying the political thought of Fichte, in short, was an endeav-
our methodologically, if not comprehensively to contradict, then at least
to revise the Kantian casting of the Rousseauian principle of constitutional
legitimacy as free, rational self-legislation. In doing this, Fichte sought to
place the legitimate constitution on concrete social foundations, to interpret
the formation of legitimate (natural) law as a distinctively sociological occur-
rence, embedded in multiple interactive acts of reason and not defined by
g. ‘Urtheile des Staates’. Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts, FSW iii, 151
h. ‘Absolute Einstimmigkeit’. Ibid., 16
any primary split between facts and norms. In particular, this involved the
suggestion that a state could only be legitimate if it incorporated, and was
incessantly formed by, the will not – in the Kantian sense – of a pure general
subject, but of a concretely existing society. In this regard, Fichte’s political
thought marked the beginning of a sociological turn in Idealism.
Schelling
To invoke Schelling as a progenitor of early sociology must surely appear
egregiously paradoxical. Most immediately, Schelling was a thinker who, in
part at least, stands accused of reversing the Kantian achievement in moving
accounts of human freedom and legal obligation beyond traditional meta-
physics towards an enlightened doctrine of determinate human autonomy.42
In his political inquiries, Schelling’s account of natural law was intended to
reconstitute a metaphysics of nature and of natural process, which integrated
human subjectivity and rationality into a broader conception of metaphysical
self-realisation and so dissolved the distinctive moment of autonomy. Fur-
ther, Schelling argued that a condition of political freedom could only result
from a state of self-identity between the inner nature of humanity and the
outer nature of the material world, marked by the positive presence of God in
human life. Such identity between humanity and nature, he claimed, would
institute God’s personal law, a new law, as the law of human society, and
under this new law the objectivity of fate (heteronomy) would be supplanted
by the identity of freedom as a common human experience of self-obedience
and self-recognition.43
Despite these quasi-theocratic impulses, however, Schelling’s work also
contains an objectivistic correction of Kantian constitutional politics. Like
Fichte, he opposed Kant’s philosophy because of its metaphysical formalism,
and he implied that Kantian philosophy resorted to vacuous metaphysical
ideas in its attempt to account for the political conditions of human freedom.
Owing to its analysis of human freedom as a moment of transcendental self-
causality, Schelling argued, Kantian legal and political thought detached
freedom from its objective foundations, and it detached freedom from the
objective conditions of human consciousness, which make it possible. Like
Kant, the early Schelling espoused the ideal of a ‘legal constitution’, and
he even affirmed the institution of a ‘constitution of universal citizenship’.i
i. ‘Rechtliche Verfassung . . . allgemeine Rechtsverfassung’. Schelling, System des transcendentalen

Idealismus, in Werke, ed. Manfred Schröter, 12 vols. (Munich: Beck and Oldenbourg, 1927−54),
ii, 586f
66 Chris Thornhill
Moreover, he suggested that rationally produced law might steer humanity

towards a state of harmony and perfectibility.44 However, he repudiated
the Kantian position by arguing that institutions ensuring freedom and
harmony cannot be generated on noumenal foundations, and they cannot
be immediately imposed as material forms in human society. Instead, he
suggested that legitimate legal forms must be founded in an adequately
elaborated condition of human consciousness and naturalised freedom: this
consciousness must objectively sustain these legal forms, it must allow them
to flourish, and it must create preconditions for their recognition. This
consciousness, he argued, could only result from the natural ‘progressivity’
of historical life, and could not be construed as an invariably given or formally
existing fact of all consciousness.j Schelling thus understood his own work as
a philosophy which gave substance to the formal-subjective metaphysics of
freedom in Kantian Idealism, and which refused to construe rationally valid
law as transcendentally disembedded from natural/historical consciousness,
or imposed across human life as a mere ‘supplement to visible nature’.k
Although not expressly concerned with the social dimension of political
legitimacy, Schelling clearly claimed that constitutional order could not be
formally manufactured, and it presupposed objective conditions of adequate
reflexivity, which could only arise from a natural-material process of societal
formation.
Hegel
This critical attitude towards the formalism of Kantian constitutionalism
culminated in the political works of Hegel. It barely needs restating that,
in his mature political philosophy, Hegel attempted to provide an account
of the constitutional state, which accepts Kant’s ‘ius-natural’ account of the
legitimate state as a legal order of equal freedom, but which attempts to
show how rational (natural) ideas of freedom are constructed in objective
legal form through different spheres of social practice. These objective legal
ideas are then internalised as constitutional elements within the state, so
that the state is formed as an organisational centre in society which draws
legitimacy from, acts to preserve, yet also rationally mediates, the sets of
legal norms that are generated in different areas of society and different
spheres of functional exchange. In Hegel’s vision of the legitimate state,
j. ‘Wo nur der Progressus als Ganzes, gleichsam für eine intellektuelle Anschauung, dem Ideale
Genüge tut.’ Ibid., 588
k. ‘Das Supplement der sichtbaren Natur’. Schelling, System, 583
the idea of equal freedom constantly shapes a condition of objective self-

legislation, in which social agents are able to exercise rational freedoms in the
concrete structure of society and the state both enables these freedoms and
reflects them as actualised normative dimensions of its own constitution.45
Distinctive in Hegel’s correction of Kant, however, is the fact that he viewed
this condition of constitutional self-legislation as realisable solely on the basis
of a pluralistic description of modern society. He specifically argued that the
modern state exists in a reality where human agents have lost the ability
simply and immediately to exercise rational freedoms overarching all arenas
of social exchange.46 Hegel thus set himself the challenge of imagining a state
authorised by a single objective rational will, in which this will segments its
rationality in proportion to the functional logic of the different life spheres
of modern society, and produces general normative principles by integrating
otherwise highly specialised imperatives and liberties in different domains of
social interaction. In this, he also set himself the challenge of reconstructing
the natural-legal foundations of the legitimate state to reflect the complex and
pluralistic structure of societal modernity. Indeed, the attempt to understand
how the modern state could be legitimised by a general objective will clearly
led Hegel to discover society, and to appreciate modern society as comprising
a plurality of functional centres and a number of necessarily conflicting ideas
of freedom. Hegel’s attempt to translate Rousseau’s idea of the general will
on to the experience of a functionally differentiated society stands close to
the beginning of contemporary understandings of society as a mass of deeply
differentiated realms of exchange.47
In the constitutional formation of freedom as law, accordingly, Hegel
argued against under-complex accounts of constitutional freedom as the
result of simple revolutionary acts of constitution making.48 Instead, he
defined constitutional freedom as necessarily organised on three distinct
levels, some of which are determined by more reflected and enduring prin-
ciples of rational freedom than others. In this model, different types of law,
some more valid (more rational, and more general) than others, emerge from
the different expressions of the will and the different resultant expressions
of freedom.49 The state acquires its constitution by assimilating, preserving
and reconciling the different ideas of freedom contained within society’s laws.
For Hegel, the crudest level at which freedom is realised under law is the
level of immediacy or of abstract particularity, where human beings act and
obtain legal status as legal persons – that is, where they construe themselves
as atomised bearers of rights and freedoms, and where they assert their wills
through the singular and exclusive claim to dominion over things. This level
68 Chris Thornhill
of freedom is characterised by the law of property, or by abstract right, and

the legal personality that determines this level of law enshrines the rights
of human wills in their claims to free ownership. As such, abstract right
expresses volitional freedoms specific to the early capitalist economy, which
Hegel viewed as a sphere of social practice whose emergence reflected the
wider functional differentiation of modern society as a whole. The freedoms
of capitalism stand in a particular relation to the legal ideas of Roman law and,
by consequence, to the early positivism growing out of the Enlightenment.
Hegel argued that the legal personality of abstract right has the epoch-making
and deeply liberating significance that it allows people to operate not only as
proprietary individuals, but as individuals who own themselves (who are not
serfs or slaves), who dispose freely over their own interests and purposes,
and who claim single legal entitlements of possessive autonomy and material
self-reliance. Nonetheless, the legal personality under abstract right, Hegel
stated, is always subject to internal limitation: it cannot generate substan-
tial or universally rational forms of law, and it cannot exceed cognitively
unformed demands for freedom. In his earlier work he was quite clear that
concepts of public order residing in the models of legal personality derived
from Roman law and early positivism promulgate alienated laws based in
formal atomism, in ‘autonomy without spirit’l and ‘empty generality’,m and
that, as legal persons, agents under law encounter themselves and each other
only as bearers of an ‘alien content’n imposed upon them by an irrationally
generalised will.50 Abstract right is the foundation of law in its most ‘formal’
and non-universal, structure: it incorporates only a highly inchoate idea of
freedom, and it inevitably raises substantive dilemmas that can only be rec-
onciled at a higher or more reflected level of constitutional universality and
rational freedom.51
Central to this aspect of Hegel’s philosophy was an implicit act of
position-taking in relation to the normative stances consolidated in the
course of the Enlightenment. This aspect of his thought involves a rejec-
tion of the more positivist lineages of early liberalism, which assumed that
the distillation of the legal person from the property law of Roman law might
provide a basis for substantial legal freedoms and for substantial experiences
of constitutional legitimacy.52 Yet it also contains the implication that the
positive principles of early liberalism, including positive rights to property,
need to be assimilated within the state, albeit not as the final source of its
l. ‘Geistlose Selbständigkeit’. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M.

Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969−71) (hereafter HW), iii, 356−8
m. ‘Leere Allgemeinheit’. Ibid. n. ‘Fremde Inhalt’. Ibid.
constitutional legitimacy. Hegel certainly did not deny the right of free pri-
vate property secured under early positivism. However, he argued that it is
only where the will of the person recognises the limits of its own freedom
as a possessive agent, where it begins to abstract from its own proprietary
particularity, and where it acknowledges that ownership of property needs
to be incorporated within a higher moral-political order, that it reflects and
produces substantial freedoms in law. The freedoms of the legal person of
Roman law, in consequence, must be subsumed, as one subordinate element,
into higher and more mediated spheres of legal freedom, such that ownership
acquires its justification where it is enshrined as a necessary but subsidiary
component in the objective form of a more generally mediated and more
substantially rational common will.
The second level of legal freedom is a condition where human beings act
as subjects: that is where they possess inner ideas of freedom and claim legal
recognition for such freedom. The legal expression of this level of freedom is
morality: the ‘law of the subjective will’.o The moral subject is the specifically
modern condition of the human being, in which individual people exercise
reason to determine their freedoms and duties and to produce independent
and internal ideas of what is right.53 This condition originates in the Christian
ethics of interiority, and it finds its distinctive expressions both in subjective
claims over rights and in Kantian doctrines of practical autonomy.54 This
level of freedom, therefore, is surely able to generate general principles of
freedom; such freedom, however, remains internal, formalistic and without
social/objective foundation.55 Under morality, people might perpetrate free
actions as subjective purposes, marked by an abstract idea of the good. Or,
alternatively, they might perpetrate free actions as ought actions, as actions
whose value is externally prescribed and ultimately heteronomous to their
own freedom and reason, such that their legal life is consequently regulated
by oppressively prescriptive and socially evacuated moral norms.56 In each
case, however, the freedom of morality and moral laws remains formalistic
and insubstantial, and it cannot form the foundation for a substantially
legitimated public order.
As in the doctrine of abstract right, at this point in the evolution of the
law, Hegel again took up a position in relation to other theoretical stand-
points of earlier liberalism resulting from the Enlightenment. He turned
most obviously against the subjectivistic particularism of Christian ethics.
But he also turned against both Lockean theories of rights and the normative
o. ‘Recht des subjektiven Willens’. HW vii, 205

70 Chris Thornhill
prescriptive apparatus of Kant’s moral liberalism, both of which he saw as

vainly intent on deducing the terms of ethical life, both particular and polit-
ical, from highly particularistic conceptions of human liberty. Like abstract
right, therefore, Hegel saw morality as a sphere of normativity that engen-
ders legal antinomies which it cannot resolve or reconcile internally, and as
necessitating an idea of freedom in which the will sees its freedom neither in
particularised purposes nor in generalised duties, but in a third condition,
objectively reconciling particularity and generality. The implication in this
argument is that a legitimate state will incorporate both subjective moral
freedoms and the normative conceptual structure of morality, but these
freedoms and these norms will not be formative of legitimacy.
The highest level of constitutional legitimacy, consequently, is formed
by a condition of human volition and liberty in which the will spontaneously
pursues universal purposes, and where it recognises its own freedom as one
mediated element of the objective conditions that surround it.57 The reali-
sation of this freedom occurs as the outcome of the progressive mediation of
the wills of many people: it is a condition of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), in which
over long periods of time many wills have shaped themselves through com-
plex processes of conflict, recognition and objective institution building into
an overarching rational will containing objective sanction for universal ideas
of freedom. This condition is reflected in the presence of a rational state,
marked by a constitution balancing singular freedoms and collective duties,
and strong enough to ensure that singular persons or unilateral or subjec-
tive freedoms specific to economic interaction do not monopolise or dictate
conditions for public order in its entirety. In particular, the constitution of
this state is determined, not by singular acts of volition and norm construc-
tion, but by the formation of a strong, elite-led administrative order, able to
legislate general norms across and above the differentiated spheres of social
practice58 and to preserve equilibrium between the liberties proportioned
to these spheres.
In proposing ethical life as a constitutional condition, Hegel implied that
other salient analyses of human freedom and the sources of constitutional
legitimacy – especially the proprietary will of Roman law, the possessive
rights doctrines of early liberalism, the inner ethics of Christianity, and the
pure will of transcendental idealism – fail to fully reflect the freedom of the
will in its objective situatedness. Such doctrines mistakenly deduce ideas of
freedom under law from an incomplete or abstractly prescriptive account
of reason and the will. Above all, such conceptions stabilise the will giving
form to freedom at a position prior to its concrete determinacy: before it has
engaged with other wills, and before it has incorporated the ideas of freedom
asserted by other wills. Other accounts of the will and of freedom are valuable
only as subordinate aspects of a substantial interpretation of human freedom
as self-reflection in shared law under rational institutions. It is only in a
constitutional state able to preserve the particular liberties of society, to
uphold the pluralistic design of society in its totality, yet also to make sure
that no set of singular liberties and no one sphere of functional practice
assumes primacy or dominance in society as a whole, that the objective
freedom of the will can gain substance.
Like Fichte, therefore, Hegel’s writings on the constitutional state also
proceed, albeit remotely, from a Rousseauian construct of the self-legislative
general will, which places emphasis on socially and objectively formed laws as
the source of legitimate state power. Hegel’s constitutionalism endeavours
to examine the formation of this will, not as the application of an immediate,
extracted normative or ‘ius-natural’ formula, but as the outcome of socially
transformative, factual process, in which fact and norm are integrally unified
through the objective formation of the idea of freedom. In particular, Hegel
deviates from other Idealists in that he aims to account for a constitutional
state able to enact a general (natural) will despite the pluralistic decomposi-
tion of society into functionally specific ideas of freedom and differentiated
volitional centres. As mentioned, Hegel’s theory of the will first engen-
dered the discovery of society’s inner logic of differentiation, which later
became the core theme of sociological inquiry. Central to this impulse is once
more the principle that the legitimate state constitution cannot be formed by
any external rationality, but needs instead to incorporate freedoms in soci-
ety at each stage in their determinate and pluralistic elaboration. For Hegel,
in fact, the defining political challenge of modern society is an integrally
sociological challenge: it is to construct a political order giving objective
expression to the general rational (natural) will of a society, although the fac-
tual will of this same society is dismembered a priori into particularised life
practices shaped by an accelerated logic of differentiation and functionally
determined liberty.
Marx
It is not very fashionable to interpret Marx as an Idealist. However, Marx’s
theory of the state can also be treated as part of the sociological turn
in Idealism, and it rearticulated the post-Rousseauian discovery of soci-
ety apparent in Hegel’s thought. In the first instance, Marx’s theory of
72 Chris Thornhill
human self-realisation and alienation set out in On the Jewish Question and
the 1844 Manuscripts reiterated earlier Idealist attempts to translate the
metaphysical principle of general human (natural) freedom, expressed in
Rousseau’s idea of the constitution, into a doctrine of objectively formed
and intrinsically social public order.
In On the Jewish Question, in particular, Marx reconstructed the idea of
freedom implied in Rousseau’s theory of the general will to reject the for-
mal rights-based constitutional liberalism of the later Enlightenment. He
depicted liberal constitutionalism – imagining equal freedom under law
without equal freedom in civil society – as reliant on distorted or meta-
physically idealised projections of human freedom, serving only to cement
an ideological distinction between state and society, to stabilise selective
monetary prerogatives in society, and to estrange members of society in their
factual life settings from the genuine conditions of their natural freedom.59
As discussed, Hegel’s theory of the general will specifically accommodated
the differentiated pluralism of modern society, and aimed to trace out con-
ditions of general freedom within the differentiated reality of early capital-
ism. In contrast, Marx repudiated Hegel’s compromise with capitalist social
pluralism,60 and he dreamed instead of a return to social order suffused by one
general (total/natural) will, and – notably – he defined societal differentiation
as coterminous with alienation.61 As an alternative to the liberal constitu-
tional state, therefore, he proposed a doctrine of legitimate public order,
which was intended to give sociomaterial substance to the original Idealist
system of rights,62 to re-fuse the state with society in its non-alienated form,
and to found public order in the encompassing (total/natural) material will
of society. In Marx’s implied model of a legitimate political order, the con-
stitutional ideal of public freedom under law was translated into a vision of
a thick unity of freedom and equality, which could only be accomplished
under a state which enforced laws of equal freedom through all dimensions
of society, thus necessitating a material transformation of society, and its
reorganisation in accordance with prerogatives generalised across all social
actors and all social exchanges. Although at different times in his trajectory
Marx clearly denied that any public order of law might be able to contribute
to the formation of human freedom, in his earlier work he clearly proposed
an account of species being which possessed formative legal implications, and
he argued that the practical realisation of the freedoms inscribed in human
nature could be achieved through the transposition of species rights (rights of
equal social, material and historical participation) into a materialised consti-
tution of state.63
On these grounds, Marx’s early work described the point where the
Enlightenment finally reconnected with sociological conceptions of political
order, from which it was originally, rather artificially, separated. In Marx,
the Idealist (and originally Rousseauian) conviction that the legitimacy of
political order depends upon the objective/legal realisation of a natural idea
of freedom, applied to and exercised by all persons in equal manner and in all
aspects of human social life, became the basis at once for a materialist account
of social process and for a phenomenology of freedom’s alienation under the
conditions of the early capitalist economy: Marx was led by Rousseau’s theory
of general natural freedom to discover society as a reality of estrangement,
and he identified legitimacy with the moment in which the overcoming of
estrangement is complete. Above all, this idea formed the basis for a theory
of political legitimacy in which the political system assumes legitimacy by
incorporating and representing freedoms, not of abstracted persons or select
social groups, but of all society in its totality, and in its anthropologically most
extended sense.
Conclusion
Idealism initially formed a lineage in political theory in which the idea of
the constitution was, formatively, presented (ideated) in abstraction from
its historical reality. In the first instance, Idealism elaborated an idea of
constitutional legitimacy, which was relatively indifferent to social agents
in their specific determinacy, and which assessed the exercise of political
power by statically subjectivistic, even hypothetical principles of right. Sub-
sequently, however, this idea of the constitution was quickly reconfigured
and translated back into a pattern of legal-sociological description. In this re-
translation, the pure idea of the constitution and constitutional legitimacy
grasped its insufficiency as a simple idea and attempted to account for itself
through a reconstruction of the normative residues inherent in socio-factual
process. Above all, the political-sociological shift in Idealism hinged on the
claim that the state could only be seen as legitimate if its internal will was
constructed, not as the external idea of society’s purified will, but as the exist-
ing will of all society. For later Idealism, the implied split between norms
and facts in Kantian legal philosophy created a theoretical outlook that was
unable to provide a compelling and internal account of the grounds on which
state power could legitimately claim to demand obligation. This failing was
experienced as a sociological failing; for later Idealism, sociological analy-
sis of the interaction between social experience and political expressions
74 Chris Thornhill
of freedom was indispensable for explaining the state’s obligatory power.

The strict methodological division between philosophy and sociology was
both initially cemented and then conclusively rejected by the legal/political
methodology promoted by Idealism. Indeed, in the writings of Hegel, analy-
sis of constitutional freedom first gave rise to sociology as an inquiry into the
discrete logics of fragmentation and functional differentiation underlying
modern society.
In pursuing a sociological idea of the constitution as the analysis of the
inner-societal will of the state, it is notable that later Idealism also began to
pursue a sociological analysis, not only of the constitution as fact, but of the
idea of the constitution itself: of the constitution as theoretical norm. Later
Idealism began to trace the formation of the constitutional idea (that is,
the normative conceptual apparatus of constitutional theory) as an internal
dimension of formative socio-political processes, and it began to elucidate
ways in which this idea had become ingrained in the normative structure
of society itself. In this last respect, in fact, the sociological impetus of
later Idealism exceeded the simple observation of the necessary unity of
fact and norm in the establishment of the legitimate constitution of state.
Later Idealism also developed the sociological feature that it recognised
the internality of the normative concept of constitutional legitimacy to the
abstraction of the state and the factual production of political power as
defining dimensions of modern society, and it accounted for the normative
arguments of constitutional theory, not as an aspect of intelligence posi-
tioned outside, but as a concentrated and adaptive reflexivity located within,
the processes in which society constructed and articulated its reserves
of political power. Later Idealism, thus, cleared the terrain for a highly
distinctive fusion of philosophy and sociology, at once (as philosophy)
constructing theoretical templates for the assessment of power and its
legitimacy yet also (as sociology) evaluating these theoretical templates
(and thus also itself) as socially produced and socially productive. Most
importantly, the insight into the internality of normative constitutional
analysis to power’s own structure is evident in the works of Hegel. Hegel’s
philosophy at once interpreted the formation of the constitutional state
as a factual sociological process, and it examined the normative conceptual
apparatus for thinking about constitutional legitimacy as a structure internal
to the state itself, as an element of the state’s own self-reflexivity and adaptive
formation.
At one level, Hegel argued that the conceptual or normative elements
of the constitution – abstract right, morality and ethical life – are exactly,
and no more than, that. They are normative principles that, once combined
within the state, generate liberty and legitimacy for those social agents sub-
ject to state power. However, at a secondary level, Hegel claimed that these
norms are both facts and norms: they are generated through the factual for-
mation of modern societies, yet they can be extracted from and presupposed
by political actors within these societies as normatively necessary precon-
ditions for their legitimacy. Third, Hegel indicated that in their specific
quality as norms these concepts are inner dimensions of – so to speak –
the necessary architecture of state power, and they generate a conceptual
apparatus guaranteeing, not only that state power can assume legitimacy,
but that a state can be constructed and power can be exercised as political
power tout court. Underlying Hegel’s reflections on the constitution is the
view that a state requires a constitution in order to be a state, and the three-
layered normative structure sustaining the constitution makes possible the
determinate abstraction of political power in modern society. This can be
seen in the context of Hegel’s rejection of feudal political order, exemplified
by his hostility to patrimonial theories of coercive entitlement as proposed
by Carl Ludwig von Haller.64 This can also be seen in his critical observa-
tions on the political forms produced in classical Greece and early Christian
communities.65 In these cases, he argued that pre-modern societies had not
been able to generate a legal structure capable of sustaining state formation,
and they were unable to articulate principles to support the abstraction of
the political system. The state, Hegel concluded, presupposes the existence
of a constitution, embodying the three layers of freedom discussed above.
States that do not have an inner normative/constitutional order based in the
three-tier legal order of positivism (ownership), morality (singular rights) and
substantial shared life (rational order) are only weakly constructed as states,
they are only weakly differentiated against other modes of social practice
and exchange, and they fail to establish the generalised reserves of power
for society upon which social freedom depends. The constitution, and its
inner normative fabric, is thus at once a normative institution and the factual
precondition of statehood.
In this respect, later Idealism proposed a more refined and more distinc-
tively sociological analysis of political power than the later, more expressly
sociological movements that turned more radically against political philos-
ophy and simply repudiated the constitutional theory of the Enlightenment
as symptomatic of neo-scholastic abstraction or normative hypostasis. Run-
ning through later Idealism is an attempt both to observe the legitimisation
of power as a societal process and to discern and trace the internality of
76 Chris Thornhill
theoretical formation and norm construction to the delineation and differ-

entiation of political power as a factual phenomenon in society. Indeed, in
its focus on the constitution, later Idealism gave the lie to the postulation of
a facts/norms dichotomy underlying the distinction between sociology and
political theory in two ways. First, simply, it does this because it retraces the
relation between normative and sociological constitutionalism, and, with-
out renouncing the normative dimension of theory, it reconverts normative
analysis into a sociological description of the formation of legitimate political
norms and a legitimate public will. Second, it does this because, in resolutely
sociological method, it refuses to accept that there might be such a thing
as a facts/norms split between society and theory or between description
and prescription, it identifies certain theoretical norms as objectively necessary
descriptions of society’s emergent form, and it includes theory and its norms
within the factual sociological process in which modern political institutions
are abstracted and obtain acceptance. Underlying later Idealist thought on
the constitution was thus an attitude which might be called double reflexiv-
ity: an attitude that observes theory both as theory and as practice and that
evaluates the norms of theory both, in simple reflexivity, as norms, and, in
second reflexivity, as adaptive elements of the objects constructed by norms
in (ostensibly) normative fashion.
This takes us back to the point outlined at the beginning of this arti-
cle, that is, that the doctrines of constitutionalism in the Enlightenment
at once contained a normative theory of power and formed sociological
preconditions for power’s abstraction. Hegel clearly comprehended this.
He looked beyond both the normative and the sociological construction of
theory, and he clearly indicated that articulated elements of theory are an
internal and formative part of the societal phenomena (in this case, the polit-
ical system), which they describe. It is only very recently, in the sociology of
concepts, that the Hegelian insistence that theory is the intelligence of its
own object has been reappropriated.66 We are left to wonder what political
theory might have become had the potentials of the late-Idealist fusion of
normative and sociological inquiry been thoroughly perceived and placed at
the centre of European political debate. Indeed, we might lament the fact
that those promoting the disciplinary segregation between philosophy and
sociology that underpins the current academic division of labour did not
adequately appreciate how later Idealism traversed the boundary between
facts and norms and construed the idea of the legitimate constitution both
as an external measure of the political system and as the political system’s
internally articulated precondition.
Notes
1. This idea was of course already spelled out in the work of Hobbes, which stands at the
beginning of Enlightenment political reflection. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
(London: Dent, 1914), 66. This culminated in Kant’s rejection of the patrimonial state.
See Immanuel Kant, Zum Ewigen Frieden, in Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, 6 vols.
(Wiesbaden: Insel, 1956–62) [hereafter KW], vi, xi, 195–251, at 197.
2. The classical example is the process of legal codification in Prussia, culminating first in
1748 and then in 1794. In the Allgemeines Landrecht of 1794, the doctrine of natural rights
proposed by Svarez was vital for explaining the socially abstracted quality of the state.
See Carl Gottlieb Svarez, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Peter Krause, 6 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad
Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2000), iv/1, 69.
3. Reinhart Koselleck, Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution: allgemeines Landrecht, Ver-
waltung und soziale Bewegung von 1791 bis 1848 (2nd edn, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1977),
37.
4. Classically the first argument appears in Montesquieu and the second in Madison’s con-
tributions to The Federalist Papers.
5. One historian says, tellingly, of eighteenth-century France: ‘politics in the modern sense
of the word did not exist’; Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: natural law, politics and
the eighteenth-century French trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 46.
6. See, for example, the account of necessary principles of judicial organisation in Paul
Henri Thiry Baron d’Holbach, La Politique naturelle ou discours sur les vrais principes du
gouvernement, 2 vols. (London: n.p., 1773), i, 220–1.
7. See above, note 2.
8. See the classical revolutionary theory of the pouvoir constituant in Emmanuel-Joseph
Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? (2nd edn, Paris, 1789), 79. To illustrate the metaphysical
abstraction underlying principles of legislation in revolutionary France, see, as a paradig-
matic definition, the comments made by Cambacérès when providing drafts for the Jacobin
Civil Code in the National Assembly in 1794: ‘Combien grande est donc la mission du
législateur! Investi par le peuple souverain de l’exercice du pouvoir suprême, tenant dans
sa main tous les élémens sociaux, il les dispose, les arrange, les combine, les ordonne, et
tel que l’esprit créateur, après avoir donné l’être et la vie au corps politique, il lui imprime
la sagesse, qui en est comme la santé morale’; ‘Rapport fait à la Convention nationale sur
le deuxième projet du Code Civil par Cambacérès’, in Pierre-Antoine Fenet (ed.), Recueil
complet des travaux préparatoires du Code civil, 15 vols. (Paris: Au Dépôt,1827), i, 99–109, at
99.
9. See Olivier Beaud, La puissance de l’état (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994),
216–17.
10. Ranke, for example, argued that the maintenance of ‘security, of right and law’ is only fea-
sible where the historical shape and traditions of society are acknowledged and preserved:
Leopold von Ranke, ‘Einleitung’, in Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift 1 (1832), 1–9, at 5.
11. On the generally conservative disposition of early sociology, see Leon Bramson, The
Political Context of Sociology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 13–16;
Hermann Strasser, The Normative Structure of Sociology: conservative and emancipatory themes
in social thought (London: Routledge, 1976), 27.
78 Chris Thornhill
12. In this category of theorists, we can include (for all the great differences between them)
Bentham, Comte, early historicists such as Savigny and Hugo, and then also Hegel
and Marx. See for comment Adolf Menzel, ‘Naturrecht und Soziologie’, in Festschrift
zum einunddreißigsten Deutschen Juristentag (Vienna: Kaiserliche und königliche Hof-
Buchdruckerei, 1912), 1–60, at 24, 36. For a distinctive view on this, see the argument
throughout in Daniel Chernilo, The Natural Law Foundations of Modern Social Theory: a quest
for universalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
13. This tendency culminated in Durkheim’s eventual reconstruction of the state under law
and the rights-based state as the result of social evolution and the rise of organic solidarity;
Émile Durkheim, Leçons de sociologie: physique des moeurs et du droit (1900) (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1950), 92–3.
14. As an early example, see Bentham’s views on the French Declaration of Rights in Jeremy
Bentham, ‘Nonsense upon stilts’, in Bentham, Rights, Representation and Reform: ‘Nonsense
upon stilts’ and other writings on the French Revolution, ed. P. Schofield, C. Pease-Watkin and
C. Blamires (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), 317–97.
15. Durkheim’s science of moral facts is the endpoint in this trajectory. For analysis of antifor-
malism in sociology, see N. S. Timasheff, An Introduction to the Sociology of Law (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 45.
16. See Pierre Manent, La Cité de l’homme (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 73.
17. See Émile Durkheim, Montesquieu et Rousseau: précurseurs de la sociologie, introduction by
Georges Davy (Paris: M. Rivière, 1953).
18. Most importantly, Hume denied that laws of justice can be condensed into promises or
contracts which are ‘antecedent to human conventions’; David Hume, A Treatise of Human
Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 542. He also rejected the belief that nature
has ‘plac’d in the mind any peculiar original principles’ which might give necessary stable
form to human action or to the institutions in which human action is organised (Hume,
Treatise, 526). For an early anti-deductive version of constitutional theory see also Adam
Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762–6), ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stein
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 347.
19. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1960), 350.
20. Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, Éthocratie ou le Gouvernement fondé sur la Morale (Ams-
terdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 1776), 20–5.
21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Du contrat social’ et autres oeuvres politiques (Paris: Garnier, 1975),
87.
22. See the important account in Durkheim, Montesquieu et Rousseau.
23. Rousseau, ‘Du contrat social’ et autres oeuvres politiques, 243.
24. Rousseau states: ‘Il y a souvent bien de la différence entre la volonté de tous et la volonté
générale; celle-ci ne regarde qu’à l’intérêt commun; l’autre regarde à l’intérêt privé, et
n’est qu’une somme de volontés particulières’; Rousseau, ‘Du contrat social’ et autres oeuvres
politiques, 252.
25. Rousseau states again: ‘En effet, chaque individu peut, comme homme, avoir une volonté
particulière contraire ou dissemblable à la volonté qu’il a comme citoyen’; Rousseau, ‘Du
contrat social’ et autres oeuvres politiques, 246. The general will, in other words, does not
exist, or it only exists hypothetically.
26. See my account of this in Chris Thornhill, ‘Sociological enlightenments and the sociology
of political philosophy’, in Revue Internationale de Philosophie 259 (2012): 55–83.
27. For discussion, see Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: rational agency as ethical
life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 117.
28. Note in particular the debates around the Marburg school on this question. My reading is
strongly indebted to the view in Hermann Cohen, System der Philosophie ii: Ethik des reinen
Willens (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1904), 269.
29. KW iv, 525.
30. Ibid., 326.
31. Immanuel Kant, ‘Über den Gemeinspruch: das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber
nicht für die Praxis’, KW vi, 127–72, at 163.
32. Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, KW iv, 645–879, at
758.
33. Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, 437.
34. Ibid., 569.
35. For discussion of first and second nature see Kant, Die Religion, 758.
36. Most early sociologists specifically understood their theories as critical responses to Kant.
This is clear in Durkheim’s idea of sociology as a science of moral facts. But it is also visible
in Weber’s theory of ideal-types, designed to distil analytical paradigms from comparative
empirical inquiry.
37. See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, KW iv, 215. See also Hermann Cohen,
Kants Begründung der Ethik (2nd edn, Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1910), 306.
38. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts, in Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte, 8 vols. (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 1971) [hereafter FSW], iii, 1–385, at 8.
39. Ibid., 39.
40. Here Fichte clearly anticipated Marx’s distinction between rights of man and rights of
citizen. Notably, he proposed a theory of property rights based, not in an account of
such rights as invariable entitlements, but in a theory of rationally sanctioned actions.
See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Der geschlossene Handelsstaat, in Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte, iii,
387–513, at 401. For classic commentary on Marx and Fichte see Arnold Gehlen, ‘Über
die Geburt der Freiheit aus der Entfremdung’, in Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 11
(1952/3), 338–53, at 350.
41. Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts, 151.
42. See Damon Linker, ‘From Kant to Schelling: counter-Enlightenment in the name of
reason,’ Review of Metaphysics 54, no. 2 (2000), 337–77, at 338.
43. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus, in Werke,
ed. Manfred Schröter, 12 vols. (Munich: Beck and Oldenbourg, 1927–54), ii, 327–634, at
604.
44. Ibid., 586. Very good on Schelling’s early political thought is: Alexander Hollerbach, Der
Rechtsgedanke bei Schelling: Quellenstudien zu seiner Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie (Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann, 1957). On this point, see especially 84.
45. This substantial reconfiguration of equality and freedom as foundations for constitutional
order is expressed in G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, pt 3, in
Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–71) (hereafter HW), x, 332–3.
80 Chris Thornhill
46. The objective will underpinning the state is thus divided into three spheres of social
interaction: family, economy (civil society) and state. See G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der
Philosophie des Rechts, in HW vii, 306.
47. For other accounts of Hegel as an early sociologist, see Friedrich Jonas, Geschichte der Sozi-
ologie i: Aufklärung, Idealismus, Sozialismus: Übergang zur industriellen Gesellschaft (2nd edn,
Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1980). Jonas speaks unreservedly of ‘Hegelian sociology’, which
he sees as primarily focused on the sociology of institutions (154–5). Like my account,
Jonas views Hegel’s sociology as resulting from his perception that contemporary society,
which can no longer be shaped by ‘substantial unity or organic totality’, is irrevocably
defined by differentiation (161). On Hegel’s sociology of law, see Robert Fine and Rolando
Vázquez, ‘Freedom and subjectivity in modern society: re-reading Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right’, in Michael Freeman (ed.), Law and Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), 241–53. One recent commentator has described Hegel simply as ‘the sociologist
amongst legal philosophers’ for whom, contra Kant, legal-theoretical questions could not
be addressed without a construction of ‘social, historical and economic circumstances’;
Rainer Schmidt, Verfassungskultur und Verfassungssoziologie: politischer und rechtlicher Kon-
stitutionalismus im 19. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2012), 206. On the concept of
differentiation as a founding paradigm for the theory of modern society, see Niklas
Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1984), 261.
48. See Hans Boldt, ‘Hegel und die konstitutionelle Monarchie – Bemerkungen zu Hegels
Konzeption des Staates aus verfassungsgeschichtlicher Sicht’, in Elisabeth Weisser-
Lohmann and Dietmar Köhler (eds.), Verfassung und Revolution: Hegels Verfassungskonzeption
und die Revolutionen der Neuzeit (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2000), 167–209, at 180.
49. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 83.
50. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in HW iii, 356–8.
51. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, HW vii, 95.
52. Centrally, Hegel’s position here was opposed to Savigny’s idea of the Roman-legal per-
sonality as an emblem for human personality in a more general sense. See the argument
in Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Das Recht des Besitzes: eine civilistische Abhandlung (1803; 6th
edn, Giessen: Georg Friedrich Meyer, 1837).
53. HW vii, 233.
54. On the latter see Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, pt 3, 316.
55. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, HW vii, 252.
56. Ibid., 245.
57. Ibid., 76.
58. This outlook was a particular feature of early post-1806 Prussian constitutionalism. For a
similar theory, see Johann Friedrich Benzenberg, Ueber Verfassung (Dortmund: Wilhelm
Mallinckrodtsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1816), 247–8. The focus on the administration
of state as a legislative organ was close to the constitutional proposals drafted, although
never implemented, by Hardenberg at this time. See Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Ver-
fassungsgeschichte seit 1789, 6 vols. (2nd edn, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1957), i, 296.
59. Karl Marx, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte, in Frühe Schriften, ed. J.-J. Lieber and P.
Furth (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1962), 506–665, at 562.
60. He described Hegel’s philosophy of state, for example, as a ‘mystical abstraction’, incapable
of accounting for the factual material origins of political power. Karl Marx, Kritik des
Hegelschen Staatsrechts, in Werke, ed. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 43 vols. (Berlin:
Dietz, 1956), 203–333, at 263.
61. See my discussion in Chris Thornhill, ‘Luhmann and Marx: social theory and social free-
dom’, in Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and Anders La Cour (eds.), Observing
Luhmann: radical theoretical encounters (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 263–83.
62. Karl Marx, Zur Judenfrage, in Werke, ed. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, i, 347–77, at 370.
63. See the analysis in Karl Marx, ‘Verhandlungen des 6. rheinischen Landtags: Debatten über
das Holzdiebstahlgesetz’, in Werke, ed. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, i, 109–47, at 116,
199. Under conditions of capitalism, Marx argued that law can only appear to enable the
exercise of a free will and the pursuit of free interests where it is ‘torn away from its real
base’ in relations of property and exploitation, and where it is counterfactually proposed
to its addressees as a universal medium of equality and justice (Friedrich Engels and Karl
Marx, Die heilige Familie, in Werke, ed. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ii, 7–223, at 118).
This assertion of course imagines, correlatively, that a legitimate public order will be one
whose base is not rooted in exploitation.
64. See especially Carl Ludwig von Haller, Restauration der Staatswissenschaft, 6 vols. (2nd
edn,Winterthur: Steiner, 1821–5), iii, 166.
65. G. W. F. Hegel, Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal, in HW i, 274–418, at 394, 323.
66. Niklas Luhmann, Ideenevolution: Beiträge zur Wissenssoziologie, ed. André Kieserling
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 148.
4
German Idealism and Marx
Douglas Moggach
The concept of labour provides a key to understanding Marx’s complex

relations to his German Idealist precursors. Through it, he appropriates
and transforms the Idealist concept of spontaneity, develops his critique
of heteronomy and alienation under capitalism, and envisages the attain-
ment of genuine autonomy in socialism. We can thus connect Marx with
Hegel, but also more broadly to German thought since Kant, indeed since
Leibniz.
The Left Hegelian programme

In the works of Kant, Fichte, Schiller and Hegel, the effects of the European
Enlightenment and indigenous theoretical traditions stemming from
Leibniz were distilled into a philosophical revolution, elaborating new
conceptions of theoretical and practical reason and of reason’s legislative
authority in morality and politics. The essence of this revolution was an
engagement with modern society: an extended reflection on individuality,
autonomy and freedom. The fundamental issue of German Idealism is not to
impugn the external world, but to ask how we can rationally and freely relate
to it, and act in it. A resolute yet critical modernism imbues German Idealism
with its particular characteristics: for all its inner divergences,1 it is a practical
idealistic approach, a brilliant vindication of freedom. It develops ideas
of practical reason as the capacity to be self-legislating and autonomous,
and it stresses the self-causing, spontaneous quality of human action. The
world as it appears to the senses is not metaphysically unreal or illusory, but
derivative; German Idealism directs our attention to the formative activity
which underlies the objects of experience, and to processes of subjective
self-shaping.
82
German Idealism and Marx 83
The central claim of Hegel’s idealism is the unity of thought and being,
effected by the historical realisation of reason in the world. In his Philosophy
of Right (1820–1), Hegel affirms the identity of the real and the rational;2
but this claim is a technical, speculative proposition, asserting both iden-
tity and non-identity, or a processual synthesis wherein being does not
evaporate but is progressively made consonant with reason. Its interpre-
tation, in its positive and negative moments, provides one of the keys to
the subsequent history of Hegelianism. The reality or effectiveness of rea-
son (its Wirklichkeit, homologous with Aristotle’s energeia) might refer to an
ongoing, dynamic historical process, with the unity of being and thought,
the accord of the external world with the evolving demands of rational-
ity, as its still unachieved telos; alternatively, if the positive moment is
stressed, the principle might imply that the existing order already satisfies
the requirements of rational legitimacy. On this issue the Hegelian school
fractured.
From the 1820s onward, German conservatives excoriated Hegel for
his conception of evolving reason, as undermining the traditional political
order and religious orthodoxy.3 In response, some of his followers expressed
their own support for the existing authorities (although most of these
accommodationists still advocated reform). Others adopted more radical
conclusions, defending the achievements of the European Enlightenment
against Restoration retrenchment, and pressing beyond these, and beyond
Hegel’s own express commitments, to envisage new forms of liberty and
political association. Hegelians of all camps were quickly at the centre of
political contestation in the period known as the Vormärz, the prelude to the
German Revolutions of March 1848. As conservative opposition hardened,
the process of extracting an openly critical and revolutionary orientation
from Hegel became the common task of the Hegelian Left, including the
young Karl Marx.
The immediate objective for these Left Hegelians was the defence and
extension of Enlightenment rationality, with its critique of traditional
political and social forms. The Left stressed the historical openness and
critical character of Hegel’s thought. The category of spirit (Geist) did not
invoke a transcendent power, as some on the Hegelian Right maintained,
but was an anthropological and historical project, a process of emancipation,
propelled by contradiction and struggle, by clearer and fuller ideas of
reason and freedom. Regressions and failures cannot be precluded, and
the outcome has no metaphysical guarantee. In combating Restoration
orthodoxy, the Left Hegelians defined religion as a form of alienated
84 Douglas Moggach
spirit, or the human consciousness unaware of its own self-abnegating

activity. The incompatibility of religion and philosophy is a Leitmotif of this
thinking.
Left Hegelian criticism is not exhausted in the critique of religion,
but encompasses social and political forms that fail the test of advanc-
ing reason. The attack on privilege and hierarchy, the defence of popu-
lar sovereignty, and the achievement of a republican constitution based
upon the recognition of universal interests animated the Vormärz works of
Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) and Arnold Ruge (1802–1880). Envisaging new,
emancipated forms of social life, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) and Max
Stirner (1806–1856) diagnosed problems of alienation and isolating ego-
ism, though their solutions – solidarity or detachment – were antithetically
opposed.4
The fulfilment of the Enlightenment programme of emancipation also
meant confronting unprecedented social and economic problems. For the
Hegelian Left, the social question – the rise of capitalism and the appear-
ance of new forms of urban poverty – signalled in especially acute form the
incomplete rationality of modern society. Revising Hegel’s account of poverty
and of political and social exclusion in the Philosophy of Right, Eduard Gans
(1797–1839) described the concentration of economic power as a determi-
nate negation, the decisive problem which had to be addressed if there were
to be further progress in freedom.5 Hegel had identified the problem, but
not the elements of its resolution. The lineaments of a solution were now,
however, becoming visible, according to Gans, in some currents of French
social thought, particularly in St-Simon’s ideas of association (an early ver-
sion of trade unionism). For Gans this position involved no illicit utopian
projection of the future, but was a reflection on real historical tendencies
which were making themselves manifest in the present. According to these
principles, poverty, exclusion and oppression occurred in the modern labour
market because of a structural imbalance in bargaining power: the isolation
of the individual worker on the one hand, and the monopolistic advantages
accruing to capital owners on the other. A more just distribution of wealth
could be secured if workers associated and bargained collectively; yet, unlike
his student Karl Marx (at least as the latter’s position had crystallised by
late 1843), Gans repudiated collective property as inimical to freedom and
individuality. Despite fundamental differences, the young Marx shared with
other Left Hegelians the view that the social question and urban poverty
made it necessary to rethink the relations between the state and civil society,
as these had been developed in German Idealism.
The resources of Idealism

To confront these issues, the Hegelian Left, including Marx, availed them-
selves of the rich resources developed by their Idealist precursors. For Hegel,
the great merit of the Enlightenment is its discovery that everything exists
for the subject, whether in the form of utility, or as matter for the expression
of freedom.6 Before him, Kant, acknowledging his debt to the Enlighten-
ment, describes this period as an epochal turning point: the shaking off of
self-imposed tutelage, marking the historical maturation of the species. Sub-
jects now seek to give a rational account of themselves and of the maxims
which are to govern their activities, independent of external authorities.7
Freedom becomes the primary value, not as antinomian denial of law, but as
an inquiry into what the self may rightfully claim and do.
Building on Enlightenment conceptions, the Kantian tradition also
undertakes a critique of these ideas. Empiricist and materialist theorists
in the Enlightenment (Helvetius8 and Holbach9 , for example, with Hobbes
as an early progenitor) had understood the centrality of the modern subject
through categories like utility and its cognates; the world existed as mate-
rial for the satisfaction of need, and the maximisation of happiness. On the
Kantian account, however, these currents had failed to grasp adequately
the nature of subjectivity. Enlightenment materialists had overnaturalised
the subject, subsuming its activities completely under natural necessity; they
had produced a reductionist account of agency, in which subjects were largely
determined in their desires by the effects of sensibility or of nature upon
them.10 While the Enlightenment divests nature of its earlier meaning as a
normative order, thus opening the possibility of the emancipation and self-
definition of subjects, it proceeds immediately to constrict these subjects
anew: natural necessity continues to control them through the mechanisms
of their needs and desires, conceived deterministically. Such subjects (as
Marx, too, later observed)11 are essentially passive, merely responding to nat-
ural imperatives, and fully integrated within the causal nexus of the natural
order. For Kant and the Idealists, the error of the materialists is to minimise
the capacity of subjects to abstract from motives of sensibility and immediate
interest, and to submit these to rational examination and critique. The error
is to deny to subjects their intrinsic spontaneity. So too Marx will contend.
In response to this picture of the passive self, German Idealism draws on
indigenous traditions stemming from Leibniz to attribute a greater spon-
taneity and self-determination to subjective action. Leibniz conceives of sub-
jects as inwardly self-determining centres of force and change, or monads.
86 Douglas Moggach
For Leibniz, spontaneity means constant change in response to an inter-

nal imperative. Each monad is unique in its perspective on the world. Each
is active and self-directing, revealing in its actions an inner content. The
activity of monads can be explained from their own intrinsic properties, not
from external natural causality (though Leibniz does not deny mechanist
causal laws; they have their legitimate sphere of operation in the derivative,
phenomenal world which the monads structure in their purposive, self-
directed movements). Action is revelation or exhibition of a spontaneous
force. Leibniz distinguishes primary and derivative forces: the grounding
level of activity, and the grounded level of phenomenal expression (Marx’s
distinction between the sphere of production and that of circulation and
exchange is a variant of this idea). Perceptible appearances are a result, the
consequence of the diffusion of forces which stem from the spontaneous
activities of subjects.12
Consequently, the relation of subject and object achieves a new salience.
How is the subject to be conceived as the active source of form in the world?
What reflexive, self-conscious relations do subjects take up in respect to
their products or manifestations? Do subjects find themselves confirmed
in their externalisations, or distorted and truncated in them? The various
schools of German Romanticism arise in response to such questions: the
particularism of Herder, with his expressivist view of freedom (thought
and being correspond from the unique perspective proper to each subject,
deploying its own powers to manifest its particular content in the world);
or the ironic detachment of Friedrich Schlegel, where the self in its infinite
creative potentiality cannot recognise itself in its fragmentary deed, and
knows its freedom precisely in this diremption.13 Most significantly, the
central idea of German Idealism, in opposition to Romanticism, emerges in
this context: to the extent that subject and object, reason and objectivity,
diverge, this disjunction is not taken to be an absolute barrier to the self, but
sets a task for rational activity: to secure the correspondence of thought and
being, to realise reason in the world of the senses. Marx is an inheritor of this
approach, and undertakes the task in his own distinctive way.
Spontaneity is a central and distinctive concept of German philosophy
since Leibniz,14 and while the Leibnizian and Kantian versions differ sig-
nificantly, the core idea is the ability not to be ruled from without, but to
be actively self-determining. This idea underlies the imperative to bring the
external and internal world under rational direction, which is the hallmark
of German Idealism in its development of the Enlightenment project. The-
oretically, Kant characterises spontaneity as the mind’s power of producing
representations out of itself.15 Practically, it refers to the will’s capacity to

exempt itself in significant respects from external causal determination; to
direct its course according to self-imposed rules or maxims which are them-
selves not causally derived; and to initiate changes in the external world and
the self which are not uniquely or exhaustively prescribed by causal mech-
anisms. This implies that subjects are able to admit causes selectively over
a significant range, according to some criterion or norm.16 Negative free-
dom in Kant’s sense is precisely this independence of the will from desires,
and the capacity to adjudicate among them; the will is not directly deter-
mined by objects of desire, but by causes which it itself admits, or allows to
operate.17 From spontaneity flow the other concepts which Kant adduces in
his account of agency: autonomy or self-legislation; heteronomy (determina-
tion from without, but with the self’s active compliance); and determinability
(the self’s capacity to determine a range of its empirical properties, by select-
ing among options, in accord with an evaluative standard).18 Kant further
distinguishes pure practical reason, or rational autonomy, with its categor-
ically binding maxims, from the domain of instrumental and hypothetical
reasonings oriented toward need fulfilment (empirical practical reason) –
and thus establishes a key distinction between right and morality, on the
one hand, and welfare or happiness, on the other. These notions will prove
central to post-Kantian political thinking.
Hegel further enriches these conceptions with his idea of ethical life,
where autonomy becomes concrete in institutions and intersubjective rela-
tions. Hegel himself provides two distinct images of modern culture, as a
culture of diremption, fragmentation and alienation,19 and as the potential
realisation of rational autonomy. These images are not merely externally
opposed, but are aspects of the same processes of modernity. Alienation and
emancipation are rooted in the same ground.
The latter image is that of the Philosophy of Right, where Hegel designates
the ‘free and infinite personality’ as the decisive political accomplishment of
modernity.a,20 He describes two complementary movements which together
constitute the modern self: outward expansion of particularity, and inner
reflection into unity, or universality.21 The attainment of rational freedom
requires both the vigorous outpouring of particularity – in the growing dif-
ferentiation of needs and functions, and demands for subjective recognition –
and a counterbalancing movement, or a self-aware return to unity in political
institutions and ethical relations. The unprecedented expansion of the scope
a. ‘[D]ie freie unendliche Persönlichkeit’. HW vii, 24

88 Douglas Moggach
of interests and activities, the increasing division of labour, the right to satisfy
private purposes, and the autonomous moral conscience characterise the new
affirmative self-consciousness of modern subjects. But, according to Hegel,
not only particularity, but universality, is recast. Modern solidarities are also
constituted by acts of freedom and recognition, synthesising the multiple
into a unity, not through imposed homogeneity, but in mutual affirmation.
This unity is achieved in political institutions in which subjects recognise
each other as amplifying, and not only limiting, one another’s freedom. For
Hegel, the rational state, the telos toward which modernity tends, combines
spontaneity or freedom, with autonomy or self-legislation. It engenders a
unity consistent with the underlying diversity of particular aims and quests
for satisfaction.22
Yet Hegel also offers a contrasting image of the modern world and its
developmental trajectory. Following Schiller,23 he describes modernity as
a culture of rigid opposition, fragmentation or diremption, an assertion
of unbridled particularity. In this image, the expansive and the reflexive
motions initiated by modern subjectivity fail to harmonise with each other.
The moment of particularisation gains predominance over recursive unity.
Thus, particular interests remain locked in stubborn opposition, and the
centrifugal forces threaten to overwhelm the integrative capacities of mod-
ern institutions. This image is one of mutual antagonism between subject
and subject, subject and object.24 Hegel locates these intractable contradic-
tions in his own Romantic contemporaries,25 who irresponsibly extol the
tensions and conflicts of the modern world: for them, diremption is a state
of freedom, once it is consciously embraced. Hegel’s contrasting visions
of modernity anticipate, in part, Marx’s own view of the inner dialectic of
capitalism. This culture of diremption par excellence expands the productive
forces immeasurably, while generating class antagonism, but also creates
in the same movement the conditions for its own transcendence in a new
rational community, now situated beyond the political state.
The tensions between universality and particularity are incorporated
into Hegel’s analysis of modern ethical life. Fundamental to this conception
is the distinction between state and civil society, which Hegel, adopting
the findings of political economy from Smith to Ricardo, theorises in
the Philosophy of Right. Civil society is redefined as the realm of market
transactions, while the state stands outside it, not only as its guardian,
but as a higher ethical domain enabling a distinct kind of freedom as
citizenship, and a more conscious universality as membership in a rationally
ordered community.26 Elaborating Kantian practical reason, Hegel seeks
to accommodate both the spontaneity and the autonomy of the will.

He recognises the market as a legitimate expression of particularity: of
modern juridical right, of the modern division of labour, and of material
satisfactions. To this extent the market realises the claims to spontaneity. If
it is a condition of possibility of an alienated culture, it is also an essential
moment of the free and infinite personality. The result depends on how the
market is contained and governed by the state, the realm where fuller and
more concrete autonomy can be practised;27 but the relation between these
spheres remains problematic. Though each has a valid range of application,
the two identities inscribed in modern conceptual schemes, as citizen and
as member of civil-economic society, can come into sharp opposition.
Viewing property as an important expression of the will and an objectifi-
cation of freedom, Hegel also recognises that modern civil society or the mar-
ket contains negations, which limit its full rationality, or its adequacy to the
concept of freedom: exclusions from satisfaction and subjective right based
upon poverty, growing polarisation between rich and poor, and endemic
tendencies toward overproduction and crisis.28 Though acknowledging the
intractability of these problems, and refusing on principled grounds to antic-
ipate the future, whose course is open to free intervention, Hegel seeks
mediating institutions whereby the market might be contained, but not sup-
pressed, so that its logic does not pervade and dominate the political sphere
and so that its dissolving effects can be mitigated. This question and its
possible resolution remain at the centre of post-Hegelian reflection.
For the Left Hegelians, the existence of the proletariat represented a
standing challenge to the rationality of the existing political and social
order. Addressing the new problems of urban poverty and exclusion, Vormärz
Hegelians such as Bruno Bauer and Arnold Ruge argued that the future
republican state was to maintain its role as the forum for the representation
of rational freedom and general interests while promoting conditions of self-
determination in other spheres of social life. Modern atomised civil society,
with its incumbent dangers of particularism and diremption, was not to be
abolished, because to do so would also abolish the conditions of rightful
spontaneous action; but the market was to be politically contained, directed
and reformed. Claiming that Hegel’s state theory represented an untenable
compromise between two incompatible principles, those of monarchical and
of popular sovereignty, they urged a more radical formulation of the nature
and basis of the state in the recognition of the supremacy of the people and its
capacity to be rationally autonomous, prescribing for itself its own political
constitution.29
90 Douglas Moggach
Like Gans before them, Vormärz republicans maintained, against Hegel’s

more sceptical assessment, that the solution of the social question was now
a concrete possibility.30 The achievement of the rational state which Hegel
had theorised, but which remained an ideal, an object of struggle, entailed
the education of workers, the humanisation of their living conditions and
the promotion of new types of self-consciousness – reforms which not only
would eliminate pauperism, but would permeate all social relations with
justice, and stimulate new forms of social and cultural creation.31 Bauer’s
critique of particularism stresses the need to reconceive labour, not as a mere
means to egoistic need fulfilment, but as a vehicle of creativity, a manifes-
tation of pure practical reason, expressing spontaneity. Freedom is won in
struggle. No state, not even the republican state, can grant emancipation;
freedom is no gift from above, but must be won by conscious effort.32
From autumn 1843, Marx takes the self-emancipation of the working
class to be the hallmark of his own specific form of socialism. Echoing a
phrase of Schiller,33 Marx claims that theory becomes a material force when
it arouses the masses to political action.34 Marx’s polemics with Hegelian
republicans help to define the character of his socialist project. For Marx,
republicanism consolidates but does not transform bourgeois civil society.
Marx describes the fetish character of the republican state, suspended above
civil society but unable to create a genuine common interest where the
economy remains divided by class.35 By setting up a sphere of spurious
political universality, an illusory community, republicanism leaves intact the
individualistic and egoistic strivings of civil society, thus confirming and
masking rather than challenging the hegemony of capital.36 For Marx, under
socialism, the universality which the state represents only abstractly is to
become effective and concrete by penetrating and transforming the relations
which sustain and reproduce material social life. Thus, from its inception,
Marx’s theory of socialism is inspired by the idea of a universal which is not
separated off into its own quasi-celestial political sphere, but which infuses
the material realities of labour. In working out these ideas, Marx refashions
the Kantian antinomies of autonomy and heteronomy, and of spontaneity
and receptivity.
Labour and spontaneity

Like Kant, Marx too observes the essentially passive character of Enlight-
enment materialism, its tendency to subordinate individuals to natural
impulses, and, in Marx’s formulation, its privileging of consumption over
production. He sees his own version of materialism, based on labour, as

indebted (though problematically) to the activist notions of his Idealist
precursors.37 Labour is Marx’s version of spontaneity. Just as Kant’s concept
is not identical to Leibniz’s, so Marx’s is distinct but related to both. In the
ways that it connects teleology with the causal nexus, Marx’s conception is
more compatibilist than the stricter rendering of Kantian negative freedom.
But it avoids the defects of previous materialism by retaining the core ide-
alistic meaning of spontaneity as (potentially) self-directed and self-causing
activity. Labour involves the engagement of subjective teleology with objec-
tive causal mechanisms, both natural and social-historical. Working subjects
are not mere bearers of an engulfing natural necessity, but originate their
projects, either freely or under social compulsion, in ways which are not
uniquely causally prescribed.38 Their activity in taking up and transform-
ing a given manifold in work is guided by a concept, whose origin is no
longer a priori but contextual and historical. The range of available ends in
labour is always constrained by historically evolving technical possibilities,
but also by the social form of labour (organising co-operation in various
ways, even in antithetical form as atomised) and by the prevailing relations
of appropriation of its instrumental conditions and its product.
In the active transformation of nature according to a concept or rule, the
scope of labour is not exhausted in the satisfaction of material need. Labour
is not merely the expression of empirical practical reason, or of the quest
for happiness; it overlaps with the domain of pure practical reason (though
Marx dispenses with that term as unnecessary Idealist baggage). Labour is an
expression of freedom, even when that expression assumes a negative form
in the denial of freedom, as under the prevailing capitalist relations of pro-
duction. Because labour manifests freedom as well as necessity, its centrality
avoids the defects that Marx uncovers in previous materialism, the denial
of subjective spontaneity. The intrinsic connection of labour and freedom
recurs in Marx’s notion of alienation, as the suppression not just of material
satisfaction, but of free self-expression;39 and in the notion of the proletariat,
not only as the exploited, suffering class, but as an active, formative power,
revolutionary in its capacity as the determinate negation of existing produc-
tive relations.40 The defining feature or ground of existence of capitalism,
the separation of the workers from the means of production, is also its limit,
marking out the conditions and the agency of its possible overthrow. Marx’s
repudiation of the sentimental socialisms of his day, which stress the misery
imposed on workers by the inhumanity of capitalistically structured life,41
represents his acknowledgement of labour as a spontaneous, creative force,
92 Douglas Moggach
even in conditions of its estrangement. His insistence that the exploitation

of labour cannot be remedied merely by a more favourable distribution of
consumption goods, but only the transformation of productive relations,
underlines the same point (though struggles over distribution are strate-
gically far from negligible, as they can lead to a deepening consciousness
of antagonistic interests). Marx transforms Kant’s moral ideas by defining
the alienation of labour as heteronomous determination by alien wills, and
by conceiving socialism, the emancipation of labour from its capitalist con-
straints, as autonomy made concrete.
The subject of labour had been addressed explicitly by Kant and the
Idealists. In ‘Idea for a Universal History’,42 Kant defined labour as break-
ing the inertia and passive satisfaction of the self, which finds in work a
means of its own liberation from heteronomous determination by sensuous
impulses. The first movement of freedom lies in the discipline and training
of these impulses, and the development of subjective capacities to formulate
and secure ends. Hegel’s Phenomenology elaborates this insight through the
incipient and defective intersubjectivity of the master–slave relation.43
Marx’s understanding of labour is also nourished by Fichte, who makes
the link between labour and spontaneity thematic. The Closed Commercial
State44 is intended to secure not primarily the happiness of subjects but
their freedom, that is, to maintain the conditions for the exercise of the
free causality of each individual in the world, and to assure a just system
of distribution, in which none can rightfully enjoy luxuries until all are
able to provide themselves with necessities.45 Fichte argues that the sphere
of right can be illegitimately constricted by economic institutions when,
as a result of inequality in civil society, some individuals are deprived of
access to the means of activity in the objective world, and thus are denied
freedom. Despite its problematic controls and regulations, Fichte’s inter-
ventionist state is designed to preserve the possibility of free causality and
spontaneity for all subjects, consistent with the basic principles of Kantian
juridical thought. In contrast to Wilhelm von Humboldt, for example, who
had derived from his reading of Kant the idea of extremely circumscribed
state action,46 Fichte’s attention to the material conditions of freedom marks
him as a precursor to Marx’s own view of labour. Both The Foundations of Nat-
ural Right47 and The Closed Commercial State focus on freedom and action in
their juridical aspects as the right of spontaneity, the right to initiate changes
in the world of the senses in accord with our concepts and purposes, and
to bring these processes to fruition. The right to labour is the fundamental
juridical principle: to be a cause of change in the material world, and to be
recognised as this cause. An ought governs the moral and juridical spheres,
enjoining subjects to processes of social creation, extending the scope of
rightful action, and gradually perfecting intersubjective relations under the
command of morality.
Yet the connection between Marx and post-Kantian Idealism lies at an
even deeper level. Fichte’s and Hegel’s elaborations of the Kantian account
of experience offer insight into the passage from Kant to Marx. As the post-
Kantians perceived, the defence of the activity and spontaneity of the self,
its freedom in the world of objectivity, can be developed from resources
internal to Kant’s first Critique. It is possible to show, on Kantian grounds,
that the cognising subject is at least partly self-determining in relating to the
objects of experience. The spontaneous activities involved in the cognitive
appropriation of a given manifold, and their analogues in practical action,
are central Idealist discoveries.
Kant defines experience as the unification of an intuited sensory manifold
according to the a priori rules or concepts prescribed by the understanding.
The distinction between concept and intuition, central to the critical project
(Kant had censured Leibniz for conflating these terms), is, however, not to
be understood as the distinction between activity, on the one hand, and mere
passive reception, on the other. The pure forms of intuition (space and time)
are the medium by which an external content is given to consciousness, and
they already involve for Kant himself a degree of activity and spontaneity,
even though he reserves the latter term for the synthesising acts of the under-
standing. The intuitive moment, the appropriation of an external content
within consciousness, is never a matter of simple determination from with-
out. Intuition refers to the active reception of a given content, a positing or
taking up, by which the knowing subject assumes a relation to that which is
external to it. This is not the assertion of an unbounded freedom or complete
exemption from any external constraints, but rather an activist idea that the
objective world is present for the self only through the self’s own exertions.
This activity, already implicit in Kant’s pure forms of intuition, is expressly
thematised in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre.48 The intuited content, next, is sub-
ject to further active transformation, as matter to be shaped, determinable
in the light of concepts or ends. The historicisation of these concepts and
the changing shapes of their articulation (as modes of experience of self and
world)49 are traced in Hegel’s Phenomenology.50 For the post-Kantians, the
activity implicit in the cognitive synthesis of a given manifold in pure reason
offers important analogies with the material synthesis effected in the sphere
of practical reason. The relation between concept and intuition not only
94 Douglas Moggach
establishes the activity of the self in its epistemic relations, but also opens
the way to distinct models of labour.
In ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, Marx criticises the bifurcation of modern phi-
losophy into (mechanistic) materialist and (subjective) idealist currents. The
former defends receptivity but denies spontaneity, whereas the latter (on
Marx’s account) confines activity to intellectual labour or goal-setting, but
abstracts from the processes of realisation. In its central concept of labour,
Marx’s new, activist materialism synthesises teleology and causality, pur-
pose and process, integrating subjective and objective dimensions which, he
argues, modern philosophy has sundered.51
While, in light of the foregoing, this criticism seems spurious in respect to
Fichte and Hegel, Marx’s argument against Feuerbach carries greater weight.
The relative independence of the given manifold to be synthesised, and the
priority of that matter to its subsequent conceptualisation, are the central
claims of Feuerbachian naturalism.52 Stressing the immersion of human
beings in their natural milieu, Feuerbach seeks to block the more activist
readings of intuition, retaining instead precisely the sense of passivity and
receptiveness against which the post-Kantian idealists had contended. Feuer-
bach’s critique of Hegel is an attempt to restore the independence of the
moment of intuition which, he claims, had been assimilated by the Hegelian
concept. In essence, he maintains that Hegel effaces the concept/intuition
distinction, falling back on a Leibnizian, pre-critical position. Feuerbach
stresses instead the priority and irreducibility of the material element to
thought.53 Marx agrees with Feuerbach that idealism inverts the relation of
subject and predicate when it hypostatises thought as the genuine subject,
and reduces concrete individuals to its bearers. This reversal also accounts for
the false positivism which permeates Hegel’s accounts of state and society, his
tendency to seek arbitrary exemplifications of pre-existing logical categories,
from which ensues his apparent accommodation with the existing order.54
While criticising the passivity of Feuerbach’s materialism,55 its preference
for perception over action and for sentiment over robust self-determination,
Marx continues to stress the independence of the natural substrate within
the newly conceived labour process. This is Marx’s materialist rendering of
Kantian intuition. Correlative to intuition, the concept now refers to the
transformation of this given material according to rules, which are not a
priori in the Kantian sense, but empirical and historical, governing how pur-
poses can be realised through objective causal connections. Two models of
labour can be distinguished in Marx’s work, one beginning with the concept
or purpose of action, the other with the reception of a given manifold. The
Kantian concept and intuition are thus reconfigured in Marx’s account of

labour.
Marx’s theory of labour in the 1844 Paris Manuscripts56 implicitly repro-
duces the threefold form of (external) teleology in Hegel’s Science of Logic.57
As intentional action, the labour process consists in three moments: subjec-
tive end, means, and objective or realised end. The alienation of labour is
the subversion of the connection between active subjects and the purposes
they pursue in their activity. The imposition of ends by the owners of the
productive apparatus prevents the self-determination of subjects in work.
Prescribed by an alien subjectivity, these ends are heteronomous, and violate
the principle of self-activity which Marx takes to be the essence of freedom.
Here Marx critically extends to the labour process the Kantian idea of auton-
omy and its opposite. Similarly, active subjects are deprived of control over
the instruments and processes of their labour, and are themselves reduced
to the status of instruments of another’s will, for the duration of their work-
ing time. They also forfeit the results of their labour to the proprietors of
the productive apparatus; and their activity reproduces the very conditions
of their own subjugation.58 The autonomy of labour, the overcoming of
alienation, implies that workers gain control over the forms and purposes of
the material interchange which they conduct with nature. This requires, for
Marx, collective property in the means of production.
In Capital, Marx will invoke the same teleological structure to describe
the qualitative character of concrete labour. Its qualitative aspect or determi-
nacy is derived from the particular result which is aimed at, from the specific
purpose which initiates the labour process.59 Here is an important revision
of the Kantian account. For Kant, it is intuition, not the concept, which pro-
vides determinacy to experience. The generality of the concept is rendered
specific and endowed with content by the specific features of the intuited
material, determining which of the realm of abstract possibilities is realised
in experience; hence Kant’s famous phrase that the concepts without intu-
itions are empty.60 In the analysis of labour as teleological action, however,
Marx appears to be attributing to the concept the role of specification and
determination, insofar as labours are distinguished by the particular needs
toward which their products are directed. This is to inflect Kant in a Fichtean
direction, where the concept becomes the condition of possibility for any
particular intuition. Marx’s later account of concrete labour maintains this
orientation. Such an intentional account can be distinguished from one in
which the purpose does not precede the act of labouring, but is intrinsic to
it. Marx’s work contains both perspectives.61
96 Douglas Moggach
The German Ideology of 1845–6 introduces the second model, which

abstracts from subjective purpose as its initial moment, and focuses instead
on the structural determinants of labour. This model begins not with the
determinacy of a particular goal, but with the given objective contents to
be synthesised. By shifting emphasis away from the initiatory moment as
teleological, the new model begins to conceive labour in abstraction from
its specific goal-directed forms. Now the first moment is the conditions of
labour, both natural and instrumental, which are given independently of
volition and must be taken up in conscious action. The second moment is
activity itself, understood in its duality as goal setting and execution (thus
not dismissing teleology, but construing purpose as intrinsic to the action).
The third moment is the product, not as the crystallisation of a particular
goal, but as the transformation of the given manifold. Labouring subjects
confront conditions independent of their wills which they must reproduce
and transform.62 As a facet of this activity, goal formation refers to the ways
in which the given manifold can be modified; its range is circumscribed by the
objective possibilities contained in that manifold. These material constraints
are to be sharply distinguished from the heteronomous imposition of ends
through social relations of subordination. Through this conception Marx
recasts the Kantian idea of intuition as the reception of a given manifold,
and focuses on the material synthesis of the given. Later, in Capital, where
products reappear as conditions of new production, Marx’s analysis demon-
strates that the conditions of activity which had initially appeared as a given
starting point are in fact the result of past labour. The given reveals itself,
upon analysis, to be highly mediated. The intuition of the sensory manifold
is thus historicised, opening access to the historical process as the systematic
and cumulative history of labour, and to the idea of modes of production as
different ways of organising the reproductive cycle, the recurrent relation
between activity, preconditions and product.
Despite its antispeculative intentions, The German Ideology manifests
its Hegelian roots in describing the culture of diremption in the sphere
of circulation and the market, where workers compete against each other
for employment; and in its contention that this culture of division and
fragmentation exists in tension with another reality, that of processes of
integration and fusion of interest. Marx reads these processes as the creation
of a new revolutionary subject within the sphere of production, forged under
the constraints of capitalist accumulation. This subject is uniquely equipped
to realise the Hegelian ideal of the free and infinite personality, once it is no
longer hampered by the division of labour in its capitalist guise. In stressing
the active, transformative historical role of the working class, and not
primarily its suffering or immiseration, Marx again takes up the legacy of
Idealism, where empirical practical reason and happiness are ancillary to the
idea of freedom prescribed by pure practical reason. For Marx, the Idealists
had failed to think through the principle of autonomy to its radical con-
clusions, but had rightly stressed the primacy of activity. This activity now
needs to be reinterpreted as the social and material interplay with nature.
Collective control of the means of production liberates individuals from
their subordination to the division of labour, and overcomes the opposition
of particular and general interest rooted in private property. The correspond-
ing realisation of the right to work (though Marx rejects this term as merely
legalistic) is the establishment of a free, conscious and willed connection
between labour and its preconditions, the material basis for autonomy.
The German Ideology, moreover, displays a certain Hegelian logic in the
opposing dialectical syllogisms of class formation of the bourgeoisie and
proletariat (the many ones, and the many coalesced as one);63 but the stress
on the concrete immediacy of premises in The German Ideology – on their
intuitional givenness – cedes to a dialectic of the abstract and the concrete in
the Grundrisse and Capital,64 by which concrete labours can also be depicted as
quantitative variations in the formally undifferentiated expenditure of labour
power.65 Both teleological and structural models together are necessary for
Marx’s decipherment of surplus value and of capitalist dynamics.
Marx’s description of two discrete models of activity heralds a distinction
fundamental to Capital, between concrete labour and formally undifferenti-
ated social labour (appearing in capitalism as abstract labour). In the 1840s,
Marx does not yet formulate this distinction, but through the second, struc-
tural model takes an important step towards it by identifying a common
essence of labour irrespective of its concrete forms.66 The duality of labour,
teleological and structural, in Marx’s work before 1848 does not imply an
‘epistemological break’ between an early philosophical and a later scientific
Marx,67 since he does not abandon the teleological model as a humanistic
deviation, but reintegrates it decisively. In the dialectic of abstract and con-
crete labour, from which the theory of surplus value derives, Capital effects
the theoretical synthesis of the two models.
Concrete labour is qualitatively determined, and it is so in virtue of
its concept (and not, as in Kantian experience, by its intuitive content); it
produces use values to serve a specific end, whether of consumption or further
production. As concrete, labour is conceived according to the teleological
model, as the realisation of a particular directive purpose.68 Abstract labour,
98 Douglas Moggach
on the other hand, allows for only quantitative variations as expressions

of a common substance. It reduces all labour to an identical essence, the
expenditure of human formative energy, distinguished only in its duration
and intensity, but not by the specific products which it yields. It generates
value, whose measure is the amount of labour time socially necessary to
reproduce the product.69 In capitalism, products appear as commodities for
exchange on the market, and these commodities can be conceived from both
vantage points, as use values directed to some specific end, and as exchange
values or quanta of labour time, manifesting in their very structure the
duality of labour which produces them.
Surplus value, the secret of the capitalist exploitation of labour, origi-
nates in the disparity between the value of the commodity labour power (the
wage as the measure of the consumption package necessary, at a particular
historic time and place, for the workers to reproduce themselves, and to be
able to work again) and the use value of that same labour power, its capacity
to produce goods whose value exceeds its own cost of reproduction. Unlike
previous social forms where those who laboured retained a more direct con-
nection with the instruments and conditions of their work,70 the defining
character of capitalism is the creation of the proletariat as a class without
property, or the sundering/alienation of the workers from their means of
production. Now monopolised by the capitalist class, the productive appa-
ratus is accessible to the workers only through the sale of their capacity
to work. Labour power has itself become a commodity under capitalism,
bought and sold at its value; once the workers in their daily activities have
reproduced the value equivalent of their wage in the form of new products
destined for the market, they then furnish essentially unpaid labour to the
capitalist for the remainder of their working day.71 The source of capitalist
profit is not that labour is paid less than its value, as Gans had believed; it lies
rather in the dialectic of use value and exchange value, and beneath that in the
duality of labour as both teleologically directed and formally indeterminate.
In Capital, and its preliminary studies entitled the Grundrisse, Marx effects
what has been described as a second appropriation of Hegel.72 He identifies a
homology between the abstractive processes of capital (the universality of the
commodity form which, under the concept of exchange value, homogenises
the products of concrete labour), and the abstractions of Hegelian logic,
which seeks to identify pure essences devoid of contingencies.73 On the basis
of this homology, Marx depicts the alienated forms of mediation among
individuals and classes through the fetishism of commodities. He deci-
phers the logic of capital as analogous to that of a self-organising concept,
distinguishing itself in its movement into various spheres of activity (produc-

tion, circulation, distribution). He examines the relations which sustain the
reproductive process of capitalist society, relations both within the labour
process, and among various economic actors and classes in respect to owner-
ship and control of the means of production. He offers a historical account
of the emergence of capitalism from preceding forms through the expropria-
tion of the direct producers, and a study of its determinate negations derived
from the defining feature of the system, the divorce of workers from their
means of production. The essential logical operation is that of mediation,
which involves neither mere inert thinghood on the side of objectivity, nor
the mere aggregation of subjects, but relational forms in which apparently
fixed and stable realities are shown to emerge from processes of activity,
transformation and change. As in Leibniz, the level of phenomenal appear-
ance (now the market, profit or the commodity itself) derives from a more
fundamental level of active deployment of force: now production, surplus
value, labour. The result is not an undifferentiated Spinozistic whole, but
an articulated totality of relations and spheres of activity. This is a decisive
Hegelian moment in Marx’s work.
If Capital is a work of science, it is so not in the positivist sense in which it
was later interpreted by official Marxism, with its deterministic programme
of dialectical materialism. Marx’s scientific approach is analogous to Hegel’s
critique of the abstract Kantian ought, but this does not mean that it is devoid
of normative elements.74 Hegel’s insistence on the rationality of the real is
the recognition of objective contradictions and processes of development,
the identification of determinate negations which condition and limit possi-
ble development. Marx’s science remains opposed to the abstract subjective
fancies of utopian socialism, but it is also irreducible to natural scientific
methods. It is intended to trace the logic of development immanent in the
capitalist mode of production so as to lay bare its characteristic processes
of determinate negation and thus find laws defining the emergence of the
specific phenomena of social life.
Post-Kantian perfectionism
Despite his critique of moralism, Marx’s programme of emancipation retains
ethical elements of post-Kantian perfectionism typical of the Hegelian Left.75
Marx’s position has been described as a self-realisation account of freedom,76
or as an account of freedom as the expression of expansive non-volitional
needs (independent of subjective preferences,77 and containing both fixed
100 Douglas Moggach
and historically variable components78 ). It is perfectionist in holding that

the development of certain capabilities is of intrinsic, and not merely instru-
mental, value.79 For Marx, these capacities include the satisfaction of basic
physical needs, but also, expansively, intellectual and cultural development,
the exercise of labour as spontaneous creativity, and membership in a
community.
Prior to Kant, perfectionist theories (ultimately Aristotelian in origin,
with Christian Wolff as a significant Enlightenment proponent)80 had
invoked a fixed human nature, and sought the conditions for its material,
mental and spiritual thriving. In affinity with cameralist economics81 (which
Marx would encounter in his own university studies), Wolff espoused an
interventionist enlightened absolutism, whose objective was to guarantee
adequate living standards, education, housing and environment, to promote
the happiness of the population through the development of the local pro-
ductive forces: a tutelary state which Kant would repudiate in ‘Theory and
Practice’82 as the paternalistic denial of freedom qua spontaneity. Marx’s
own perfectionism, in its account of standard and non-standard needs, risks
appearing as a self-managing variant of Wolffianism, unless we understand
its expressly post-Kantian character, that is, its endorsement of spontaneity
and freedom, and not only need satisfaction. But it is precisely here that an
important ambiguity lies.
Post-Kantian perfectionists from Schiller and Fichte onwards, through
the Hegelian School, repudiated Wolff’s view of predetermined natural ends
and predicated their theories instead on spontaneity and self-creation. They
also rejected the Leibnizian idea of a pre-established harmony of interests,
in favour of the view that harmony is a (problematic) result to be achieved
through conscious and concerted effort. These theories accommodated in
different ways the Kantian distinction between empirical and pure practi-
cal reason, happiness and freedom. Freedom requires that each individual
be enabled to pursue particular conceptions of happiness, without author-
itative imposition. The perfectionist character of this approach lies in its
commitment to ‘social creation,’83 to securing and enhancing the practices
of freedom, and eliminating obstacles to it: actions are validated by their
contributions to these ends.
Two central theoretical issues can be distinguished in post-Kantian
perfectionism. Firstly, what is the relationship between happiness and right,
and conceptions of happiness or thriving itself? In a Kantian register, the
pursuit of happiness or need fulfilment is subtended by a juridical order
of right which circumscribes the legitimate sphere of each subject, and
simultaneously enables the practice of freedom. Marx’s early polemic with

the republicans leads to a dismissal of this problem, since he conceives the
idea of right as a principle of bourgeois ideology, dispensable under the
socialist organisation of production. Republican perfectionists, however,
maintain there must be a mechanism for the enforcement of right, not the
presumption of common interests, to guarantee the grounds of freedom. A
system of juridical rights is not necessarily equivalent to a regime of private
property, but a means of co-ordinating individual teleological acts, even if
these are no longer animated by irreconcilable interests. It is to offer mutual
guarantees of freedom, while permitting each to define the particular ends
of happiness or satisfaction. Otherwise the distinction between happiness
and freedom dissipates, and the result resembles a Wolffian perfectionism.
Secondly, are the ends of happiness the result of the mechanism of nature
(the causal problem of Enlightenment materialism), or the ancient sense of
nature as a system of fixed ends, as in Aristotle; or are these ends products
of spontaneity, open to variation by the will of active subjects? Concepts of
determinability, as self-shaping, figure in Schiller and other post-Kantians; so
also in Marx, when he stresses the historical variability of social characteris-
tics. A defining feature of Marx’s early thought, however, is the combination
of such Kantian ideas (often understressed in the literature84 ), and a substan-
tive good reminiscent of Aristotle,85 mediated through the Feuerbachian
idea of species-being and the postulated conditions of thriving.86 The latter
subsume the subject under predetermined ends (even if these are conceived
as historical rather than as permanently fixed), in unresolved tension with
the Kantian sense of free self-determining spontaneous action.87 While Aris-
totelian eudaimonia is not to be equated with subsequent naturalistic and
scientistic accounts, Marx’s incomplete assimilation of Kant left open a the-
oretical space to be filled by heterogeneous ideas. Marx connects labour both
to need satisfaction and to freedom, but the Kantian distinction between
empirical and pure practical reason may have been, partly, effaced in his turn
to materialism.
Aftermath
Following the scientistic turn in European social thought after 1850,88
Engels develops a dialectics of nature, a naturalistic materialism whereby
human consciousness and activity could be explained through the laws gov-
erning material interactions, yielding a determinist and technicist reading of
history.89 This tendency crystallised as official Marxist doctrine in debates
102 Douglas Moggach
about the international workers’ movement in the late nineteenth century,

and was formalised in Soviet readings of Marx.90 Lenin’s early work91 evinced
this mechanistic materialism, but his 1914 study of Hegel’s Logic modified
his understanding of economic processes and revolutionary subjectivity.92
He recognised self-movement or spontaneity as the central dialectical cat-
egory, but now inflected in a voluntarist direction.93 Debates with Rosa
Luxemburg and other communists explicitly concerned spontaneity in the
organisational forms of the workers’ movement. For Lenin, the spontaneous
class consciousness of the workers could not achieve revolutionary clarity
without the direction of a vanguard party. The paternalistic perfectionism
of Christian Wolff might be reflected in these developments: in the theory
of the party, and in the Soviet state’s privileging of need satisfaction over
freedom.
Deriving from linguistic structuralism, Althusserian Marxism of the
1960s and 1970s attempted to expunge Marx’s Idealist heritage by insist-
ing on the scientificity of his work, after the ‘epistemological break’ of
1845–6. Here scientificity is equated with the denial of spontaneity, and
the depiction of actions (and of ideologically conditioned thought) as causal
effects of variously articulated structures. Hegel was unfavourably con-
trasted with Spinoza, because of the inadmissibility of teleology as a scientific
principle.94
In opposition to scientism, and influenced by Marx, members of the
Frankfurt school criticised Enlightenment rationality for thwarting its
own emancipatory promise by subsuming subjects under new technical
imperatives,95 underscored the technocratic and oppressive character of
Soviet Marxism,96 and endorsed against Hegel the irreducibility of being to
thought.97 In Habermas’ lengthy dialogue with Marx, the retrieval of certain
Kantian elements remains partial and problematic, insofar as the concept of
spontaneity is undertheorised. Habermas rejects the theoretical and practical
centrality of labour, construed as dramaturgical or instrumental action, pre-
supposing a monological or self-referential subject.98 Reviving the classical
distinction of praxis and poiesis, Habermas roots intersubjectivity in commu-
nicative action, and normativity in the rationality of discourse.99 He divests
labour of its capacity to sustain and orient social life. In recent work by Axel
Honneth, the naturalised and needy subject, damaged by misrecognition,
assumes the central role.100
The development of Marxism and Marx-inspired thought is thus char-
acterised by the marginalising or repudiation of spontaneity in favour of
scientistic accounts of history and agency, and by the conceptual divorce
between spontaneity and labour. Both these movements sacrifice Marx’s key
insights and his intimate connections with German Idealism.
Notes
1. The theoretical relationships are analysed in Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
2. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) (hereafter PR), 20.
3. Gustav Mayer, ‘Die Anfänge des politischen Radikalismus im vormärzlichen Preußen’,
Zeitschrift für Politik (1913), no. 1, repr., 51; Jacques D’Hondt, Hegel en son temps (Paris:
Éditions Sociales, 1968).
4. Douglas Moggach (ed.), The New Hegelians: politics and philosophy in the Hegelian school
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
5. Eduard Gans, Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände (1836), ed. N. Waszek (Stuttgart-Bad
Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995), 91–101.
6. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Werke in zwanzig Bänden,
ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1969–71), (hereafter HW), xx, 332–3.
7. Immanuel Kant, ‘An answer to the question: what is enlightenment?’ (1784), in Kant’s
Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 54–60.
An earlier formulation occurs in I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. P. Guyer and A. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) (hereafter CPR), 4–5 n. 1 (p. Axi).
8. Claude Adrien Helvétius, De l’esprit (Paris, 1759).
9. Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach, Système de la nature ou des lois du monde physique et du monde
moral, 2 vols. (London, 1770).
10. Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 5–6, 39–40, 60–1, 191–8.
11. Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works
(New York: International Publishers, 1975), v, 3–5.
12. E.g. G. W. Leibniz, ‘Discourse on metaphysics’, Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger
Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 35–68. See Daniel Schulthess,
Leibniz et l’invention des phénomènes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009).
13. Douglas Moggach, ‘Aesthetics and politics’, in Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys
(eds.), Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
14. Spontaneity has a technical sense here of self-causing action. G. W. Leibniz, Monadology,
ed. Nicholas Rescher (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), esp. §§ 11–
13; Donald Rutherford, ‘Leibniz on spontaneity’, in D. Rutherford and J. A. Cover
(eds.), Leibniz: nature and freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 156–80. On
Leibniz and German Idealism: Ernst Cassirer, Freiheit und Form: Studien zur deutschen
Geistesgeschichte, ed. R. Schmücker (Hamburg: Meiner, 2001).
15. CPR, 193 (B75/A51).
16. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, 40.
104 Douglas Moggach
17. I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), § 8
(v, 33).
18. Ibid., 43 (v, 42–3).
19. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. H. Glockner, vol. xii
(Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1964), 88, 90–1.
20. PR, 20–1.
21. Ibid., § 260, 282–3.
22. For various perspectives, see Ludwig Siep (ed.), G. W. F. Hegel: Grundlinien der Philosophie
des Rechts (Berlin: Akademie, 1997).
23. Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen
(1795), in Werke, ed. Julius Petersen et al., 42 vols. (Weimar: Böhlaus, 1962), xx, 309–
412; On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. E. Wilkinson and
L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), Letter vi/7.
24. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 88–91.
25. PR, § 140.
26. M. Riedel, Between Tradition and Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984).
27. A. Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); F. Neu-
houser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: actualizing freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000); K. Deligiorgi (ed.), Hegel: new directions (Chesham: Acumen,
2006).
28. PR, §§ 241–8. The 1824–5 lectures give a fuller account of overproduction and crisis:
G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie, ed. K.-H. Ilting, 4 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad
Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1974), iv, 61–3.
29. Arnold Ruge, ‘Die Hegelsche Rechtsphilosophie und die Politik unsrer Zeit’ (1842),
in G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts, ed. H. Reichelt (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein,
1972), 624–49.
30. Bruno Bauer, ‘Der christliche Staat und unsere Zeit’, in Hans-Martin Sass (ed.), Feldzüge
der reinen Kritik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 33.
31. Bruno Bauer, ‘Verteidigungsrede vor den Wahlmännern des vierten Wahlbezirkes am
22. 2. 1849’, in Ernst Barnikol, Bruno Bauer: Studien und Materialien, ed. Peter Riemer and
Hans-Martin Sass (Assen: van Gorcum, 1972), 522.
32. Bruno Bauer, ‘Erste Wahlrede von 1848’, in Barnikol, Bruno Bauer, 526–9.
33. Cf. Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law: introduction’,
in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, iii, 182; and Schiller, On the Aesthetic
Education of Man, 51.
34. Marx, ‘Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law ’, 175–87.
35. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, iii,
164–8.
36. Ibid., 164–8.
37. Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, 3–5.
38. Marx, Capital i (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 178; Grundrisse, trans. Martin
Nicholaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), 611.
39. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Collected Works, iii, 270–82.
40. Marx, ‘Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law’, 175ff.

41. E.g. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. G. Stedman Jones
(London: Penguin, 2002), 245–57.
42. Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view’ (1784), in
Immanuel Kant on History, ed. and trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1963).
43. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), offers a
controversial account.
44. J. G. Fichte, Der geschloßne Handelsstaat, in Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte, 8 vols. (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 1971), iii, 388–513.
45. Fichte, Der geschloßene Handelsstaat, 409.
46. W. von Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu
bestimmen (1792), in Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Reimer, 1903), i.
47. J. G. Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts, in Gesamtausgabe i/3 and i/4 (Stuttgart-Bad
Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1966 and 1970).
48. J. G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, in Gesamtausgabe i/2 (Stuttgart-
Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1965); Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and
John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
49. Dieter Henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World: studies in Kant (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 3–27.
50. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1987); Phenomenology
of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
51. Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, 3–5.
52. Ludwig Feuerbach, ‘Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Philosophie’ (1839), Sämmtliche Werke ii
(Stuttgart: Frommann, 1904).
53. Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums (1841) (Berlin: Akademie, 1973).
54. Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law’, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Collected Works, iii, 3–130.
55. Werner Schuffenhauer, Feuerbach und der junge Marx (Berlin: DVW, 1972), 88–131.
56. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 270–82.
57. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969),
735–54; Wissenschaft der Logik, in Gesammelte Werke, Friedrich Hogemann and Walter
Jaeschke, 31 vols. (series ongoing) (Hamburg: Meiner, 1981), 154–72. On intentionalist
and functional models: W. de Vries, ‘The dialectic of teleology’, Philosophical Topics 19, no.
2 (1991), 51–70. I present these in ‘New goals and new ways: republicanism and socialism
in 1848’, in Douglas Moggach and Paul Leduc Browne (eds.), The Social Question and the
Democratic Revolution: Marx and the legacy of 1848 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press,
2000), 55–69.
58. Herbert Marcuse, ‘The foundations of historical materialism’, in Studies in Critical Philos-
ophy, trans. J. de Bres (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 1–48; C. J. Arthur, Dialectics of Labour:
Marx in his relation to Hegel (London: Blackwell, 1986); Michael Quante, ‘Kommentar’, in
Karl Marx: Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009),
209–390.
59. Marx, Capital i, 41–6.
60. CPR, 193 (A51/B75).
106 Douglas Moggach
61. Willem van Dooren, ‘Het arbeidsbegrip in Hegels Fenomenologie van de Geest’, in J.
Kruithof and F. Mortier (eds.), De arbeid in Hegels filosofie (Antwerp: Lesoil, 1982),
56–7.
62. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, v, 31.
63. Ibid., 74–83. Cf. Hegel, Science of Logic, 163–78.
64. Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’, trans. P. Burgess (London: Pluto,
1977).
65. Marx, Grundrisse, 103–4, 296.
66. Jacques D’Hondt, ‘Marx en het Hegeliaanse arbeidsbegrip’, in J. Kruithof and F. Mortier
(eds.), De arbeid in Hegels filosofie, 74–93, derives the idea of the generality of labour,
independent of its form, from Hegel’s distinction of an sich and für sich.
67. Cf. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1977),
32–8.
68. Marx, Capital i, 35.
69. Ibid., i, 36, 46.
70. Marx contends that earlier social forms like slavery and feudalism were highly exploita-
tive, but lacked the dynamic features of capitalism, which make possible a communist
future of abundance and freedom: Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 219–34, 245–
57.
71. Marx Capital i, 233–46.
72. Helmut Reichelt, Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx (Frankfurt am
Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1973).
73. C. J. Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
74. Michael Quante, ‘Die fragile Einheit des Marxschen Denkens’, Zeitschrift für philosophische
Forschung 60 (2006), 591–608.
75. See my ‘Post-Kantian perfectionism’, in Douglas Moggach (ed.), Politics, Religion, and
Art: Hegelian debates (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 179–200.
76. Daniel Brudney, Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998), 160–7.
77. David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx: German philosophy, modern politics, and human flour-
ishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 226.
78. Leopold, Young Karl Marx, 224.
79. Ibid., 185.
80. Christian Wolff, Institutiones juris naturae et gentium (1754), in Gesammelte Werke xxvi, ed.
M. Thomann (Hildesheim: Olms, 1969), § 43, §§ 106–8.
81. Keith Tribe, Governing Economy: the reformation of German economic discourse, 1750–1840
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
82. Immanuel Kant, ‘On the common saying: “this may be true in theory, but it does not apply
in practice”’ (1793), in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1970), 74.
83. Marc Maesschalck, Droit et création sociale chez Fichte (Louvain: Peeters, 1996).
84. Leopold, Young Karl Marx, 154.
85. See, for example, G. F. McCarthy, Marx and Aristotle (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
1992); Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Introduction’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The
Communist Manifesto, ed. G. Stedman Jones, 99–140.
86. For permutations of this idea, see Quante, ‘Kommentar’, 264–8.

87. Cf. I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: 1964),
112.
88. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941).
89. Friedrich Engels, ‘Socialism, utopian and scientific’ (1880), in Marx Engels Selected Works
(Moscow: Progress, 1970), iii, 95–151; Dialectics of Nature (1872–82?) (1925; Moscow:
Foreign Languages, 1954). Marx himself is not immune to this tendency. On the more
naturalised account of labour, see Quante, ‘Kommentar’, 305–9. See also Norman Levine,
Divergent Paths: Hegel in Marx and Engels (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
90. Georgi Plekhanov, ‘Fundamental problems of Marxism’, Selected Philosophical Works
(Moscow: Progress, 1976), iii, 117–83.
91. V. I. Lenin, ‘Materialism and empirio-criticism’ (1908), Collected Works (Moscow:
Progress, 1972), xiv, 17–362.
92. Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: a critical study (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1995), 105–6.
93. V. I. Lenin, ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s Book The Science of Logic’, in Collected Works (Moscow:
Progress, 1961), xxxviii, 236; Anderson, Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism, 96.
94. Pierre Macherey, Hegel ou Spinoza (Paris: Maspero, 1979).
95. M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: philosophical fragments
(1947), ed. G. S. Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
96. Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism (1958) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985);
T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 348.
97. T. W. Adorno, Hegel: three studies (1963), trans. S. Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1993).
98. J. Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, ed. P. Dews (London: Verso, 1986), 177, 214; The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987),
63–9.
99. J. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action (1981), 2 vols., trans. T. McCarthy (1984;
Boston: Beacon, 1987); Faktizität und Geltung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992),
135–45.
100. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: the moral grammar of social conflicts, trans. J.
Anderson (Cambridge: Polity, 1995).
5
Ethos, nature and education in Johann Erich von Berger

and Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg
Steffen Wagner
1 F. A. Trendelenburg: character and development

Johann Erich von Berger (1772–1833), professor of astronomy and phi-
losophy, was, together with Karl Leonhard Reinhold, one of the two
teachers who decisively influenced Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802–
1872) during his studies at the University of Kiel, near his home (Easter
1822 to Michaelmas 1823).1 Trendelenburg, who attracted attention pri-
marily because of his above average abilities in ancient philology, had been
prepared for his university studies by the (virtually) private tuition of Georg
Ludwig König, a Kantian-inclined schoolteacher who influenced his pupils
in a similar direction.2 König also knew how to direct his student in the
realm of educational theory and practice, entrusting Trendelenburg in his
final year with the task of teaching the younger pupils.3
Trendelenburg studied further in Leipzig and Berlin, where on 10 May
1826, he completed his philological and philosophical studies with a dis-
sertation on Plato and Aristotle.4 After a long period as a private tutor
in Frankfurt, he was awarded, in 1833, at the instigation of Minister von
Altenstein, an associate professorship in Berlin, as well as a position in the
Ministry of Culture. He taught in Berlin from 1837 until his death as a full
professor of practical philosophy and educational theory.5 In a rich academic
career, Trendelenburg was three times rector of the university, five times
dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, after 1846 a full member of the Royal
Prussian Academy of Sciences, and from 1847 until 1871 he was secretary
of its Philosophical and Historical section. His sphere of activity reached
well beyond the university, and as far as the Prussian Gymnasium (academic
school) system: for more than thirty years (1835–66) he was a member of the
examinations board for prospective teachers, and for ten years he chaired
108
J. E. von Berger and F. A. Trendelenburg 109
that body, which was also responsible for supervising the school-leaving
examination.6 Trendelenburg can be described as a figure who influenced, if
not dominated, the academic and cultural life of the first uniting, and then
later united, German (Prussian) national state, over a period of decades.7
Trendelenburg’s entire thinking is pervaded by the idea of an imma-
nent connection between Ethos and Nature.8 He wrote of the ‘metaphysical
assumption of an organic world-view’a whose teleological view of nature is
influenced, apart from Aristotle, by the philosophies of nature of Schelling
and Steffens.9 In this the character and thinking of his teacher von Berger
played a very important mediating role. Trendelenburg’s principle of the
teleology of immanent purposes (which ‘understands the inner purpose which
manifests itself in the parts and in the whole of the knowledge-world as
the determining element’10 ) moves from that which is to that which should
be, from Natur to Ethos, and encompasses the spheres of action, ethics and
law, all of which must ‘form’ themselves ‘in accordance with a world-view
which is fully absorbed and recognised as true’.b The movement from natural
teleology, with its necessary obedience to the laws of nature, to the ethical
teleology found in the human is the leap to the freedom which constitutes the
human ethical world, a leap which identifies the individual as a rational being,
in contrast to a natural being, which draws entirely on instinct and impulse.
In a lecture on Johann Friedrich Herbart’s practical philosophy, held before
the full assembly of the Academy of Sciences on 5 June 1856, Trendelenburg
explains his own ‘Ethics of immanent teleology’ as follows: ‘The organic is
the lower, the ethical the higher stage; because the inner purposes which
pervade blindly the organic within nature become consciously known and
willed within the ethical, and as a result that which is constrained in nature
becomes free within humanity.’c The fundamental metaphysical principle
of this teleological-organic world-view is at the same time the systematic
assumption and basis of Trendelenburg’s political ideas and his definition
of law.11 According to this definition, law is ‘the embodiment of those general
determinants of action, through which the ethical whole and its parts can maintain
a. ‘[D]ie metaphysische Voraussetzung einer organischen Weltansicht’. F. A. Trendelenburg, ‘Der

Widerstreit zwischen Kant und Aristoteles in der Ethik’ (1858/1860), in Historische Beiträge zur
Philosophie iii (Berlin: Bethge, 1867), 171–214, esp. 201
b. ‘[Welches] im Ganzen und in den Theilen der Erkenntniswelt den sich gliedernden inneren
Zweck als das Bestimmende ansieht . . . wie es der als wahr erkannten und zum Grunde gelegten
Weltanschauung gemäss ist’. Trendelenburg, Naturrecht auf dem Grunde der Ethik, § 18, 22
c. ‘Das Organische ist der allgemeine Boden, das Ethische die höhere Stufe: denn die inneren
Zwecke, welche das Organische der Natur blind durchwalten, werden im Ethischen gewusst
und gewollt und das Gebundene der Natur wird dadurch im Menschen frei.’ F. A.
Trendelenburg, Historische Beiträge zur Philosophie iii (Bethge: Berlin, 1867), 165
110 Steffen Wagner
and develop itself ’.d State and society rest on the ethical idea of humanity and
the ideal of a potentially harmonious spiritual whole, to be realised in free-
dom, the realisation of which is the task and duty not only of individuals,
but also of the legal institutions and structures of civil society. The person
who acts consciously and ethically contributes as a human and as a rational
being to the obligatory (both for the individual and society) realisation of
the ethical ideal, individually through perfecting their moral capacity and their
capacity for knowledge and socially through the creation and cultivation of
the outward conditions of the ethical life in law and politics.12
The theme of education took on a particularly important position in the
thought and work of Trendelenburg.13 In his 1863 inaugural address as rec-
tor, Trendelenburg explained the close relationship between ethics, politics
and education: ‘It is up to us to improve our community through that form
of public-spiritedness which in its parts raises the whole, and which holds
the flourishing and blooming of the whole higher than any individualistic
or ulterior motives. We must contribute, each doing his part in his place,
in our intercourse with students, to the maintenance of that ethical purity
and impartiality, that chaste cast of mind, without which knowledge and
the development of the understanding lose their nobility and the fruit of
our life’s work loses its dignity.’e From this perspective, his influence in
universities, academies and educational institutions must be understood in
the context of his thinking, and his importance can be measured on the basis
of the great success of his Elementa Logices Aristotelicae, which was used as a
textbook in the Gymnasium system in Prussia for many decades.14 Together
with his almost forty year engagement with educational institutions, this
little school book sealed – perhaps more than any other of his texts –
Trendelenburg’s extraordinary importance for German educational culture.
In what follows I will reconstruct and pursue two aspects of the develop-
ment of von Berger’s thought, throughout the period of German Idealism,
both of which are also characteristic of the philosophy and influence of
d. ‘[D]er Inbegriff derjenigen allgemeinen Bestimmungen des Handelns, durch welche es

geschieht, dass das sittliche Ganze und seine Gliederung sich erhalten und weiter bilden kann’.
Trendelenburg, Naturrecht auf dem Grunde der Ethik, § 46, 76
e. ‘Es ist an uns, unser Gemeinwesen durch jenen Gemeinsinn zu heben, welcher in den Gliedern
das Ganze hochhält und das Gedeihen und die Blüthe des Ganzen über jeden eigenwilligen
Nebengedanken stellt. Es ist an uns, dass wir, jeder an seinem Orte und seines Theils, im Verkehr
mit der akademischen Jugend dazu beitragen, jene Reinheit der Sitte, jene sittliche
Unbefangenheit und Unverdorbenheit, jene keusche Gesinnung zu erhalten, ohne welche
Wissenschaft und Verstandesbildung ihren Adel einbüssen und die Frucht unseres
Lebensberufes ihre Würde verliert.’ F. A. Trendelenburg, Ansprache bei der Eröffnung des Semesters
am 15. Oktober 1863 in der Aula der Königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität von dem antretenden
Rektor Adolf Trendelenburg, Berlin: Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften (1863), 6
Trendelenburg and both of which were applied in education as well as in the

practice of shaping one’s personal life. What is meant here, on the one hand, is
an enlightened humanist ethical ideal of the human being and of education as
well as, on the other hand, a connected conceptual unity of nature and moral-
ity, which finds its expression in a metaphysical-organic world-view and in
a practical philosophy. Despite unmistakable differences15 it is noticeable
how many embryonic and developmental elements of von Berger’s thought –
adapted to their time and philosophical circumstances and flavoured with his
Aristotelianism – are retained in the work of Trendelenburg, and therefore
maintain their influence after German Idealism.16 Through this reconstruc-
tion it is shown how deep the roots of Trendelenburg’s Socratic-ethical
ideal of the human person lie in enlightened eighteenth-century humanistic
educational thinking, quite apart from Plato and Aristotle.17
2 ‘Better people for better masters and better servants’:

von Berger’s thinking before his arrival in Jena
Von Berger’s career is exemplary both of the reception of the successive
phases of German Idealism and of the development of the concepts through
which Idealism had its impact on the later nineteenth century. In the course of
his life his researches into natural science and philosophy and their practical
applications continually influenced each other. His starting point was an
Enlightenment humanist image of the person, an image descended from
those of Kant, Reinhold, Fichte, Herder, and from the education debate
in the eighteenth century (Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller), but his later views
show the impress of the nature philosophy of Schelling and Steffens and the
political philosophy of Hegel.
The son of a general in the Hussars who had moved from service in
Hanover to service in Denmark, he sat his law examinations in Copenhagen
in 1791 after completing his (for that time typical) preparatory studies in
philology and philosophy.18 He continued his studies in Göttingen, this time
focusing on deepening his understanding of finance and diplomacy, sitting in
on lectures by, amongst others, the political and legal scholars August Ludwig
von Schlözer, Johann Stephan Pütter, and Georg Friedrich von Martens.19
His interests ranged from German constitutional law to English history and
politics to philosophy, where he was particularly taken by Reinhold’s Letters
on the Kantian Philosophy (Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie).20
Von Berger’s efforts to integrate theory and practice were already appar-
ent by this time, particularly in his engagement with the conditions of the
poor and servants and in his campaigning for better schools for all ranks of
112 Steffen Wagner
society. He took an interest in institutional poor relief as early as his time in

Göttingen, as well as on a journey to Kiel in the spring of 1793.21 In Kiel von
Berger had contact with the political scientist August Christian Niemann,
who was active in publicising the plight of the poor and had also co-founded
the Gesellschaft freiwilliger Armenfreunde (Society of Voluntary Friends
of the Poor), as well as contact with Adolf Friedrich Trendelenburg, the
great uncle of Friedrich Adolf, Kantian professor of law and well-known
and respected personality.22 Von Berger was involved in negotiations with
the Gesellschaft as a representative of the student body. The young ‘politi-
cally engaged philosopher’f – as Ratjen describes von Berger – wrote, in the
autumn of the same year, before he left Kiel for Jena in October, an essay,
‘On the Condition of Servants, Particularly concerning Morals’ (‘Ueber das
Gesindewesen, besonders in sittlicher Ruecksicht’), for Niemann’s journal
Schleswig-Holsteinische Provinzialberichte, through which he intervened in the
debate on the subject of the legal regulation of this social institution by
means of so-called ‘Servant Statutes’ (Gesindeordnungen).23 In this first work
the young and unknown author attempted to measure his capacities against
an easily mastered, yet socially relevant, timely and above all concrete theme,
to reflect philosophically on his practical engagement and to influence the
conditions of his time to the extent that that was possible. This piece of
around fifty pages on the condition of servants is the only direct source
for an analysis of von Berger’s thinking on the subject of moral philosophy
before his encounter with Fichte and his experience of the Literary Society of
Free Men (Literarische Gesellschaft der freien Männer). It views its theme,
as its subtitle suggests, through the lens of morality, by which is understood
an ethic of virtue and humanity to which all social (and also political and
economic) concerns are subordinated.24
Von Berger began his treatise with a provocative thesis, which appears
to modern eyes to reduce to absurdity the socioeconomic realities of the
relationship between the wealthy and the poor at the end of the eighteenth
century – an issue which he understood to be encompassed by his theme
of the servant system: the class of house servants ‘can and must’ become
something like a ‘charitable educational establishment for humankind, a
nursery for good citizens, conscientious spouses and mothers’.g Despite
all the associated problems, one ought to view this relationship as a ‘very
f. ‘[J]unge politisirende Philosoph’. Ratjen, Johann Erich von Bergers Leben, 14

g. ‘[K]ann und mus . . . eine wohlthätige Bildungsanstalt der Menschheit, eine Pflanzschule guter
Bürger und Bauern, gewissenhafter Gattinnen und Mütter’. Berger, ‘Ueber das Gesindewesen’,
114
welcome preparatory period for future activity within civil society’.h,25 Both
parties should be able to use a successful relationship for their ‘own ethical
and intellectual development’i and in this way ‘spread enlightenment and
charitable knowledge, good morals, and rational culture’.j Noticeable here
is the characteristic relationship between knowledge (pragmatic, naturally
appropriate to the requirements of particular conditions of life and work)
and morality (universal, identical for people of all classes and situations). The
basis of this connection is a Kantian-influenced concept of reason, which,
alongside its ‘higher’ theoretical and practical variants in science and ethics, is
also applicable in ‘lower’ activities and situations, and it is in these situations
that it takes on a pragmatic and instrumental meaning summarised in the
concept of a rational culture. In contrast to these distinctions, the concept of
ethos encompasses morality, and thereby the Kantian pure will, the field of
the categorical imperative, as well as instrumental-practical, goal-directed
action, the field of hypothetical imperatives.
Because of their concern with the satisfaction of their contrived desires,
the better-off forget ‘that all people have a common destiny, and that they
are obliged to use their knowledge and spiritual powers with as much insight
and energy as possible for the education and ennobling of their less fortunate
brothers, who find themselves by chance dependent on the wills of their
betters’.k,26 Instead, they view these ‘members of the same household, who
are often far more worthy of respect . . . as members of an inferior species’.l
‘Improvidence and a failure to recognise their own worth’ on the part of the
poor and ‘pride and carelessness’ on the part of the wealthy cause the gulf
between the two to grow ever wider.m
As is obvious from the expression ‘less fortunate brothers’, von Berger
regarded human beings as having been born equal. The class differences into
which people are born create these differences, and make the members of
one class into ‘more fortunate classmates’.n,27 And for now these differences
h. ‘[E]ine sehr willkommene Vorbereitungsperiode zu einer künftigen Wirksamkeit in der
bürgerlichen Gesellschaft’. Ibid., 117
i. ‘[E]igene sittliche und intellektuelle Bildung’. Ibid., 118
j. ‘Aufklärung und gemeinnützige Kenntnisse, gute Sitten und überhaupt vernünftige Kultur
ausbreiten.’ Ibid., 119
k. ‘[D]aß allen Menschen eine gemeinschaftliche Bestimmung vorgeschrieben ward, und daß es
ihre Pflicht sei, ihre Kenntnisse und Geisteskräfte zur Bildung und Verädlung ihrer minder
glücklichen Brüder, die ein zufälliges Verhältnis von ihrem Willen zum Theil abhängig machte,
nach bester Einsicht und mit dem möglichsten Eifer anzuwenden’. Ibid., 116
l. ‘[O]ft weit achtungswertheren Hausgenossen . . . als Wesen einer untergeordneten Gattung’.
Ibid., 116
m. ‘Verkennung eigener Würde und Leichtsinn . . . Stolz und Sorgenlosigkeit’. Ibid., 116–17
n. ‘[G]lücklicheren Mitschüler’. Ibid., 133
114 Steffen Wagner
cannot and should not be shaken. Conditions must be changed by educational

betterment rather than by revolution. With regard to the creation of ‘schools
for servants’ aimed at specific vocations or classes, he argued that: ‘It seems
to me that the caste mentality must be progressively banished from our social
relations. The sharp divide between the classes may have been necessary and
useful up to now. With the increasing perfection of the human race, however,
it must give way to the gentler and nobler bonds of citizenship, of world
citizenship, indeed of humanity.’o However, von Berger qualifies this with
the observation that ‘this golden age is not achieved overnight. Centuries
pass and hope may remain. Its path is cleared not by violent revolution but
by virtue and justice.’p
Despite accepting these class differences at a fundamental level, this
general attitude of cautious optimism regarding the future was also to have
concrete implications for action. In the school system it was meant, amongst
other things, to have an effect on the values of the people. The ‘son of the
less fortunate’ should, on the one hand, acknowledge that change other than
personal ethical development would be ‘dangerous’ and ‘disturb and retard
the completion of the communal journey’, although ‘very different paths
will in the end lead to the same goal’.q In the process of realising these
prospects the value of a person derives ultimately from their sincerity in the
performance of those endeavours appropriate to their station.
In the language of humanism, enlightenment and revolution, von Berger
urged action, addressing his comrades – ‘Brothers, let us do good and not
become weary’r – and also the good citizen, the friend of humanity: ‘The
whole of humanity has one common calling – one and the same destiny:
To help each other in the fulfilment of the ethical calling is the ultimate
purpose of all human bonds . . . Every member must understand himself as
both purpose and member . . . Having absorbed this sublime truth, the father
of every house must regard the relationship he has to his servants – and act!’s
o. ‘Das Kastenartige scheint je länger je mehr aus unsern gesellschaftlichen Verbindungen verbant
werden zu müssen. Die scharfe Absonderung der Stände mag bisher nothwendig und nützlich
gewesen sein. Bei fortschreitender Vervollkommnung des Menschengeschlechts mus sie den
sanfteren und edleren Banden des Bürgertums, der Weltbürgerlichkeit, der Humanität, die
Stelle räumen.’ Ibid., 133
p. ‘[D]ies goldne Zeitalter ist nicht das Werk des Augenblicks. Jahrhunderte verstreichen und es
bleibt vielleicht noch Hoffnung. Nicht gewaltsame Statsumwälzung – nein Tugend und
Gerechtigkeit bahnen ihm den Weg’. Ibid., 162
q. ‘Sohn des minder Glücklichen . . . gefährlich . . . Vollendung der gemeinschaftlichen
Wanderschaft stöhre und aufhalte . . . sehr weit auseinander laufende Wege endlich doch zu
einem Ziele führen.’ Ibid., 134
r. ‘Lasset uns – ihr Brüder – Gutes thun und nicht müde werden.’ Ibid., 162
s. ‘Die grosse Menschheit hat Einen gemeinschaftlichen Beruf – Ein und dieselbe Bestimmung.
Die Erfüllung des sittlichen Berufs sich gegenseitig erleichtern, mus der lezte Zweck aller
Von Berger’s position here is obviously influenced by the Kantian-Protestant

concept of the person and its ethics of conviction, as well as the ideals of
equality, liberty and fraternity. He appealed ever more enthusiastically for
action, turning, as a Jacobin would, to the citizen in his contemporaries, and
as a humanist would, to the ‘friends of humanity’. The goal was the highest
possible for which one might take action, the ethical ideal of a life which
realises one’s own dignity in society.
Although the interaction between the upper classes and their domestic
servants was always also a legally defined and regulated relationship, from
which various rights and obligations arose, for von Berger the problem of
service remained essentially a moral problem: ‘Master and Servant are negli-
gent in fulfilling their obligations: they are thoughtless and immoral.’t,28 For
this politically careful, scientifically educated apostle of the enlightenment –
in the sense of Kant’s 1784 appeal to ‘sapere aude!’ – knowledge, morality
and reason are inseparable values.29 Social improvement requires the moral
improvement of all those involved more than it requires legal intervention:
‘Better people are required for there to be better masters and better servants. But
people can only be improved by themselves, by the free expression of reason
and good will . . . But such improvement can be encouraged and assisted.’u
True knowledge is not a pragmatic knowledge of the virtues which can be
taught or learnt, but an acquaintance with one’s own rational nature and its
dignity. What one’s moral obligations are is clear to everyone, according to
von Berger, just like ‘the starry heavens above and the moral law within me’:
‘I see them before me, and connect them immediately with my consciousness
of my own existence.’30 Morality is, as Trendelenburg also saw it later, prior
to the law. Society’s laws are merely ‘representations – more or less accurate
copies of that one great law which lives in every man’s heart, and to whose
divine decrees all our actions are subject’.v
Despite optimism about human reason, the realisation of progress is sub-
tly undermined when positive law is not as advanced as individual perception
Verbindung der Menschen unter einander sein. . . . Jedes Mitglied müsse sich als Zweck und als
Mitglied betrachten. . . . Von dieser erhabenen Wahrheit tief durchdrungen, betrachte jeder
Hausvater das Verhältnis, worin der zu seinem Gesinde steht – und werde thätig!’ Ibid., 121
t. ‘Herr und Diener sind nachlässig in Erfüllung ihrer Pflichten; sie sind unwissend, unsittlich.’
Ibid., 123
u. ‘Bessere Herrschaften und Dienstbothen sezen bessere Menschen voraus. Aber nur durch sich selbst,
durch freie Thätigkeit der Vernunft, durch aufrichtiges Wollen werden bessere
Menschen. . . . Aber die Besserung des Menschen kann veranlasset erleichtert, gefördert
werden.’ Berger, ‘Ueber das Gesindewesen’, 123
v. ‘Stellvertreter – mehr oder minder getreue Abdrücke des Einen grossen Gesetzes, das in aller
Menschen Herzen wohnt, dessen göttlichen Ausspruch eine jede unsrer Handlungen
unterworfen ist.’ Berger, ‘Ueber das Gesindewesen’, 126
116 Steffen Wagner
of the moral law: however, instead of the upheaval of political revolution,

which von Berger saw as an unpromising means, what is required is enlight-
enment, and the education of all classes of society.31 The necessity of the
autonomy of individual actors was also already anticipated by von Berger at
this time, as well as the topic of the Gesellschaften. The success of attempts
at education do not depend so much on the educator as on the personal good
will of those who are to be educated. The idea of ‘shaping people’ (Menschen
bilden) is a metaphor of merely practical use, since: ‘if freedom and virtue
are not to be hollow words, the moral improvement of people must be on
their own merits.’w An important instrument in reaching the goal of the
enlightenment and improvement of human beings is the ‘free association
of citizens . . . and writings’.x On the basis of his experience in the Armenge-
sellschaften (Poor Societies), von Berger still speaks here of the ‘assembling of
a “Society of Free Friends of the Servant Class” [Gesellschaft freiwilliger Gesin-
defreunde]’, but it would not be long before the Literarische Gesellschaft der
freien Männer served as the forum in which he sought to realise his idea
of collective action in societies of the educated with the aim of benefiting
humankind.
Von Berger’s philosophy (of history) before his arrival in Jena, and so
before his encounter with Fichte and the Lectures on the Vocation of a Scholar
(Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten) moved in tension between the
thought of Kant and that of Herder. The influence of Herder can be seen
in his choice of terminology when discussing his ideals of education and of
humanity, and that of Kant in his relativisation of them to a mere capacity
for reason.32 Kant’s influence can be seen further in the matter of what is
necessary for the realisation of enlightenment and also of what is thought
to prevent it.33 Without wishing to deny the contemporary influences of
Rousseau or of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, von Berger’s conception of edu-
cation also shows obvious affinities with that of Kant. One is reminded, for
example, of Kant’s two short pieces from 1776, which he wrote for the Phil-
anthropisches Archiv with reference to the Basedow Institute. In these Kant
appeals to the ‘educators of humankind’: to those aiming to study education
at the Philanthropinum in Dessau and to parents who are considering sending
their children to a school which is ‘devoted to humankind and the devel-
opment of world-citizens’, affirming that Basedow has ‘committed himself
w. ‘Wenn Freiheit und Tugend anders nicht lere Töne sind, . . . mus die sittliche Besserung des
Menschen sein eigenes Verdienst sein’. Berger, ‘Ueber das Gesindewesen’, 139
x. ‘[F]reie Vereinigung der Bürger . . . und Schriften’. Ibid., 157
to the improvement and welfare of humanity’,y and encouraging therefore

the spread of his educational institutions. He criticises the educational sys-
tem of his time, which ‘by no means brings forth the good within human
beings, with which nature has provided them’.z This improvement is, how-
ever, only possible through education, which ‘makes human beings out of
animal creatures’.aa For this to happen, though, it is necessary that schools
should be reformed by ‘enlightened men, animated by noble ideals rather
than by the wish to earn a salary.’bb
3 ‘One can only be free if one has the courage to free

oneself through action’: von Berger and the Society
of Free Men
‘Under the influence of Kant’s writings’34 von Berger finally gave up the study
of diplomacy and political economy in favour of philosophy, and decided in
the autumn of 1793 to leave for Jena, in all likelihood to listen to the lectures
of Reinhold there. In no time von Berger became so close to him that he
was involved in the awarding of a service medal to Reinhold on the latter’s
departure from Jena the following spring (28 March 1794).35
Fichte came to Jena for the summer semester. The deep impression his
Lectures on the Vocation of a Scholar made on von Berger, as on so many, is
perhaps best shown by the fact that he translated a part of the text into Danish,
without, however, publishing it, for reasons that remain unknown.36 For von
Berger, the encounter with Fichte was a confirmation of the Enlightenment
project and image of humankind, which he had already developed and which
corresponded to a considerable extent with the ideas presented by Fichte in
his Lectures. It was also an impetus to the implementation of his plan, alluded
to in his first work, for the formation of a society with ethical-intellectual
aims.37
In 1794–5 von Berger took an active part in the organisation of the
Literary Society of Free Men, which existed formally from 1794 until 1799.38
On 1 June 1794 – only fourteen days after Fichte’s arrival in Jena and nine
y. ‘[D]er Menschheit und also der Theilnehmung jedes Weltbürgers gewidmet . . . der Wohlfahrt
und Verbesserung der Menschen feierlich geweiht’. Kant, GS ii, 451, 447
z. ‘[B]ei weitem nicht das Gute aus dem Menschen gebracht werde, wozu die Natur die Anlage
gegeben’. Ibid., ii, 447
aa. ‘[W]ir thierische Geschöpfe nur durch Ausbildung zu Menschen gemacht werden können’.
Ibid., ii, 449
bb. ‘[V]on aufgeklärten Männern nicht mit lohnsüchtigem sondern edelmüthigen Eifer’. Ibid.
118 Steffen Wagner
days after his first lecture – ten students from various disciplines agreed
on the constitution of the Society and thereafter met every fortnight or so
in a rented garden.39 These meetings involved essays and presentations on
mostly ethical or political themes, chosen by the students themselves, as well
as poetry readings.40 In comparison to others, von Berger’s membership was
one of the longest.41
Von Berger’s vision for the Society involved an enlightened, ethical,
activist influence on his fellow human beings, and this conviction was
strengthened by Fichte’s second lecture entitled ‘On the Destiny of Human
Beings in Society’.42 According to the minute book it was von Berger who, on
16 July 1794, ‘introduced to the Society Fichte’s recommendations, which
were then approved, that several of the statutes be changed’.cc He held two
lectures under the auspices of the Society, and, on 28 August 1794, was
elected to the position of auditor of its statutes.43 For this he received an
honourable mention in the minutes of 11 December 1794. At the same time,
however, an anti-von Berger faction arose amongst the auditors, focusing on
the statutory rules on the nature of the collective external influence of the
Society – an argument which von Berger, with his outward focus and com-
mitment to influencing the student body as a whole, was unable to win.44 As
a result of this organisational conflict and the atmosphere of suspicion caused
by debate concerning student organisations, negotiations on the subject of
the printing of the statutes and the recognition of the Society on the part of
the University lasted from December 1794 to May 1795.45
Von Berger remained true to his ideals independently of the Society.
The bonds of friendship between its members were of great importance
to him, and remained strong long after his time in Jena.46 In the rhetorical
manner of the time, von Berger wrote in his friend Johann Smidt’s autograph
book on 28 September 1794: ‘Actions teach, actions console; away with
words! . . . One can only be free if one has the courage to free oneself through
action.’dd No better description of von Berger’s life and work could be found.
Von Berger’s two works from this time are closely connected to his
experiences in the Society. Both first appeared in Danish, and were then
translated into German by himself. The essay, The Matters of the Day (Die
cc. ‘[D]er Gesellschaft einige von Hrn Prof. Fichte vorgeschlagene Veränderungen in den
Gesezzen, die genehmigt wurden’. P. Raabe, Das Protokollbuch der Gesellschaft der freien Männer
in Jena 1794–1799, in Festgabe für Eduard Behrend zum 75. Geburtstag am 5. Dezember 1958, ed. H.
Seiffert and B. Zeller (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1959), 347
dd. ‘Thaten lehren den Menschen, Thaten trösten den Menschen; fort mit den Worten! Nur der ist
ein freier Mann, der durch Thaten sich frei zu machen den Muth hat.’ Quoted in Marwinski,
‘Wahrlich, das Unternehmen ist kühn . . . ’, 62f., 91
Angelegenheiten des Tages, early 1795), deals with the questions of political
and religious Enlightenment (against the ‘two-headed monster of political
and religious superstition’),ee while ‘On the Preconditions of an Improved
National Educational System’ (‘Ueber die vorhergehenden Bedingungen
einer verbesserten Nationalerziehung’) is concerned with the educational
system and its philosophical and ethical conditions.47
The point of view defended here and the goal of these educational endeav-
ours can be summarised in the concepts of reason, self-knowledge, freedom,
and perfectibility in the following passage from ‘The Matters of the Day’: ‘To
become one with oneself and to subordinate all to the judgements of reason, that is
the eternal law of the human will. Freedom through reason is the eternal goal of
our struggle. The dependent and sensuous rational being must become free
and autonomous.’ff The optimism of his first piece appears to have deserted
him by this point: despite positive signs (‘the political rebirth of France, and
the great gospel of reason emanating from Germany’),gg time was passing,
yet there is little evidence of improvement, meaning that human progress
begins to appear like the efforts of Sisyphus. This ‘human goal’ of ‘being
at one with one’s self’ and ‘universal sovereignty’ is an unending process,
possible only through ‘purity of will’ and ‘outward, lawful liberty’.hh
As one might expect, the theme of association returns at length in the
‘private’ – but not secret!48 – societies ‘for the encouragement of moral
intentions’.ii,49 In this way education becomes the focus of von Berger’s
researches and efforts.50 While cautiously demanding more outward
freedoms, he did not neglect his patriotic love for Denmark, but wished
to combine it with his universal political ideal of humanity on the basis
of the concept of reason: ‘Patriotism, correctly understood, is the true
cosmopolitanism.’jj France’s example was not to be followed: ‘Reason, not
ee. ‘[Z]weiköpfige Ungeheuer . . . politischen und religieusen Aberglauben[s]’. J. E. von Berger, Die
Angelegenheiten des Tages (Röhß, Schleswig, 1795), 23
ff. ‘Einig mit sich selbst zu werden und alles dem Ausspruch der Vernunft zu unterwerfen, das ist das ewige
Gesetz des menschlichen Willens. Freyheit durch Vernunft ist unseres Strebens ewiges Ziel. Das
abhängige und sinnliche Vernunftwesen muß frey und selbstständig werden.’ Von Berger, Die
Angelegenheiten des Tages, 8–9
gg. ‘Frankreichs politische Wiedergeburt, und das von Deutschland ausgegangene große
Vernunftevangelium.’ Ibid., 12
hh. ‘Ziel des Menschen . . . Uebereinstimmung mit sich selbst . . . Beherrschung [alles dessen,] was
da ist, . . . Reinheit des Willens . . . äussere gesetzmäßige Freyheit’. Ibid., 17
ii. ‘[V]ertraulich zur Beförderung moralischer Absichten’. Von Berger, Die Angelegenheiten des
Tages, 54; 34–5
jj. ‘Der wohlverstandene Patriotismus ist zugleich der einzige wahre Kosmopolitismus.’ Von
Berger, Die Angelegenheiten des Tages, 66
120 Steffen Wagner
unbridled sensuousness, should show us the way.’kk A ‘daily rising level of

culture’ and ‘democracy’ would lead ‘to a higher form of civil freedom and
political autonomy’.ll,51
4 Von Berger and the philosophy of nature

In the spring of 1796 von Berger and his friend August Ludwig Hülsen jour-
neyed initially to Dresden and then on to Switzerland, where they spent the
better part of a year based in Zurich, from where they made numerous excur-
sions into the surrounding countryside.52 An inheritance from his mother
enabled von Berger to work on perfecting his own education and to seek to
express and test practically, in the company of his friends, an ideal of commu-
nal life, rather than looking for a settled position.53 The freedom to practise
scientific research was amongst his major concerns, as was his deepening
interest in educational questions; he often followed in Rousseau’s footsteps
to the Île St-Pierre on Lake Bienne, and he made contact with, amongst
others, Pestalozzi.54 Music, drawing, poetry, and reading (particularly the
works of Jean Paul) filled his days, and he underwent a powerful aesthetic
experience of nature while hiking in Switzerland.55 Von Berger remained
sceptical of institutionalised activity, and the rural life seemed to him the
best way to avoid it. He continued to maintain his relationship to Fichte in
the years which followed, but, under the influence of other thinkers, began
to distance himself philosophically from him.56
When von Berger returned to Jena in the autumn of 1797, he had acquired
an interest in the natural sciences as well as the thought of Schelling.57 He
expressed this change in a letter to a friend as follows: ‘I don’t wish to read
anything more on natural law or morality, and instead philosophise about
the life force, oxygen, light and warmth, the atmosphere of the sun, animals
and plants, about the sunrise and the sunset, and about all the stars of the
night. Nature is the endless power which is the source of all our joys and
sorrows . . . Do you know Schelling’s ideas for a philosophy of nature? It
has been long since such a book was written!’mm While it might have been
kk. ‘Vernunft, nicht die zügellose Sinnlichkeit soll uns den Weg abstechen.’ Ibid., 72
ll. ‘[T]äglich wachsende Kultur . . . Demokratie . . . zu einem höheren Grad bürgerlicher
Freyheit, und politischer Selbstständigkeit’. Ibid., 72f.
mm. ‘Ich mag kein Naturrecht und keine Moral mehr lesen und philosophiere dafür lieber über
Lebenskraft, Oxygen, Licht und Wärme, die Sonnenathmosphäre, Thiere und Pflanzen, über
das Morgen- und Abendroth und über alle Sterne der Nacht. Die Natur ist die unendliche
Kraft, aus der wir alle unsere Freude und Sorgen schöpfen . . . Kennst Du Schellings Ideen zu
einer Philosophie der Natur. Ein solches Buch ist lange nicht geschrieben.’ Ratjen, Johann
Erich von Bergers Leben, 26
the case that von Berger’s interest in politics took a back seat in the light
of his new interest, a further letter of his, dated 27 December 1797, shows
that he was not committed simply to a life of contemplation, but that he
had retained both the desire for active involvement and a concern with the
fate of humanity:58 ‘I will always insist that nature is the source of all our
joys, for I spoke and I speak now only of our nature and the spirit which
speaks to us through nature. I did not retreat from life and I will never do
so. . . . Why should I fear the sufferings of people, the way they are? We are in
all likelihood not sufficiently sympathetic to this suffering and are often too
idle in contemplating our ideals.’nn In the spring of 1798 von Berger left Jena
for Kiel, where he arrived after a long journey in June 1798, and subsequently
met with, amongst others, Henrik Steffens.59 During this period of his life
he was primarily taken up with the idea of communal agriculture, based on
the progressive technical and scientific principles which had been developed
in England and were being taught and tested in Holstein at the time.60 With
the aim of learning about these matters, both practically and theoretically,
he moved to Flottbeck near Hamburg.61 The extent to which his interest in
the philosophy of nature is imbued with the ideals of the old cosmopolitan
enlightenment ethos is shown by his description of his plans to settle down
as a farmer: ‘The independence which one gains by working on one’s own
without expectation is such a wonderful feeling that one cannot get enough
of it. Only those who work directly with nature can experience this. We
wish to buy land in Holstein together, to plough and to sow, to pursue
different arts and crafts, to draw more and more decent people to us, and to
create a little free state under the protection of the gods. Let us begin our
cosmopolitan work afresh, and do it thoroughly, in other words tend the soil
from which the plants can grow and on which our young world citizens can
play around.’oo Neither research nor attempts to write for the public were
nn. ‘Ich will immer wiederholen, daß die Natur die Quelle aller unserer Freuden sei, denn ich
redete und rede auch jetzt nur von unserer Natur und vom Geiste der durch die Natur zu uns
spricht, ich war aus den Gebilden des Lebens nicht zurückgewichen und werde sie nie
verlassen. . . . Warum sollte ich mich vor dem Elend der Menschen, wie sie sind, fürchten; wir
nehmen an diesem Elend vielleicht nur zu wenig Antheil und bleiben oft zu müßig im
Anschaun unsrer Ideale.’ Ibid., 27
oo. ‘Unabhängigkeit, die der eigne anspruchslose Fleiß gewährt, ist ein so herrliches Gefühl, daß
man sie sich nicht frisch genug verschaffen kann. Nur der kennt es, der unmittelbar in der
Natur wirkt und schafft. Wir wollen in Holstein Land zusammen kaufen, pflegen und säen
und allerlei Künste und Gewerbe treiben, mehr und mehr ordentliche Leute an uns ziehen
und einen kleinen Freistaat bilden, der unter dem Schutz der Götter stehen soll. Laßt uns nur
frisch unser kosmopolitisches Werk beginnen und dabei gründlich verfahren, daß heißt einen
Grund und Boden schaffen, wo die Pflanzen grünen und unsere jungen Weltbürger herum
springen können.’ Letter from Flottbeck addressed to Rist (after October 1799), in Ratjen,
Johann Erich von Bergers Leben, 31–2
122 Steffen Wagner
neglected: von Berger founded the journal Mnemosyne, which published two
issues in Altona in 1800, containing, amongst other items, his ‘Letters on
Nature’ to ‘A. H.’ (August Hülsen).62 Nature shows us ‘the godly and the
beautiful’. She is ‘creation, and the image of Geist’.pp It is ‘not only nature
which we admire’, but we seek ‘in her that free and sensitive existence which
is a close relation of ours’.qq A fundamental equality between human beings
is grounded in this spirit of nature, which seeks ‘everywhere that which is
related to it’ and grants to them ‘its life and its freedom’rr so that we can see
that even the ‘sage of Königsberg’ and ‘any particular Eskimo’ are ‘simply
one being’.ss This meets a profound human need, for ‘in the circle of life More
or Less is not sufficient. We seek equality, truth, and self-contained perfection.
We struggle for ever to behold a spirit of unity.’tt This ‘one and all’ ensures
that humankind may be made whole in both organic and inorganic nature,
and may ‘also concern themselves with humanity’ alongside nature.uu ‘Nature
is pure and complete’ and we ‘feel the need of’ and ‘follow . . . our own free
eternal existence in her, through the harmony of our spirits’.vv In spite of
all human differences (‘everyone sees the glorious creation differently’) it
remains that everything that divides us was nevertheless created by ‘one
Godhead’.ww
The scientific view of nature and the cosmos (‘through the circles of the
world’), in which knowledge and feeling are apparently indistinguishable,
confirms to humanity its divine origins and that it is part of the whole. This
thought grants Nature meaning, and the same holds true for science: ‘I believe
that Linnaeus did something greater and better than mere classification, and
that in fact every natural scientist seeks in his research into nature that related
spirit, even if he is not aware of it himself.’xx It should be remembered at this
point that it is a central argument of Trendelenburg’s organicist world-view
pp. ‘[D]as Göttliche und Schöne . . . Schöpfung, und das Abbild des Geistes’. Von Berger, ‘Briefe
über die Natur’, 6
qq. ‘[So ist es nicht] nur die Natur, die wir bewundern [, sondern wir suchen] in ihr das freie
empfindende Wesen zu erkennen, das uns verwandt ist.’ Ibid., 12
rr. ‘[Ü]berall die Verwandten seines Wesens . . . sein Leben und seine Freiheit’. Ibid., 16
ss. ‘ . . . Weltweise von Königsberg . . . ein gewisser Esquimaux . . . nur Ein Wesen’. Ibid., 18
tt. ‘[G]enügt uns im Kreise des Lebens nicht das Mehr und Weniger. Wir suchen Gleichheit, und
Wahrheit und Vollendung in sich. Wir ringen ewig, Einen Geist zu erblicken.’ Ibid., 21
uu. ‘Eins und Alles . . . auch um den Menschen bekümmern’. Ibid., 28
vv. ‘Die Natur ist rein und vollendet . . . [wir] vermissen . . . verfolgen . . . unser eignes freie
unendliche Daseyn in ihr, durch die Harmonie unsrer Geister.’ Ibid., 41
ww. ‘Jeder sieht die herrliche Schöpfung anders . . . Eine Gottheit’. Ibid.
xx. ‘Nur meyne ich, daß Linné wohl noch etwas grösseres und besseres that, als klassificiren, und
daß überhaupt jeder Naturforscher in der Natur eigentlich nur den verwandten Geist zu
erforschen sucht, wenn er es auch nicht immer selbst wissen sollte.’ Ibid., 27
and his conception of science that the practice of natural science leads to
organicist thinking.63
In the autumn of 1800 von Berger took up a position in the Copen-
hagen pensions office, in accordance with the wishes of his father. He was
present during the English attack of 1801 and took part in the hostilities
as a volunteer.64 When calm returned to Holstein he acquired the Seekamp
estate near Kiel, married the Countess Anna Holk, and settled down there
with her. As Hülsen also settled down on a neighbouring farm in 1804 one
can speak of a circle of ‘philosophical farmers’ which gathered around the
von Berger and Hülsen estates: Fouqué was initially there, as were Thaden
and Rosenkrantz, who also lived in the vicinity.65 It was for the realisa-
tion of those plans which had developed between Jena and Switzerland, and
for that ethical moment which unfolds in higher companionship, that the
interest in the philosophy of nature and the natural sciences had been taken
up. One gets the impression that the political and educational aspects of
the ideals of the old Jena friends working on the lands of Holstein receded
into the background, despite the unity of Ethos and Natur, as a result of the
somewhat individualistic and elitist form in which they were lived out at
this time. Their place was apparently taken by science, if a rather mystical
understanding of science, in which the power of poetry was preferred to
scientific rigour. This retreat from philosophy to visions of nature – and to
knowledge of God (through sight and sense) as well as to worship – happened,
against a religious background, in rapturous, romanticising, allegorical and
mythologically saturated language, somewhere between that of philosophy
and that of poetry, the distinction between which von Berger explicitly
rejected.66
It was, to a certain extent, in this middle phase, in which he was preoccu-
pied with the philosophy of nature, that von Berger adopted the organicist
world-view that so influenced Trendelenburg, and for which he himself
later attempted to find systematic support. That model of living is still,
despite all material difficulties, to be understood as one of general applica-
tion, capable of having an influence on society. It looks, however, as though
von Berger’s initial optimism gave way to a more sceptical attitude to
social reality, in which the realisation of his ideals now seemed possible
only in seclusion, either individually or with a small group of like-minded
people.
During the difficult years of turmoil around the time of the Napoleonic
wars the problems of economic survival competed for his attention with
questions of a philosophical nature, as well as his own research, focused now
124 Steffen Wagner
primarily on the philosophies of nature of Schelling and Steffens, but also

on physiology and physics.67 In the end he wanted to sell his estate, but
sought a buyer in vain.68 Henrik Steffens fled the turmoil in the wake of
the French invasion in 1807, initially to Hamburg, then to Kiel, which at
that time was still Danish, and then to Copenhagen; he and his family were
accommodated for many months on the Holstein estates of friends.69 In
his memoirs, Steffens claims to have influenced von Berger’s A Philosophical
Account of the Harmonies of the Universe (Philosophische Darstellung der Harmonien
des Weltalls), which appeared shortly afterwards.70
Von Berger now turned his attention from the concrete conditions of
life in society to researching the question of our relation to the infinite and
that harmony of the whole which can be captured in one eternal thought.
‘In the eternal idea of the wise, all peoples of the earth live the same divine
life, and their unification (the earth’s coming to self-knowledge) is the great
phenomenon we call history. Here every external difference of speech and of
social form etc. disappears – as individual chords in a harmony – and all must
harmonize in the perfection and glorification of the eternal (ideal) man. This
was how Socrates envisioned things when he was asked who his people were
and replied that he was a citizen of the world.’yy By the mere addition of the
concept of harmony – the notion of the abolition of difference in an eternal
Idea – von Berger succeeds in importing his ethical-cosmopolitan concept of
humanity, together with his concept of association and its possible fulfilment
in history – the free association of noble and enlightened citizens into a life
of virtue and external freedom, which, consistently with Fichte’s vision, had
been the condition of the progress of humankind71 – into his new conception
of the philosophy of nature, and thereby to imbue it from the very beginning
with a markedly ethical-political character.
Dissatisfied with the conventional mathematical manner of presenting
astronomy, von Berger resolved to take up contact with the scholarly world
once more as soon as the opportunity presented itself. As a result he travelled,
in 1809, to Göttingen, so as to deepen his knowledge of astronomy under
Carl Friedrich Gauß.72
yy. ‘In der ewigen Idee des Weisen leben alle Völker der Erde das gleiche göttliche Leben, und
ihre Einigung (die Selbsterkenntnis der Erde) ist das grosse Phänomen der Geschichte. In
dieser Idee verschwinden – wie in der Harmonie die einzelnen Accorde – jene äusseren
Verschiedenheiten der Sprache, der geselligen Formen u.s.w., und alle müssen zur Vollendung
und Verherrlichung des ewigen (idealen) Menschen zusammenstimmen. Diese Idee war es,
welche dem Griechen Sokrates vorschwebte, als er auf die Frage, wes Volkes er sey, einen
Weltbürger sich nannte.’ Von Berger, Philosophische Darstellung der Harmonien des Weltalls, xxi
5 The institutional path and the development

of the system
Johann Erich von Berger was called to the professorship of astronomy at
the University of Kiel in 1814, where he remained until his death in 1833.73
Apart from his mathematical lectures, he also taught philosophy, exclusively
so after the death of Reinhold, being additionally appointed to the chair
of philosophy in 1816.74 With Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann and other
colleagues he founded the patriotic journal Kieler Blätter (1816–19), in the
pages of which – in this troubled period after the Wars of Liberation and
the Carlsbad Decrees – he intervened in the discussion about a corporative
German constitution, writing two long essays on political and social theory.75
In connection with his role as professor of philosophy, he initially produced
a small piece on the religion debate, and then, most importantly, his General
Outlines of Science (Allgemeine Grundzüge zur Wissenschaft), which he published
in four parts over a period of ten years (1817–27), and which served as the
basis of his lectures.76
Von Berger returned to social themes in the Kieler Blätter: the journal, as he
explained in his first contribution ‘On the Distinctiveness of Peoples’ (‘Ueber
Volks-Eigenthümlichkeit’), was to serve as a ‘society for the encouragement
of those called to science’, to ‘bring knowledge into life’, and also to express
opinions ‘on the most important human issue – how we should live together’.zz
The time was ripe, as he saw it, for a discussion of the issue of the corporative
constitution, and it was to such a debate that he called the ‘thinking men of
the Fatherland’,aaa the ‘heart’ and ‘voice of the citizens’, as well as the scholars,
who ought not to live ‘in the monastic seclusion of their ideas alone’.bbb This
sounds like a return to the demands Fichte made in Jena in 1794, and to von
Berger’s reasons for leaving his rural seclusion and entering the institutional
life of the University of Kiel.
At this time von Berger became ever more interested in Hegel, in par-
ticular in his phenomenology, his logic and his philosophy of nature, the
influence of which could already be seen in his writings and discussions of
zz. ‘Verein zur Pflege der Wissenschaften berufener Männer . . . das Wissen ins Leben
einzuführen . . . über die höchsten Angelegenheiten des Menschen, wie er mit Menschen
zusammen lebt . . . ’ J. E. von Berger, ‘Ueber Volkseigenthümlichkeit und den Gegensatz
zwischen den mehreren Völkern’, Kieler Blätter 1 (Kiel: Verlag der academischen
Buchhandlung, 1818), 2
aaa. ‘[D]ie denkenden Männer des Vaterlandes’. Ibid., 3–4
bbb. ‘Herz . . . Stimme des Bürgers, der nicht in klösterlicher Abgeschiedenheit nur in seinen Ideen
[leben solle]’. Ibid., 6
126 Steffen Wagner
the harmony of the whole before the Allgemeine Grundzüge zur Wissenschaft.
In a passage from ‘Ueber Volks-Eigenthümlichkeit’, the content of which is
dialectical, but which uses his own words and makes no reference to Hegel,
he writes:
The antithesis [of nature] is necessary, as originally grounded in

nature. Nature is however itself only the reflection, or the eternal
sphere, of reason. The antithesis is therefore also grounded in reason,
and everywhere also ceases to be external and independent of Geist. In
whatever form it appears, Geist subordinates the antithesis to itself,
and determines it according to its own law. What was once external,
random and unintelligible to Geist, becomes internal, moderated and
recognised by it. In this way it becomes a sublated antithesis, or
harmony. It is inseparable from finitude, or rather it is finitude,
determinate existence, itself, which one may also therefore call the way
of being of the infinite (or the purely spiritual).ccc
In 1819, in ‘On the Purpose and Nature of Civil Society’ (‘Ueber Zweck und
Wesen der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft’) the references to Hegel are explicit in
the discussion of the social contract between the ‘people and the authorities’
which founds the state: ‘It is a contract the (immortal) people makes with
itself, an expression of that universal thought which orders its relationships
and is now at one with itself. The people and the authorities are not to be
thought of as two separate, independent, contracting parties. Rather they rep-
resent a substantial and original unity, as expressed particularly profoundly
and admirably by Hegel.’ddd Von Berger also shared Hegel’s assessment of
the negotiations surrounding the Estates of Württemberg, in particular his
opposition to a purely atomistic ordering of society. Suffrage in civil soci-
ety needed to be dependent on conditions such as ownership of property,
ccc. ‘Der Gegensatz [zur Natur] ist nothwendig, als in der Natur ursprünglich gegründet. Die
Natur aber ist selbst nur der Wiederschein oder die ewige Sphäre der Vernunft. Der Gegensatz
ist also zuletzt wieder in der Vernunft selbst gegründet, und hört überall wieder auf zu gelten
als ein bloß äußerer und vom Geiste unabhängiger. Wie er auch erscheinen möge, der Geist
ordnet sich ihn unter, und bestimmt ihn nach seinem Gesetz. Aus dem bloß äußern,
zufälligen, den Geist verwirrenden, ist er ein innerer, gemäßigter, vom Geiste selbst erkannter
geworden. So ist er aufgehobener Gegensatz, oder Harmonie. Er ist von der Endlichkeit
unzertrennlich, oder vielmehr die Endlichkeit, das bestimmte Daseyn, selbst, welches man
daher auch als die Art zu seyn des Unendlichen (oder rein Geistigen) erklären kann.’ Ibid., 10
ddd. ‘Es ist ein Vertrag des (unsterblichen) Volkes mit sich selbst, ein Ausdruck seines allgemeinen,
seine Verhältnisse ordnenden, mit sich selbst nun einigen Gedankens. Volk und Obrigkeit sind
hier nicht als zwei, von einander unabhängige und sonst getrennte, Contrahenten zu
betrachten. Sie bilden vielmehr eine wesentliche und ursprüngliche Einheit, wie dies
besonders von Hegel . . . trefflich und tief erörtert ist’. Von Berger, ‘Ueber Zweck und Wesen
der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft’, 26
income, public business, office, standing or trade.77 In the very next sentence,
however, von Berger returns to his original concepts and ideals, which he
integrates into this Hegelian-style text by means of his own, equally clear,
demand for external freedoms. ‘The more essential characteristics of the voters
are the inner ones, such as a respectable character and a certain level of educa-
tion and maturity [Mündigkeit, Kant’s term] of judgement. These, of course,
are dependent on the external conditions of one’s own free existence etc.’eee
Hegel’s logical and conceptual rigour seems to have freed von Berger from
the conceptual and linguistic mysticism of his harmonising nature philoso-
phy, and allowed him to rediscover the old Kantian human and educational
ideals by turning to large political and social themes.
The concept of education cannot be ignored here either. Already in his
first essay for the Kieler Blätter there is no lack of references to the free devel-
opment of the individual, who ‘as a freely determined harmoniously rational
being,’ should ‘assert and develop powerfully his individuality or autonomy,
as he has recognised it ideally should be’.fff In his second essay, von Berger con-
nects education to politics: ‘because the state . . . must be understood as an
association for the purpose of attaining humanity or spiritual freedom, it is
its necessary task and higher obligation to lead its citizens, who are at first,
in many cases, immature [unmündig] and lacking in independent judgement,
to that autonomy which is the soul and ideal essence of the state. Every
citizen should belong to the state only as a member judging and willing for
himself.’ggg The notion of education into humanity is also present in the
third volume of the Allgemeine Grundzüge zur Wissenschaft. According to the
second main section, entitled ‘On the Genesis of Humankind, and the Origin
of Language and Culture’, ‘the whole infinite organism of nature must be
understood as in a state of becoming’ – and the human species raised itself
up above all others ‘most perfectly and freely’, on the one hand through the
‘instinct for the highest’, which is present in nature, and, on the other hand,
eee. ‘Die wesentlicheren Eigenschaften des Wählers sind überhaupt die inneren, die eines
unbescholtenen Charakters, und einer gewissen Bildung und Mündigkeit des Urtheils. Diese
hängen nun freilich wieder von den äußeren Bedingungen einer eignen freien Existenz u.s.w.
ab.’ Ibid., 53–4
fff. ‘[A]ls eine frei bestimmte Harmonie des Vernunftwesens überhaupt . . . seine Individualität
oder Selbstständigkeit, wie er sie in der Idee erkannt hat, kräftig behaupten und ausbilden soll’.
Von Berger, ‘Ueber Volks-Eigenthümlichkeit’, 11
ggg. ‘[W]eil der Staat . . . als eine Verbindung zur Humanität oder zur geistigen Freiheit gedacht
werden muß, so ist es seine nothwendige Aufgabe und seine höhere Pflicht, seine Bürger, die
fürerst zum Theil unmündigen und des eignen Urtheils entbehrenden, zu jener Autonomie, die
des Staates Seele und ideales Wesen ist, zu erziehen und zu bilden. Jeder Bürger soll dem Staat
nur als ein selbsturtheilendes und wollendes Mitglied angehören.’ Von Berger, ‘Ueber Zweck
und Wesen der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft’, 25
128 Steffen Wagner
through the ‘social instinct’; for it is only ‘amongst other humans’ that a
human ‘can become human’.hhh This development, which is driven by the
process of individuation, gets its meaning and value from the concept of the
realisation of humanity in individuals, which must be the goal of education –
of ‘the teachers and educators leading the rest to humanity’.iii
Hegel is also present in a central section of the second volume of von
Berger’s Allgemeine Grundzüge zur Wissenschaft. In the introductory section,
on the relation between being and thought (as Trendelenburg would later
call it),78 or (as von Berger expressed it) on the ‘general system of knowledge,
with a retrospective view of earlier investigation’ (by which he means the
first volume, of 1817), he describes the ‘system of knowledge’ as an ‘organic
formation . . . in which all parts and functions are determined and unified by
the soul of the whole’.jjj He is concerned with ‘the general life of Geist and
of nature in its eternal rhythm of the unifying and reconciling of opposites,
harmony, the beginning, the middle and the culmination’.kkk Von Berger
points out the ‘dominance of that form’, the dialectic, ‘in certain brilliant
schools of antiquity’, but also ‘Hegel, whom we follow here’ had ‘used it
and demonstrated its vitality’.lll Through the ‘three moments: the logical,
the physical, and the ethical’ as well as through the activity of the mind, a
philosophical system pursues the development of knowledge and existence,
but must not lose sight of ‘the higher organic unity and internal connection’
in doing so: ‘We see Geist developing and ordering its inner world, and then
destroying its creations in order to rejuvenate that immortal nature within it
in higher and freer forms, and so to bring its finite, ever-growing, system of
thought ever closer to that eternal nature which is the reflected Idea of the
immortal World Spirit.’mmm But knowledge is nevertheless ‘in an even higher
hhh. ‘Der ganze unendliche Organismus der Natur ist als ein werdender zu denken . . . am
Vollkommensten und Freisten . . . Trieb nach Oben . . . Geselligkeitstrieb . . . nur unter Menschen
selbst auch zum Menschen gebildet’. Von Berger, Allgemeine Grundzüge zur Wissenschaft iii:
Zur Anthropologie und Psychologie, 306–7
iii. ‘[D]ie Lehrer und Erzieher der übrigen zur Humanität’. Ibid., 309
jjj. ‘System der Wissenschaften überhaupt . . . organischen Bildung . . . in welcher alle Theile
und Functionen durch die Seele des Ganzen bestimmt und geeinigt sind’. Von Berger,
Allgemeine Grundzüge zur Wissenschaft ii: Zur philosophischen Naturerkenntniß, 1
kkk. ‘[D]as allgemeine Leben des Geistes und der Natur in seinem ewigen Rhythmus einer
Einigung und Versöhnung des Entgegengesetzten, die Harmonie, der Anfang, die Mitte, die
Vollendung’. Ibid., 5
lll. ‘Hegel, dem wir hierin folgen [habe] sie geltend gemacht und ein reiches Leben in ihr
darzustellen gewußt’. Ibid.
mmm. ‘Wir sehen ihn [den Geist] seine innere Welt bilden und ordnen, und seine Schöpfungen
alsbald auch wieder zerstören, um das unvergängliche Wesen in ihnen in ewig höheren und
freieren Bildungen zu verjüngen, und so sein werdendes, endliches Gedankensystem dem
ewigen der Natur, als der reflektirten Idee des unendlichen Weltgeistes, in steter
Entwicklung näher zu bringen’. Ibid., 2–3
sense than Existence or Nature, an infinite development, everywhere deter-

minate, to be sure, but at the same time continuous’.nnn Goal and method
correspond then to some extent with those of Hegel, but there remains a
decisive difference, which von Berger does not highlight as such, but which
cannot go unremarked in the light of Trendelenburg’s well-known criticism
of Hegel for beginning the dialectical process in pure thought, which pre-
supposes from the start the concept of movement.79 If we were to ‘seek
to arrange the whole of knowledge such’ that we said: ‘first, Geist was pure
thought, second, that it found itself alienated from and in opposition to itself
as a natural being, third, that it returned to itself, determining Nature within
itself and destroying the opposition’ and if we then thereby produced ‘the
three major branches of philosophy (which we could call, roughly, logic,
physics and ethics) . . . then we would still have to remember that this com-
prehensive idea contains truth only in virtue of its totality, that in each
of the three distinct parts the whole must reflect itself in some way, and –
that the sequence of the parts might be different from what it is, without
damaging the truth of the whole’.ooo ‘For in the realm of philosophical
knowledge it is everywhere the same spiritual unity that is the starting
point: this or the whole is in it present, as force or capacity, in the individ-
ual parts also, whether as an element (hidden, primordial) or as a swelling
germ which, at first tender and undeveloped, nevertheless contains within
itself in potentia the entire riches of its future shape.’ppp Trendelenburg’s
later criticisms of Hegel in his Logische Untersuchungen, making use of the
Aristotelian concepts of movement and soul, seem to be prefigured in these
words.
Translated by Ian Jennings
nnn. ‘[I]n einem noch höhern Sinn als das Daseyn oder als die Natur eine unendliche, zwar
überall bestimmte, zugleich aber auch stetige Entwickelung’. Ibid., 3
ooo. ‘[D]as Ganze des Wissens etwa so anzuordnen versuchten . . . der Geist sey zuerst denkend
ganz nur in sich, zweitens finde er sich als Naturwesen sich selbst wie entfremdet und mit sich
selbst in Widerspruch, drittens kehre er, die Natur in sich bestimmend und den Widerspruch
vernichtend, in sich selbst zurück . . . drei Hauptsphären der Philosophie (die wir kurz Logik,
Physik und Ethik bezeichnen könnten) hervorgehen . . . so müßten wir uns hiebei doch
zugleich auch daran erinnern, wie jene umfassende Idee eben nur in ihrer Totalität
Wahrheit habe, wie in jedem der drei unterschiedenen Theile immer wieder auf gewisse
Weise der ganze Gedanke sich spiegeln müsse, und – wie die Folge der Theile auch wohl eine
andere seyn könnte, unbeschadet der Wahrheit des Ganzen’. Von Berger, Zur philosophischen
Naturerkenntniß, 3–4
ppp. ‘Denn in der philosophischen Erkenntniß bleibt es ja überall dieselbe geistige Einheit, von
welcher ausgegangen wird; diese oder das Ganze ist in ihr, der Kraft und Anlage nach, auch
im Einzelnen schon gegenwärtig, als Element (verborgenes, Uranfängliches) oder als
schwellender Keim, welcher, zuerst noch zart und unentwickelt, dennoch den ganzen
Reichthum der künftigen Gestalt der Möglichkeit nach schon in sich trägt.’ Ibid., 4
130 Steffen Wagner
Notes
1. See E. Bratuscheck, Adolf Trendelenburg (Berlin: Henschel, 1873), 17–32, especially con-
cerning Reinhold, 18–20, and von Berger, 20–4.
2. On Trendelenburg’s schoolteacher see, ibid., 5–11, and F. Breier, Georg Ludwig König:
einige Worte der Erinnerung an den Verewigten von einem seiner Schüler (Oldenburg: Ferdinand
Schmidt, 1849).
3. See also the biography of the family written by his son Friedrich: F. Trendelenburg,
Geschichte der Familie Trendelenburg für Kinder und Enkel (Halle an der Saale: Buchdruckerei
des Waisenhauses, 1921), 124.
4. F. A. Trendelenburg, Platonis de ideis et numeris doctrina ex Aristotele illustrata (Leipzig:
Vogel, 1826). See, amongst others, Bratuscheck, Adolf Trendelenburg, 49–58.
5. On Trendelenburg’s being called to Berlin see ibid., 75–6 and 83.
6. See, amongst others, H. Bonitz, ‘Zur Erinnerung an Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg: Vor-
trag gehalten am Leibniztage 1872 in der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften’,
in Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 1872 (Berlin: F.
Dümmler, 1872), 14 and 24.
7. See, for example: F. Paulsen, Die deutschen Universitäten und das Universitätsstudium (Berlin:
Asher, 1902), 243, but also E. Feldmann, Der preußische Neuhumanismus: Studien zur
Geschichte der Erziehung und Erziehungswissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Friedrich
Cohen, 1930), i, 3–65 and 117–39.
8. Also worth considering in this connection, apart from Trendelenburg’s Logische Unter-
suchungen (Berlin: Bethge, 1840; further editions: 1862 and 1870, which is quoted here),
is his treatise Naturrecht auf dem Grunde der Ethik (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1860, 1868).
9. Trendelenburg also attended Steffens’ lectures on natural philosophy in the winter of
1824, and these left a deep impression on him. See Bratuscheck, Adolf Trendelenburg, 47–8.
10. Trendelenburg, ‘Der Widerstreit zwischen Kant und Aristoteles in der Ethik’, 201.
11. See here in addition to the significant title of the treatise on natural law (‘auf dem Grunde
der Ethik’) his short piece Die sittliche Idee des Rechts from the year 1849, which appeared
immediately after the disappointing failure to achieve national unity, a cause which Tren-
delenburg had supported in his capacity as a deputy in the state parliament.
12. Antonia Ruth Weiss describes Trendelenburg as a moderate liberal thinker, who neverthe-
less did not allow himself to be identified with any of the classical varieties of liberalism
and conservatism, and who attempted to resist the legal positivism which had become
increasingly influential in his time (see A. R. Weiss, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg und das
Naturrecht im 19. Jahrhundert (Kallmüntz: Lassleben, 1960), 2, 15–20, 42–3, 72–5, 79–109).
13. See here, amongst others, Bratuscheck, Adolf Trendelenburg, 92: ‘Educational practice was
for him the most important and far-reaching application of ethics, and not only in the
narrow sense of the doctrine of the training of the will – but also in the methodological
sense.’
14. This excerpt from the Organon appeared as a preparatory didactic aid for the teaching of
philosophy in Latin in 1836 and in German in 1842 (Erläuterungen zu den Elementen der
aristotelischen Logik: zunächst für den Unterricht in Gymnasien (Berlin: 1842; 2nd edn 1861)).
15. One example, amongst many, would be von Berger’s much stronger emphasis on religious
and divine moments in his organicist philosophy of nature. Trendelenburg distinguished
more decisively between philosophy and religion than von Berger in ways that space does
not permit any more than a hint of here. See here chapter 22 of the Logische Untersuchungen:
‘Das Unbedingte und die Idee’ (Logische Untersuchungen ii, 461–510).
16. On the socially conditioned meaning of concepts like ‘culture’ and ‘morality’ for the aspi-
rational, emancipation-oriented bourgeoisie in Germany, see N. Elias, Über den Prozeß
der Zivilisation: soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen i: Wandlungen des Verhal-
tens in den westlichen Oberschichten des Abendlandes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997),
89–131.
17. The evaluation of von Berger’s writings in the following account seeks consciously to focus
on those moments and works of his which are less accessible, or which have attracted less
attention in the relevant literature.
18. The most comprehensive source on von Berger’s life is his biographer Henning Ratjen:
Johann Erich von Bergers Leben, mit Andeutungen und Erinnerungen zu ‘Johann Erich von Bergers
Leben’ von J. R. (Altona: Hammerich, 1835), esp. 5–8.
19. See Ratjen, Johann Erich von Bergers Leben, 8, and the recollections of Rist, ibid., 65.
20. See ibid., 8.
21. See ibid., 9.
22. See C. E. Carstens, ‘Niemann, August Christian’, in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie xxiii
(Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1886), 673–4.
23. J. E. von Berger, ‘Ueber das Gesindewesen, besonders in sittlicher Ruecksicht’, Schleswig-
Holsteinische Provinzialberichte, ser. viii , 1, no. 2 (1794), 113–62.
24. Von Berger, ‘Ueber das Gesindewesen’, 114: ‘every institution in society’ must ‘encourage
the ethical education of the human race’ and every ‘effort of active humanitarians’ must
aim at ‘influencing the ethics of their fellow citizens’.
25. See also ibid., 131 and 160.
26. The terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘spiritual powers’ are used quite deliberately here. The sharing
of material goods was to be governed by the contractually regulated agreements in which
‘disproportionate payments’ were to be avoided, given that they have a corrupting effect,
and where restraint in spending on one’s own diversions was also to be exercised (ibid.,
143–4).
27. ‘The human race is in every circumstance free and ethical, there are virtuous and vicious
people in every class. Everywhere there is enlightened understanding and encouragement
to virtuous desire’ (ibid., 154).
28. ‘Because our complaints are about moral evils’ (ibid., 123). Von Berger defines the ‘Ver-
trag zwischen Herrn und Diener’ (contract between master and servant) in terms of the
ethically charged legal concept of ‘Contractus bonae fidei’ (ibid.) and remains sceptical
about politico-legislative solutions (‘The state does not offer much help’ (ibid., 124));
and because so much of domestic concern escapes the gaze of the police and the justice sys-
tem he held legal resources such as the ‘Gesindeordnungen’ (Servant Statutes), amongst
others, to be ‘impractical’ and at best a ‘makeshift solution’ to prevent greater evils
(ibid., 125).
29. I. Kant, Beantwortung der Frage: was ist Aufklärung?, in Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed.
Königlich preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1900–) (here-
after GS), viii, 35.
30. I. Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, in GS v, 161–2.
132 Steffen Wagner
31. ‘One day – and this time must come – one day the mild but firm sceptre of the rule of reason
will be the only sceptre’ (ibid.). But the ‘hopes of future generations’ rest on enlightenment,
education, and training: ‘Pure ethical teaching, true religion’ against ‘irrational dogmas’ –
‘superstition and darkness’ will one day give way to ‘religion, this beautiful daughter of
morality’ (ibid., 129–30).
32. See J. G. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Carlsruhe: Christian
Gottlieb Schmieder, 1790), vol. i (1784), bk 4, 335; vol. ii (1790), bk 9, 251–65; vol. iii
(1790), bk 15, 363ff., 372, 379, 407, 414.
33. See here, amongst others, I. Kant, GS viii, 18, 20f., 35; vii, 84.
34. See Ratjen, Johann Erich von Bergers Leben, 10–11, but also F. Marwinski, ‘Wahrlich, das
Unternehmen ist kühn . . . ’: aus der Geschichte der Literarischen Gesellschaft der freien Männer
von 1794/99 zu Jena (Jena: Academica & Studentica Jenensia e. V., 1992), 16, according to
which von Berger matriculated in Jena on 11 November 1793.
35. On the rally in sympathy with Reinhold see E. Reinhold, Karl Leonhard Reinholds Leben
und literarisches Wirken (Jena, 1825), 70–1, but also the anonymous article, ‘Aus einem
Briefe von Jena, über Reinholds Abgang nach Kiel’, in the periodical Der Genius der Zeit 2
(May–August 1794), no. 6 (June 1794), edited by August Hennings (Altona: Hammerich,
1794), 245–54.
36. See Ratjen, Johann Erich von Bergers Leben, 14.
37. See Marwinski, ‘Wahrlich, das Unternehmen ist kühn . . . ’, 17: ‘The two concurred in their
views on the meaning of the French revolution, in their ideas on the contemporary moral
influence of Kantian philosophy, and in that optimism, peculiar to the Enlightenment,
which held that once conditions are seen to be capable of improvement, they can in fact
be changed if the necessary energy is found.’
38. Although there were similar such societies prior to this date, the minuted anniversary
celebrations one year later suggest that this was a first establishment (see ibid., 11, but
also P. Raabe, ‘Das Protokollbuch der Gesellschaft der freien Männer in Jena 1794–1799’,
in H. W. Seiffert and B. Zeller (eds.), Festgabe für Eduard Berend zum 75. Geburtstag am
5. Dezember 1958 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1959), 336–83, esp. 357–8). ‘These groups
ran the gamut from the philosophical circle of the students of Fichte to a Jacobin-style
revolutionary league via an elite literary-aesthetic circle of friends of early Romanticism
and republican aligned, well-organised student societies for political reform. Instances
of all these facets can be found in their history.’ (Marwinski, ‘Wahrlich, das Unternehmen
ist kühn . . . ’, 8–9). Fichte apparently attended a function of the Gesellschaft just once, on
4 September 1794, when von Breuning spoke on the subject of the secret societies (see
ibid., 16–17 and 31; as well as Raabe, ‘Das Protokollbuch’, 350). Marwinski remarks, on
the subject of Reinhold, that the idea of such a society was in circulation prior to Fichte’s
arrival in Jena (18 May 1794), and that many of the founding members, including von
Berger, were pupils of Reinhold.
39. Marwinski, ‘Wahrlich, das Unternehmen ist kühn . . . ’, 20–4; C. Jamme, ‘Geselligkeit und
absolutes Sein: Weisen des Anschlusses an Fichte im Umkreis der “Freien Männer”’, in
M. Bondeli and H. Linneweber-Lammerskitten (eds.), Hegels Denkentwicklung in der Berner
und Frankfurter Zeit (Munich: Fink, 1999), 395–428, at 397.
40. Marwinski, ‘Wahrlich, das Unternehmen ist kühn . . . ’, 10.
41. See the graph indicating the length of various memberships of the Society in ibid., 82. Raabe
gives the following dates for his membership: from the founding up to 30 September 1794,
from 26 June up to August 1795, from 1 November 1797 up to 21 March 1798 (Raabe,
‘Das Protokollbuch’, 379).
42. See J. G. Fichte, ‘Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten’, in Gesamtaus-
gabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. R. Lauth and H. Jacob assisted by R.
Schottky (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstadt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1962–2012) , i/3, 1–74, esp.
33–42.
43. See here Marwinski, ‘Wahrlich, das Unternehmen ist kühn . . . ’, 31, as well as Raabe, ‘Das
Protokollbuch’, 350.
44. See here Breuning’s letter to Herbart of 29 October 1795 from Mergentheim (Briefe von
und an J. F. Herbart, in J. F. Herbart, Sämtliche Werke xix, edited by T. Fritzsch (Langensalza,
1912), no. 711, 69, cited by Marwinski, ‘Wahrlich, das Unternehmen ist kühn . . . ’, 32); also
Raabe, ‘Das Protokollbuch’, 351 and 358–9.
45. See Marwinski, ‘Wahrlich, das Unternehmen ist kühn . . . ’, 38–40. What remains is a non-
hierarchically organised society, which is arranged so as to prevent any particular indi-
vidual from having too great an influence: ‘von Berger and his party had developed a
thoroughly utopian conception of society, which depicts individuals as acting responsibly
and independently and which rejects all paternalism’ (ibid., 38).
46. Ibid., 7; unlike the Gesellschaft, with which it was often equated, the ‘Bund der freien
Männer’ (Association of Free Men) was not wedded to any fixed organisational form. See
also D. Klawon, ‘Geschichtsphilosophische Ansätze in der Frühromantik’ (Inaugural Dis-
sertation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, 1977), 180, and
W. Flitner, August Ludwig Hülsen und der Bund der Freien Männer (Inaugural Dissertation
Jena, Naumburg: Gottfried Pätz, 1913), 12: ‘a genuine cult of friendship’.
47. For a treatment of these two texts in greater depth than is possible here see particularly
Jamme, ‘Geselligkeit und absolutes Sein’, 402–8, which reveals, amongst other things,
the ‘parallelisms’ between the principal ways of thinking in the writings of von Berger
and ‘those of Hölderlin and above all the young Hegel’, with special reference to their
common criticism of ‘the end of the emancipatory phase of the enlightenment’ in the light
of ‘Herder’s concept of national education’ and the demand for the ‘application of Kantian
and Fichtean philosophy’ (ibid., 404–5).
48. In using the term ‘vertraulich’ rather than ‘geheim’ von Berger is taking a clear position
with regard to the student societies and the events surrounding the continuation of
Fichte’s Lectures on the Vocation of the Scholar in the winter semester 1794/5.
49. See on this subject as well J. E. von Berger, ‘Ueber die vorhergehenden Bedingungen einer
verbesserten Nationalerziehung’, Genius der Zeit 6, no. 2 (1795), 266–318, at 313.
50. See here especially R. Lassahn, Studien zur Wirkungsgeschichte Fichtes als Pädagoge (Heidel-
berg: Quelle & Meyer, 1970), 50–5.
51. For a differentiation of his conception of freedom see the concluding footnote in von
Berger, Die Angelegenheiten des Tages, 76–8.
52. On Hülsen see also the biographical sketch in F. Strack and M. Eicheldinger (eds.), Frag-
mente der Frühromantik (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), ii, 503–6, in vol. i of which are found
extracts from Hülsen’s unpublished philosophical fragments. See also A. Schmidt, Fouqué
134 Steffen Wagner
und seine Zeitgenossen: biographischer Versuch (Zurich: Haffmanns, 1987), 148–9, on von
Berger’s relations with Hülsen and the sojourn in Switzerland.
53. See Rist, in Ratjen, Johann Erich von Bergers Leben, 22 and 66, as well as Strack and
Eicheldinger (eds.), Fragmente der Frühromantik, ii, 504–5.
54. See Rist in Ratjen, Johann Erich von Bergers Leben, 22–3: their plans are to take effect
‘through writings which are free of any educational pressures’. Von Berger would not
publish anything more until 1800.
55. See ibid., 21.
56. During this time Fichte informed von Berger in a letter of 11 October 1796 (cited in
ibid., 21) that, in his absence, together with Hülsen, Smidt, the court chaplain Schulz in
Königsberg, and Klopstock in Trieste, as the uncle of Fichte’s wife, he had been named
godfather of Fichte’s son Immanuel Hermann, who had been born on 18 July.
57. See ibid., 25.
58. See ibid., 24.
59. See ibid., 28 and 30.
60. See Rist, in ibid., 75–8.
61. See Ratjen, Johann Erich von Bergers Leben, 30. There was an agricultural training institute,
headed by Lucas Andreas Staudinger, on the smallholding of the Hamburger merchant
Caspar Voght. See G. Ahrens, Caspar Voght und sein Mustergut Flottbek: englische Land-
wirtschaft in Deutschland am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: Christians, 1969).
62. J. E. von Berger, ‘Briefe über die Natur’, Mnemosyne: eine Zeitschrift, no. 1 (Altona: Ham-
merich, 1800), 6–58.
63. Trendelenburg wrote as early as his ‘Geschichte der Kategorienlehre’ (in Historische
Beiträge zur Philosophie, i (Berlin: Bethge, 1846), 202) of ‘a tendency of the individual
sciences towards the general’ which would ‘complete philosophy’ and ‘continue and
deepen the whole at a fundamental level’.
64. See Ratjen, Johann Erich von Bergers Leben, 32–3.
65. Ibid., 33; see also Strack and Eicheldinger (eds.), Fragmente der Frühromantik, 506. The
circle comprised Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Nicolaus von Thaden and Erich Scheel
von Rosenkrantz, the latter a member of the Gesellschaft in the spring and summer of
1795.
66. ‘Divine knowledge (Philosophy) proclaimed itself directly in enthusiastic tales and songs’
(J. E. von Berger, Philosophische Darstellung der Harmonien des Weltalls i: Allgemeine Blicke
(Altona: Hammerich, 1808), xxx). ‘The distinction and opposition between philosophy
and poetry . . . has always seemed to us a poorly-told tale from the life of the spirit’ (ibid.,
xiii).
67. See von Berger, Philosophische Darstellung der Harmonien des Weltalls, xxxvi f. See also
Ratjen, Johann Erich von Bergers Leben, 34–5.
68. See ibid., 37.
69. See ibid. See also I. Möller, Henrik Steffens, trans. H. E. Lampl (Stuttgart: Verlag Freies
Geistesleben, 1962), 133–43.
70. See H. Steffens, Was ich erlebte: aus der Erinnerung niedergeschrieben v (Breslau: Joseph Max,
1842), 272–3. See also the letter of October 1807, cited in Ratjen, Johann Erich von Bergers
Leben, 38.
71. See Fichte, Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten, 40.
72. See Ratjen, Johann Erich von Bergers Leben, 38–9 and 42.
73. He was named rector of the university for the first time in 1821, and died shortly after
the beginning of his second period of office in 1833. See Ratjen, Johann Erich von Bergers
Leben, 81.
74. Ibid., 43.
75. J. E. von Berger, ‘Ueber Volks-Eigenthümlichkeit und den Gegensatz zwischen den
mehrern Völkern’, Kieler Blätter 1 (Kiel: Verlag der academischen Buchhandlung, 1816),
1–52; ‘Ueber Zweck und Wesen der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und über die Entwicklung
ihrer Formen’, Kieler Blätter 2 (Hamburg: Perthes und Besser, 1819), 1–64.
76. J. E. von Berger, Ueber den scheinbaren Streit der Vernunft wider sich selbst besonders in Reli-
gionssachen: ein Beitrag zur Verständigung (Altona: Hammerich, 1818); Allgemeine Grundzüge
zur Wissenschaft i: Analyse des Erkenntnisvermögens oder der erscheinenden Erkenntniß im All-
gemeinen (Altona: Hammerich 1817); ii: Zur philosophischen Naturerkenntniß (Altona: Ham-
merich, 1821); iii: Zur Anthropologie und Psychologie: Grundzüge der Anthropologie und der Psy-
chologie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Erkenntnis- und Denklehre (Altona: Hammerich, 1824);
iv (final volume): Zur Ethik, philosophischen Rechtslehre und Religionsphilosophie: Grundzüge
der Sittenlehre der philosophischen Rechts- und Staatslehre und der Religionsphilosophie (Altona:
Hammerich, 1827).
77. See Berger, ‘Ueber Zweck und Wesen der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft,’ 53–4: the ‘intelligent
power of citizens will be immediately made use of on matters of common interest’ by means
of ‘good communal constitutions’ which are more than mere ‘corporations or guilds’ and
so a stable basis will be created ‘for the entire society’ – thus securing what he believes to
be Hegel’s anti-atomistic goals.
78. See, for example, Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen i, 132–3.
79. See the chapter ‘Die Dialektische Methode’, in Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen i,
36–129.
6
The concept and philosophy of culture

in Neo-Kantianism
Stephan Nachtsheim
Neo-Kantianism represents a third strain of modern Idealism, following

Kant’s transcendental and Hegel’s absolute Idealism. It understood itself as
a form of cultural-philosophical idealism and was the dominant academic
philosophy in the German-speaking world from 1870 to 1920, indeed ‘the
only philosophy of world significance’.1 People came from all over the world
to study it, in both of the main schools, the Marburg school of Cohen,
Natorp and Cassirer, as well as the south-west German school of Windelband,
Rickert, Lask, Cohn and Bauch.2 Although it was by no means united in
its substantive positions, it was held together by a basic framework and
represented a new and highly promising type of philosophy. The basis of its
predominance was an interpretation of Kant that addressed contemporary
problems, and a further development of Kant’s ideas that envisaged the
working out of philosophical problems in all fields.
Back to Kant
The return to Kant entailed a desire for an idealism that differed from
post-Kantian systems and was free from their encumbrances, and the
search for a new foundation for a systematic philosophy that the decline
in Hegelianism had discredited. It was above all in the natural sciences
that systematic philosophy had been discredited, and where there was a
strong anti-philosophical resentment.3 Idealism’s speculative flights of
fancy, its devaluation of the empirical, Hegel’s philosophical claim to have
presented the knowledge contained in the individual natural and human
sciences scientifically (i.e. philosophically) had aroused protest in those
sciences. Especially his philosophy of nature,4 but increasingly too his
136
The concept and philosophy of culture in Neo-Kantianism 137
philosophy of history and art were seen by representatives of the specialist

positive sciences as an assault.5 Hegel’s philosophy was seen as scientifically
inadmissible.
The sciences threw off what they saw as the yoke of Hegelian philosophy
and the presumptuous claims of Idealism, whose basic questions appeared
resolvable into a complex of problems within individual empirical disci-
plines. Every philosophical appeal to foundational questions contained the
whiff of a reversion to the despised Hegelian dialectic. The age replaced
the totality of the great systematic constructions with the mass of data that
the natural and human sciences had painstakingly collected. The totality of
nature and the totality of history seemed finally to be a matter of empirical
research. The flights of fancy of philosophical thought were dissolved by
what Windelband called ‘devotion to the small’.a,6
This was much more than the emancipation of the individual disciplines
from philosophy, for it denied philosophy its role as the basis for the positive
sciences, and led systematic philosophy into a crisis of legitimation. Philos-
ophy saw in great historical works its own glorious past or assimilated itself
to the successful empirical sciences. Several varieties of empiricism and pos-
itivism appeared, all of which classified a priori knowledge as metaphysics
and thereby unscientific. These scientific doctrines were, to be sure, initially
the work of natural scientists, but they increasingly influenced philosophy.
In the eyes of the early neo-Kantians, post-Kantian German Idealism
had been a mistake, its demise after Hegel understandable. It could offer no
basis, therefore, for the development or even renewal of philosophy. This
certainly did not mean that individual ideas of Fichte or Hegel were of no use.
However, the post-Kantians had reinterpreted Kant’s critical idealism as a
form of absolute idealism. They therefore believed it necessary to challenge
the competence of the non-philosophical sciences and to overcome Kant’s
critical restriction of the scope of philosophical reason. In the words of Ernst
Cassirer,
But those who followed systems of thought immediately after Kant,

and believed themselves with their systems directly in line with him,
actually did not follow in his footsteps. They did not see in his
transcendental formulation of the problem a sure means for
a. ‘Andacht zum Kleinen’. Wilhelm Windelband, Die Philosophie im deutschen Geistesleben des 19.
Jahrhunderts (2nd edn, Tübingen: J. C. B.Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1909; repr. edn, Eschborn:
Dietmar Klotz, 1996), 86
138 Stephan Nachtsheim
determining the limits of pure reason but actually took it to be an

instrument for freeing reason from all the restrictions formerly laid
upon it . . . logic and dialectics were now no longer to be regarded as a
mere organon for the knowledge of reality, but were thought to
contain this knowledge in all its fullness and totality and to allow of its
being made explicit. Herewith the realm of philosophic thought
appeared to be fixed for the last time, and its goal attained, the identity
of reality and reason.7
The system was to be not merely the foundation of knowledge, but

also of transcendence and metaphysics.8 The limits that transcendental-
philosophical idealism had drawn around reason were, as the south-west
German school put it, dissolved in Hegel’s ‘panlogism’.
The sharp rejection of metaphysics is a shared feature of neo-Kantianism –
a point, moreover, on which it concurs with positivism. F. A. Lange, an
important inspirer of the Marburg school, had described Hegel’s system as
a reversion to scholasticism, and all metaphysics as a form of madness. Otto
Liebmann had strengthened the turn against absolute idealism in his early
work Kant and His Epigones of 1865, in which the examination of the doctrines
of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel closes with the famous sentence: ‘and so one
must return to Kant’.b
For as the neo-Kantians saw it, the way out of the crisis, and with it the
rehabilitation of systematic philosophy, could not consist in standing abso-
lute idealism on its head, nor yet in a retreat into the history of philosophy.
What was required was a return back to before the absolute idealism that
had caused the problem. Its transcendental-metaphysical baggage made it
necessary to appeal to Kant’s transcendental idealism, and his critique of
metaphysics was brought into play against absolute idealism.
One aspect of this was the strict opposition between validity (Geltung)
and being (Sein), based above all on the third volume of Lotze’s Logic, and
the thesis that all determination of being is grounded in the determination
of validity, since all knowledge of being must be grounded in the principle
of the validity of knowledge.9 The strict separation of validity and being
and the assignment of validity to philosophy, and of being to the individual
sciences, was the basis for the critique of Hegelian Idealism and its concept
of the absolute identity of subject and object.
b. ‘Also muß auf Kant zurückgegangen werden’, O. Liebmann, Kant und die Epigonen: eine kritische
Abhandlung (1865), repr., ed. B. Bauch (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1912), 96, 109
To be sure, the aim was not a simple exegesis of Kant, but to return
to Kant in order to inaugurate a new development in philosophy which
would be directly relevant to contemporary problems. This would be secured
when philosophy regained its scientific character and provided a reliable
epistemological basis for the individual sciences as Kant had done:
we philosophers of the nineteenth century are all students of Kant. But

our ‘return’ to him cannot take the form of a mere renewal of a
historically determined figure who represents the idea of critical
philosophy . . . to understand Kant means to go beyond him.c
Kant’s theory provided the means with which to correct two things: firstly,
endless speculation and the threat to the independence of the empirical
sciences from an illegitimate expansion of the truth claims of philosophy;
secondly, however, the temptation to ground the validity claims of empirical-
scientific statements themselves in something empirical (e.g. psychological
laws or anthropological constants). In this sense, for the neo-Kantians it was
a question of regaining the autonomy of philosophy, of its proper object,
domain and method.
To be sure, after 1870 there were numerous efforts to return to Kant:
not only neo-Kantian ones, but also, on occasions such as anniversaries,
popularisations that bordered on the grotesque.10 What is peculiar to the
neo-Kantian return is the effort to go beyond him. Kant’s work was to be
systematically developed with reference to the historical problems of the
age.
I regard many aspects of Kantian philosophy to have been scientifically

superseded by post-Kantian thinkers, and precisely therein seems to lie
Kant’s greatness, in his not having created a system which one must
either accept or reject wholesale. I see in critical philosophy the basis
for further work that has already progressed a long way, and I believe
that a true Kantian is one who seeks to develop and rework critical
ideas. It is he alone who pursues science, which can only survive by
progressive development.d
c. ‘Wir alle, die wir im neunzehnten Jahrhundert philosophieren, sind die Schüler Kants. Aber
unsere heutige “Rückkehr” zu ihm darf nicht die blosse Erneuerung der historisch bedingten
Gestalt sein, in welcher er die Idee der kritischen Philosophie darstellte. Kant verstehen, heißt
über ihn hinausgehen.’ W. Windelband, Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer
Geschichte i (8th edn, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 1921), iv
d. ‘Viele Teile der kritischen Philosophie halte ich durch die nachkantischen Denker für
wissenschaftlich überholt, und gerade darin scheint mir Kants Größe zu liegen, daß er nicht ein
System geschaffen hat, welches man in seiner Totalität entweder annehmen oder ablehnen muß.
Hermann Cohen wanted his famous ‘Kant books’,11 which largely consisted
of his own systematic propositions, to be seen as making Kant relevant
once again: ‘from the start my aim was the further development of Kant’s
system’.e
Nevertheless, the development of Kant through neo-Kantianism should
be understood correctly. It was distinguished from developments in post-
Kantian and contemporary idealism by its exclusive concern with the theme
of validity.12 This was what was common to and characteristic of the neo-
Kantian schools. It matters little that the principle of validity was understood
sometimes as the lawfulness of cultural consciousness (Marburg school), and
sometimes as values (south-west German school).
According to Manfred Brelage, it was this that enabled neo-Kantianism
‘in the face of widespread anti-philosophical resentment, and in a period of a
positivistic restriction and reduction in the intellectual level of philosophy,
to secure its independence vis-à-vis the positive sciences and simultaneously –
albeit in a sharply reduced form – to reconnect with the major traditions of
philosophy’.13
From epistemology to cultural philosophy

The first move was to adhere to the basic ideas of Kantian epistemology and
work out principles for the determination of the validity of knowledge.14
E. Zeller had already recommended epistemology as a way into Kant in
his famous commentary of 1862.15 Kuno Fischer’s presentation of critical
philosophy in 1860 should also be noted.16 The renewal of Kant through epis-
temology had already been prepared by natural scientists who had fostered
a new link between philosophy and the empirical sciences. It was above all
Hermann von Helmholtz who recognised that the natural sciences required
a philosophical clarification of their foundations and that there was much in
Kant’s philosophy that might provide it.17 This neo-Kantian foundation for
knowledge was directed against post-Kantian idealism, theoretical material-
ism, positivism and historicism.18
Ich finde vielmehr im Kritizismus die Grundlage für positive Weiterarbeit, die bereits weit
fortgeschritten ist, und erst der wirkt meiner Überzeugung nach wahrhaft im Sinne Kants, der
sich bemüht, die kritischen Gedanken auszugestalten und umzubilden. So allein treibt er
Wissenschaft, die immer nur in fortschreitender Entwicklung leben kann.’ Rickert, Kant als
Philosoph der modernen Kultur, viii
e. ‘Von vornherein war es mir um die Weiterbildung von Kants System zu thun.’ H. Cohen, System
der Philosophie i: Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (2nd edn, 1914), Werke, ed. Hermann-Cohen-Archiv
am Philosophischen Seminar der Universität Zürich, under the direction of Helmut Holzhey vi
(Hildesheim: Olms, 1987), vii
However, it would be a crude simplification to see neo-Kantianism

merely as an epistemological movement back to Kant.19 To be sure, the
theme of validity was first worked out as a theory of the principles of the
validity of knowledge: that is to say, as epistemology. However, after the end
of the 1870s, following the first epistemological phase and the initial focus
on the critique of knowledge, neo-Kantianism expanded its scope. It soon
came to be about the determination of the validity not only of the theoret-
ical, but also of the atheoretical (practical, aesthetic, religious) relationship
between subject and object. Philosophy became cultural philosophy, as the
main interest shifted to a comprehensive foundation for validity and norms.
Neo-Kantianism now meant ‘a critical science of generally valid values’ as
such.f For Heinrich Rickert, what Windelband and the Marburg school had
in common was an appeal to Kant, the rejection of a metaphysics of things
in themselves, and the attempt to extend philosophy from epistemology to
a total philosophy of culture.20
This expansion of theme corresponded fully to the neo-Kantian concep-
tion of systematic philosophy. Precisely the systematic claims of philosophy
made it necessary to go beyond an epistemology understood as science and
to make the totality of culture the reference point for reflection on the theory
of validity. The logic of the system of critical philosophy demanded that
theoretical philosophy be extended not only to ethics but also to aesthetics
(and possibly to religion).21 According to Cohen the possibility of a system-
atic philosophy depended on this.22 For as Natorp put it, the parts of the
system stand in a complementary relationship: if they are necessary, they are
necessary together.23 In other words: the theoretical, the practical and the
aesthetic are to be seen as the basic features of cultural consciousness, but that
means as part of the definition of rational subjectivity, and therewith as some-
thing that is necessary to the humanity of human beings. Philosophy is, then,
essentially – and in the classical neo-Kantian sense exclusively – the theory of
validity.24 The validity problem as such is the basic problem of philosophy.
It should be understood that this does not mean that critique involves
attributing to inherited values an autonomous and objective validity
independent of human conceptions of them. Rather the question is always,
irrespective of the degree of factual recognition that such inherited values
might enjoy, of whether they can justifiably be granted universal recogni-
tion. It is also a question of whether they can be traced to natural grounds
(as in evolutionary theory) or to psychological, sociological, economic, or
historical ones.
f. ‘[K]ritische Wissenschaft von den allgemeingültigen Werten.’ Windelband, Präludien i, 29

The idea of validity, whether it is understood to mean the laws of cultural

consciousness or values (norms), establishes the specific task of philosophy:
the interpretation of culture from the point of view of validity. For it is only
in culture that values are realised – or not. Windelband describes the task of
neo-Kantian philosophy as a testing of ‘thought, will, and feeling with the
aim of a universal and necessary validity.’g
The neo-Kantians’ turn to the philosophy of culture had not only inter-
nal, systematic reasons but also external ones. In 1860, for instance, a kind of
happy conjuncture centred on the concept of culture had begun to emerge;25
culture became an increasingly prominent theme of intellectual life. In this
sense neo-Kantianism participated in a general tendency towards philosophi-
cal cultural criticism and cultural philosophy that was developed by Eucken,
Simmel and others. This was encouraged by an increasing sense of crisis.
Above all, an experience of alienation and loss of cultural coherence gave rise
to a need for cultural renewal.26 Indeed, the expansion of Neo-Kantianism
into cultural philosophy had its own internal logic in an extended engage-
ment with Kant, in the course of which his ethics and aesthetics had been
rediscovered. Moreover, the return to Kant was expected to provide decisive
guidelines for the solution of urgent cultural tasks.
Kant and the neo-Kantian concept of culture

However, it is by no means self-evident that the step towards cultural philos-
ophy could legitimately claim to be taken in the name of Kant; certainly not,
when one reflects that the neo-Kantians understood by cultural philosophy
not a particular part of a system of philosophy, but philosophy as such. From
about 1880, philosophy for them is cultural philosophy. Kant by contrast
had neither seen his philosophy as cultural philosophy nor wanted it to be
so understood.
Nevertheless, in 1924, on the bicentenary of Kant’s birth, Rickert cele-
brated Kant as a philosopher of modern culture who had brought modern
cultural consciousness to philosophical expression. Windelband emphas-
ised the ‘intimate relationship’ between the principle of transcendental phi-
losophy and the problems of cultural philosophy,h and wished to see the
g. ‘[D]aß sie das tatsächliche Material des Denkens, Wollens, Fühlens an dem Zwecke der
allgemeinen und notwendigen Geltung prüft und daß sie das, was vor dieser Prüfung nicht
standhält, ausscheidet und zurückweist.’ Windelband, Präludien i, 27
h. ‘ [Die] . . . intime Verwandtschaft, die zwischen ihm und dem Problem der Kulturphilosophie
besteht’. W. Windelband, ‘Kulturphilosophie und transzendentaler Idealismus’, in Präludien ii,
286f.
fundamental principle of a ‘synthesis according to the laws of “conscious-

ness as such” on the basis of comprehensive, objectively valid forms of reason’
applied to ‘the practical and aesthetic conduct of cultural beings’. ‘Therein
lies the objective unity of transcendental idealism as of cultural philosophy’.
For in all spheres the crucial issue was ‘the creation of objects out of the laws
of consciousness’.i
Curiously enough, the neo-Kantians made no use of Kant’s definition
of the concept of culture that appears in sections 82–4 of the ‘Critique of
Teleological Judgment’.27 For them, such a teleological concept of culture
was impossible. Thus Kant’s understanding of culture as increasing culti-
vation gave way to an idea of culture as cultural goods defined according
to criteria of validity. Kant’s exemplary status for the philosophy of culture
rested on the three critiques, and the concept of culture was discussed only
with reference to the system of critiques: that is, with reference to the theory
of the differentiation of forms of validity. For the neo-Kantians, it is solely
the theory of validity, introduced into theoretical philosophy by Kant and
then extended into atheoretical domains, that makes possible not only the
philosophy of culture but also the science of culture.
The theory of validity and the concept of culture

Insofar as it reduces the philosophy of culture to the problematic of valid-
ity, neo-Kantianism doubtless simplifies and restricts the Kantian concept
of culture. This judgement is unaffected by the fact that the neo-Kantians
conceptualised the realisation of validity as the self-formation of the subject.
Esoteric-sounding titles like ‘domain of validity’, ‘direction of conscious-
ness’, ‘cultural value’ and so on refer to the necessary and complementary
basic possibilities of the self-determination of the subject; they are conceived
as basic possibilities in accordance with which humanity ‘brings forth what
is unique in the human being and raises it to ever higher levels’,j and as per-
spectives in accordance with which human beings can interpret the meaning
of their conduct.28
The philosophy of culture is defined in this way as a reflection on the
principles which govern the validity of theoretical, practical and aesthetic
i. ‘Erzeugung der Gegenstände aus dem Gesetz des Bewusstseins.’ Präludien ii, 287
j. ‘“Kultur”: darunter verstehen wir die ganze gemeinsame Arbeit der Menschheit, in der sie das
Eigentümliche des Menschentums selbst hervorbringt und immer höher hinaufbildet’. Natorp,
Philosophie: ihr Problem und ihre Probleme, 25
accomplishments; these accomplishments are found in cultural objectivi-

sations (science, morality, art). This is expressed in an understanding of
philosophical method that is oriented towards culture. Important here is an
understanding of the transcendental method, based on Kant’s Prolegomena.
Reflection on validity has to start from a factum, which is to be found in
culture.29 This is always the ‘reality of a cultural or intellectual domain’, or
more precisely, it is the validity claim of all subjects, the claim to objective
validity. Philosophy enquires about the right to make such claims, and thus
about the conditions of validity of those judgements on behalf of which the
claims are made. It finds thereby its object of analysis in culture and is in
this sense a theory of culture.
The neo-Kantian theory of culture sees in culture – understood as the
essence of the content and creations of cultural consciousness – a sphere of
forms of meaning which can be discovered in their manifestations. But as
a philosophy of culture it is a theory of consciousness. It appeals to a ‘pure
consciousness’ (Marburg school) or ‘normal consciousness’ (Windelband).
This concept of consciousness is based on Kant’s ‘consciousness as such’.k
This is the subjectivity that remains when one abstracts the subject from its
involvement in reality. The ‘empirical’ subject is a theme exclusive to the
empirical sciences. Pure consciousness is nothing other than the foundation
of validity. Windelband writes:
this consciousness as such is thus a system of norms which are

objectively valid and which should be subjectively valid too, but which
in the empirical reality of human life are only partially so. It is
according to these that the value of the real is determined.l
This concept of pure subjectivity was to immunise the foundations of validity

against anthropologism, psychologism and naturalism.
By contrast, no foundational significance is attributed to the objective
(including the objective features of the subject). For the object is determinate
solely thanks to its being posited by consciousness. Philosophy then has as
its theme a set of functions of consciousness (functions of reason): ‘forms of
validity’.
As a theory of consciousness cultural philosophy forms a systemic whole
made up of three parts, each of which deals with a dimension of pure
k. ‘Bewusstsein überhaupt.’ Windelband, Präludien i, 44
l. ‘Dies “Bewusstsein überhaupt” ist also ein System von Normen, welche, wie sie objektiv gelten,
so auch subjektiv gelten sollen, aber in der empirischen Wirklichkeit des menschlichen
Geisteslebens nur teilweise gelten. Nach ihnen bestimmt sich erst der Wert des Wirklichen.’
Ibid., 46
consciousness: logic, ethics and aesthetics. This systematic structure results

from the specific way in which the Kantian philosophy is received by the
neo-Kantian movement.
Even if neo-Kantian theory has numerous variants, the following is a list
of what are generally (or at least mostly) accepted as the main features of its
theory of validity.30
(1) The forms of validity are non-objective; they represent functions of

pure (non-objective, non-psychological) consciousness.
(2) They concern at the same time both the object and its determination
(as thought, wished for, aesthetically experienced). They represent the
essence of transcendental principles, which make possible specific ref-
erences to objects. They are also constitutive of the object. For every
reference to an object there is a corresponding constitution of the object.
(3) Factual, theoretical, practical and aesthetic acts can succeed or fail, be
valuable or valueless, valid or invalid; that is, they ‘differ according to
validity’ and ‘differ according to value’. Therefore forms of validity (the
value or lawfulness of consciousness) represent standards and norms for
the actual ‘cultural conduct’ of the subject. They imply the existence of
an ‘ought’ (Sollen).
(4) Therefore, ‘validity’ is to be strictly separated from ‘being’. Forms of
validity and values are neither beings nor are they necessarily actualised
as forms of being; they ‘are valid’. Therefore, no science of the factual
can have validity as its theme. Sciences of the factual, such as history or
sociology, can only state what is empirically held to be valuable or valid.
(5) Reason finds principles of validity in itself. In so far as such principles
can be found in the subject alone, reason remains autonomous.
(6) Since the principles of validity are those of a (pure) consciousness, they
form a unity. The unity of culture is based on this unity, as also on
the norms that are derived from such principles. To be sure, for neo-
Kantianism there is a difference in value between cultural achievements,
but no cultural relativism. There are universal standards of validity that
apply to all cultures.
(7) The unity of the forms of validity is a differentiated unity. Taken
together, the corresponding spheres of validity constitute a system.
This system, whether it be thought open or closed, encompasses at
least the theoretical, the practical and the aesthetic.
(8) The forms of validity cannot be reduced to one another (in this sense
they are autonomous). Each form of validity is independent.
The idea of a differentiation of spheres of culture in classical neo-Kantianism

(and its development by Cassirer) has often been criticised for assuming
the existence of these spheres and the determination of their validity, and
therefore not treating their differentiation systematically. One can therefore
speak of the possibility of a value or validity positivism, which seen against
the background of neo-Kantianism’s basic claims would certainly be unfor-
tunate. It may well be that the tradition of the great ideas of the true, the good
and the beautiful (from time to time supplemented by that of the holy) is a
settled one. But the basic neo-Kantian division of culture through an orien-
tation to Kant’s system of critiques and to the three corresponding forms of
objective reference is certainly a prejudice: the ‘cultural spheres’ are science,
praxis (morality and law) and art; religious belief appears occasionally and
then as a derivative of morality. And when Windelband characterises ‘the
system of critique as a comprehensive cultural philosophy’,m the threefold
division of cultural philosophy (and of culture) is just as much emphasised as
the possibility of conceptualising the unity and differentiation of culture on
the basis of principles.31
According to Rickert, ‘research, ethical life, art and belief’ are neo-
Kantianism’s thematic fields. But taken together they are ‘the specialist fields
of a single human culture’, and ‘in this sense have something in common’.
The philosophy of values is a theory of culture: ‘but Kant set precisely this
task everywhere, in his epistemology, his ethics, his philosophy of art, and in
his theory of religion’.n Windelband makes it plain ‘that the demonstration
that the great spheres of culture were grounded in reason emerged from
critique, the basic structure of science from the critique of pure reason . . . ,
the realm of ends in morality and law from the critique of practical reason
and the metaphysics of morals erected on the basis of it, the nature of art and
the aesthetic shaping of life from the critique of judgement: and only after
all this could the question be asked of how many of those cultural values
derived from pure reason could be contained in society’s religious forms of
life’.o
m. ‘[D]as System des Kritizismus als eine umfassende Kulturphilosophie’, Windelband, Präludien
ii, 281
n. ‘[D]aß . . . die Forschung, das sittliche Leben, die Kunst und der Glaube, alle Sondergebiete der
einen menschlichen Kultur sind und insofern etwas Gemeinsames haben’. ‘Grade diese Aufgabe
aber hat Kant sich überall, in seiner Wissenschaftslehre, seiner Ethik, seiner Kunstphilosophie
und in seiner Theorie des religiösen Lebens gestellt.’ Rickert, Kant als Philosoph der modernen
Kultur, 7
o. ‘[D]aß als Ergebnis der Kritik überall der Aufweis der Vernunftgründe für die großen Gebilde
der Kultur heraussprang, aus der Kritik der reinen Vernunft die Grundstruktur der
This clearly is a very narrowly philosophical concept of culture, indeed

one restricted to the theory of validity and values, and excluding anything
that is independent of human conception and cannot be validated. This
brought complaints from outside neo-Kantianism. Competing movements
such as Lebensphilosophie or the New Ontology of Nicolai Hartmann cor-
rectly sensed something was missing. And indeed, within neo-Kantianism
(Cassirer) or at least critical philosophy (Hönigswald) the one-dimensional
theory of validity was not adopted in the long term. Cassirer’s theory of
language was important here,32 and a greater systematic weight was given to
language by Hönigswald.33 Paul Natorp, by contrast, who can be considered
here as a representative of classical neo-Kantianism, questioned whether lan-
guage could be given a foundational status. For him, language is merely a
means for the realisation of validity and for the communication of cultural
goods in theory, praxis and art. Language is no more than an instrument ‘for
the preservation and maintenance of the cultural consciousness of humans,
and a source of nourishment, and therefore, since the means depends on the
end, determined by them . . . It may become an end in itself, but then it falls
under the category of art’.p
Seen objectively, the neo-Kantian conception of culture is that of the
totality of individual and distinct realisations of validity (of values) in history.
‘In the end, by culture we understand nothing less than the totality of what
human consciousness can, by virtue of its own rationality, make of what is
given to it.’q Or ‘culture is the essence of those goods that we cultivate for the
sake of their values’.r Because cultural facts in their facticity are the business
of the positive sciences, while philosophy addresses them only in terms of the
Wissenschaft . . . , aus der Kritik der praktischen Vernunft und der darauf gebauten Metaphysik
der Sitten das Reich der Vernunftzwecke in Moral und Recht, aus der Kritik der Urteilskraft das
Wesen der Kunst und der ästhetischen Lebensgestaltung: und erst nach all diesem konnte
gefragt werden, wieviel von jenen Kulturwerten aus bloßer Vernunft in der religiösen
Lebensform der Gesellschaft enthalten sein könne.’ Windelband, Die Philosophie im deutschen
Geistesleben des 19. Jahrhunderts, 281
p. ‘[D]er Lebendigerhaltung und Fortpflanzung des Kulturbewußtseins in der menschlichen
Gemeinschaft, gleichsam ein Nährmittel für sie alle, daher, da der Zweck sich das Mittel
gestaltet, auch wieder durch sie alle bedingt . . . Zwar kann sie auch Selbstzweck werden; aber
dann fällt sie ersichtlich unter den Begriff der Kunst.’ Natorp, Philosophie, ihr Problem und ihre
Probleme, 27f.
q. ‘Denn unter Kultur verstehen wir schließlich doch nichts anderes, als die Gesamtheit dessen,
was das menschliche Bewußtsein vermöge seiner vernünftigen Bestimmtheit aus dem
Gegebenen herausarbeitet’. Windelband, Die Philosophie im deutschen Geistesleben des 19.
Jahrhunderts, 287
r. ‘Kultur ist der Inbegriff der Güter, die wir um ihrer Werte willen pflegen.’ Rickert, Kant als
Philosoph der modernen Kultur, 7
basis of their possible validity, this ‘totality of culture’ amounts to a system

of types of validity.
Neo-Kantianism as a cultural movement

It was important for the self-understanding of neo-Kantianism as a philos-
ophy of culture that it sought to be not only an academic exercise but also
a ‘movement’ that went beyond science and devoted itself to the cultural
questions of its time, as a cultural actor.34 One’s own philosophical work was
understood as work on the urgent problems of culture.35 Lange had already
addressed ‘the worker question’ in 1865. The neo-Kantians believed that
the prevailing critical state of culture was driving them to make a decisive
contribution to the realisation of a genuinely modern culture, inspired by
the spirit of Kant.36 Philosophy should provide a service to culture, so that
‘cultural philosophy is a matter for every thinking cultural being’.s
In the cultural situation of the age there was a fundamental uncertainty
about the sources of life-orientation available to human beings. Windelband
discerned in industrialisation, in economic growth, world trade and colo-
nialism a collapse of old forms of life.37 He lamented the fact that scientific
thought was valued now only in so far as it was applicable.38 At the same time
‘an agitated reform of our education system’ had begun.t Windelband was
referring here to Julius Langbehn and his widely read anti-Enlightenment,
anti-cosmopolitan and anti-liberal book, Rembrandt as Educator, of 1890. His
general diagnosis was of ‘a nervous condition of yearning and fermenta-
tion that takes on form’. And like the Marburg school, he addresses the
social question, which for the neo-Kantians was more than a political and
economic one: ‘the masses are making their claims heard as much in the
political and other spheres of cultural life as in the economic sphere . . . this
social expansion is the most important reason for the extensive and intensive
increase of life. Across the breadth of cultural life the deepest political, social
and economic problems are growing. That introduces new and far-reaching
changes of a hitherto unacknowledged force into the life of values.’u This
s. ‘Die Kulturphilosophie geht jeden nachdenklichen Kulturmenschen etwas an.’ Rickert, Kant als
Philosoph der modernen Kultur, 7
t. ‘[D]as aufgeregte Reformieren an unserem Erziehungswesen’. Ibid., 106
u. [E]inen aufgeregten Zustand des Suchens und Tastens, eine vielfältige Gärung, die zur
Gestaltung drängt.’ ‘Nicht nur in der politischen Entwicklung, sondern auch auf allen Gebieten
der geistigen Geschichte macht sich der Anspruch der Massen in demselben Grade geltend, wie
auf dem ökonomischen Gebiete . . . diese soziale Ausweitung bildet den bedeutsamsten Grund
für die extensive und intensive Steigerung des Lebens . . . Daraus erwachsen überall in der Breite
is a dangerous situation for the individual: ‘His interests, his work and his
fate compel each individual to adopt an all-embracing collective life; it is the
industrial existence that spreads unopposed across all spheres of our outward
and inner life. . . . There is virtually no vocation in which the individual is able
to determine his activity himself.’ This was true even for science.v In general,
the ‘cultural world of the present’ was that of an ‘eroded total culture’.w
‘Thus modern consciousness is a fragmented one . . . it has lost the harmony
of simple unity and is occupied with its own contradictions’.x Jonas Cohn
drew the same conclusions.39
Windelband sees the great significance of Kant’s philosophy in the fact
that it makes us aware of this whole state of affairs.40 But Kant had not
only rendered obsolete the metaphysical world picture, but with his three
critiques created a philosophy for the modern world, one that made it possi-
ble ‘to reconcile the contradictions contained in the foundations of modern
consciousness’.y ‘Everything thus points to the fact that critical philosophy,
if it is to prove itself in addressing contemporary problems as it has proved
itself for a century, must show itself capable of bearing within its system of
concepts a Weltanschauung that can bring to consciousness the value content
of reality. This is both its right and its vocation, for in accordance with its
Kantian foundations, its task is to seek the basis for universally valid and nec-
essary convictions across the entire gamut of cultural activity.’z For similar
des Kulturlebens die schweren Probleme der politischen, der sozialen, der intellektuellen
Bewegung. Das gibt auch für das Wertleben völlig neue Momente und tiefgreifende
Veränderungen von einer früher ungeahnten Mächtigkeit.’ Ibid., 109
v. ‘Jeder Einzelne sieht sich mit seinen Interessen, mit seiner Arbeit, mit seinem Schicksal in ein
übergreifendes Kollektivleben gezwungen; es ist der Typus des industriellen Daseins, der sich
auf alle Sphären äusserer und innerer Betätigung unwiderstehlich ausbreitet. . . . Es gibt wenige,
bald keine Berufsarten mehr, in denen das Individuum seine Tätigkeit von sich selbst aus zu
bestimmen vermag.’ Ibid., 111
w. ‘[D]ie Kulturwelt der Gegenwart . . . eine[r] abgeschliffene[n] Gesamtkultur’. W. Windelband,
‘Immanuel Kant: zur Säkularfeier seiner Philosophie’ (1881), in Präludien I, 119
x. ‘So ist das moderne . . . das zerrissene Bewußtsein. Es hat die Harmonie der unbefangenen
Einfachheit verloren und müht sich an seinen inneren Widersprüchen ab.’ Ibid., 120
y. ‘[D]ie Widersprüche zu versöhnen, die in den Grundlagen des modernen Bewußtseins
enthalten waren’. Ibid., 142
z. ‘So drängt alles darauf hin, daß die kritische Philosophie, wenn sie die Lebenskraft, die sie ein
Jahrhundert bewahrt hat, auch in der Bewältigung der aktuellen Bedürfnisse der Gegenwart
bewahren soll, sich fähig erweisen muß, mit ihrem Begriffssystem eine Weltanschauung zu
tragen, welche den geistigen Wertinhalt der Wirklichkeit in sicherem Bewußtsein zu erfassen
vermag. Sie hat dazu das Recht und den Beruf, weil sie, den kantischen Grundlagen gemäß, die
Gründe allgemein giltiger und notwendiger Überzeugungen in dem ganzen Umfange
menschlicher Kulturtätigkeit . . . zu suchen angewiesen ist.’ W. Windelband, ‘Nach hundert
Jahren: zu Kants hundertjährigem Todestage’ (1904), in Präludien I, 147–67, at 165
reasons Rickert sees in Kant’s philosophy the foundations that should make
scientific answers to specifically modern cultural problems possible.41
Windelband sums up the Idealist programme thus: ‘We are seeking from
philosophy less and we expect from it less than it once offered, which was
a theoretical world picture that would be synthesised from the results of
the individual sciences or beyond that, formed along its own lines and self-
contained: what we expect from philosophy today is reflection on values that
are grounded in a higher spiritual reality and endure across the changing
interests of the age’,aa that is, in principles of validity as the objectively valid
guidelines for the self-formation of the subject.
Now at the time both cultural philosophy and philosophical cultural
criticism were demands of the day.42 In 1890 ‘culture’ had become a basic
theme in public discussion and in philosophy. It was the neo-Kantians’
belief, and one that was widespread in philosophy, that philosophy could
contribute to the humanisation and cultivation of society. Even the diagnoses
were similar. Rudolf Eucken, for instance, challenged philosophy to help
shape the idea of a new human being and a new culture: ‘all that sanitised
pseudo-culture that comes out of our big cities’ was unbearable, ‘the gulf
between the goals that are proclaimed and what is actually sought grows
ever deeper, and with it the inauthenticity of life. This must be opposed,
and growing dissatisfaction indicates that such a movement is already under
way’.bb Eucken made a plea for a new idealism, which was also in accord with
neo-Kantianism. A new idealism was needed because changes taking place in
the nineteenth century, above all the need for a new ‘work culture’, ruled out
a return to the old idealism. Many others could be added to the list. The most
important philosophical cultural critic of the time was undoubtedly Georg
Simmel. Perhaps the most important representative of a modern critical
philosophy was Wilhelm Windelband whose collection of popular essays,
Preludes, reached a broad middle-class readership.
aa. ‘Wir suchen weniger und erwarten von der Philosophie weniger, als was sie früher bieten
sollte, ein theoretisches Weltbild, das aus den Ergebnissen der einzelnen Wissenschaften
zusammengefasst oder darüber hinaus in eigenen Linien gestaltet und harmonisch in sich
geschlossen werden soll: was wir heute von der Philosophie erwarten, ist die Besinnung auf die
bleibenden Werte, die über den wechselnden Interessen der Zeiten in einer höheren geistigen
Wirklichkeit begründet sind.’ Windelband, Die Philosophie im deutschen Geistesleben des 19.
Jahrhunderts, 119
bb. ‘[A]ll jene aufgeputzte Scheinkultur, wie sie namentlich von unsern Millionenstädten ausgeht,
immer weiter wird der Abstand zwischen dem, was als Ziel verkündet und was in Wahrheit als
solches erstrebt wird, immer größer wird damit die Unwahrhaftigkeit des Lebens. Dem muß
widerstanden werden; die wachsende Unzufriedenheit zeigt deutlich genug, daß eine solche
Bewegung schon im Gange ist.’ R. Eucken, Geistige Strömungen der Gegenwart (3rd edn, Leipzig:
Veit, 1913), 243 (= 4th rev. edn, Geschichte und Kritik der Grundbegriffe der Gegenwart, 1878)
The following passage from Paul Natorp, in its pathos, is typical:
But as cultural philosophy transcendental idealism becomes a force of

life. Here too we are seeking to deepen Kant with Plato, who insisted
that philosophy was not a luxury of the scholar in his study or of the
cultivated, but the indispensable source of nourishment for a life
worthy of the name . . . One will scarcely be able to deny that here we
are as true to Kant as to Plato. We, just like our forefathers Schiller,
Wilhelm von Humboldt, and all the rest, make Kantianism a matter of
the heart, of the whole of life, as well as the head. And make no
mistake, it is precisely our age that demands nothing so much as the
penetration of life by philosophy, and with it the penetration of
philosophy with the warm blood of life of a cultural development that
strives for the highest prizes. We detect the pulse of such a life in the
apparently marble cold ideas of the great critic of reason. And because
this pulse beats, he will live as long as there are people on earth.’cc
Among other things, the cultural philosophical intent of the neo-

Kantians was made clear by the founding of the journal Logos, which appeared
between 1910 and 1933; one of its co-founders was Rickert. The editor was
Georg Mehlis, a member of the circle around the south-west German school;
Richard Kroner, a student of Rickert, soon became deputy editor. Its subtitle
was ‘International journal for the philosophy of culture’. Its editorial board
included Jonas Cohn, Rudolf Eucken, Otto von Gierke, Edmund Husserl,
Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, Wilhelm Windelband,
Heinrich Wölfflin and Georg Simmel.43
Its opponents were in movements of irrationalism, materialism44 and
pessimism,45 and religious dogma, particularly of a Catholic variety.46 The
autonomy of philosophy and reason were to be defended against natural
cc. ‘Als Kulturphilosophie aber wird uns der transzendentale Idealismus zur Lebensmacht. Auch
in dieser Richtung streben wir Kant zu vertiefen durch Plato, der ja davon ganz durchdrungen
war, dass Philosophie nicht ein Luxus der Gelehrtenstube oder der verfeinerten Bildung,
sondern das allerunentbehrlichste Nährmittel eines wirklich lebenswerten Lebens sei . . . Das
aber wird man uns schwerlich abstreiten können, dass wir damit dem Geiste Kants ebenso treu
bleiben wie dem Platos. So wie unseren Altvordern, den Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt und
allen den Andern, der Kantianismus nicht bloss Kopf- sondern Herzenssache, die Sache des
ganzen Lebens war, so sei er es uns. Und, irren wir nicht, so verlangt gerade unsere Zeit nach
nichts so sehr wie nach einer philosophischen Durchdringung des Lebens, und darum nach
einer Durchdringung der Philosophie selbst mit dem warmen Lebensblute der nach den
höchsten Siegeskränzen ringenden Kulturentfaltung. Den Pulsschlag solchen Lebens
empfinden wir in den scheinbar marmorkalten Gedankenbildungen des grossen Kritikers der
Vernunft. Weil aber diese Lebensenergie in ihm pulsiert, darum wird er leben, solange noch
eines Menschen Herz und Hirn auf diesem Weltkörper arbeitet.’ Natorp, ‘Kant und die
Marburger Schule’, 219
scientific reductionist accounts of the human being, and against materialist

socialism (by an appeal to an ‘ethical socialism’ grounded in Kant’s moral
theory). There was also occasion to defend the philosopher of Protestantism
against neo-Thomism,47 and thereby to play a role in the Kulturkampf.
Impact
The contemporary impact can only be discussed briefly here. As we have
already seen, neo-Kantianism was the dominant philosophy of the age, at
least in the German-speaking world. Some authors who later went their own
way started out under the influence of the south-west German school, among
them the young Georg Lukács48 and Heidegger. Nicolai Hartmann and
Heimsoeth came out of the Marburg school as did the Polish moral philoso-
pher and historian of aesthetics Tatarkiewicz. Franz Staudinger and Karl
Vorländer, who tried to synthesise Kantianism and socialism, belonged to
the circle around the Marburg school, as did August Stadler, who attempted
to make Kant responsible for contemporary natural science, and K. Lasswitz,
who wrote on physics and philosophy. From 1939 onwards A. Liebert, now
in Birmingham, tried to organise a ‘global humanist association’ and make
Kantianism a basis for political practice. The same goes for S. Marck who
was influenced by Cassirer, Rickert and Hönigswald and who after 1920
dedicated himself to leftist politics.
When discussing the contemporary impact of neo-Kantianism it should
be remembered that by no means all of its representatives were university
professors. Karl Vorländer (an editor of Kantian works, author of several
books about Kant and of a well-known history of philosophy, and champion
of neo-Kantian socialism) was a grammar-school teacher; another grammar-
school teacher was Franz Staudinger, an advocate of consumer co-operatives
(neo-Kantianism saw in the co-operative a crucial part of the solution to
‘the social question’). Wilhelm Sturmfels, known today only to specialists,
taught outside the university, at the Labour Academy in Frankfurt (founded
in 1921 as ‘the first German college for working people’, and closed in 1933
and reopened in 1946, today it is the European Labour Academy).49
Neo-Kantianism also had a notable impact outside philosophy. Firstly it
had prominent adherents in the sciences: legal scholars such as Radbruch,
Stammler and Kelsen; theologians such as Hermann, Buber, Rosenzweig
and Troeltsch; sociologists such as Weber.50 Cassirer was an influence on
Panofsky’s art historiography.
Secondly, it had an impact on politics and society. The Kant Society,

founded in 1904, with its numerous regional groupings, was not exclusively
neo-Kantian but helped neo-Kantianism spread beyond the universities.
Through its numerous public lectures, held even in small towns, the Kant
Society sought to popularise Kantian and neo-Kantian thought.
The neo-Kantian influence on education should also be mentioned. Paul
Natorp, with his understanding of pedagogy as applied philosophy, was
more than an important academic philosopher. He sought direct influence,
for instance through his debates with the youth movement, his repeated
advocacy of university training for teachers, and his sharp rejection of the
idea that education should serve economic and political goals.51 His ethical
and social theory was expressed in his Social Pedagogy of 1899.52 This social
pedagogy was ‘a theory of community education and community formation,
directed against individual and class pedagogy and its economic, political and
social presuppositions, and having as its ideal the freely chosen community
of free individuals’.53 Perhaps the most lasting impact of the Marburg school
was the concept of ethical socialism, which influenced the programme of the
Social Democratic Party, both the dispute over revisionism between the end
of the nineteenth century and 1933, and the Bad Godesberg programme of
1959.
The originators of the neo-Kantian theory of socialism – among them
Friedrich Albert Lange – saw it as a solution to the ‘worker question’ or ‘the
social question’.54 The origins of this theory lay in ethics, on which they
founded a critique of capitalism. As an ethically founded socialism, it was
directed against materialism, which was seen as being just as metaphysical as
Hegel’s dialectic.55 It opposed both with an ethics grounded in Kant’s theory
of the categorical imperative. Hermann Cohen had described Kant as the
‘true, genuine founder of German socialism’.dd Paul Natorp had advocated
the adoption of socialism as an ethical idea from Kant.56 The Marburg neo-
Kantians saw the core of ethical socialism in Kant’s demand that people
be treated at all times as ends rather than means, in line with the third
formulation of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics
of Morals. According to Natorp this should apply to all social spheres, but
particularly those of work and politics.57
dd. ‘[W]ahren und wirklichen Urheber des deutschen Sozialismus’. H. Cohen, ‘Einleitung mit
kritischem Nachtrag zur Geschichte des Materialismus von F.A. Lange’, in Werke V/2 (1984), 112
The socialism promoted by the Marburg school was conceived of as co-

operative socialism. For Cohen, the legal theoretical equivalent of Kant’s
concept of the ‘realm of ends’ was the juristic person of the co-operative
(Genossenschaft). Ethics required a legal order in which state and society were
organised along co-operative lines.58 Franz Staudinger, who was attached to
Marburg neo-Kantianism, saw in the consumer co-operative a contribution
to the solution of the social question. He became a theorist of the co-operative
movement, spoke at co-operative movement events, and was active on the
Central Committee of the German Association of Co-operatives.
After the Second World War neo-Kantianism gradually lost its leading
position. After 1933 it was brutally suppressed, and its prominent represen-
tatives (such as Cassirer, Cohn, Hönigswald) removed from their teaching
positions by the regime and its academic supporters59 and driven into exile.
The histories of philosophy written in this period remained silent about
Jewish neo-Kantians such as Cohen.
Symptomatic here is the fate of the journal Logos. After the editor Kroner
was driven out of his job, Logos went from being ‘an international journal for
the philosophy of culture’ (Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur)
to being ‘a journal for German cultural philosophy’ (Zeitschrift für Deutsche
Kulturphilosophie).60 It was not only its title but the introduction to the
first issue that distanced it from the international character of philosophy,
something that had been taken for granted by most of the neo-Kantians.
After 1945 neo-Kantianism was partly forgotten, partly killed off.
Manfred Brelage stated in the early 1960s that ‘the neo-Kantians’ entire
philosophy, which still dominated Germany fifty years ago, has been
extinguished and has no place in today’s philosophical consciousness’.ee
New directions had taken over the field, so that those derived from neo-
Kantianism appeared obsolete: Nicolai Hartmann’s ontology (at least for
a short time), existentialism, hermeneutics, neo-empiricism, neo-Marxism,
analytical philosophy.61 The basic philosophical frameworks shifted increas-
ingly towards the empiricist, or positivist. Thus in Stegmüller’s much-read
Main Currents of Contemporary Philosophy, the discussion of the philosophy
of the present has no place for neo-Kantianism (in contrast to its contem-
porary Franz Brentano). Thus Herbert Schnädelbach is right to say that
‘neo-Kantianism, which apparently reduced philosophy to epistemology, is
ee. ‘[D]aß die gesamte Philosophie der Neukantianer, die noch vor 50 Jahren das philosophische
Leben Deutschlands beherrschte, im gegenwärtigen philosophischen Bewußtsein ausgelöscht
worden ist’. M. Brelage, Studien zur Transzendentalphilosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965), 81
regarded as having been overcome for no other reason than the fact that the
protagonists of modernity, from the Vienna Circle neo-positivists through
critical theory to the New Ontology, defined their positions primarily against
that once dominant academic approach’.ff Friedrich Tenbruck went further
and spoke of a ‘failure of memory’ (Gedächtnisausfall),62 although this formu-
lation, if taken in isolation, sounds almost apologetic (as if it were uninten-
tional, like amnesia).63
Neo-Kantianism today
In the 1960s a renewed engagement with neo-Kantianism sought to reactu-
alise the theme of validity (H. Wagner, G. Wolandt, W. Flach, M. Brelage).
Since 1975 there has been an intensive and widespread interest in re-
establishing central neo-Kantian positions. It has resulted in a series of edi-
tions of neo-Kantian writings (including very prominently those of Hermann
Cohen) and a notable number of publications.64 Numerous conferences
about neo-Kantianism have taken place, serving not only the reacquaintance
with neo-Kantian philosophy but also the clarification of its significance for
science (for instance, jurisprudence).
It is above all younger scholars, both in German-speaking countries and
in the Netherlands, Italy, France, Poland and Russia, who are active in this
field, and who see in neo-Kantianism an unjustifiably neglected philosophy.
They seek to bring its basic ideas to bear on contemporary discussions. This
is true of specialist or esoteric problems in epistemology and the philosophy
of science, and even more so of moral-legal problems.65
Occupying oneself with neo-Kantian cultural philosophy is not so strange
when one thinks about the current state of systematic philosophy. For it does
not take long to see pressing analogies with the intellectual situation that
brought neo-Kantianism to the fore. On the one hand, today a systematic
philosophy is regarded as dispensable or indeed impossible, at any rate obso-
lete. On the other, the dominant strains of philosophy, despite all variations,
are united by an empiricist, or positivist, foundation, be it in the analyti-
cal philosophy of language, in forms of naturalism drawing on evolutionary
ff. ‘[D]er Neukantianismus . . . , der angeblich die Philosophie auf Erkenntnistheorie reduzierte,
auch heute noch vielfach aus keinem anderen Grunde als “überwunden” [gilt], weil die
Protagonisten der Moderne vom Wiener Kreis des Neopositivismus über die Kritische Theorie
bis hin zur Neuen Ontologie ihre Positionen vornehmlich in Abgrenzung gegen eben jene,
damals vorherrschende akademische Richtung definierten’. Schnädelbach, Philosophie in
Deutschland 1831–1933, 13
biology or neurobiology, in a pervasive moral empiricism and utilitarianism,

or in the transformation of ethics into metaethics. But theoretical philoso-
phy can indeed put serious questions to logical and linguistic neo-positivism,
such as that of the function of logic.66 And on the question of the foundation
of norms, empiricism in all its forms exhibits serious weaknesses.
In this way it is understandable that neo-Kantianism is today increasingly
seen as a philosophy that, with its concept of culture based on the theory of
validity, presents itself as an alternative to empiricism and non-committal
postmodernism. In the eyes of its supporters, much points to the fact that
the approaches that replaced neo-Kantianism in the end had no alternative
to offer.67
A re-evaluation has in the meantime proceeded so far that one may either
discern neo-Kantian positions directly (particularly in analytic linguistic phi-
losophy) or at least point to unacknowledged, or indeed carefully concealed,
commonalities in the conflicts between standpoints. For followers of Frege
and Carnap such proofs would meet with no little success.68
Nobody would think today of adopting neo-Kantian critical philosophy
without considerable modifications. Whoever tries to reanimate it needs to
follow its example and take to heart the neo-Kantian motif of going-beyond-
Kant. As far as I can see, this is just what is happening. However, regardless
of this, the systematic claim of neo-Kantian philosophy is a form of security
in the face of all ‘poetic’ philosophising and the pretentious chatter offered to
the German television viewer as philosophy, which unfortunately threatens
to determine the image of philosophy in the mind of the public for some
time to come.
Translated by D. C. S. Turner
Notes
1. J. Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988),
170.
2. For a recent account see Helmut Holzhey, ‘Der Neukantianismus’, in H. Holzhey and.
W. Röd (eds.), Geschichte der Philosophie xii (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2004), 13–122.
3. On the intellectual context see C. Krijnen, Nachmetaphysischer Sinn: eine prob-
lemgeschichtliche und systematische Studie zu den Prinzipien der Wertphilosophie Heinrich Rick-
erts, Studien und Materialien zum Neukantianismus 16 (Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 2001), 29–120.
4. Windelband says of the Idealist systems that they ‘represented a violation of empirical
natural science research’: W. Windelband, Die Philosophie im deutschen Geistesleben des 19.
Jahrhunderts (2nd edn, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1909), 80.
5. Compare H. Schnädelbach, Philosophie in Deutschland 1831–1933 (Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp, 1983), 17ff.; S. Nachtsheim, Kunstphilosophie und empirische Kunstforschung
1870–1920 (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1984).
6. Windelband, Die Philosophie im deutschen Geistesleben des 19. Jahrhunderts, 86.
7. E. Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 2.
8. See H. Wagner, ‘Die absolute Reflexion und das Thema der Metaphysik’, in Kritische
Philosophie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1980), 49–56.
9. H. Lotze, Logik (Leipzig: Weidmann’sche Buchhandlung, 1843); reprint of the third book,
Vom Erkennen (Methodologie), ed. G. Gabriel (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1989). On Lotze’s
Logik see B. Bauch, Lotzes Logik und ihre Bedeutung im deutschen Idealismus, Beiträge zur
Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus 1 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1918), 45–58. On
the distinction between validity and being, see especially E. Lask, Die Logik der Philosophie
und die Kategorienlehre, in Gesammelte Schriften ii (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck),
1923), 1–282; on Lask, see S. Nachtsheim, Emil Lasks Grundlehre (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr
(Paul Siebeck), 1992).
10. See H. Rickert, Kant als Philosoph der modernen Kultur (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul
Siebeck), 1924), v f.
11. Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (1871), Begründung der Ethik (1877), Begründung der Ästhetik
(1889).
12. See M. Brelage, Studien zur Transzendentalphilosophie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965), 90; H.
Oberer, ‘Transzendentalsphäre und konkrete Subjektivität: ein zentrales Thema der
neueren Transzendentalphilosophie’, in Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 23 (1969),
578–611, esp. 582; H. Schnädelbach, Reflexion und Diskurs: Fragen einer Logik der Philosophie
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 343; H.-L. Ollig, Der Neukantianismus (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 1979), 4f.; W. Flach, Grundzüge der Erkenntnislehre (Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 1994), 25.
13. Brelage, Studien zur Transzendentalphilosophie, 80.
14. On the determination of validity as the main theme in neo-Kantianism’s return to Kant,
see H. Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (1871; 2nd edn, 1918), in Werke, ed. Hermann-
Cohen-Archiv am Philosophischen Seminar der Universität Zürich, under the direction of
Helmut Holzhey, vol. i (Hildesheim: Olms, 1987); H. Cohen, System der Philosophie i: Logik
der reinen Erkenntnis; P. Natorp, ‘Kant und die Marburger Schule’, Kant-Studien 17 (1912),
193–221; Philosophie, ihr Problem und ihre Probleme: Einführung in den kritischen Idealismus
(1911) (4th edn, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1929) (repr., Göttingen: Edition
Ruprecht, 2008); E. Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der
neueren Zeit, 4 vols. (repr., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994); Philoso-
phie der symbolischen Formen (1923–9) (repr., Hamburg: Meiner, 2010); W. Windelband,
‘Was ist Philosophie?’ (1882), in Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer
Geschichte i (6th edn, Tubingen: Mohr, 1980 [1919]), 2−54.
15. E. Zeller, ‘Über Bedeutung und Aufgabe der Erkenntnistheorie’, in Vorträge und Abhand-
lungen ii (Leipzig: Fues, 1877), 479–96.
16. Memorial edition: K. Fischer, Geschichte der neuern Philosophie iv: Immanuel Kant und seine
Lehre (6th edn, Heidelberg: Winter, 1928).
17. See E. Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem iv, 11; Windelband, Die Philosophie im deutschen
Geistesleben des 19. Jahrhunderts, 80.
19. G. Lehmann, Die deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1943), 35.
20. H. Rickert, Wilhelm Windelband (1914) (2nd edn, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck),
1929), 17.
21. H. Cohen, Kants Begründung der Ästhetik (1889), in Werke iii (Hildesheim: Olms, 2009),
9.
22. Ibid., 17.
23. Natorp, Philosophie: ihr Problem und ihre Probleme.
24. This only changed with E. Cassirer and R. Hönigswald.
25. W. Perpeet, ‘Kultur, Kulturphilosophie’, in J. Ritter, K. Gründer and G. Gabriel (eds.),
Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, iv (Basel: Schwabe, 1976), 1309–24; ‘Kulturphiloso-
phie um die Jahrhundertwende’, in H. Brackert and F. Wefelmeyer (eds.), Naturplan und
Verfallskritik: zu Begriff und Geschichte der Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984),
364–408.
26. The influence of Simmel is clear in Jonas Cohn, Der Sinn der gegenwärtigen Kultur: ein
philosophischer Versuch (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1914).
27. On Kant’s concept of culture see M. Heinz, ‘Immanuel Kant’, in R. Konersmann (ed.),
Handbuch Kulturphilosophie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2012), 70–8; W. Bartuschat, ‘Kultur als
Verbindung von Natur und Sittlichkeit’, in H. Brackert and F. Werfelmeyer (eds.) Natur-
plan und Verfallskritik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 69–93. On the relationship
between the neo-Kantian cultural philosophy and Kant’s concept of culture, see W.
Flach, ‘Kants Begriff der Kultur und das Selbstverständnis des Neukantianismus als Kul-
turphilosophie’, in M. Heinz and C. Krijnen (eds.), Kant im Neukantianismus (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 9–24.
28. H. Rickert, ‘Vom Begriff der Philosophie’, Logos 1 (1910), 1–34, esp. 19ff.; cf. 7, 9f.
29. Cohen, Kants Begründung der Ästhetik, 144.
30. Cf. Gerd Wolandt, Idealismus und Faktizität (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971), 12f.
31. See B. Recki, ‘Freiheit und Werk: über handlungstheoretische Kategorien der kultur-
philosophischen Grundlegung bei Ernst Cassirer’, in P.-U. Merz-Benz and U. Renz
(eds.), Ethik oder Ästhetik? Zur Aktualität der neukantianischen Kulturphilosophie (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), 115–24.
32. E. Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen i: Die Sprache.
33. R. Hönigswald, Philosophie und Sprache: Problemkritik und System (Basel: Haus zum Falken,
1937).
34. Ibid., 2.
35. Cf. Cohn, Der Sinn der gegenwärtigen Kultur.
36. F. Tenbruck, ‘Neukantianismus als Philosophie der modernen Kultur’, in W. Orth and H.
Holzhey (eds.), Neukantianismus: Perspektiven und Probleme, Studien und Materialien zum
Neukantianismus 1 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994), 71–87, at 71.
38. Ibid., 102.
39. Cohn, Der Sinn der gegenwärtigen Kultur. On this, particularly on Cohn’s account of the
situation of art, see S. Nachtsheim, ‘Lage und Aufgaben der zeitgenössischen Kunst in
der Kunstphilosophie Jonas Cohns’, in E. Mai, S. Waetzoldt and G. Wolandt (eds.),
Ideengeschichte und Kunstwissenschaft: Philosophie und bildende Kunst im Kaiserreich (Berlin:

Gebrüder Mann, 1983), 153–170.
40. Windelband, ‘Immanuel Kant: zur Säkularfeier seiner Philosophie’, in Präludien i, 120f.
41. Rickert, Kant als Philosoph der modernen Kultur, 139ff.
42. Cf. Perpeet, ‘Kulturphilosophie um die Jahrhundertwende’.
43. On Logos, see Harald Homann, ‘Die “Philosophie der Kultur”: zum Programm des
“Logos”’, in W. Orth and H. Holzhey (eds.), Neukantianismus: Perspektiven und Probleme,
Studien und Materialien zum Neukantianismus 1 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
1994), 88–112.
44. In epistemological, but more so in ethical materialism, which went against ethical idealism.
45. Cf. Windelband, Die Philosophie im deutschen Geistesleben des 19. Jahrhunderts, esp. ch. 3.
46. Cf. K. C. Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus: die deutsche Univer-
sitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993),
319ff.
47. For example, F. Medicus, ‘Zwei Thomisten contra Kant’, Kant-Studien 3 (1899), 320–33; B.
Bauch, ‘Kant in neuer ultramontan- und liberal-katholischer Beleuchtung’, Kant-Studien
13 (1908), 33–56.
48. See his obituary of Emil Lask, G. von Lukács, ‘Emil Lask: Ein Nachruf’, in Kant-Studien
22 (1918), 329–70.
49. It is perhaps significant that Sturmfels’ name does not appear on the Academy’s website.
50. Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz, Max Weber und Heinrich Rickert: Die erkenntniskritischen Grundlagen
der verstehenden Soziologie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1990).
51. Cf. W. Fischer, ‘Paul Natorp’, in Wolfgang Fischer and Dieter-Jürgen Löwisch (eds.),
Philosophen als Pädagogen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 242–55,
at 250–2.
52. P. Natorp, Sozialpädagogik: Theorie der Willenserziehung auf der Grundlage der Gemeinschaft
(Stuttgart: Frommann, 1899) (7th edn, 1974).
53. N. Jegelka, ‘Paul Natorps Sozialidealismus’, in H. Holzhey (ed.), Ethischer Sozialismus: zur
politischen Philosophie des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 185–222,
at 212.
54. F. A. Lange, Die Arbeiterfrage in ihrer Bedeutung für Gegenwart und Zukunft (Duisburg: W.
Falk & Volmer, 1865).
55. Also Eduard Bernstein, who argued for the replacement of dialectical materialism by a
social democracy oriented toward Kant; see E. Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozial-
ismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (1899) (8th edn, Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf.,
1984), 29–65, 219–32; on Bernstein: H. Kleger, ‘Die Versprechen des evolutionären Sozial-
ismus: oder, Warum noch einmal Bernstein lesen?’, in H. Holzhey (ed.), Ethischer Sozialis-
mus: zur politischen Philosophie des Neukantianismus, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994),
94–124.
56. P. Natorp, ‘Pestalozzis Ideen über Arbeiterbildung und soziale Frage’, in Gesam-
melte Abhandlungen zur Sozialpädagogik i (2nd edn, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-
Holzboog, 1922), 104. On Natorp’s social philosophy: N. Jegelka, Paul Natorp: Philoso-
phie, Pädagogik, Politik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1992), and ‘Paul Natorps
Sozialidealismus’, 185–222.
57. See Jegelka, ‘Paul Natorps Sozialidealismus’, 212.

58. H. Holzhey, ‘Neukantianismus und Sozialismus: Einleitung’, in H. Holzhey (ed.), Ethischer
Sozialismus: zur politischen Philosophie des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1994), 7–38, at 29f.
59. On Heidegger’s role in the removal of R. Hönigswald from his position as professor in
Munich, see C. Schorcht, Philosophie an den bayerischen Universitäten 1933–1945 (Erlangen:
Fischer, 1990), 157–62; Tom Rockmore, ‘Philosophie oder Weltanschauung? Über Hei-
deggers Stellungnahme zu Hönigswald’, in W. Schmied-Kowarzik (ed.), Erkennen–Monas–
Sprache: Internationales Richard-Hönigswald-Symposion Kassel 1995, Studien und Materialien
zum Neukantianismus 9 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1997), 171–9.
60. In 1938 Kroner emigrated to England, teaching for three years in Oxford. In 1940 he
went to the United States and taught in New York until 1952. On Kroner: Walter Asmus,
Richard Kroner, 1884–1974: Ein Philosoph und Pädagoge unter dem Schatten Hitlers (Frankfurt
am Main: Peter Lang, 1990).
61. The first of these was closest to neo-Kantianism, yet emerged as an anti-critical philosophy
and as opposed to the one-sidedness of neo-Kantian cultural philosophy. Hartmann and
Heidegger both came out of neo-Kantian schools.
62. Tenbruck, ‘Neukantianismus als Philosophie der modernen Kultur’, 71.
63. On the moral-political side of this ‘amnesia’, see R. Aschenberg, Entsubjektivierung des Men-
schen: Lager und Shoa in philosophischer Reflexion (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
2003), esp. 104.
64. The series Studien und Materialien zum Neukantianismus alone, begun in 1994, now stands
at thirty volumes.
65. Cf. H. Wiedebach, Hirntod als Wertverhalt: medizinethische Bausteine aus Jonas Cohns Wert-
wissenschaft und Maimonides’ Theologie (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2003).
66. An impressive example of a reactualisation and systematic evaluation of what is still
relevant in the neo-Kantian logic of cognition (with a confrontation with contemporary
positions) can be found in Werner Flach, Grundzüge der Erkenntnislehre: Erkenntniskritik,
Logik, Methodologie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994).
67. See W. Flach, ‘Zur Neubewertung des Neukantianismus’, in C. Krijnen and A. Noras
(eds.), Marburg versus Südwestdeutschland: philosophische Differenzen zwischen den beiden
Hauptschulen des Neukantianismus, Studien und Materialien zum Neukantianismus 28
(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012), 9–40, esp. 17.
68. For example, G. Gabriel, ‘Frege als Neukantianer’, Kant-Studien 77 (1986), 84–101;
‘Windelband und die Diskussion um die Kantischen Urteilsformen’, in M. Heinz and
C. Krijnen (eds.), Kant im Neukantianismus, 91–108; G. Edel, Hypothesis versus Linguistic
Turn: Zur Kritik der sprachanalytischen Philosophie (Waldkirch: Edition Gorz, 2010); ‘Die
Aktualität Cohens in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie’, in V. N. Belova (ed.), I. Kant, Kan-
tianism and H. Cohen [in Russian] (Saratov: Naučnaja Kniga, 2004), 88–91.
7
After materialism – reflections of Idealism in

Lebensphilosophie: Dilthey, Bergson and Simmel
David Midgley
The term Lebensphilosophie was adopted in the early decades of the twentieth
century to identify a philosophical trend that distinguished itself by its con-
cern with the conception of life as a creative process, with the continuity of
mental experiences associated with that process, and with ‘inner perception’
or intuition as a privileged mode of understanding that process. That trend
answered to a number of perceived needs in the broader intellectual culture
of the Western world at the time. These included the sense that modern,
industrialised societies were generating oppressive institutional structures
that constrained creativity and the life choices of individuals; the notion
that organising human lives in ways that were more in touch with natural
processes and the world of nature might overcome the supposed decadence
and degeneracy of contemporary European societies; and the endeavour of
interpreting life processes and human cultural activity in ways that looked
beyond the ostensibly mechanistic conceptions associated with the rise of
the natural sciences and the dominance of philosophical materialism and
positivism in the mid-nineteenth century. In the German-speaking world
in particular, these three tendencies came together in the well-known cult
of Nietzsche around 1900. Nietzsche’s writings offered trenchant criticisms
of contemporary European culture and educational institutions, as well as
challenging inherited philosophical doctrines and seeming to point the way
to the cultivation of a higher humanity.1 But there were other thinkers,
equally influential in their day, whose writings bear the traces of a thought-
ful dialogue with (as opposed to a scornful repudiation of) the exponents of
post-Kantian Idealism, and it is with three of the most prominent of these –
Dilthey, Bergson and Simmel – that the present chapter is concerned.
All translations D.M. unless otherwise noted.
161
162 David Midgley
Beyond question, the heritage of German Idealism was still a signifi-

cant presence in the world these authors inhabited. Hegel’s doctrine of the
state remained influential long after historians had turned away from his
philosophy of history,2 and we shall see explicit echoes of Hegel’s concep-
tion of culture as ‘objective spirit’ in the writings of Dilthey and Simmel.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the will had also become a pervasive influ-
ence, strengthened indeed by the reception of Darwinian evolutionary the-
ory since around 1860.3 Schelling, too, attracted interest in the first decade
of the twentieth century in circumstances that are entirely germane to our
subject. The publisher Eugen Diederichs, whose main base was that early
bastion of German Idealism, Jena, issued a selection of Schelling’s writings
in 1907 under the title Schöpferisches Handeln (Creative action) as part of his
‘educational’ programme for the cultural reinvigoration of Germany.4 For
all the difficulty of his abstract philosophical language, Schelling evidently
provided the sort of watchwords with which Diederichs and his collabo-
rators sought to oppose the materialism and political cynicism of the time
through the cultivation of spiritual values: the world of mankind, like the
world of nature, is one of incessant creative activity and the development
of individual potential, and the means to grasp it is not the ‘dead’ language
of science but the vividness of intuition (Anschauung). And when Diederichs
undertook, around this time, to publish the works of Bergson in German, it
was under the heading ‘New Idealism’ that he presented Bergson to German
readers in his prospectus for 1907.5
Whatever such marketing strategies might suggest, however, those who
attempted to describe Lebensphilosophie as a philosophical trend were bound
to acknowledge the disparities among the various thinkers to whom they
attached that label. The earliest such attempt appears to have been that of
Max Scheler, on whose advice Diederichs had first considered publishing
Bergson, in an essay dating from 1913. Scheler includes Nietzsche in his
selection on the strength of the insights into the nature of life as a self-
enhancing process that might be said to anticipate Bergson’s thoughts on
the matter, rather than as a philosopher in his own right, and Dilthey for his
pursuit of the historical understanding of the experience of living communi-
ties. The common feature that Scheler sees as linking these three thinkers is
the impulse to philosophise ‘out of the fullness of the experience [Erleben] of
life’ – but he uses precisely this essay as the opportunity to distance himself
from that trend, announcing that he is now joining forces with Edmund
Husserl in his project of phenomenology instead.6 Heinrich Rickert, in
a book entitled Die Philosophie des Lebens (The philosophy of life, 1920),
After materialism 163
provides a broader survey, but his purpose is to repudiate the whole trend
from a neo-Kantian perspective. Dilthey receives scant mention here, but
Simmel is presented as a determinedly anti-systematic thinker who thereby
epitomises the general character of Lebensphilosophie.7 (On the other hand,
it can be reasonably argued that Simmel’s practice of relating his arguments
back to traditional modes of metaphysical speculation preserves him from
the extremes of anti-intellectual irrationalism that came into prominence
in the period between the world wars.8 ) Otto Friedrich Bollnow, finally,
from a historical perspective further removed from those early polemics,
acknowledges the positive contribution that Lebensphilosophie made to
the awareness of the human capacity for intuitive understanding and to
techniques of hermeneutic inquiry.9
For our present purpose, the value of comparing Dilthey, Bergson and
Simmel is that between them they exemplify the historical trends in philo-
sophical thought that became important around 1900, and the various ways
in which these can be related back to the concerns of German Idealism.
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) achieved his professorial chair at the univer-
sity of Berlin on the strength of his attempt to develop a methodology for
the humanities that could stand alongside that of the natural sciences. It
was Dilthey who gave us the familiar – apparently categorical – distinction
between the sciences looking at the natural world with a view to explain-
ing its operation and the humanities looking at the human world with a
view to understanding it. He began his career at a time when metaphysical
speculation had been eclipsed by materialist arguments, and he interests us
here for the way he puts German Idealism in a historical perspective, as
well as for the use he makes of parts of its heritage. Henri Bergson (1859–
1941) consistently sought to construct arguments that would transcend the
claims of scientific empiricism, and in his book L’Évolution créatrice (1907)
he offered a view of human existence that took on board the notion of
the evolution of all species over time, while also insisting on a conception
of life as vested with a spiritual impulse. There are apparent similarities
between his aims and those of the German Idealists, but also important
differences in their mode of argument. Georg Simmel (1858–1918) owed a
great deal to both Dilthey and Bergson. It was Dilthey who enabled him
to achieve his habilitation, and there are signs that Dilthey’s Einleitung in
die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the human sciences, 1883) exerted
a long-term influence on his thinking;10 he also engaged closely with Berg-
son’s writings around 1910 and was directly involved in their translation into
German.11
164 David Midgley
All three can be seen to have regard to the integrative systems of earlier
metaphysical philosophy, but their writings also reflect historical develop-
ments in the conception of knowledge that were making it increasingly dif-
ficult for any such attempt at integration to command authority. As Simmel
was to put it in 1910:
Does anyone nowadays still ask whether Plato’s theory of ideas or the
pantheism of the Stoics and Spinoza is ‘correct’, whether Nicholas of
Cusa’s concept of God as the coincidentia oppositorum or Fichte’s
world-creating self ‘correspond to the facts’, or whether Schelling’s
doctrine of the identity of nature and mind or Schopenhauer’s
metaphysics of the will is ‘true’?a
He added that the undying significance of such doctrines did not derive from
their empirical verifiability, but from what had prompted their formulation.
In complex ways, the relation between experience of the external world
and the sense of what human nature truly is had become problematic for all
three of our thinkers, and not least for that reason, epistemology became the
terrain on which they conducted many of their philosophical battles. It was
terrain that they shared with the German Idealists in so far as they, too, were
looking for ways to overcome that sharp distinction between intellectual
understanding and intuition that is often referred to as Kant’s dualism.12
Indeed there is a sense in which the gate through which the critique of
Kant enters in both instances is the one that – as Paul Guyer has put it –
Kant himself left open when he said that his ‘categories’ would not apply
to ‘an understanding that itself intuited’.13 But as we consider the relation
between Lebensphilosophie and German Idealism, we would do well to heed
a precept to which Bergson held when expounding philosophies of the past,
namely that each philosopher has to be understood in the terms of his own
arguments.b
a. ‘Wer fragt heute eigentlich noch danach, ob Platos Ideenlehre oder der Pantheismus der Stoiker
und Spinozas “richtig” ist, ob des Nikolaus Cusanus Begriff von Gott als des “Zusammenfallens
der Gegensätze” oder Fichtes weltschöpferisches Ich “den Tatsachen entspricht”, ob Schellings
Lehre von der Identität von Natur und Geist oder Schopenhauers Willensmetaphysik “wahr”
ist?’ (Georg Simmel, Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, in Gesamtausgabe xiv (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1996) (hereafter GSG), 31
b. ‘Un vrai philosophe ne s’expliqu[e] que par lui-même.’ Henri Bergson, ‘Cours du Collège de
France sur “Le Traité de la Réforme de l’Entendement” de Spinoza’ (1911), quoted in Camille
Riquier, Archéologie de Bergson: temps et métaphysique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
2009), 120
Dilthey
It is likely that Dilthey’s contribution to epistemological thought is better
known nowadays through the description of it in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s
book Truth and Method than at first hand. Dilthey is discussed there as an
important link in the modern tradition of hermeneutics that begins with
Schleiermacher and is characterised by ‘Romantic’ assumptions about the
possibility of pursuing ‘infinite understanding’ and the ‘homogeneity of
human nature’, which ought to make it possible to achieve a complete
understanding of the creations of the human mind despite cultural and
historical differences.14 Gadamer highlights the senses in which Dilthey,
whose inquiries often focused on the history of literary and philosophical
movements, had inherited an aesthetic model of historical interpretation from
Schleiermacher, and even establishes an equivalence between Dilthey’s con-
ception of ‘historical consciousness’ and Hegel’s notion of ‘absolute spirit’;
but he does so in order to expose the notion of trying to reconcile the pur-
suit of the absolute with the awareness of historical perspective as a ‘utopian
ideal’, and he even questions along the way whether Dilthey himself really
thought in terms of ‘infinite understanding’.15 There is, however, an aspect
of Dilthey’s writings that provides positive momentum for Gadamer’s argu-
ment, and that is the perception that life is capable of developing a view of
itself that is ‘prior to any scientific objectification’: this leads Gadamer to
speak of philosophical self-reflection, too, as an objectification of life and
as ‘philosophy of philosophy’, but in a sense that is distinct from that of
Idealism.16 Gadamer’s critique of Dilthey, then, helps to prepare the way
for presenting his ontological model of hermeneutics as a more adequate
description of how ‘objective historical knowledge’ might come about,17
and for his well-known theory of the ‘merging of horizons’ in the process of
historical understanding. As Gadamer puts it in a sentence that he himself
italicises, ‘Historical consciousness is a mode of self-knowledge.’18 When he speaks
of an internal contradiction in Dilthey’s thinking, Gadamer describes it as
an ‘unresolved Cartesianism’.19 But when we examine those tensions within
Dilthey’s arguments of which he was himself clearly aware, we encounter a
different set of epistemological issues, and in Dilthey’s attempts to resolve
these we find frequent echoes of post-Kantian philosophy.
Dilthey began his academic career in the 1850s, when history was estab-
lishing itself as a newly self-conscious discipline, and interest in metaphysical
speculation was declining.20 When he looked back at his own career at the
166 David Midgley
time of his seventieth birthday in 1903, he noted that his own historical
investigations had led him to inquire into the nature of, and the conditions
for, historical consciousness, a project that he frequently labelled a ‘critique
of historical reason’; and he openly acknowledged that there was a seemingly
irresolvable tension within that project, a tension between the finitude of
all historical phenomena and the intellectual need for ‘universally valid knowl-
edge [Erkenntnis]’.21 He added that, like science and philosophy, the histor-
ical world-view contributed to the liberation of the human spirit, but that
it was also necessary to ward off what he called the ‘anarchy of convictions’,
by which – to infer from his use of that phrase elsewhere22 – he probably
meant the polemical character of much nineteenth-century historiographical
writing once it moved beyond the straightforward and disciplined task of
chronicling events.
Dilthey’s early work carries the hallmarks of its time. He treats the meta-
physical concerns of German Idealism as a phenomenon that requires to be
understood historically, and in the prize essay on Schleiermacher that he
wrote in 1860 he dismisses the philosophy of Schelling and his followers
as ‘mystical’.23 In the 1870s, when the study of human societies had come
strongly under the influence of the natural sciences, he specifically rejected
the classifications of Schelling, Hegel and Schleiermacher on the grounds
that they contain ‘constructive elements that are not susceptible to exact
proof’;24 and as late as 1905, on the opening page of his important study
of writings by Hegel that pre-date his attempts at systematic philosophy
he commends Hegel’s close engagement with the stuff of history, noting
with approval that it was ‘as yet unconstrained by the compulsive logic of
the dialectical method’.c But Dilthey’s sense of a methodological dilemma
is apparent in an essay of 1875, where he draws attention to the enormous
complexity encountered when applying the principle of ‘exact determina-
tion’ to psychic processes and explicitly repudiates the positivism of Comte
and Mill on the grounds that psychology in its current state cannot fulfil the
expectation that it might furnish empirical laws for the study of history.25
The solution he envisages in 1875 is that of allowing historical inquiry to
be guided by philosophical reflection, and it is with a self-conscious echo
of a well-known title of Kant’s that he formulates this goal as ‘historical
research with a philosophical intention’ (historische Forschung in philosophis-
cher Absicht).26
c. ‘[W]ie [die Bruchstücke aus dieser Periode] noch unbeengt vom Zwang der dialektischen
Methode aus der Vertiefung in den größten Stoff der Geschichte entstanden . . . ’. Wilhelm
Dilthey, ‘Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels’, in GS (Dilthey), iv, 3; cf. also p. 33
Dilthey describes his epistemological problem more explicitly in an essay

of 1892 on experience and thought: ‘Erfahren und Denken’. Here he polemi-
cises against the metaphysical conception of the faculties of cognition that
he finds in two mid-nineteenth-century systems of logic,27 objecting to the
Kantian dualism on which they are predicated, and in particular to the pre-
cept, at the start of Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’, that that which orders
sensations cannot itself be a sensation.28 In this he is conscious of following
in the footsteps of Hegel, whose critique of Kant he recalls at the end of the
essay, and like his Idealist predecessors he aims to unite the sundered halves of
human perception represented by empiricism and rationalism.29 As Dilthey
puts it, only if we conceive of perception and thought as ‘genetically’ related
can we advance beyond a ‘merely hypothetical’ basis for valid knowledge.30
His solution to the problem also shows how close he was at this stage to
Bergson, whose first major publication, the Essai sur les données immédiates de
la conscience, had appeared in 1889; for Dilthey insists that our thinking must
be subsidiary to our experience, and that our confidence that this is so must
be based, not on our sense data, but on our ‘inner experience’.31 At the same
time he takes heart from the view of the contemporary experimental psy-
chologist Carl Stumpf that sensations must be subject to an inherent ordering
principle,32 and argues that ‘the order we seek for our representation of
the course of history must be similarly inherent in history’.d While he seeks
backing from empirical science, his abiding philosophical concern is with the
conditions of possibility for knowledge,33 and he seeks to combine the two
perspectives by positing a structural symmetry between the empirical world
and our knowledge of it. He would like to go further and replace Kant’s
categories with formal ‘rules of thought’ (Denkregeln) that would express the
principles by which the organisation of our thoughts (the Denkzusammen-
hang) is contained in reality itself; but he also recognises that the complex of
thoughts in question has come about in the course of generations, and that
it must stand in some relation to the conjunction (Zusammenhang) of all the
perceptions that have been made down the centuries.34 It is an endeavour in
which the analysis of any judgement entails potentially endless contextual
inquiry.
Dilthey was still wrestling with this problem in his last major work, and
the ambiguity of the perspective in which he presented his epistemological
d. ‘Die Einheit, durch die wir diesen Verlauf anschaulich vorstellen, muß in ihm selber liegen.’ GS
(Dilthey), v, 36; cf. also p. 73
168 David Midgley
thinking there is reflected in the fact that its title has variously been trans-
lated into English as ‘The Construction’ or ‘The Formation of the Historical
World’:35 the German word is ‘Aufbau’, and it can be taken to imply both a
structure that is inherent within historical reality and the mental construc-
tion of it. It is in this text that, as Gadamer notes, Dilthey incorporates
Husserl’s demonstration (in his Logical Investigations of 1900–1) of the ‘ide-
ality’ of meaning that transcends psychological determination,36 and that he
makes substantial use of Hegel’s term ‘objective spirit’ in his discussion of
historical interpretation. But we need to be clear about the purpose for which
he uses this term. Dilthey includes here the spirit objectifying itself in ‘the
powerful forms of art, religion and philosophy’, which, as he notes, Hegel
himself had assigned to the ‘absolute spirit’.37 In fact, as Rudolf Makkreel
shows in his seminal study of Dilthey, when he uses the expression ‘objective
spirit’ he is generally at pains to detach it from the metaphysical framework
in which it appears in Hegel’s system. For Dilthey, the term designates ‘the
realm in which the human spirit is embodied’ and ‘the plurality of objectifi-
cations that can be empirically discovered through the study of history’.38 In
this sense, ‘objective spirit’ also comes to signify the medium in which experi-
ence (Erlebnis) and understanding (Verstehen) can be shown to be structurally
related,39 and it is this aspect of Dilthey’s hermeneutics to which Gadamer is
alluding when he writes, ‘Life itself, flowing temporality, is ordered toward
the formation of enduring units of significance. Life interprets itself. Life
itself has a hermeneutical structure.’40
Where Gadamer finds Dilthey’s aspiration for universally valid knowl-
edge associated with the term ‘absolute’, the context turns out to be that of
an inquiry into the historical process by which values that ‘life’ has generated
come to acquire ‘absolute’ status for a nation or an epoch.41 For Dilthey it is
the ‘actual expressions of life’ that consistently provide the foundation for
historical knowledge,42 and he drew on the terminology of German Idealism
in order to convey his thinking about the nature of the cognitive processes
entailed in historical interpretation. With Bergson (whose writings display
no manifest interest in history) we move to a more radical inquiry into the
role of inner perception in our understanding of our own organic nature.
Bergson
Already in his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889; translated as
Time and Free Will, 1910), Bergson establishes the premise that our experience
of the continuity of time is the basis on which we may know the nature both
of our own life and of the creative consciousness at work in the world. The
key elements of his argument are these:
(1) What he calls ‘pure duration’ (durée pure) is conceived as the form of
our continuous flow of consciousness when we allow ourselves to live
(quand notre moi se laisse vivre).43
(2) That qualification (when we allow ourselves to live) is designed to coun-
teract the tendency to treat time as a homogeneous medium which can
be subdivided and quantified. According to Bergson, that approach,
which he finds to be characteristic of modern scientific thought in gen-
eral, imposes an artificial categorisation on the true nature of time by
importing assumptions that are appropriate to the analysis of space.
(3) The consciousness that experiences time, and which can conserve memo-
ries of previous states of consciousness, is thereby able to testify to the
continuous process of change to which that consciousness itself con-
tributes. This is the sense in which he speaks of time as heterogeneous
and therefore not susceptible to the subdivision and quantification that
characterises experimental science and those aspects of Kant’s thinking
that proceed on the same assumptions as experimental science.44 The
sharp distinction he makes in the Essai between mechanics and dynam-
ics as ways of looking at the world is carried forward to his discussion
of the development of life forms in L’Évolution créatrice (1907; translated
as Creative Evolution, 1911).
(4) That distinction is also the basis for the argument he develops about the
nature of freedom. He avoids giving a definition of freedom because, as
he puts it, to define it would be to deprive it of its true nature and hand
the victory to determinism.45 As he sees it, we are able to recognise our
own freedom through our acts, more particularly through those acts
that emanate from the integral totality of our personality, in the course
of the continuous flow of time.46 (The choice of the title Time and Free
Will for the English translation of this work is therefore an accu-
rate reflection of its central concerns.) In essence Bergson’s argument
here is about the unique nature of a seat of consciousness (a moi) that is
free to act and thereby to create new conditions for its existence, and
which therefore cannot be compared with any other force at work in
the world.47 These arguments are again carried forward to L’Évolution
créatrice, where they are developed in an evolutionary perspective.
It is characteristic of Bergson’s way of arguing that he seeks to expose the

weaknesses in the arguments of others in order then to advance his own
170 David Midgley
preferred view as more plausible, and this is what often gives his thinking
the appearance of being heavily dependent on the manner of its rhetorical
presentation. In L’Évolution créatrice he aims to discredit those interpretations
of biological phenomena that are based on either mechanistic or finalistic (tele-
ological) assumptions, i.e. scientific approaches that adopt the categories
of physics and chemistry. For Bergson, thinking in terms of mechanical
causality is appropriate only to the interpretation of phenomena that our
intellect has separated out from the continual passage of time, and therefore
inappropriate to the interpretation of organic processes.48 It is with this
perception that he sets himself apart, not only from the dominant trends of
scientific thinking since the nineteenth century, but also from such cosmo-
logical schemes as that of Leibniz, for whom ‘organism’ connotes the ‘order
and artifice’ that are essential features of God’s wisdom and is therefore ‘not
opposed to “mechanism”, but rather a variety of it’.49 For exactly similar
reasons Bergson rejects finalism (as exemplified in Leibniz’s conception of
‘pre-established harmony’) because it amounts to a kind of ‘mechanism’ in
reverse, which assumes that all ultimate purposes are given from the outset
and that there is no further possibility of creative development.50 Bergson is
more sympathetic to biological vitalism, i.e. the notion that organic develop-
ment is determined by an internally given principle (the Aristotelian concept
of entelechy, which Leibniz had adopted, was also introduced into biological
discourse by the German zoologist Hans Driesch around 1900),51 but he sees
a difficulty with that position too. Nature, Bergson observes, knows neither
a sense of purpose that is purely determined from within, nor a sense of indi-
viduality that can exist in isolation, so it is futile to seek a principle of finality
located within the individual organism.52 If none of these familiar biological
positions is regarded as tenable, then, what conception of the evolutionary
life force can Bergson offer us instead?
His view of the evolutionary process draws on the observation of phe-
nomena that were of great interest to biologists themselves in Bergson’s day.
These include the general issue of adaptation to environment; the capacity
for the regeneration of organs, which is more pronounced in some species of
animal than in others; evidence of convergence in the development of par-
ticular organs (notably the eye) in species that are not directly related; and
apparent evidence of abrupt development in some plant species and some
marine creatures.53 In Bergson’s presentation of such evidence, it becomes
suggestive of an inherent tendency within organic nature as a whole to develop
continually in ways that display, firstly, directedness that is not necessarily
aimed towards a predetermined goal, and secondly the capacity of organisms
to change and adapt in interaction with the environment they encounter.

His explanation for the evident diminution of the impetus to develop and
change in particular species, and also for the phenomena of ageing and death,
is that the ‘energy’ that drives life encounters the ‘resistance’ of matter.54
The mental image of the overall evolutionary process that he constructs
is that of a complex bundle of trajectories (this meaning is implicit in the
French word he uses: gerbe) emanating from an originary explosion, some-
what like a fireworks display. He even refers to the formulation for which
L’Évolution créatrice is most commonly remembered – élan vital – as an image:55
for him it represents the best attempt that the human imagination can make
to visualise and to express in words the intuition of the ultimate reality of the
natural world of which we are ourselves part. This brings us in turn to the
epistemological dimension of Bergson’s thinking.
Gilles Deleuze is commonly credited with having been the first to take
Bergson’s sense of method seriously;56 and it is true that earlier commen-
tators on Bergson’s writings had often tended to regard his arguments and
his manner of presenting them as inherently unmethodical (A. O. Love-
joy, for example, described Bergson’s philosophy as ‘an extremely unstable
compound of elements which are not merely ill-assorted but reciprocally
antipathetic’).57 But this may largely have been a conditioned response to
the ways in which he sets himself up in opposition to the conceptual schemes
inherited from Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and others. Deleuze, in his book Le
Bergsonisme, constructs his argument about ‘intuition as a method’ around
passages in which Bergson extends the notion of intuition to that of a con-
scious process of inquiry. He points, for example, to the imagery in which
Bergson speaks of constructing a sense of the mental activity that took place
around a moment of experience as evidence that intuition can take us beyond
awareness of a particular experience to a perception of the ‘conditions’ of
that experience;58 and he extends this observation into a claim that Bergson’s
argument about the knowledge with which intuition can equip us takes us
not in the direction of concepts (which would lead back to the Kantian analysis
of the ‘conditions of possibility’ for knowledge in general), but of percepts
that in turn serve to identify the articulations on which the particularities of
experience depend.59 The key steps in the ‘method’ that Deleuze delineates
consist in, firstly, distinguishing true from false problems, secondly combat-
ing philosophical ‘illusions’ in order the better to recognise specific ‘artic-
ulations of the real’, and thirdly relating the resolution of problems to the
experience of time (durée) as Bergson defines it. As a description of the con-
scious shift that Bergson encourages us to make this is broadly convincing,60
172 David Midgley
and it serves to highlight the reasons why Bergson’s thought has often been
seen to carry features of a radical empiricism.61 But it significantly downplays
another manifest dimension of Bergson’s writings, namely his pretension to
a renewal of metaphysical awareness and his claim that intuition can take
us towards knowledge of the absolute. That aspiration is explicit in the
texts from which Deleuze primarily derives his corroboratory evidence,62
and when Bergson outlines his purpose in the introduction to L’Évolution
créatrice, he speaks of wanting to develop a method that would transcend the
logical systems constructed by philosophers in the modern period generally,
by combining the theory of life with the theory of knowledge and, as he
puts it, allowing them to enhance each other in an endless circular process.63
Let us then consider, independently of Deleuze, how Bergson applies per-
ceptions from the realm of biology in the development of the method he
professes.
It is precisely in L’Évolution créatrice that Bergson develops his critique of
scientific thinking along the lines that human intelligence (for which he uses
the term ‘intellect’ interchangeably) should itself be considered a product
of the evolutionary process: it has developed as an instrument for assessing
and dealing with the physical environment in which we have to survive,
and is therefore strongly associated with spatial awareness and the cognitive
processes based upon it. Intuition on the other hand (which Bergson aligns
very strongly with the notion of instinct) is the faculty that enables us to have
cognition of life, of the continuity of time, and thus also of the character of
the natural world as a whole. The biological evidence that he adduces for this
part of his argument tends to focus on the behaviour of insects – the case of
the wasp, for example, that is consistently able to sting a grub in a particular
part of its anatomy so that it is not killed, but paralysed, and can therefore be
consumed gradually.64 As creatures of the natural world, he infers, human
beings similarly have an ability to intuit the nature of the world of which
they are part, but this ability has become attenuated in the course of time and
overlaid by the development of the intellect. Not that he is straightforwardly
arguing for the superiority of the one over the other: in a formulation worthy
of Pascal, Bergson states that there are things that only the intellect is capable
of seeking, but which on its own it would never find, whereas instinct can find
them, but left to itself would never be impelled to seek.65 The elaboration of
that insight involves a pursuit of more flexible concepts than those inherited
from earlier philosophers, as early analysts of his writings noted.66 At the
same time it is evident that Bergson’s epistemology is designed to support
and lend credence to his metaphysical vision of the world as an eternal process
of becoming, of the coming into being of the new and unforeseeable over
time.67
It is in this dimension of Bergson’s philosophy that we might recog-
nise strong affinities with the thinking of the German Idealists, as indeed it
appeared to German readers from the moment that L’Évolution créatrice was
published.68 Hans Driesch, in one of the very earliest reviews of the book saw
a resemblance to Schelling’s nature philosophy, particularly with regard to
the sense of an opposition between life and matter, and to Schopenhauer in
the discussion of an innate knowledge of things afforded by instinct.69 Such
comparisons were the subject of rich debate throughout the English- as well
as the German-speaking world during the decade that spanned the First
World War, and Bergson’s detractors found them a very effective weapon
to wield against him. Lovejoy, again, provided a succinct and vivid account
of the perceived connections, arguing that Bergson’s conception of the vital
impulse closely resembles Schopenhauer’s notion of the will in that it is
characterised by ‘purposiveness without prevision or conscious design’; and
he detects strong echoes of Goethe and the young Schelling in Bergson’s
conception of nature as a realm of constant striving for renewal and self-
transcendence.70 As late as 1903, in his essay Introduction à la métaphysique,
Bergson had indeed appeared to echo Schelling’s use of the formulation
‘intellectual intuition’,71 and only later, after developing his sharp distinc-
tion between intuition and intellect in L’Évolution créatrice, distanced himself
from the phrase by placing it in quotation marks.72 But those who scruti-
nised Bergson’s arguments more closely soon recognised subtler complexi-
ties behind the development of his thinking.
A German doctoral thesis of 1917 confirmed the similarity in the out-
comes of Schelling’s and Bergson’s inquiries, but also made it clear to what
extent Schelling, by contrast with Bergson, continued to argue as a ratio-
nalist and on the basis of much the same premises as Kant. The author,
Georg Jäger, was able to point to what was by then also common knowledge
about the philosophical provenance of Bergson’s thought: it was the ‘spiri-
tualist realism’ of his nineteenth-century French predecessors, and of Félix
Ravaisson (1813–1900) in particular. This tradition, Jäger concluded, had
led Bergson to a still more pronouncedly ‘panpsychistic’ conception of the
natural world than Schelling’s ‘world spirit’.73 In his research, Jäger had been
able to draw on the findings of René Berthelot’s wide-ranging study of the
relationship in which Bergson’s thought stood to both Romantic and prag-
matist philosophy, published in 1913, which had taken into account what
was known about the personal contacts that had existed between Ravaisson
174 David Midgley
and Schelling. Berthelot concluded that the diffusion of Schelling’s ideas in

France in the 1830s had provided a stimulating intellectual ferment for the
development of Bergson’s thinking, but that instead of taking specific ideas
from Schelling, Bergson had arrived at similar conclusions to Schelling’s by
following up ideas that he had first encountered in the works of Ravaisson.74
Bergson’s relation to Schopenhauer, whose writings he evidently knew well,
was eventually clarified along similar lines. A publication in the Jahrbuch der
Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft for 1929 demonstrated convincingly that Bergson’s
metaphysical vision of the life force was quite different from Schopenhauer’s,
even if some of the imagery deployed by Bergson, including that of the élan
vital, may well have been influenced by particular formulations in Schopen-
hauer’s writings.75
A more intriguing connection is suggested by the occasional references
in L’Évolution créatrice to Fichte. Bergson had given a course of lectures on
Fichte in 1898,76 and this may help to account for the fact that the model of
Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre seems readily to come to his mind, particularly at
a point where he is also contrasting his own sense of philosophical purpose
with that of Herbert Spencer. Bergson presents Spencer as a clear represen-
tative of mechanistic thinking in that he tries to reassemble the process of
evolution from the fragments that that process has produced, rather than try-
ing to grasp the essential nature of the process itself.77 Earlier in the text he
speaks of Spencer as starting from external reality and condensing it into an
intelligible thought process (intelligence), by contrast with Fichte, who starts
with a highly concentrated idea and expands it into an account of reality.e
On the face of it, then, Bergson presents these two thinkers respectively as
the ideal types of induction and deduction, and he is aiming to transcend
both approaches by means of the intuition of the ‘internal, living unity’ that
is the ‘being’ of which we are part.78 But the Fichte expert Jean-Christophe
Goddard has also argued that, when Bergson read the Wissenschaftslehre, what
he saw was an apparently novel way of presenting the relation between two
principles familiar from philosophical discussions in antiquity: the intellect
and the sense of oneness. More particularly, in the thinking of the late Roman
philosopher Plotinus (ad 204–270) Bergson had found a precedent for deny-
ing primacy to the intellect on the grounds that, by its very nature, it implies
a separation out into subject and object, and is therefore not characterised
e. ‘Fichte prend la pensée à l’état de concentration et la dilate en réalité. Spencer part de la réalité
extérieure et la recondense en intelligence.’ EC, 191
by the unity that is to be demanded of the absolute.79 In a more recent study,

Camille Riquier confirms this finding, pointing out that in Plotinus – with
whom he customarily began his lectures on the metaphysical tradition –
Bergson would also have encountered the conception of consciousness as
the synthesis of all sensations (synaisthesis) which he frequently invokes.80
In the brief historical survey that he provides towards the end of
L’Évolution créatrice, Bergson’s main purpose is to contrast the thinking of
the modern world in general with that of antiquity. He finds Descartes’
representation of the dichotomy between body and soul more extreme than
Aristotle’s distinction between psyche and soma, and he sees the legacy of
that dichotomy perpetuated by Spinoza and Leibniz.81 When it comes to
Kant, Bergson does not need to mention the criticisms made by Schelling or
Hegel because his own criticism is directed against the alignment of Kant’s
arguments with post-Newtonian science which, in Bergson’s view, ‘filters’
natural phenomena through ‘intelligence’.82 Nor does he need to engage
with Schopenhauer in this connection, because his purpose is to refute what
he calls the ‘infra-intellectual’ conception of intuition expounded in Kant’s
‘Transcendental Aesthetic’, and to advance in its place the notion of a ‘supra-
intellectual intuition’ that is capable of grasping the vital and the psychical,
and thus also the absolute.83 Bergson draws a clear distinction here between
his own view and that of ‘post-Kantian’ philosophy in general, which he
sees as having failed to let go of the notion of a ‘unified science for all phe-
nomena’ – and in this connection he does allude to Hegel (a conception
of the world as the realisation of an idea) and Schopenhauer (the world as
the objectification of ‘will’) in order to repudiate both as (quasi-Spinozan)
deductionists and to place them firmly in the ‘mechanistic’ camp.84
This is perhaps the clearest sign of how Bergson saw his own project
in relation to that of the German Idealists. There is, however, one sense in
which German philosophy was important to him in the exposition of his
own thinking: it was in Kant that he often found the points of departure
for his arguments, precisely because Kant’s precepts and conclusions were
unacceptable to him. As the doyen of Bergson scholarship, Frédéric Worms,
has put it, Kant was to Bergson what Hume was to Kant. In the course
of his writings Bergson can be seen progressively breaking down Kant’s
distinctions in order to reabsorb the various issues discussed in the Critique
of Pure Reason into the functions of intuition.85 Here we may also glimpse an
element of continuity between the philosophy of Bergson and that of Georg
Simmel.
176 David Midgley
Simmel
Simmel is most commonly remembered for his publications on a wide range
of cultural issues, from social practices and gender relations, to art and fash-
ion, urban culture and the money economy.86 His writings have remained
important stimuli to cultural inquiry in our own time, as they were for readers
and listeners in his day, because they are often concerned with the complex-
ity of relations between the aesthetic, the psychological and the sociological;
and that interest in the diversity of factors at work in human behaviour is
also reflected in his way of doing philosophy, which it is fair to regard as
‘relationist’ rather than ‘relativist’.87 Simmel problematises (as we would say
nowadays) the notion of universally applicable concepts, and shows no sign of
aspiring to knowledge of the absolute in the manner of Bergson or Schelling.
He does frequently invoke the notion of ‘totality’ as a goal of hermeneutic
inquiry, but he usually locates the unity of meaning that is to be striven for in
the individual human subject, as Siegfried Kracauer noted in his helpful early
description of Simmel’s work,88 and it is when he seeks to articulate how we
might achieve an understanding of the historically developing human world
that we are most likely to find him reflecting on particular elements of the
post-Kantian heritage.
Simmel was fond of bringing one line of thinking into play alongside
another in order to tease out the senses in which the two might mutually
inform each other, and for this purpose he often chose sets of ideas that
were likely to strike his readers as antithetical. In an essay on Kant and
Goethe, for example, which he originally published in 1906 and elaborated
further in 1916, he presents the two historical figures as representatives of
contrasting approaches to a shared aim, that of overcoming the opposition
between materialism and spiritualism. Kant, in this context, appears as the
philosopher who made it possible to conceive of both matter and spirit as
human mental constructs (Vorstellungen), but within a ‘mechanistic’ world-
view; Goethe, on the other hand, is the thinker for whom the distinction falls
away because he can conceive of both matter and spirit as having absolute
value within a ‘vitalistic’ world-view.89 Simmel recalls the rallying cry ‘Back
to Kant!’ that had epitomised the post-Idealist phase of the mid-nineteenth
century, and echoes the perception around 1900 that ‘Back to Goethe!’ had
become a necessary corrective to that earlier trend.90 But then, in his final
note, he anticipates that a time will come when the perceived opposition
between Kant and Goethe will have been resolved into a more encompassing
world-view.91 In a similar vein we find him, in a major essay of 1910, picking

his way among key features in the development of German Idealism that he
evidently continues to regard as indispensable points of orientation.
In that context Simmel expressly endorses Hegel’s critique of Fichte’s
subjectivism, emphasising the importance of the concept as a prefashioned
ideational form (Gestalt) and as the means by which the mind achieves objec-
tivity. Cognition, in this view of the matter, is more than a momentary act of
consciousness; it is, rather, an act of mental representation (Vorstellen) that
contains the objects of perception in intellectual form, and is capable of acting
as the vehicle of objective intellection.f The concept, in Simmel’s elaboration
of this point, is the most elementary manifestation of the content of cognition,
which enables the mental act to contain the ‘truth’ about external forms by
virtue of being the common ground between the subjective psychic process and
the external objects of consciousness.92 His thinking about the ‘form’ and
‘content’ of cognition has been found to be inconsistent in certain respects,93
but it is clear from this passage alone that he is pursuing a conception of the
human mind at work that owes considerably more to the legacy of German
Idealism than it does to the perceptions of Bergson.
Schelling’s conception of the absolute (as a condition of ‘indifference’
or ‘identity’ standing above all distinctions between the universal and the
particular or between subject and object) appears to interest him only as a
view to be eliminated from his discussion of how to reconcile unity with
diversity.94 But he does embrace what he calls Hegel’s ‘fundamental meta-
physical principle’, i.e. the unity of the spirit that unfolds itself in cognition,
which Simmel is content to call the ‘metaphysical reality’ of the ‘idea’ that
realises itself as ‘objective spirit’.95 The Hegelian cast of his thinking about
historical and cultural processes is obvious when he goes on to speak of the
‘idea’ as the ‘absolute reality’ that is expressed in concepts and logical devel-
opments, and which is the ‘eternally becoming’ being that manifests itself
in all physical and psychical events.g That powerful underlying sense of the
continual dynamic of human experience is also strongly apparent in Simmel’s
critique of Kant’s model of cognition.
f. ‘Erkennen ist mehr als bloßes Vorstellen, als der momentane Bewußtseinsakt des Subjekts, es ist
das Vorstellen, das die Dinge in der Form des Geistes in sich enthält . . . oder der Träger der
geistigen Objektivität ist.’ GSG xiv, 70
g. ‘Die Idee, der in Begriffen und logischen Entwicklungen ausgedrückte Sinn der Dinge ist ihre
absolute Realität, in aller physischer und psychischer Erscheinung als das eigentlich und allein
Seiende lebendig. . . . Dieses Sein ist ein unaufhörlich werdendes.’ Ibid., xiv, 73
178 David Midgley
In the lectures on Kant that he published in 1904, Simmel describes

Kant’s ‘Transcendental Analytic’ as a useful conceptual apparatus, but con-
siders the terms in which it is couched to be circumscribed by the historical
perspectives of Kant’s time. He accepts as self-evident the notion that the
constitution of the perceiving subject is a fundamental condition of the cog-
nitive process, but argues that no statement about specific cognitive acts
automatically follows from this. For Simmel the a priori conditions of our
cognition are themselves inextricably involved in the ever-changing ‘tissue’
(Gewebe) of our knowledge so that, as with all psychological inquiry, we can
only hope to progress towards a precise understanding of their particular
manifestations gradually and cumulatively.96 Where Hegel had objected to
Kant’s separation of the forms of thought from the nature of being,97 Simmel
expands the purview of the argument to encompass the role of experiential
factors in determining the forms of thought.98 His view of Kant resembles
Bergson’s to the extent that he sees him as trying to establish the conditions
of possibility for scientific inquiry as it was understood in Kant’s day, and he
speaks of it as being more in tune with the concerns of his own time to bring
the rhythms of organic existence and the sense of never-ending development
into consideration.99 He even argues that Kant’s static, quasi-geometric a
priori structures betray a ‘secret scepticism towards life’ (which is why they
had not appealed to Goethe).100 But as he puts it, the notion of a ‘transcen-
dental’ structure of the mind remains important because it reminds us what
our mind is: the mind does not possess such structures, it consists of them.101
Neo-Kantian critics have identified two kinds of difficulty with Simmel’s
thinking. One is that he gives the Hegelian notion of the spirit objectifying
itself as culture a negative inflection, reinterpreting it as a necessarily tragic
process. In a notorious essay of 1911 he writes of a ‘general fate’ of the
constituent elements of human culture that consists in their acquiring their
own developmental logic, which in turn constrains the subsequent activity
of human beings.102 This aspect of Simmel’s thinking drew a firm rebuke
from Ernst Cassirer, who argues in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences that,
on the contrary, historical development brings with it a cumulative increase
in culture, to which the human individual always has the potential to con-
tribute by transforming, through interpersonal action, the legacy that s/he
has inherited.103 It is a resolutely Kantian perspective that Cassirer offers in
place of Simmel’s: the goal of culture, he writes, is ‘not the realisation of hap-
piness in this life but the realisation of freedom, of that genuine autonomy
that consists not in the technical mastery of man over nature but in man’s
moral mastery over himself’.104 The other difficulty relates to the deliberately
antisystematic character of Simmel’s arguments, which attracted immediate

reproval from Rickert and other neo-Kantians.105 It is the indeterminacy of
inquiry that Simmel incurs by virtue of his focus on the individual manifesta-
tions of human experience. In a sense, however, this difficulty contains signs
of what prompted other new departures in twentieth-century philosophy.
The ‘view of life’ (Lebensanschauung) that Simmel elaborated in the decade
before his death in 1918 is the closest he came to describing his metaphysical
vision, and it is again presented in terms of the interaction between various
domains of human experience. His text explores questions of individuality
and the challenge that psychological complexities pose for any conception of
moral obligation; the integration of death within our conception of life; and
the relationship in which ideas stand to the processes and experiences of life.
His underlying premise, however, is that life constantly transcends itself in
two senses: it perpetually seeks to go beyond the boundaries that temporar-
ily define it (in this sense it is always ‘living more’, ‘Mehr-Leben’), and the
knowledge of it always entails a transcendence of it in turn (it is ‘more than
life’, ‘Mehr-als-Leben’).106 Simmel had spoken in 1911 of life as the poten-
tial basis for a metaphysics that would replace the dogmatism of inherited
systems of philosophy, describing his goal as a shift of attention from the
‘terminus ad quem’ to the ‘terminus a quo’ of philosophical endeavour.107
This argument appears in the introduction to a collection of essays which,
he acknowledged, was notable for the heterogeneity of its subject matter,
and to which he gave a programmatic title: Philosophische Kultur (Philosophi-
cal Culture). Rather than systematically elaborating a particular set of ideas,
he wrote, philosophy should be seen as an attitude of mind and a ceaseless
process that should be understood in terms of its functionality rather than
its content.108 In so far as Simmel’s view of life is one of infinitely variable
complexity, it is understandable that Rickert should have perceived his argu-
ments as the epitome of intellectual instability and a demonstration of the
futility of basing any philosophy on the notion of life. But by the same token,
the multifariousness of the factors that he felt obliged to take into account
indicates why the new philosophical directions that followed sought in one
way or another to supersede the models inherited from German Idealism.
The key moves of the 1920s, after all, are on the one hand the progression
via Husserl’s phenomenology to Heidegger’s ontology, which treats inter-
pretation (Auslegung) as a function of our very being in the world,109 and on
the other hand the effective abandonment of any concern with developing
metaphysical schemes in favour of a focus on how we speak of the world we
inhabit, as pioneered by Wittgenstein.
180 David Midgley
Notes
1. See Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992); R. Hinton Thomas, Nietzsche in German Politics and Society,
1890–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); Gunter Martens, Vitalismus
und Expressionismus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971), 31–102.
2. Cf. Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: the rise and downfall of Prussia 1600–1947 (London:
Penguin Books, 2006), 431–5.
3. See Wolfgang Riedel, ‘Homo Natura’: literarische Anthropologie um 1900 (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 1996), 41–77; Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 143–5.
4. Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, Schöpferisches Handeln, ed. Emil Fuchs (Jena: Eugen
Diederichs, 1907). For the background circumstances to the publication, see Irmgard
Heidler, Der Verleger Eugen Diederichs und seine Welt (1896–1930) (Wiesbaden: Harras-
sowitz, 1998), 238–42; also 333–52, for the extensive presence of nature philosophy
and Lebensphilosophie in Diederichs’ programme. For a thorough characterisation of
Diederichs’ activities and his underlying thinking, see George L. Mosse, The Crisis of Ger-
man Ideology: intellectual origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964),
52–66.
5. Heidler, Der Verleger Eugen Diederichs, 335; cf. 342.
6. Max Scheler, ‘Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens: Nietzsche–Dilthey–Bergson’,
Gesammelte Werke iii (Bern: Francke, 1955), 311–39.
7. Heinrich Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens: Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen
Modeströmungen unserer Zeit (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1920), 26.
8. Cf. Peter Ulrich Hein (ed.), Georg Simmel (Auslegungen) (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang,
1990), 11.
9. Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Die Lebensphilosophie (Berlin: Springer, 1958), 141–3.
10. See Horst Jürgen Helle, Soziologie und Erkenntnistheorie bei Georg Simmel (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), 40–4.
11. For a full analysis of their relationship, see Gregor Fitzi, Soziale Erfahrung und Lebens-
philosophie: Georg Simmels Beziehung zu Henri Bergson (Constance: UVK Verlagsge-
sellschaft, 2002).
12. See Paul Guyer, ‘Absolute idealism and the rejection of Kantian dualism’, in Karl Ameriks
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 37–56.
13. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1974), 144 (B145); Guyer, ‘Absolute idealism’, 52–3.
14. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall
(rev.) (2nd edn, London: Sheed & Ward, 1989), 230–3.
15. Ibid., 229–30 and 232. These moves can be seen as part of Gadamer’s strategy to expose
the ahistoricity of Idealist philosophy; see Kristin Gjesdal, Gadamer and the Legacy of
German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
16. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 235–6.
17. Ibid., 234 and 242.
18. Ibid., 235; cf. 306–7.
19. Ibid., 237.

20. See Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933, 33–64.
21. Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, 26 vols. (vols. i–ix and xi–xii, Leipzig and Berlin:
B. G. Teubner, 1921–36; vol. x, Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1958; vols. xiii–xxvi, Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970–2005) (hereafter GS (Dilthey)), v, 9).
22. See GS (Dilthey), v, 48.
23. Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: philosopher of the human studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1992), 335; cf. GS (Dilthey), v, 35.
24. GS (Dilthey), v, 58.
25. Ibid., 43; cf. 50–8. For a fuller account of the ways in which Dilthey positions himself
relative to positivism, Idealism and Kant, see also Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey
and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 136–48.
26. GS (Dilthey), v, 35. The allusion is to Kant’s essay on the notion of a universal history,
‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’ (1784).
27. Hermann Lotze, Logik (Leipzig: Weidmann’sche Buchhandlung, 1843); Christoph Sig-
wart, Logik (Tübingen: Laupp, 1873–8).
28. GS (Dilthey), v, 77. See Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 69–70 (A20/B34). Cf. also Wilhelm
Dilthey, Selected Writings, ed. H. P. Rickman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1976), 14–16.
30. Ibid., 83f.
31. Ibid., 85.
32. Ibid., 77–9; cf. Carl Stumpf, Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie (Munich: Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 1891).
33. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981), 48–9.
35. Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘The construction of the historical world in the human sciences’, in
Dilthey, Selected Writings, 168–245; ‘The formation of the historical world in the human
studies’, in Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, ed. R. A. Makkreel and F. Rodi, vol. iii
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 101–209.
36. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 225–6; cf. also Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences,
52–3 and 152.
37. Wilhelm Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, in GS
(Dilthey), vii, 151.
38. Makkreel, Dilthey, 307–8.
39. Ibid., 308–9, citing GS (Dilthey), vii, 146.
40. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 226.
41. GS (Dilthey), vii, 290. Cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 237.
42. See, for example, GS (Dilthey), vii, 151; cf. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey and the Crisis of
Historicism, 170.
43. Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, critical edition, ed. Frédéric
Worms and Arnaud Bouaniche (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007) (hereafter
DI), 165–6.
44. DI, 173–7.
182 David Midgley
45. Ibid., 165.

46. Ibid., 129 and 165–6.
47. Ibid., 107.
48. Henri Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice, critical edition, ed. Frédéric Worms and Arnaud
François (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007) (hereafter EC), 37–9.
49. Justin E. H. Smith, ‘Leibniz and the life sciences’, in Brandon C. Look (ed.), The Continuum
Companion to Leibniz (London: Continuum, 2011), 259–74, at 264.
50. EC, 39–40.
51. See, for example, Hans Driesch, The History and Theory of Vitalism (London: Macmillan,
1914).
52. EC, 42–3.
53. Ibid., 62–5. For these points Bergson draws on William Bateson, Materials for the Study of
Variation: treated with special regard to discontinuity in the origin of species (London: Macmillan
& Co., 1894), and Hugo de Vries, Die Mutationstheorie (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit, 1901–3).
54. EC, 95–8.
55. Ibid., 248 and 258.
56. Cf. Camille Riquier, Archéologie de Bergson: temps et métaphysique (Paris: Presses Universi-
taires de France, 2009), 19–21.
57. Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, Bergson and Romantic Evolutionism (Berkeley: University of
California, 1914), 8.
58. Gilles Deleuze, Le Bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), 17, citing
Bergson, Matière et mémoire, ed. Frédéric Worms and Camille Riquier (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2008), 205–6; cf. 153.
59. Deleuze, Le Bergsonisme, 19, citing Bergson, La Pensée et le mouvant, ed. Frédéric Worms
et al. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), 148–9.
60. Bergson explicitly characterises intuition as the opposite of analysis in his ‘Introduction
à la métaphysique’ (1903). See La Pensée et le mouvant, 224–5.
61. For an excellent summary of the senses in which Bergson had sought to revive meta-
physics by combining the scientific method of positivism with a spiritualist conception
of reality, see Ernst Behler, ‘Der Beitrag Henri Bergsons zur Gegenwartsphilosophie’,
Hochland 55 (1962/3), 417–29, at 420.
62. See Bergson, La Pensée et le mouvant, 149, on ‘unity of perception’ as an aim; also Matière
et mémoire, 200–3, on the metaphysical problem of the relation between body and soul,
and 246–51, on memory as a manifestation of the spirit.
63. EC, ix–x.
64. Ibid., 173–4.
65. Ibid., 152.
66. Cf. Scheler, ‘Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens’, 327–8; Roman Ingarden, ‘Intuition
und Intellekt bei Henri Bergson: Darstellung und Versuch einer Kritik’, Jahrbuch für
Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung 5 (1922), 285–461, at 396.
67. See especially EC, 194–200.
68. For a full discussion of the German reception of Bergson, see David Midgley,
‘“Schöpferische Entwicklung”: zur Bergsonrezeption in der deutschsprachigen Welt
um 1910’, Scientia Poetica 16 (2012), 12–66.
69. Hans Driesch, ‘Bergson, der biologische Philosoph’, Zeitschrift für den Ausbau der Entwick-
lungslehre 2, nos. 1–2 (1908), 48–55, at 51–2.
70. Lovejoy, Bergson and Romantic Evolutionism, 24–33. Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens,
22, also assigns Bergson to the ‘Romantic’ tradition that includes Schelling and
Schopenhauer.
71. Bergson, La Pensée et le mouvant, 220.
72. Ibid., 445 (editor’s note).
73. Georg Jäger, Das Verhältnis Bergsons zu Schelling: ein Beitrag zur Erörterung der Prinzip-
ien einer organistischen Weltauffassung (Hamburg: Lütke & Wulff, 1917), 18–19, 27,
45–6.
74. René Berthelot, Un Romantisme utilitaire: étude sur le mouvement pragmatiste ii: Le Prag-
matisme chez Bergson (Paris: F. Alcan, 1913), 84–121, esp. 103: ‘Il semble que l’esprit
de Bergson[,] travaillant dans la direction que lui avait imprimée de bonne heure la
pensée de Ravaisson, a retrouvé par son propre travail certaines des conclusions de
Schelling.’ See also Yvette Conry, L’Évolution créatrice d’Henri Bergson: investigations cri-
tiques (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 265–8; Jean-Michel Le Lannou, ‘L’Anti-idéalisme de
Bergson’, Études Philosophiques 59, no. 4 (2001) (special issue, Bergson et l’idéalisme alle-
mand), 419–37.
75. Peter Knudsen, ‘Die Bergsonsche Philosophie in ihrem Verhältnis zu Schopenhauer’,
Jahrbuch der Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft 16 (1929), 3–44. Of the élan vital in particular,
Knudsen writes (p. 43), ‘Daß der “Lebensschwungkraft” in Schopenhauers “Willen”
seinen Ursprung hat, ist wohl unbestreitbar; aber niemand kann aus Schopenhauers
Schriften allein die eigentümliche schöpferische Wirkungsweise herauslesen, die dieser
Faktor, das Bild des Lebensstromes, auf dem Gebiete des organischen Lebens und der
menschlichen Seelentätigkeit ausübt.’ He also sees no precedent for Bergson’s notion of
‘durée pure’.
76. See Henri Bergson and Octave Hamelin, Deux cours sur Fichte, ed. Philippe Soulez and
Fernand Turlot (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 1989).
77. EC, 363.
78. Ibid., 200. When presenting his conception of ‘metaphysical intuition’ in ‘Introduction
à la métaphysique’, Bergson explicitly speaks of aiming to surpass both idealism and
realism: La Pensée et le mouvant, 206.
79. Jean-Christophe Goddard, ‘Bergson: une lecture néo-platonicienne de Fichte’, Études
Philosophiques 59, no. 4 (2001) (special issue, Bergson et l’idéalisme allemand), 465–77, at
471.
80. Riquier, Archéologie de Bergson, 232. Riquier points in particular to passages in Matière et
mémoire (247) and L’Évolution créatrice (261) in illustration of the significance of Plotinus
for Bergson.
81. EC, 345–55.
82. Ibid., 356; cf. 196.
83. Ibid., 359; cf. DI 69. Cf. Frédéric Worms, ‘L’Intelligence gagnée par l’intuition? La rela-
tion entre Bergson et Kant’, Études Philosophiques 59, no. 4 (2001) (special issue, Bergson et
l’idéalisme allemand), 453–64, at 455. Worms also draws attention to a passage in ‘Intro-
duction à la métaphysique’ where Bergson speaks of Kant pushing the independence
184 David Midgley
of reason to extremes (‘Il a exaspéré l’indépendance de l’entendement’); La Pensée et le

mouvant, 220.
84. Ibid., 361–2.
85. Worms, ‘L’Intelligence gagnée’, 458 and 464.
86. For a concise overview in English, see David Frisby, Georg Simmel (London: Routledge,
2002).
87. Helle, Soziologie und Erkenntnistheorie bei Georg Simmel, esp. 101–8.
88. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Georg Simmel’ (1920), in Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 209–48, at 243.
89. Georg Simmel, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989–2008) (hereafter
GSG), viii, 117–19; x, 131 and 142 (cf. also 164–6).
90. Ibid. viii, 120; cf. ibid. x, 127.
91. Ibid. x, 166.
92. Ibid. xiv, 70.
93. See Rudolph H. Weingartner, Experience and Culture: the philosophy of Georg Simmel (Mid-
dletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), 21–40.
94. GSG xiv, 89–93.
95. Ibid., 72–3.
96. Ibid. ix, 35–8.
97. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, pt 1, in Werke
in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–71), viii, 116–19, § 42; cf. Guyer, ‘Absolute idealism’, 38.
98. For a full exploration of the relation between Simmel’s thought and Kantian episte-
mology, see Heinrich Adolf, Erkenntnistheorie auf dem Weg zur Metaphysik: Interpretation,
Modifikation und Überschreitung des kantischen Apriorikonzepts bei Georg Simmel (Munich:
Herbert Utz, 2002).
99. GSG ix, 38–9.
100. Ibid., 39.
101. Ibid., 44–5.
102. Ibid., 410–11. The negative reinterpretation of Hegel is explicit in the continuation
of this passage (p. 411): ‘Es ist der Begriff aller Kultur, daß der Geist ein selbständig
Objektives schaffe, durch das hin die Entwicklung des Subjektes von sich selbst zu sich
selbst ihren Weg nehme; aber eben damit ist jenes integrierende, kulturbedingende Ele-
ment zu einer Eigenentwicklung prädeterminiert, die noch immer Kräfte der Subjekte
verbraucht, . . . ohne doch diese damit zu der Höhe ihrer selbst zu führen’.
103. Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, trans. S. G. Lofts (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000), 105–10; ‘Die “Tragödie der Kultur”’, in Zur Logik der Kul-
turwissenschaften, Göteborgs högskolas årsskrift 48 (Gothenburg: Elanders boktryckeri
aktiebolag, 1942), 113–39, at 115–21.
104. Cassirer, Logic of the Cultural Sciences, 104.
105. See, for example, Max Frischeisen-Köhler, ‘Georg Simmel’, Kant-Studien 24 (1919),
1–51.
106. GSG xvi, 212–35; Georg Simmel, The View of Life, trans. John A. Y. Andrews and Donald
N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 1–17.
107. GSG xiv, 165.

108. Ibid., 162.
109. Hans-Georg Gadamer testifies to the close interest that Heidegger took in Simmel’s
late writings (Truth and Method, 242–3 n. 138), as well as in Bergson (see Midgley,
‘“Schöpferische Entwicklung”’, 61–2) while he was developing his own philosophy.
8
‘Rationalisation’, ‘reification’, ‘instrumental reason’
Fred Rush
Idealism in the history of European philosophy has taken, broadly speaking,

two main forms. In the first, the term ‘idealism’ refers to the view that the ulti-
mate constituents of reality, and thus the ultimate objects of possible human
intellection are entities called ‘ideas’. Such entities are mind-independent;
cognitive access to them involves decreasing to a minimum obstacles native
to being human impinging on that access, sharpening special capacities that
enable such access, or both. Plato’s theory of forms is this sort of account. An
idea or form (εἶδος, ἰδέα) is a fundamental structure of the world and knowing
one, or a system of them, is a matter both of diminishing the effect on human
cognition of transient, misleading sensuous and dispositional elements in
experience and developing a special sort of intuition that can ‘see’ the idea
in question.
The second type of idealism conceives of the structure of what is real on
the model of structuring, i.e. in roughly intentional terms. In this tradition,
ideas are mental items, hence not mind-independent, and are only with sub-
stantial qualification fundamental constituents of reality. What systematises
such items is a theory of human reason and this, more than anything else, is
why it is appropriate to consider idealist philosophy of this mien under the
heading ‘rationalism’. There are several differing and systematic renderings
of why rationalism emerged as one of the dominant trends in modern philos-
ophy, but all stress in various ways the advent of new and powerful models
in physics and other sciences that had the effect of leaching out of the idea
of reality any purposive structure. Ideas are closely related to ends, even in
antiquity, and the problematic status of de re purposes in modern philosophy,
All translations F.R. unless indicated otherwise. I owe thanks to Karl Ameriks, Peter Hylton, Robert
Pippin and Robert Stern for their comments and criticisms.
186
‘Rationalisation’, ‘reification’, ‘instrumental reason’ 187
which was strongly responsive to the accumulation of scientific discoveries

leading up to Newtonian mechanics, resulted in ideas being relegated to the
subjective side of the cognitive equation and a consequent exacerbation of
the problem of access to reality through such ideas. The word ‘through’ is no
throwaway: ideas both are the means by which one can comprehend reality
and potential blocks to that comprehension. It is only by the dual processes
of policing the content of the ideas and by soundly accumulating them that
objectivity is preserved. There is no intuition of objective order on this
picture of things; ideas achieve maximal objectivity and truth to the extent
that they advance en masse and ever-increasingly. Kant’s account of what he
takes to be the transcendentally necessary ideational structure of invariant
subjectivity, including both what he terms ‘constitutive’ and ‘regulative’
rules for cognition (i.e. ‘concepts’ and ‘ideas’), is an especially striking
attempt to thrive theoretically at the diminishing margins of the distinction
between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’. Kant’s attempt to ‘cover’ or ‘make lawful’
the relation, on the one hand, of nature and, on the other, of ideas is a variant
of a problem embedded in modern European philosophy generally. Appeals
to a structuring agency claimed to be responsible for both the structure of
the world, of ideas, and of their connection to one another are typical. The
obvious candidate theories are those that deploy arguments from purported
conceptual resources to the reality of God, whose function it is to secure
the isomorphism in question: e.g. the ontological proofs of Descartes or
Leibniz. Kant’s statement that arguments from design are superior to
classical ontological arguments (although they are, too, in the end wanting)
should not obscure the fact that Kant’s own vouchsafing device is also gener-
ated out of what he takes to be conceptual resources – this time the ‘demands
of reason’. Later rationalistic Idealists like Hegel attempt to further cleanse
the world order of requirements exogenous to reason; this is the impetus for
Hegel’s rejection of the related concepts in Kant of a thing-in-itself and of a
transcendental regulative idea – they are extra-rational intrusions mandated
by an incomplete theory of reason. This rejection of Kant on this point is
achieved by reincorporating elements of Platonic idealism into rationalistic
Idealism. It is only with Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche that there is a
definitive break away from this current; the origins of analytic philosophy
are thoroughly ‘Idealist’, if but in an extended sense.
What could this Idealist legacy possibly offer to modern European social
thought? Could it be a ‘legacy’, properly speaking, for social philosophy at all?
The answers to these questions are mixed. Later nineteenth- and twentieth-
century reactions to Idealism, many of which were decidedly negative, are
188 Fred Rush
sources for many central ideas in modern social philosophy. One might think
that is a legacy of a peculiar, ex negativo sort. But, as reflection on one’s own
family tree often betrays, rejection can be a form of legacy. I shall discuss the
legacy of German Idealism in connection with three concepts central to mod-
ern European social theory: ‘rationalisation’, ‘reification’ and ‘instrumental
reason’. All three concepts figure together in many such theories, but the
precise relation of these concepts to one another is often poorly understood.
Considering these concepts in light of their Idealist legacy can illuminate
this relation, especially in virtue of the modifications to Idealism that typify
each of the concepts.
Rationalisation
The concept of rationalisation comes into the mainstream through the work
of Weber. Weber’s Idealist roots are generally well-known, but academic
philosophical study of Weber’s Idealism tends to view him as providing a
social-scientific solution to architectonic issues left over from German Ideal-
ism, e.g. the unity of theoretical and practical reason, and does not lay stress
on the question of what may be carried forward, if anything, of the Idealist
legacy by means of the concept of rationalisation.1 Weber’s discussion of
rationalisation is not centralised in any one of his works and he never offers
anything like a definition of ‘rationalisation’, yet the term figures promi-
nently from the early The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism (1904/5)
to the posthumously published Economy and Society (1921). Rationalisation is
a process through which experience generally, and social-theoretical under-
standing of that experience as well, comes to be dominated by the ideals and
practices of exactness that gave rise to the modern physical sciences. The
key idea is that of the systematic conversion of quality into quantity within
experience.
Prior to rationalisation, positive social value resided primarily in custom,
kinship, tradition and religious rite. Calvinist and other Reformation reli-
gious thinking conceived of work and the economic gain that results from it
as worshipful. This Reformation attitude arises, hypothesises Weber, so that
Protestants could provide a surrogate for the assurances of salvation that sub-
mission to clerical authority afforded Roman Catholics in virtue of priestly
ritual. Doctrines of predestination, Weber held, gave such assurances to
the born-saved but external signs of salvation were excluded. Personal self-
confidence in one’s election is the surrogate, but it is not externalised, as
‘true’ signs demand.2 Economic wherewithal answers to this requirement of
externalisation. This tendency was carried further in Pietism and its secular
philosophical variant, ethical Kantianism. This ascetic religious strand of
thought, which might superficially look like it would stand over and against
the secular development of capitalism was, indeed, not only part of that
development but a main part of it, making such development ‘comfortable
to the soul’.
Rationalisation is, however, a broader phenomenon than monetary Puri-
tanism or Ben Franklinesque thrift an sich (one of Weber’s pet examples).3
It is part and parcel of a wider social development in which thoughts and
actions come to be evaluated positively mostly in terms of ends-efficiency and
calculability. It is not going too far to say that modern sociology grew along
with this trend and takes it to be one of its first major objects of study. In fact,
the battle between social-scientific positivism of Comte and Durkheim and
the more ideal-oriented, non-positivistic school of Troeltsch and Weber is
pitched in just these terms: i.e. whether or not the methodologies developed
in the physical sciences are apt for the explanation of ‘social facts’. Rational-
isation consists, then, in a reduction or near reduction of the many forms
of rationality and reason to one species of rationality – calculation. Calcu-
lation is the focus of reduction because it answers to modern requirements
for abstraction, i.e. calculation seems itself valueless, neutrally applicable to
almost any object, and precise when done correctly. This allows for an invari-
ant and systematic way to assess goods and evils. Of course, numbers don’t
apply themselves to social phenomena; humans decide what the numbers
mean in given contexts. The point is, rather, that the overwhelming empha-
sis given to calculation in social evaluation (and ultimately in experience)
makes experiences radically non-singular and thus incapable of other modes
of evaluation. This is the sense in which quantity displaces quality generally
in experience under conditions of rationalisation.
Moreover, rationalisation’s transfer of value from quality to quantity is
itself increasingly quantitative; such evaluations become objects of tighter
and tighter social administration, where outcomes of action are tracked
scrupulously, in turn normalising action-types according to measurable
outcomes. Capitalism is the economic modality expressive of greater and
greater rationalisation, and as it advances to its efficient limit, money sloughs
off its symbolic economic function as a measure and becomes the exclusive
value-bearing item.4 Weber did not think rationalisation an entirely bad
thing; legislative authority, which requires rationalisation as a precondition,
is an improvement over monarchic or politically charismatic autocracy.
Nonetheless, rationalisation, especially in connection with modern political
190 Fred Rush
and economic institutions, results in bureaucracy and its undertow, the

effect of which strongly tends toward dehumanisation.5
Reification
The term ‘reification’ (Verdinglichung) is given perhaps its most well-known
statement by Marx in his treatment in the first volume of Kapital of the fetish
character of commodities,6 but its meaning has been focused in terms of
Lukács’s analysis.7 Reification is a process through which one treats an idea
as if it were a thing (res), i.e. as an object that is not a product. Of course,
one might say that one can always treat an idea as a thing as an exercise
of imagination, and that might eventually be theoretically productive. But
Marx is not interested in the explicit theoretical role of fictions. His analysis
concerns a generalised aspect of ‘ordinary’ experience. For Marx, all ideas
are results of human agency (are ‘products’) and to treat an idea as if it were
not a product (and to not realise that one was doing so) is an error. Of course
this is not a simple mistake, a psychopathic state in which one might actually
mistake people for things, or a Cartesian one in which one might entertain
the thought for sceptical purposes. Rather, like rationalisation, reification
is a social process or operation, the outcome of which is a certain way of
understanding the value of one’s actions. Like rationalisation, reification
is ‘alienating’ and dehumanising – in fact, it is so by definition. It sunders
the possibility that one can relate oneself cognitively and affectively towards
one’s labour, the primary means for self-awareness and development of one’s
capacities according to Marx. Put slightly more abstractly, reification sepa-
rates objects from their initial contexts as standing in social relations with
one another, thereby stripping them of their meanings, and recombines them
in ways that are radically non-social.
Both Marx and Lukács treat reification as a form of thinking that is
conceptually proximate to commodity economics.8 As is true with such
Hegel-inspired views, it would be unproductive to try to understand the
relation of reification by first trying to specify the ontological nature of the
relata (here, the subject and object) and then understand the relation in terms
of them. Rather, the relation is the primary part of the structure and it is
by understanding it that one can clarify deviations, if there are any, in the
nature of the subjects and objects involved. The main feature of reification
that Lukács wants to explicate is the appearance of inalterability it confers
on the objects on which it operates. Capital markets are ‘objects’, in the
sense that they are human products that are treated as if they are intractable
natural processes. This is not to say of course, that one cannot operate within
markets in differential ways and alter the arrangement of their constituent
parts. Commodity trading accomplishes this. It is rather that the system itself
does not qualify as a candidate for change. Lukács, in essence, reverses the
polarity of the Dilthey–Windelband–Rickert Natur- and Geisteswissenschaft
distinction,9 arguing that not marking the distinction experientially and
social-scientifically allows one, under certain material circumstances, to treat
non-natural systems more or less like counterparts to physical systems. Of
course, one can change nature, and some such changes may even be due to
thinking of nature as a proper part of human production. But this would miss
Lukács’s point by attempting to disarm the analogy too locally. Changing
nature as such is the apt parallel.10
Lukács deploys the concept of reification not just in the domain of com-
plex, whole social structures and institutions, for reification also taints under-
standing of oneself and of one’s relationships with others, and at its limit,
reification makes it difficult to formulate how one might change oneself
with regard to one’s social self-understanding at all. This is a crucial point
for him: the effects of reification reach all the way down into desire- and
belief-formation. Reification thus is basically psychologically productive and,
for that reason (among others) will prove to be quite difficult to extirpate.
Even so, Lukács holds that a more or less reification-free society is possible,
i.e. a society whose members re-establish their practical stake in their actions
in a way that confronts, and then puts to the side, the interference caused by
the idea that disembodied cognition is the proper mode for considering that
work. Lukács’s version of how this obtains has less in common with Marx
than with Lenin. For the mature Marx material conditions will themselves
provide the basis for criticism, which criticism leads to socialist revolution,
the communist state, and beyond. Lukács treats ideology as more problem-
atically related to basic economic structures and, in the place of materialism,
puts forward a more conceptually explicit and even rationalistic sort of cri-
tique, in which the concept ‘totality’ plays a main role. To some this has
seemed an unconvincing remnant of his youthful Idealism.
Instrumental reason
‘Instrumental reason’ (instrumentelle Vernunft) is a category that originates
in the writings of the early Frankfurt school of critical theory: Max
Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. At first glance, the
phrase ‘instrumental reason’, even if not exactly a pleonasm, courts a truism.
192 Fred Rush
Much reasoning is structured in terms of means and ends and is therefore

‘instrumental’ in a broad sense. I buy a ticket for the métro to Bastille,
in order to go to the Opéra, in order to see a new performance of Saint
François d’Assise, in order to compare it to Boulez’s, and so on. It is natural
to think of much life in just this way: one has projects of more or less scope,
which require more or less in the way of planned thought and action to
realise, perhaps connected rather closely with one another at certain points,
perhaps not. All of this seems to require thinking of means in terms of ends
and vice versa. Some reasoning may not be inherently instrumental in this
sense: pure mathematical reasoning, musical improvisation, and so on. But
one might be happy to concede generally that there does not seem to be
anything particularly suspicious about ‘instrumental reason’ understood in
this manner, although of course one may doubt its application in specific
contexts or whether a particular bit of it has been carried through very well.
Perhaps the first thing to emphasise, then, is that critical theorists do not
begrudge rational agents their means and, so, are not ‘against’ instrumental
reason in these broad terms. For them, rather, instrumental reason involves
a specific structural ‘weighting’ present in the relation of ends to means in
reasoning, which weighting occurs under the pressures of modern social life.
It is not a difficult matter to state the main worry, but it is difficult to state
it in a way that shows it to be distinctive. This requires setting out the sense
in which instrumental reason for the Frankfurt thinkers is pathological.
At first pass, one might offer that ‘instrumental reason’ in the suspect
sense is an operation in which what were initially and properly merely means
to ends are transformed into ends themselves. In itself that claim is entirely
unremarkable of course; conversion of means to ends is not inherently a bad
thing. One might discover, for example, that an end to which one directed
one’s action was poorly understood, false, illusory or merely a means while
the means to that end were not and, into the bargain, that the means could
exchange status with what were considered ends in a properly rational chain.
Perhaps some explicitly religious ends are good examples of this permuta-
tion, where the means can stand on their own as non-religious ethical ends.
Feuerbach’s criticisms of Hegel depend on this sort of ‘inversion’.
Given this, one might think that the distinctive feature of the Frankfurt
critique of instrumental reason is the further claim that there is a general
tendency to substitute means for ends under modern societal conditions, a
tendency that is insensitive to specific rationales for the inversions. This
does set instrumental reason off from the cases just discussed; instrumental
reason is not rational, so the thought would go, because the inversions are
not produced by reasons (although they are produced for reasons). Another
way to put the relation of means to ends in means–ends rationality helps to
bring out the point. One might think it a good thing to be able to conceive
of ends as not, at least not as a matter of principle, antecedently determined
in their content by the means that they require for their realisation. Ends
might be thought to dictate to means, rather than the other way around.
The point is simple and anodyne: reasons are purposive and that means that
the relation of means to ends cannot be treated reductively as a form of
efficient causation; causally speaking, reasoning requires rational ends to be
final causes that in effect pre-structure what can count as means. Of course,
that reasons cannot be thought of as causal, as if on a par with mere behaviour,
is a substantive claim that can and has been subject to much debate. But let
it stand for purposes of analysis.
Following this train of thought, one might make a broader claim still: to
think otherwise of the relation of means to ends involves a kind of formalism
ordaining that ends be set in terms of the conceptual status quo – in terms
of what are already available as means – and not in more imaginative ways
that might require either the development of new means or the turning of
old means to new purposes. Forms of rationality that place ends first in this
way could diminish the overall tendency to think of ends as prior to means
and, to that extent, would stifle other and better prospects for thinking
more clearly and comprehensively about candidates for rational ends. In a
similar vein, instrumental reasoning would suppress creation of new ends,
ends whose conceivability qua ends is not held hostage to whatever set of
rational means are currently devoted to other ends (or to themselves as ersatz
ends). Finally, non-instrumental rationality might promise more plasticity
in means; one of its effects might be to loosen the sense in which, given
some end, a set of means are understood to be obligatory. Of course, this is
merely a negative specification of what non-instrumental rationality might
be. As it turns out, the early Frankfurt school has various accounts, different
amongst the various members of the school, of what non-instrumental reason
amounts to. Aposiopesis is unwelcome in good writing; notwithstanding
that, I cannot help saying that that’s a very complicated issue that I can’t
hope to pursue here.
Despite this enmity to the subversion of ends by means, what is distinc-
tive about the critical theorists’ treatment of the issue is their ascription of
the source for the subversion to a social-psychological condition that they
claim has developed in European thought since the time of archaic Greece
and even before. The most famous treatment of this issue is in Horkheimer
194 Fred Rush
and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment of the mid-1940s, but there is cognate

material that litters the earlier work of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse.
The main idea is drawn from the application of classical psychoanalysis to
cultural analysis. Freud’s own Civilization and Its Discontents is an important
source in this regard, but there are others – in particular Freud’s now dis-
credited work on paranoia.11 The point can be stated, however, without
essential reference to Freud’s views. The benefits of civilisation, predictabil-
ity, increase in objective knowledge, coordinated social response, etc., are
bought at the cost of repression of a more immediate potential relation to
nature in terms of drives, desires, pleasures, etc. Horkheimer and Adorno are
interested primarily in the human capacity for representation and language.
These capacities have their ultimate source in a fearful mimetic adaptation
to nature, where one reacts to the lack of control over one’s immediate
environment by becoming part of it, submerging any nascent individuality
in order to ‘blend in’. This primordial orientation to nature is, however,
not completely suffused with fear; immediate pleasure in de-individuation is
also on offer. Increase in cognitive control involves forms of mimesis that are
ever more detached from environmental immediacy, with attendant gains of
rational control coming with sacrifice of the pleasures of immediacy. Conso-
nant with Nietzsche’s and Freud’s views on the nature of psychological force
and repression of that force, these sacrifices do not dissipate the connection
to immediate nature within one, as both fearful and pleasurable; rather, these
repressed psychic sources pervade unconscious human life in unpredictable
ways. Under late forms of capitalism the trade-off between repression and
control reaches disequilibrium within subjects and society; the control, so to
speak, is out of control and the repression of and return of repressed nature
volatile and overwhelming. This is the Frankfurt school’s assessment of the
character of fascism. Instrumental reason then, at this high pitch, is patho-
logical because the repression of nature expresses itself in a re-experience of
nature as repressed and posits a second nature of social dimension, unrecog-
nised as such, which models humans impersonally as objects over which
dominion is properly exercised, as it would be over nature. This is the char-
acter of the reduction of ends to means or final causes to efficient causes in
early critical theory’s analysis of instrumental reason. It thus repays the effort
to track more precisely than usual the etymology of the term ‘pathological’.
For the Frankfurt theorists, reason is pathological because reason suffers the
undertow of repressed nature in the form of passivity or immediacy, but the
stress can be laid in reverse fashion: pathological reason is the reactivity of
reason to the immediate at a remove.
It is to the point just here to emphasise that the reflections on instru-

mental reason just discussed also apply to the operation of reason at the
level of theory in the social sciences according to critical theory. The poster-
board case is Horkheimer’s distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’
theory.12 Although there are many forms of traditional theory according
to Horkheimer, their overarching and shared structure is that they are sys-
tematic instances of instrumental reason – instruments of instrumental rea-
son, one might say – that take as their social-scientific object social reason
conceived instrumentally. There are two main points to this reflexive appli-
cation of the critique of instrumental reason to social science. The first is
that, strictly speaking, social science has no ‘data’, if by a ‘datum’ one means
something whose aptness for analysis is taken for granted as on a par with
brute physical fact. No social phenomenon is given in this brute way. The
mode of initial access to what is given for social-scientific understanding is
more adequately captured by concepts with their homes in art-theoretical
understanding like ‘interpretation’, and not by concepts like ‘observation’.13
Additionally, the critical theorists follow Marx in holding that social theo-
ries grow out of broader material cultural circumstances, and even their basic
apparatuses express the social values of those circumstances.14 Finally, the
subject matter of at least some social science is affected by its theoretical
treatment; ethnography is a common example in the literature. Studying a
culture in the field requires participation in it and, thus, one is an element in
what one is studying.15 Sociology is perhaps a bit more difficult in this regard,
given as it is to the use of statistical analysis. But critical theorists would still
insist that such seemingly detached empirical means of analysis – of which
the Frankfurt school availed itself in some of their research – is guided by
independent evaluations of relevance that are expressions of valuation on
the part of the social scientist.
To critical theorists the idea that social science can be adequately mod-
elled on the natural sciences, even if that modelling is subject to substantial
restriction, will constitute a barely covert expression of the rational deforma-
tions and biases they link with instrumental reason.16 Instrumental reason
treats means and ends as on a normative par with one another; its presence in
the social sciences thus expresses the main sort of relation that several of the
physical sciences track: efficient causality involving ‘things’. Efficient causa-
tion is not just a concatenation of elements, where form does not constrain
its elements; it is not ultimately plastic, e.g. it has a direction: causes produce
their effects, not the other way around. But that is not the point. Efficient
causality does not comprehend at all a means–ends relation; effects are what
196 Fred Rush
are produced by causes and do not qua effects contain constraints on their
being so produced. That would be an instance of final causality – i.e. of purpo-
sive action. So, thinking of social action or the theoretical understanding of
it in terms of physical science maps systematically the same ends-eliminative
structure that typifies instrumental reason. Now, theories that Horkheimer
groups under the heading ‘traditional’ do not all take as their models theo-
ries in the physical sciences, at least not explicitly. Even so-called ‘positivist’
sociology does not court the physical sciences quite so crassly. Nevertheless,
the social conditions that underwrite the increase in instrumental reason as a
blanket tendency in thought over the last two centuries also, unsurprisingly,
dictate second-order ways to think about those social conditions that express
in their structure as theories the instrumentality current in what they aim to
explain. Social-scientific theories of this sort cannot offer solutions to patho-
logical means-reductive rationality, and this is because they are instances of
such pathological rationality. Only a properly ‘critical’ theory can do that
job, which is as much about changing the conception of what theories do
and how they are constructed as it is about interpreting specific components
of modern experience.
Conceptual overlap, Idealist residue

Rationalisation involves reduction to calculation and predictability. This
phenomenon is conceptually distinct from that of instrumental reasoning;
reduction to calculation does not entail inversion of means and ends. One
might think that an end qua end is properly statistical. Indeed Weber
held this. Yet, critical theory tends to treat these discrete phenomena
as equivalent. This treatment reveals a point of difference between the
Frankfurt school and other Weber-inspired sociology. For the critical
theorists, Weber’s diagnosis of rationalisation was correct as far as it went,
but it did not go far enough: it did not situate itself in the broader context
of a critique of instrumental reason. For Weber rationalisation is not
inherently pathological and, as a result, his analysis of modern social life for
all its importance is quietist.17 It is also the case that the extensions of the
concepts ‘rationalisation’ and ‘reification’ do not overlap precisely. Assume
that calculative thinking is pre-eminent and widespread in modern society.
Without more, that claim does not yield the proposition that modern
society views human thought and its institutional products as being like
‘things’. Reification requires alienation, a sundering of the claimed essence
of labouring, i.e. to be able to see the product of one’s labour as expressive
of one’s capacities in the making of it. Rationalisation can occur, if it does,

without this social-psychological dimension being in play. Nor is reification
synonymous with instrumental rationality. Clearly, one might subvert the
capacity to set ends independently from means without treating those ends
as ‘things’ in the relevant sense.
That said, as a historical matter these three concepts have received inter-
pretations by Weber, Lukács and the early critical theorists that accentuate
their overlap – more than enough to make it reasonable to consider them
as one structure with mutually reinforcing parts. Given the transformation
of modern life by technology and capitalism, it is understandable that one
treats thought as rigorously constrained by canons of calculation, human pro-
cesses as non-human processes, and reverse the practical priority of means
over ends as converging with one another in ways that threaten to render
ideas of human freedom problematic. What role does Idealism play in this?
Weber, Lukács and the early Frankfurt school thinkers were all serious stu-
dents of German Idealism and its nineteenth and early-twentieth century
offshoots. Their interests were not merely academic; Idealism was still a live
philosophical option at that point. But it enjoyed strong competition from
empiricist and materialist camps – in the case of Weber, from sociological
positivism, in the cases of Lukács and the critical theorists, from co-called
‘vulgar’ Marxism. Weber, Lukács and the early Frankfurt school investigated
Idealism as a source for humanistic counterweights to reductive materialism.
But – and this is a crucial point – any positive appeal to German Idealism
would have to adjust its retrieval by subtracting any metaphysical cum tra-
ditional religious content. German Idealism cannot be a simple ally; internal
to it are suspect elements that express various inappropriate forms of dom-
ination. The rehabilitation of German Idealism in the social theory of the
early- to mid-twentieth century was a selective business.
The concepts of rationalisation, reification and instrumental reasoning
are each overdetermined by their Idealist antecedents. Rather than attempt
the hopelessly complicated task of surveying the whole of the vast network
of the Idealist impact on these concepts, pro and con, I wish to do something
both less ambitious and more artificial. I would like to sketch in summary
form an antecedent for each of the concepts in a doctrine of an Idealist
forebear.
(A) Weber’s close association with the thought of Rickert and Lask tokens
a partial commitment to south-west neo-Kantianism, which stressed the nec-
essary role of ‘value’ in social-scientific research. The provenance of rationali-
sation in Kant’s thought is, however, contestable. Kant’s moral philosophy is
198 Fred Rush
a faintly secularised version of the Protestant ethic. The idea of an internal

sphere in which a personal and authenticating relationship with the super-
sensible constitutes true moral worthiness is the common thread – Kant
offering a philosophical treatment of the theological conception of inward-
ness. Kant is less concerned with the externalising labour dimensions of this
inward devotion, but that is ancillary to the main point. Weber holds that
the concept of the inherent worthiness of labour that Calvinism inaugurates
is outpaced by the development of external labour forces to the point where
the internal dimension of these forces all but disappears. As noted earlier,
Weber analyses the propensity for the internal state to disappear behind its
effects as due to a property of the internal state: i.e. that, unlike rite-based,
already externalised religions, Protestantism had no way other than exter-
nalised labour to make the state ‘substantial’ enough to sustain a modern
form of life. As a secularised variant of Protestantism, Kant’s ethics of duty
suffers the same fate; indeed, it accelerates the approach of that fate. Accord-
ing to Kant the morality of an act depends on its source in the moral will;
its felt morality, it would stand to reason, would depend upon being able
to treat the presence of the moral will in one as definitive of morality in the
teeth of advancing rationalisation. Kantian moral autonomy thus plays two
main roles in the history of rationalisation: (1) as a statement within the credo
of the Protestant ethic, it facilitates the emergence of rationalisation, but it
also (2) is outrun by the ever more free-standing conception of externalised
labour and, thus, is a victim of rationalisation as well. Weber is less than
forthcoming concerning the question of whether it is still possible to pursue
Kantian ethics with a straight face. His Kantianism is more ‘methodologi-
cal’, featuring the redeployment of select transcendental Idealist resources
(ideal types, values). But the sociologist turns back these very resources to
understand Kantian morality and epistemology as themselves expressive of
rationalism, not as constituting a bulwark against it.
(B) Reification converts what is human into what is not; its result is a form
of social awareness in which human innovation, which is in reality subject
to human intervention and change, is comprehended to be unchangeable
and inevitable. It is worth noting that the ‘direction of fit’ of reification
can be the reverse, where things are endowed with personalities (where
‘objects are subjects’). This two-way trafficking in things and ideas is possible
because reification renders both the concept of a thing and that of a person
so superficial that they become interchangeable. My car can be ‘my best
friend’ because that is what best friends and cars amount to under these
conditions. (Of course, a car is an artefact, a product and not a natural thing;
but the point still stands for it is not as human as is a human.) For Lukács an
outlook like Weber’s in which rationalisation is ineluctable and according to
which the most comprehensive understanding of that fact is resignation is
unacceptably Idealist. For it does not credit the combination of material and
ideological conditions for change – that reason and history can combine to
deliver critical understanding that will effect change away from the reduction
of the qualitative to the quantitative, of work to thing. In this sense, Weber
is no different from the Carlyle of Past and Present.
Reification is a reciprocal structure in which the concepts of product and
thing are interchangeable, and recognition that this is the case might lead one
to the further thought that its structure is dialectical. Now, one might think
that the structure can be analogised to the first three sections of the dialectic
of ‘Self-Consciousness’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which has been
typically a wellspring for adapting Hegel’s thought to contemporary use.
Lukács’s conception of reification, however, fits this mould uncomfortably.
It is true that the dialectic that ends up in the ‘struggle for recognition’ in
Hegel begins with the antagonists working stepwise through various species
of ‘negation’ where treating the object to be negated as a ‘thing’ has a promi-
nent role to play. But the result of this process points in a direction opposite
to that of reification. If one were to think of reification on the model of recog-
nition for Hegel, reification would signify a reversal to negation by brutal
consumption. In fact, this way of putting things is also quite problematic
because the conditions under which reification occurs are decidedly indus-
trial, a specification not in place in those portions of Hegel’s work. Perhaps
reification is a mode of ‘forgotten recognition’, as Axel Honneth thinks, but
this is not an idea that one can pull straight from Hegel.18
I suspect that one can find a better candidate for a Hegelian counterpart
to reification in the closing sections of the chapter on ‘Observing Reason’
in the Phenomenology. Hegel’s point in these passages is that taking the non-
human world to deliver preordained laws of thought betrays an inadequate
appreciation of the nature of both law and thought. Nature so considered
might cause certain stimuli and even associations of thought with regard
to them, but it cannot account for the inferential structures pertaining to
such items, because inferences involve norms and norms, in turn, require not
merely consciousness but taking consciousness to be significant in particular
ways, i.e. norms require self-consciousness. There are no natural laws of
self-consciousness, Hegel holds. Hegel allows that the idea that regularity
of thought is a species of causal regularity is tempting because Observing
Reason mistakes the force of association in thought. One thing coming after
200 Fred Rush
another, even with necessity, does not yield meaning, and the idea that it
would involves a systematic substitution of things for thoughts. I take it that
the upshot of Hegel’s crushing treatment of phrenology in these sections is
intended to reverse the direction of the false substitution. Character is not
subject to the laws of things; the agent herself cannot know it inductively
‘from within’ on the basis of putative laws of natural processes. Nor can
a third party (or the agent) know it ‘from outside’ in terms of the sort of
thing-regularities that phrenology posits.19 Character is social; phrenology’s
attempt to conceive it as being otherwise exposes the category error at the
heart of the attempt by making clear the conceptual extremes to which
reason drives itself to maintain a mechanistic view of agency. As is standard
for Hegel, alienation and the impulse to overcome it provide the impetus
to this rational structure and the conceptual movement within it. What is
slightly out of key here is Lukács’s treatment of reification as a deformation
of reason. Hegel analyses all deformation of reason Platonically, i.e. as a
lack of adequate formation which may be rectified by progressive rational
analysis. There is a way to accommodate reification on this model, to be sure;
reification is but a lack of correct awareness of the implicit rational structure
in play – what could be more Hegelian than an observation like that? Still, it
is not clear to me that the sense in which reifying reason is deforming is fully
amenable to self-correction.
(C) One might think that the idea of instrumental reason has a bifur-
cated relation to Idealism. Idealist accounts of theoretical reason are striking
instances of unsuccessful attempts to break free of the constraints of conceiv-
ing of the world as causally closed around the concept of humanity. Kant’s
epistemology might be regarded in this light as a philosophical brokerage
house in which shares in Newtonian mechanics are, on the conceptual side of
things, traded for shares in Leibniz’s relational conception of space, on the
intuitional side. Efficient causation forms the limits of the knowable world,
and this bows to the power of means efficacy. True, Kant reserves a place in
his metaphysics for things considered apart from their efficient causal roles
where the idea of a final cause comes into play. But this is a ‘merely intelli-
gible’ realm whose ends-rationality can only be assumed, never proven. Of
course, one might say, the idea of human ends plays only a subsidiary role in
Kant’s theoretical philosophy: so what? Isn’t it more to the point that Kant
paves the way for the neo-Kantian distinction between Natur- and Geisteswis-
senschaften so important to non-instrumental experience and social science
by cordoning off causal concerns from his ethical theory? And isn’t it also
more to the point that Kant accumulates over the course of demonstration
in the third Critique an understanding of the proper role of the concept of

ends-rationality more generally in experience and science? So, what then
motivates, for instance, the equation of Kant’s ethics to Sade in Dialectic of
Enlightenment? This sort of remark, most likely Adorno’s, characteristically
brings out one of two responses in Kantians: a smug snicker or a run for
the brickbats. The first response expresses mild intolerance for yet another
naive misunderstanding of the relation of the moral will and freedom in
Kant, the latter an outrage at the comparison of the nearly holy-willed Kant
to the French libertine.
Horkheimer and Adorno mean to claim that the idea of the self-legislating
moral will in Kant is a cardinal instance of the sort of domination that they
find generally in the phenomenon of ‘enlightenment’.20 They treat Kant’s
moral psychology, in fact, as indicative of a rather purified or distilled type
of domination. This is why it is put on a par with Sade, who expresses
in stark form the external, bodily antipode of this domination. Is this a
simple instance of Horkheimer and Adorno not understanding that moral
rationality and freedom are one and the same thing for Kant?
It is worthwhile noting that the claim that Kant’s duty-based ethics
involves domination was not novel: Weber makes the point. Recall that
Weber treats Kant’s ethics as a rigid, secularised version of Protestantism,
which imports rationalising elements into its conception of self-rule. Protes-
tant ethics enables capitalist conceptions of the value of labour crucial to
rationalisation by a three-stage reinforcing process in which the stages are
mutually reinforcing. There is an initial emphasis on inwardness as the crite-
rion of utmost value. But this inwardness must have external, institutional
expression. Having turned its back on the showy rites of other forms of
Christianity, the work of the Protestant becomes this expression. One cen-
tral and distinctive feature of Kant’s ethics, which separates it from other
ethical theories that deploy the idea of self-rule, is that the moral agent for
Kant is in some sense the author of the moral law. This ‘authorship’ does
not have to do with ‘making up’ the moral law out of nothing, but rather
involves the idea that the source of moral reason, while not individual, is
constitutively human. Moral reason is ‘there’ because it is part of humanity;
there is no such thing as moral reason that just is, i.e. that is given indepen-
dent of human reason. Consider now the relation between this conception of
ethical self-authorisation and rationalisation. At first blush, they would seem
opposites. What could be less subject to calculation than a reason under this
specification? Indeed, consequentialism in its various forms would seem the
best candidate for a rationalised moral theory according to Weber. I don’t
202 Fred Rush
wish to deny that; Mill’s views fare ill under an analysis of rationalisation.
(Although, one hastens to add, they fare well there too, given that Weber
treats rationalisation as also politically progressive.) Nevertheless, the idea
that morality is constituted by rigorous submission of desire and inclinations
to rules, self-given or otherwise, is easy to arrange in the bestiary of ratio-
nalisation. For the concept of rule here is extraordinarily abstract and, in the
most famous of its schemata – the first statement of the categorical impera-
tive – achieves its power through universalisation notwithstanding content.
One might go further. This reinternalisation of rationalisation has the poten-
tial for greatly advancing the external force of institutional rationalisation,
for it deploys a concept of the relation of law to instance internal to agents
that lowers resistance to the operation of such thought externally. So, on
the face of it, one might think that Kantian morality stringently opposes the
action of the calculable on moral agents in virtue of its denial that any causal
feature of the world can determine truly moral judgement. That is true of
Kant’s theory, but to stop there in the analysis would result in a superficial
understanding of the relation of Kant’s moral theory to rationalisation. The
deeper point is that Kant’s ethics is one of rational and universal abstraction
from the particular and, to that extent, it has its share of rationalisation. The
fact that moral judgement is not itself calculation is not pertinent. Kant’s
moral theory is not calculation, but it is nonetheless calculative.
In a nutshell this is one half of Horkheimer and Adorno’s claim that
‘Kant is Sade’. Sade luxuriates in carnal domination, which domination
surely counts as ‘instrumental’ in Horkheimer and Adorno’s sense of the
term. The identity claim then comes to this: an ethics according to which
inclination and reason are conceived of as being in principal systematic ten-
sion and in which the resolution of the conflict is that one is ‘put down’
in favour of the other is an ethics according to which a large part of one-
self is viewed as merely means, thing-like, a cipher, and a target for self-
domination. A moral philosophy according to which reason progresses to
the extent that it juxtaposes itself sharply with nature, where the modality
of juxtaposition is ‘making nugatory’ by controlling or dominating, finds its
correlate in how Sade conceives of the body (among other things) as that
upon which ‘spontaneity’ operates. When one engages in this sort of activity
the unintended ‘return of nature’ takes the form of treating part of oneself
as a thing.
That view may be wrong, and may be wrong about Kant, but it is not just
a simple mistake in Kant interpretation. It is Horkheimer and Adorno’s way
of giving voice to an old complaint against Kant’s ethical views that Schiller
first lodged. What would be a corrective to this view from within the camp
of Idealism? Is there non-instrumental reason possible in Idealism? Adorno
seems to have no clear answer. Horkheimer came in his late work to admire
Schopenhauer, and one can understand why Schopenhauer’s ethical views
would be of particular interest to him.21 Schopenhauer’s ethics is one of co-
suffering for co-sufferers. For Schopenhauer suffering cannot be eradicated,
even if it can be ameliorated for a time by means of some aesthetic expe-
riences and by self-abnegation. This follows strictly from Schopenhauer’s
metaphysics of Will: all sentient things constantly suffer because individua-
tion necessarily involves slippage between (1) uncontrollable perturbations
of the Will as it is housed in any individual thing and (2) the craving for some
kind of metaphysical stability in terms of which one can achieve orientation
in the world. In essence, Schopenhauer defines suffering functionally; it just
is the friction between these two orders from the point of view of the individ-
uated. If one recognises that everyone is part of Will and suffers on that basis
alone, the difference between individuated cases of suffering can be over-
come. One might think that this is an abstract, almost Kantian, way of think-
ing, where ‘overcoming’ means something like abstracting from difference
in order to reveal a common, supersensible rational basis. But Schopenhauer
has a much more interesting view, according to which transcendence of the
barriers between suffering individuals requires compassion.22 Compassion,
in turn, requires an exercise of imagination motivated by the idea that we are
basically co-sufferers, an exercise that has the aim of entering into another’s
suffering to the vanishing point of being able to ‘feel with’ one another in
terms of what it is like to suffer in that way.23
It is not too far-fetched to suppose that Horkheimer is attracted to this
way of looking at ethical intersubjectivity in part because of its refusal of
the central Kantian concept of duty. The kind of identification required for
‘ethical inclusion’ on this theory is imaginative and precisely not abstractly
rational. Schopenhauer holds that even what one would regard as the most
antagonistic relations – say, between torturer and tortured – might be recon-
ciled, at least in principle, in this manner. Of course Horkheimer would not
endorse Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the Will, nor would empathy suffice
for ‘criticism’ for him. It is also open to question how much ‘real world’
action is required to alleviate suffering on this understanding.24 But the
appeal to Schopenhauer, morose as it might be, is well motivated for at least
the reason that giving the category of suffering pre-eminence guards against
conceiving of persons and their experience instrumentally yet Idealistically,
although of course it offers no guarantee.
204 Fred Rush
Notes
1. See Dieter Henrich, Die Einheit der Wissenschaftslehre Max Webers (Tübingen: Mohr, 1952),
for this approach, finding the value of Weber as consisting in effecting a solution to the
question of the unity of reason from the Baden side of neo-Kantianism. Fritz Ringer, Max
Weber’s Methodology: the unification of the cultural and social sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000), performs a similar service for the sociological understanding of
Weber’s ‘synthesis’ of elements of hermeneutics and positivism.
2. Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus (1904/5) (Bodenheim:
Athenaeum, 1993). The full story of course is more complex.
3. Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 11ff. Weber’s adverting to such North American examples
was based in experience. Weber attended the St Louis World’s Fair of 1904, planned as the
centennial celebration of the mammoth land deal that laid the predicate for the modern
United States, bearing the fitting official title of the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition. He
made steamship passage in a party that included the two other most significant figures
in the emerging field of sociology in Germany: Ferdinand Tönnies and Ernst Troeltsch.
Tönnies, Troeltsch and Weber were attending one of the many academic conferences that
orbited the Fair. Weber had completed the first half of The Protestant Ethic by the time
he set sail for the States, but his return to Germany at the end of 1904 saw him finish
the book in a whirlwind two and a half months. It is difficult to shake the impression
that he had experienced its argumentative conclusions in medias res in an especially vivid
way. The first-hand account by Marianne Weber is evocative: her husband’s debilitating
depression is staid by the ocean voyage and trip around the Eastern and Central United
States. Although she writes little of his impressions of the conference, Weber is taken by
the rough and vigorous self-reliance bordering on hucksterism of the ‘rustics’ especially,
only outdone by the denizens of that Temple of All-Things-That-Can-Be-Bought-Sold-
or-Stolen: Chicago. See Marianne Weber, Max Weber: ein Lebensbild (Tübingen: Mohr,
1926), 292–317.
4. See Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes (1907), in Gesamtausgabe vi, ed. O. Rammstedt
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992).
5. Weber held this tendency in the modern West to be ineluctable given the historical
developments that led up to it. He had wintry things to say about future prospects.
The declaration that bureaucracy is a ‘steel-hard shell’ (stahlhartes Gehäuse) is somewhat
ambivalent; shells both protect and constrain. See Die protestantische Ethik, 153. But,
although it might be passed off merely as a melancholy and disappointed prophecy of the
fate of Germany after the defeat of the First World War, the conclusion of Politik als Beruf
has a more univocal and deadening finality to it: ‘[n]icht das Blühen des Sommers liegt vor
uns, sondern zunächst eine Polarnacht von eisiger Finsternis und Härte. . . .’; Max Weber,
Politik als Beruf (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992), 90 (‘for now not the summer blooms but a
polar night of iron darkness awaits us’). Everything depends on the force of ‘zunächst’
here.
6. In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx-Engels-Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1956–), i.i.4, 23(orig-
inal, 1867). The idea is also present, explicitly and implicitly in several of Marx’s works in
the late 1850s and 1860s, most notably in the discussions of the general concepts of com-
modity and money in Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, §§ 1 and 2 (1859); see also Grundrisse,
§ G (1857/8) (objectification of labour through mechanisation). It is important to mark

that ‘reification’ is not for Marx the equivalent to ‘objectification’ (Vergegenständlichtsein)
in all contexts. It is rather that the way in which labour is objectified under conditions of
late-stage capitalism is distorting, and thus is a form of reification. Generally, Marx has
no axe to grind against objectification of labour, so long as the objectification is not the
product of alienation. See especially Grundrisse, § 1.
7. ‘Die Verdinglichung und das Bewußtsein des Proletariats’ (1923), in Geschichte und Klassen-
bewußtsein (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1968), 257–397.
8. I emphasise here continuities between Marx’s and Lukács’s treatment of reification. But it
is worth bearing in mind that the continuities are only partial. It goes without mentioning
that Lukács does not share Marx’s version of materialism, according to which economic
causes are fundamental and ideological components of society merely dependent on them.
9. The Geistes-/Naturwissenschaft binary is Dilthey’s. Theoreticians of history like Dilthey typ-
ically focused on the ‘cognitive’ dimension of the distinction between natural and social
sciences, positing a sharp divide between explanation and interpretation. Explanation
must take the cognitive perspective of the third person and is not suited to understanding
reasons for an action from the point of view of the actor. Only interpretation can accom-
plish this. Natural sciences require a nomological conception of understanding, where
to understand x is to (properly) mark it as an instance of a general law governing like
cases. The Geisteswissenschaften deploy ‘laws’ (if one wants to talk that way) that govern
the internal constitution of singularities, i.e. of single events. Such laws are invariant in
the sense that they are necessarily constitutive of the singularity in question but, external
to it, do not support counterfactuals. This way of putting the distinction between natural
and social sciences offended Windelband’s and Rickert’s neo-Kantian scruples. It was too
‘psychologistic’, too Romantic, too imprecise, and a weak check on positivism.
Windelband laid emphasis on a different legacy of Idealism, not having to do with the
purported sanctity of internal reasons but rather involving formal constraints on theory
construction stemming ultimately from Kant’s accounts of reflective judgement and regu-
lative reason. Windelband distinguished two types of understanding: nomothetic, which
comprehends objects in terms of invariant laws, and idiographic, which comprises knowl-
edge of particulars qua particulars, i.e. of singular objects. Nomothetic understanding is
the primary sort of knowledge that concerns what Windelband calls the ‘lawful sciences’
(Gesetzeswissenschaften); idiographic knowledge is cardinal for what he terms the ‘experien-
tial sciences’ (Ereigniswissenschaften). Windelband’s more structural approach allows that
social science proper can avail itself of and aim at nomological knowledge; consequently,
there is systematic overlap possible between natural and social science. (In fact Dilthey
never denied this.) The threat of positivism is in its reductive or even eliminative claim that
the nomological concept of a law is the only permissible concept of law in the sciences.
Windelband’s student, Rickert, presents these ideas in more systematic form. It is
sometimes said that Rickert’s analysis of value (Wert) as a necessary component of social
and historical research is his key innovation, but its precise significance, at least as Rickert
understands it, is apt to be missed. Emphasising values in social science underscores that
the social-scientific investigator must attend to the phenomena she is investigating in a
particular way, notwithstanding whether the object of the investigation is a value or not.
This is the crux of Rickert’s contribution, which one can divorce from the concept of
206 Fred Rush
value. Even idiographic knowledge requires preformation by the investigator of the thing
to be known; without such structuring, the ‘real’ cannot be understood at all. The point is
perhaps best grasped by reminding oneself that Rickert, like Dilthey and Windelband, held
that no bit of reality could be exhaustively conceptualised. Given any conceptualisation
there is a residuum of the concrete unconceived. This is true of singularities grasped
idiographically as much as it is true of generalities grasped nomothetically. For the social
scientist, values are the prime vehicles of synthesis of what is represented in the theory, to the
extent that it can be so represented. Moreover, any representation is ultimately provisional
and, to that extent, its stability is an idealisation, albeit one that is theoretically necessary.
This leads one directly to Weber’s views on ‘ideal types’, a concept already present in
Tönnies. See Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) (2nd rev. edn, Berlin:
Curtius, 1912).
10. Another, complementary way to look at the matter is that reification for Lukács is a
perfectly Hegelian process. Hegel views nature conceived as if it were disconnected from
its conception as inert and theoretically idle. The claim that one treats ideas as if they were
things is to: (1) fail to recognise the salience of Hegel’s point about nature and (2) then go
on to conceive of artefacts, people and ideas in that way.
11. Natalia Baeza, ‘Contradiction, critique, and dialectic in Adorno’, unpublished PhD thesis,
University of Notre Dame (2012), contains an innovative argument to the effect that
Freud’s early theory of paranoia as a projective neurosis rigorously structures Adorno’s
account of rational pathology.
12. Max Horkheimer, ‘Traditionelle und kritische Theorie’ (1937), in Kritische Theorie, in
Studienausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1968), 521–75.
13. This does not mean that nomological-deductive or inductive reasoning is inappropriate
in social science. Such reasoning, however, will be constrained by more inclusive inter-
pretative structures. Cf. note 9, above.
14. Some commentators on the Frankfurt school will think that I have gone too far here.
In response, I would challenge anyone to find a single thinker in the tradition of critical
theory who has not raised the question of the material conditions for social theoretical
activity for themselves and answered that question wholly in the negative. Even Adorno
and Benjamin were ‘materialists’ in their fashion.
15. Geertz is the stock example. See especially his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York:
Harper & Row, 1973). But there are others, e.g. Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard. For
Malinowski see, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: an account of native enterprise and adventure
in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922); and
for Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1937); see also Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1958).
16. It is perhaps worth mentioning that this is not the same issue as that of naturalism in
social science. For an incisive survey of the difficulties – even of naturalism in the physical
sciences – see Sidney Morgenbesser, ‘Is it a science?’, in D. Emmet and A. MacIntyre (eds.),
Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 20–35.
17. See, for instance, Herbert Marcuse, ‘Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus im Werk Max
Webers’, in Kultur und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1968), 281–303.
18. Axel Honneth, Reification: a new look at an old idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008).
19. See Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Hegel on skulls and faces’, in Hegel: a collection of critical essays,
ed. A. MacIntyre (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 219–36.
20. It is worth emphasising that ‘enlightenment’ for early critical theory does not refer to an
historical epoch, i.e. the Enlightenment. It is, rather, a characteristic mode of thought.
The text of Dialectic of Enlightenment is, in essence three intellectual ‘case histories’ of
enlightenment: in archaic Greece (Homer’s Odyssey), in the end stages of the Enlighten-
ment (Sade’s Juliette), and in 1930s America (the ‘Culture Industry’). The fourth section
of the book, on anti-Semitism, was added after its first circulation, but one might also
consider it such an entry.
21. See ‘Die Aktualität Schopenhauers’, in Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer, 1967), 248–68.
22. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818), in Sämmtliche Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Cotta
Insel, 1982), i, §§ 63ff.
23. Imaginative participation for Schopenhauer seems close to empathy and has structural sim-
ilarities to art and asceticism: imagination used ethically in this fashion is de-individuating
to a degree. One might say that ethical experience of this sort is a mediate term between
art and ascetic experience as a way, for a time, to negate the effects of the Will by approxi-
mating immersion in it. Art does this (music is the limit case) by pushing from within the
envelope on representation. Schopenhauer rates this as a temporary respite from suffer-
ing. Ascetic experience develops discipline over the bodily appetites and is more lasting,
although it too is fraught with contradictions that consign it ultimately to suffering.
24. The Frankfurt school became less engagé as it entered its second, Adorno-dominated
phase. Given the mix of earlier empirical and philosophical work at the Institute for
Social Research, one might have thought that the earlier critical theorists would have
heeded Bakunin’s bon mot that ‘when faced with desperation [отчаяние], even a German
will stop philosophizing. . . .’; Mikail Bakunin, Государственность и анархия [Statism
and anarchy] (1873), in Archives Bakounine iii, ed. A. Lehnung (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 27.
Apparently not.
9
Freedom within nature: Adorno on the idea

of reason’s autonomy
Brian O’Connor
A commitment to the thesis of the autonomy of reason can be located across

various phases of German Idealism. Initiated in Kant’s critical work, it devel-
oped diverse conceptualisations and functions in the philosophy of Fichte’s
Jena period, early Schelling and, arguably, all of Hegel’s mature writings.
For Kant the self-governance of reason was to mean, at the practical level,
that rational agents could determine themselves through reason alone. To
do so they would endorse principles for action, these principles taking the
form of a law compelling for all rational beings. As materially pure, universal
laws, practical principles were valid independently of the normative author-
ity of existing sociocultural practice and of the pathological and wholly
subjective preferences of any given empirical agent. The rational agent,
through the use of autonomous reason, could both identify what a ratio-
nal will should will and be at the same time moved to act upon what it wills.1
Kant’s theory of reason offered a framework within which practical reason
itself could be defended, and theories that privileged sentiment, happiness
or any other variety of affective motive were exposed as antithetical to moral
legislation.
For Kant it was not only practical reason that was capable of autonomy,
that is, of providing us with laws that are independent of empirical causal-
ity. The very practice of philosophy itself – of theoretical reason – was to
be reconceived as an exercise of autonomous reason. Without reference to
experience it was supposed to be possible for reason to identify its own
capacities and limitations. It could establish the different kinds of gover-
nance reason brings to bear on the various regions of concern to it. The limit
points of reason were revealed when reason recognised its own contradic-
toriness within particular domains. Philosophy, construed in this new form,
might be considered as reason’s own self-explication.
208
Freedom within nature: Adorno on the idea of reason’s autonomy 209
Among the philosophers who succeeded Kant theoretical reason was set
to validating the fundamental claims of human knowledge, on purely con-
ceptual considerations, in order to provide those claims with a security they
did not apparently possess when conceived within their separable, original
empirical disciplines. These claims, if they were claims of reason, could be
understood as elements or moments of reason’s own system.
Autonomous practical and theoretical reason were not to be understood
as distinct rationalities. Implicit in the very idea of reason’s autonomy – i.e.
its capacity to endorse principles in independence from empirical criteria –
is, according to the Idealists, its unity. There is not one faculty of reason for
philosophy and another for morality: it is one and the same reason applying
itself in differing ways depending on what it chooses to analyse. The theory
of the basis of that unity can take different directions: practical or theoretical
reasons might be seen as derivations of each other (giving rise to claims
about the primacy of either practical or theoretical reason) or as belonging
to a single substance.
The appealing historical precept that human beings have an entitlement
to make new and emancipating social arrangements in independence from
existing sources of authority, habit or tradition was bolstered by the Idealists’
insights into reason’s autonomy. Politics and theory were implicit partners.
The interest in the autonomy of reason for the sake of human freedom was,
though, to recede sharply in the period of post-Idealist philosophy, with
history and philosophy playing their parts in complicating the classical ideals
of emancipation. It is through the development of critical theory, in explicit
negotiation with the legacy of Idealism, that this distinctive interest regained
philosophical attention. For critical theory, the capacity of human beings to
create a rational society – one in which antagonism, want and institutionally
generated suffering are absent – depends on our capacity to reason without
the determinations of social normativity: that is, autonomously.
The autonomy of reason, critical theory maintains, is imperilled by the
forces of prevailing intellectual conventions. Reason loses its connection
with emancipation and instead is turned towards the exigencies of successful
management within existing institutional life. The Idealists believed that
their account of the autonomy of reason could promote the development
of a capacity that human beings had, in the main, lacked the confidence to
exercise. The critical theorists, however, found themselves in a quite different
environment. The concept and value of reason was well understood, but,
tragically, it was the wrong notion of reason – instrumental, manipulative,
strategic – that had taken hold. The critical theorists did not recommend a
210 Brian O’Connor
return to the classical formulations of reason’s autonomy as a solution to the

problem of reason’s current limitations. In fact, those formulations had in
certain respects reproduced developing social practices of reason: the control
of ‘natural’ being, including human being.
Early critical theory’s preoccupation with providing a defensible account
of reason’s autonomy – one which at the same time specifically rejects the
formulations of the Idealist tradition – has been obscured by the ferocity of
that movement’s criticism of reason in general. Adorno and Horkheimer’s
sweeping indictment of the dialectic of enlightenment – the charge that every
effort to lift ourselves from nature appears to entail nature’s destruction –
might lead us to suppose that early critical theory is eager, in sympathy with
Nietzsche, to expose the motives and, thereby, inherent heteronomy of
reason. It appears to be, in other words, an effort to undermine the very
principle of the autonomy of reason. Arguably the force of their rhetorically
coloured proposition leads irrevocably to that conclusion. But this cannot
be critical theory’s intention, at least. Were it so, criticisms of the distortion
of reason and the attendant irrationality of society (it produces antagonism,
want and suffering while proclaiming freedom) would be groundless (at least
in terms of ‘rationality’) since there would be no way of taking a normative
stance, based on ‘true’ reason, against them. What critical theory actually
attempts is to offer ways of thinking about human experience that can explain
our capacity to take a reflective view of that experience without also holding
that reflection separates us from experience’s natural basis.
In drawing out the relationship between German Idealism and critical
theory on the question of reason’s autonomy I will concentrate on Adorno’s
criticisms of transcendental idealism as it is the most sustained and detailed
discussion within the critical-theory tradition of the autonomy of reason.
These criticisms open up for Adorno the conceptual space within which a
more inclusive account of reason’s autonomy might be articulated. The next
section of this essay will turn to that criticism and a consideration of the new
theoretical direction that the critique seems to necessitate – the direction
Adorno attempts – will follow.
Criticisms of the transcendental theory

Adorno’s various criticisms of Kant’s notion of the autonomy of reason
attempt to reveal the limitations and implicit dangers of that notion when
conceived purely within the terms of Idealism. Idealism articulated in a rev-
olutionary manner the power of reason to free us from authority, but its
theoretical basis actually narrowed what the exercise of freedom was to be.
At the centre of this difficulty, according to Adorno, is the fundamental
opposition between reason and freedom on the one side and nature on the
other. This opposition detaches reason from, Adorno will try to show, its
natural basis. His criticisms concentrate on three main issues, to be consid-
ered in turn in this section: autonomous agency as coercion, the unity and
heteronomy of reason, and reason as ontology.
The worry about transcendental idealism’s opposition between reason/
freedom and nature can be found within the history of German Idealism
itself. The respective Naturphilosophien developed by Schelling and Hegel
seek to address the explanatory insufficiency of the concept of nature per-
mitted by transcendental idealism. The latter was perceived to have reduced
nature to product, to what mind or reason had made (natura naturata) and
thereby to have neglected the question of nature’s own productivity (natura
naturans). Conceived solely as natura naturata, Schelling argued, nature was
deprived of its dynamic and converted into ‘absolute rest’ (absolute Ruhe).2
Furthermore, the physical actuality of reality itself came, implausibly, to be
posited purely as an act of the subject. Transcendental idealism, Schelling
argued, would have to be reinterpreted as an explanation of one side of expe-
rience only, namely, of our productive capacities. Beside that explanation a
philosophy of nature would have to be placed in order, as he wrote,
to explain the ideal by means of the real. Hence, the two sciences form
a unity, and differ only in the opposing orientations of their tasks.
Furthermore, not only are the two directions equally possible, they are
equally necessary, and hence both receive the same necessity in the
system of knowledge.a,3
This endeavour to identify the unity of reason/freedom and nature was

also to be pursued by Hegel. In the Encyclopaedia, he argues that nature
like spirit has its own history of development, a history that parallels that
of the development of spirit. Far from being ‘dead’ and animated solely
by human consciousness, nature, he writes, ‘is to be regarded as a system
of stages, one arising necessarily from the other and being the proximate
a. ‘Wenn es nun Aufgabe der Transscendentalphilosophie ist, das Reelle dem Ideellen
unterzuordnen, so ist es dagegen Aufgabe der Naturphilosophie, das Ideelle aus dem Reellen zu
erklären: beide Wissenschaften sind also Eine, nur durch die entgegengesetzten Richtungen
ihrer Aufgaben sich unterscheidende Wissenschaft; da ferner beide Richtungen nicht nur gleich
möglich, sondern gleich nothwendig sind, so kommt auch beiden im System des Wissens gleiche
Nothwendigkeit zu.’ Schelling, ‘Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der
Naturphilosophie’, 272–3
truth of the stage from which it results: but it is not generated naturally
out of the other but only in the inner Idea which constitutes the ground of
Nature’.b,4 It may be arguable that Schelling and Hegel respectively represent
challenging responses to the inevitably inert conception of nature framed by
transcendental idealism. But viewed from within the critical concerns of
Adorno – who refers hardly at all to the Naturphilosophie – it is continuous
with what transcendental idealism attempted to do in that it is an effort
to conceive nature as something which can be systematised. He perempto-
rily dismisses Hegel’s work on nature and natural beauty as ‘virtually unre-
flected partisanship for subjective spirit’.c,5 The ‘spirit’ supposedly at work in
nature – what it is that licences the task of reconstructing its inner system –
is an anthropomorphism. As we shall see in more detail below, Adorno holds
that nature, of which we are a part, is not translatable into the language of
reason. Hence the symmetry of reason in nature and nature in reason is, for
him, excluded from the start.
For the most part Adorno proceeds not by criticising Kant’s position by
the measure of his own presumed account of reason’s autonomy. Rather he
attempts to read Kant’s position immanently. This involves an examination
of the conclusions that Kant wishes to establish and the concepts that are
deployed in developing that conclusion. Adorno will find that contradic-
tions appear, and inevitably so given the impossibility of realising the inten-
tion in its Idealist form. The lessons that are drawn from these difficulties
guide Adorno in determining the parameters within which a space for a new
account of reason’s autonomy is to be developed. This approach indicates
the significance for Adorno of Kant’s endeavour. In criticising Kant Adorno
understands himself to be engaging with the exemplary articulation of Ide-
alism’s conception of the autonomy of reason: if that conception ultimately
fails then it is symptomatic of Idealism’s failure, on this point, as a whole.
The central significance of Kant’s thesis for Adorno is that it attempts
to give foundation to the idea that human beings are capable of reflec-
tive engagements with immediacy (ND, 221; GS (Adorno) vi, 220).6 By
b. ‘Die Natur ist als ein System von Stufen zu betrachten, deren eine aus der andern notwendig
hervorgeht und die nächste Wahrheit derjenigen ist, aus welcher sie resultiert, aber nicht so, daß
die eine aus der andern natürlich erzeugt würde, sondern in der inneren, den Grund der Natur
ausmachenden Idee.’ G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl
Markus Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–71), ix, § 249, 31
c. ‘Hegels objektiver Idealismus wird in der Ästhetik zur krassen, nahezu unreflektierten
Parteinahme für subjektiven Geist.’ Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, in Gesammelte
Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970) (hereafter GS (Adorno)), vii,
117
immediacy is meant anything which serves as a quasi-natural trigger for

action, and that includes those forms of life that have taken on the character
of what critical theory thinks of as ‘second nature’: in particular, the norms of
our institutionalised existences, the blind application of manipulating forms
of reason. The autonomy of reason implies that we have the possibility of
withstanding and in that specific sense placing ourselves outside the condi-
tioning of these forms of immediacy. That is the principle, though it is faced
with a difficult reality.
In the era of what Adorno and the Frankfurt school identify as ‘late
capitalism’ reason’s autonomy has become problematic. Capitalism, it is
claimed, does not merely structure the exchange of goods, it influences all
forms of interaction, thereby reducing them to acts of strategic calculation.
Agents manipulate themselves and others in order to succeed within this
system. Even love, Adorno believes, does not escape that conditioning. In
Minima Moralia, following Proust, he writes:
The exchange relationship that love partially withstood throughout

the bourgeois age has completely absorbed it; the last immediacy falls
victim to the distance of all the contracting parties from all others.
Love is chilled by the value that the ego places on itself.d,7
In this environment reason is anything but autonomous: it is the mechanism

of negotiating intra-institutional life, never a critical attitude towards the
norms that allow capitalism to be experienced as second nature.
In some ways Adorno’s identification of late capitalism as a destructive
dynamic falls within a long-standing form of social criticism: that the human
capacity for reason or wisdom is compromised by the independence-sapping
influences of the collective ideas of the mob, the priests, the system. But
there is a further claim in Adorno’s position that separates it from social
criticism in that perennial form. Whereas conventional criticism attempts
to identify the ways in which reason is suffocated by powerful social forces
Adorno argues that reason itself is vulnerable to unreasonableness. Human
beings can live by means of a model of reason, valorise it and order the world
according to it, but yet the model may be destructive. He holds that the very
notion of reason’s primacy comes with this danger, that it can position itself
as ‘taming, suppressing, ordering and governing whatever is unreasonable,
d. ‘Das Tauschverhältnis, dem sie durchs bürgerliche Zeitalter hindurch partiell sich widersetzte,
hat sie ganz aufgesogen; die letzte Unmittelbarkeit fällt der Ferne aller Kontrahenten von allen
zum Opfer. Liebe erkältet am Wert, den das Ich sich selber zuschreibt.’ Adorno, Minima Moralia:
Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, in GS (Adorno), iv, §107, 190–1
instead of absorbing it into itself in a spirit of reconciliation’.e,8 Adorno

theorises this problem as what he calls, following Lukács, the phenomenon
of reification (Verdinglichung).
Reification is a state of affairs in which there are only quantitative and
therefore mutually translatable differences within and between objects.
Adorno believes this is typical of the scientific ‘modes of procedure’ (Ver-
fahrungsweisen) (ND, 233, translation amended; GS (Adorno), vi, 232), but it
now reaches outside scientific processes of the classification of nature and
into the space of everyday judgements about how one should act and how we
are to think about other people. Differentiations between objects are estab-
lished by reference to preconceived conceptualisations of what those objects
can be. This behaviour excludes the possibility of surprise at the distinctive
character of particular objects. It gains its grip on us because, as Adorno puts
it, we forget what objects really are. As he explained in a letter to Walter
Benjamin, an explanation later echoed in Dialektik der Aufklärung: ‘For all
reification is a forgetting: objects become purely thing-like the moment they
are retained for us without the continued presence of their other aspects:
when something of them has been forgotten’.f,9 Theories that take consis-
tency as a criterion of reason are reified. According to Adorno they place
‘logical stringency’ (ND, 233) over experience of the complexity of objects,
a complexity that must be ‘forgotten’ for that stringency to succeed. Under
these conditions, Adorno writes, the ‘autonomy of reason vanishes: the part
of reason that exceeds the subordinate reflection upon and adjustment to pre-given
data’.g,10 Acts of reason, in other words, are limited in advance by what is to
count as reasonable.
Autonomous agency as coercion

Adorno understands reifying judgements as a kind of coercion, a coercion
he finds reproduced by Idealism’s autonomous reason. The word he gener-
ally uses to capture the manner in which these judgements act on objects is
e. ‘Im Begriff der Vormacht der Vernunft, in dem Begriff also, daß die Vernunft etwas sei, welches
ein Unvernünftiges zu bändigen, zu unterdrücken, zu regeln, zu beherrschen habe, anstatt es
versöhnt in sich aufzunehmen.’ Theodor W. Adorno, Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und von der
Freiheit, in Nachgelassene Schriften iv/13 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 69
f. ‘Denn alle Verdinglichung ist ein Vergessen: Objekte werden dinghaft im Augenblick, wo sie
festgehalten sind, ohne in allen ihren Stücken aktuell gegenwärtig zu sein: wo etwas von ihnen
vergessen ist.’ Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940, ed. Henri
Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994), 417
g. ‘Die Autonomie der Vernunft entschwindet; das an ihr, was sich nicht erschöpft im Nachdenken
eines Vorgegebenen, dem sie sich anmißt.’ Adorno, GS (Adorno), x/2, 464
‘Zwang’, and from its range of connotations – which include compulsion and
constraint – it is that of coercion that is emphasised. As coercion it is violence
against objects but also against self. That Zwang and reification are concep-
tually related for Adorno means that knowledge as Zwang is itself a kind of
forgetting. Thought begins its engagement with objects by fitting them into
patterns that are familiar. In this respect objects are made into something
they are not, but that should be only the beginning of knowledge: ‘without
a coercive moment there could be no thinking’ (ND, 233).h Idealism, how-
ever, conceives knowledge wholly within this structure. Because it locates
the autonomy of reason in the subject alone it excludes the possibility of an
account of how we can proceed beyond the coercive moment with which
thinking begins.
Hegel’s Idealism is accused of placing priority on the systematisation
of knowledge over experience. With the assumption that the fundamental
principles of reality as the products of reason must somehow fit together,
Hegel forces, Adorno alleges, reality into a system.11 Contrary to Hegel’s
claim that the system simply unfolds as necessitated by the objects under
consideration, Adorno argues, the ‘Hegelian system in itself was not a true
becoming; implicitly, each single definition in it was already preconceived.
Such safeguards condemn it to untruth’ (ND, 27).i Kant too is accused of
distorting experience by operating with a system. However, it is his notion
of freedom as causality that, for Adorno, marks out its distinctive form of
coerciveness.
Adorno critically considers Kant’s claim that reason conceived as a ‘law-
making power’ converts freedom into ‘a “special sort of causality”’ (ND,
255).j Kant is trying to convey the efficaciousness of practical reason. It
can determine the will and thereby produce an effect in the world. Kant’s
position makes appeal to consciousness or reason as possessing causal power
of some kind. The obvious strangeness of that idea has prompted alternative
models of action which attempt to avoid the language and logic of causality
altogether.12 Certainly – as we shall see further on – Adorno is concerned by
the dualism implicit in this theory of action. His primary criticism, though,
is the relationship of subject (agent) to object (others, nature) to which
the model of freedom as causality is committed. As causality reason, the
h. ‘Ohne Zwangsmoment indessen könnte Denken überhaupt nicht sein.’ GS (Adorno), vi, 232
i. ‘Das Hegelsche war nicht in sich wahrhaft ein Werdendes, sondern implizit in jeder
Einzelbestimmung bereits vorgedacht. Solche Sicherung verurteilt es zur Unwahrheit.’ GS
(Adorno), vi, 38
j. ‘Darum muß er Freiheit von Anbeginn als “besondere Art von Causalität” vorstellen. Indem er
sie setzt, nimmt er sie zurück.’ GS (Adorno), vi, 252
highest exercise of freedom, is not conceived as the power to act and react.
In principle, the idea of the exercise of reason as efficient causality need not
suggest coercion (violence done to the non-agent). It is simply the intentional
action of the agent. Adorno’s claim, though, is that the Kantian conception
rigidifies the relationship of the agent towards the world and narrows its
self-understanding of what kind of action is available to it to the resources
of its own rationality. This turns out to be the business of imposing form
on a world that is not made in the form of reason the agent assumes (i.e.
the thing-in-itself, our pathological character). And the autonomy of reason
grants the agent this relationship to the object, Adorno argues, as affecting
objects but not being affected by them: it is not response, but the power to
make objects what the subject’s reason deems them to be. He writes:
Freed from the compulsion of identity [Identitätszwang], thinking

might perhaps dispense with causality, which is made in the image of
that compulsion. Causality hypostatises the form, as binding upon a
content which on its own would not assume that form . . . (ND, 234)k
Adorno establishes the charge that transcendental practical philosophy is

in some respect a violence against experience by reading Kant’s notion of
Zwang in a particular and obviously contentious way. Kant conceives Zwang
as a freely adopted constraint that the rational being places on the urgings of
his/her sensuous being. In the second Critique he writes:
As submission to a law, that is, as a command (indicating constraint
[Zwang] for the sensuously affected subject), it therefore contains in it
no pleasure but instead, so far, displeasure in the action. On the other
hand, however, since this constraint is exercised only by the lawgiving
of his own reason, it also contains something elevating.l,13
It is elevating in that the subject can now ‘cognise himself’ as ‘free’. Kant,
as we have just seen, admits that the experience of Zwang is not always an
agreeable one regardless of the freedom of choice through which the rational
agent came to adopt this constraint. It is always – it seems – aimed against
k. ‘Des Identitätszwangs ledig, entriete Denken vielleicht der Kausalität, die jenem Zwang
nachgebildet ist. Sie hypostasiert die Form als verbindlich für einen Inhalt, der von sich aus diese
Form nicht hergibt . . .’ GS (Adorno), vi, 232
l. ‘Es enthält also, als Unterwerfung unter ein Gesetz, d.i. als Gebot (welches für das
sinnlich-affizierte Subjekt Zwang ankündigt), keine Lust, sondern, so fern, vielmehr Unlust an
der Handlung in sich. Dagegen aber, da dieser Zwang bloß durch Gesetzgebung der eigenen
Vernunft ausgeübt wird, enthält es auch Erhebung . . .’ I. Kant, Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed.
Königlich preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1900–) (hereafter
GS), v, 80–1
the agent’s pathological inclinations and tendencies toward self-love. Appro-

priately, the source of this Zwang, Kant claims, is ‘intellectual’.14 Viewed
in one way Kant’s proposal appears commonsensical: when an individual
determines a course of action, that individual now has a reason to self-deny
attractive opportunities which may be diversions from that course. Yet what
Kant is proposing does not disallow the presence of a peculiar misery in the
adoption of a self-constraint, of going against what one might want to do
and thereby feeling necessitation to undertake, as he writes, ‘what one does
not altogether like to do’.m,15 Clearly, acting in this way is not equivalent to
acting against one’s will, as in situations of coercion. At the same time, one
must go against some part of one’s will in order to be autonomous. Within
this Kantian conception of moral motivation the authority of reason is to
win in the end over the authority of sensuousness.
It is noteworthy that Kant elsewhere expresses the tension between
Zwang and freedom in a way that might even serve to bring into question the
value of Zwang. In the first Critique he describes the discipline of pure reason
as Zwang, contrasting it with culture as a space of self-realisation. He writes:
The compulsion [Zwang] through which the constant propensity to stray

from certain rules is eliminated and finally eradicated is called
discipline. It is different from culture, which would merely produce a
skill without first cancelling out another one that is already present. In
the formation of a talent, therefore, which already has by itself a
tendency to expression, discipline will make a negative contribution,
but culture a positive.n,16
While it would be wrong to interpret Zwang here as connoting the fettering

experience of coercion it does appear, nevertheless, to indicate a negatively
restrictive experience. Whereas ‘culture’, which follows no necessary course,
permits the development of our abilities, discipline produces rigour in our
knowledge and protects us from error. Discipline as Zwang sits uneasily
with the variety of freedom that is exemplified in working outside rules. It
therefore involves what Kant, in the second Critique, refers laconically to as
‘some sacrifice [Aufopferung]’.17
m. ‘Selbstzwang, d.i. innere Nötigung zu dem, was man nicht ganz gern tut’. GS v, 84
n. ‘Man nennet den Zwang, wodurch der beständige Hang, von gewissen Regeln abzuweichen,
eingeschränkt, und endlich vertilget wird, die Disziplin. Sie ist von der Kultur unterschieden,
welche bloß eine Fertigkeit verschaffen soll, ohne eine andere, schon vorhandene, dagegen
aufzuheben. Zu der Bildung eines Talents, welches schon vor sich selbst einen Antrieb zur
Äußerung hat, wird also die Disziplin einen negativen, die Kultur aber und Doktrin einen
positiven Beitrag leisten.’ GS iv/iii, A709–10/B737–8
It is this range of thoughts, in which Zwang signifies a kind of imposition

on a subject that is in some sense unwilling, that underpins Adorno’s reading
of Kant’s notion of Zwang generally. The world, including the whole human
being, is formed after the image of order or law-likeness that is the partic-
ular definition of reason in Kant’s philosophy. Freedom, which is not the
experience of action without planning (or discipline), becomes instead the
unilateral power of the agent to be the cause of its objects. Adorno writes:
The Kantian freedom means the same as pure practical reason, the
producer of its own objects; this, we are told [by Kant], has to do ‘not
with objects or their cognition, but with its own faculty to make those
objects real (in line with their cognition)’. (ND, 255–6)o
Adorno interprets Kant’s claim here to imply that the supposed causality
at work in these acts of construction is rather straightforwardly a process
of domination. He continues: ‘The absolute volitional autonomy implied
therein would be the same as absolute rule of one’s inner nature’ (ND, 256).p
In essence, the role of reason is to suppress the impulse for action and
instead create motivations for action out of reason. This suppression creates
a particular type of human being by selecting, as that which elevates us, that
part of our capacities that alone can conform to law-likeness: pure reason.
Adorno explores the relationship not only between Zwang as causality
and freedom but between the very notion of freedom as causality and the
terms of the Kantian division of reality. Kant presents us with two spaces
within which to place the totality of the agent’s motivations and actions,
namely within the world of appearance – the phenomenal world – or that of
freedom – the noumenal world. Adorno argues that Kant’s notion of free-
dom as causality cannot be placed within either option without collapsing
that notion. The option of noumenality is to be excluded, Adorno argues –
expressing a familiar worry – because a noumenal agent could not be intel-
ligibly conceived as having purchase on the phenomenal world. This means
that a theory of noumenal causality must be rejected in principle. It leaves the
agent outside a space in which action is possible. If this notion is nevertheless
to be maintained it generates only what Adorno sees as subjectification: ‘The
o. ‘Gegebenheit indessen ist, worauf das Wort anspielt, das Gegenteil von Freiheit, nackter
Zwang, ausgeübt in Raum und Zeit. Freiheit heißt bei Kant soviel wie die reine praktische
Vernunft, die ihre Gegenstände sich selber produziert; diese habe zu tun “nicht mit
Gegenständen, sie zu erkennen, sondern mit ihrem eigenen Vermögen, jene (der Erkenntniß
derselben gemäß) wirklich zu machen”.’ GS (Adorno), vi, 252–3
p. ‘Die darin implizierte absolute Autonomie des Willens wäre soviel wie absolute Herrschaft über
die innere Natur.’ GS (Adorno), vi, 253
semblance of a noumenal objectivity of practical reason establishes its com-

plete subjectification; it is no longer clear how its intervention across the
ontological abyss may reach anything that is at all’ (ND, 237).q This con-
ception of the noumenality of autonomous practical reason, Adorno argues,
actually depracticalises the agent. Reason is explicable in independence of
objects, but what can reason be about if it needs no reference to objects –
to complex states of affairs – to which it might react and respond? We can
find some support for Adorno’s worry by turning to a distinction Kant him-
self makes in the second Critique between choices grounded in autonomous
reason and those grounded in heteronomy. The former, it seems, are straight-
forwardly apparent, whereas the latter – perhaps in the manner of phronetic
practical reason – require experience. Kant writes:
What is to be done in accordance with the principle of the autonomy

of choice is seen quite easily and without hesitation by the most
common understanding; what is to be done on the presupposition of
heteronomy of choice is difficult to see and requires knowledge of the
world.r,18
The effective practicality of the agent is understood purely in terms of formal

reason. The very idea, according to Adorno’s interpretation, is paradoxical:
it is ‘that absolutely sovereign reason . . . is to have the capacity to work
empirically irrespective of experience and irrespective of the leap between
action and deed’ (ND, 236).s
The notion of phenomenal causality is also problematic, though for
quite different reasons. Kant does not want, of course, the causality of the
autonomous agent to be phenomenal as this would place the agent wholly
within the space of empirical causality. But Adorno holds that this commit-
ment is implicit in Kant’s understanding of how the agent acts. For Adorno,
as we have seen, Kant’s theory of autonomy entails action in the world, by
an agent in the world against the objects of the world. In this regard Kant
follows, without realising it, the growing conception of human beings as
rational by measure of their capacity to master nature. There is nothing in
q. ‘Den Schein der ansichseienden Objektivität praktischer Vernunft stiftet ihre vollendete
Subjektivierung; nicht länger erhellt, wie sie, über den ontologischen Abgrund hinweg,
eingreifend Seiendes irgend erreichen soll.’ GS (Adorno), vi, 235
r. ‘Was nach dem Prinzip der Autonomie der Willkür zu tun sei, ist für den gemeinsten Verstand
ganz leicht und ohne Bedenken einzusehen; was unter Voraussetzung der Heteronomie
derselben zu tun sei, schwer, und erfordert Weltkenntnis.’ GS v, 36
s. ‘[E]rst als entgegenständlichte wird sie zu jenem absolut Souveränen, das in der Empirie ohne
Rücksicht auf diese, und auf den Sprung zwischen Handeln und Tun, soll wirken können’. GS
(Adorno), vi, 235
this conception which elevates the subject outside the world of appearances.
Adorno concludes: ‘what the aporetical construction of freedom rests upon
is not the noumenal but the phenomenal . . . it is naked compulsion, exerted
in space and time’ (ND, 255).t
The unity and heteronomy of reason

The Idealists take the claim that reason is unified as a corollary of its auton-
omy. Were it without unity there would be separate rationalities, a conclu-
sion which could be reached only by ignoring the analogous roles played by
reason in its separate domains. Adorno criticises this notion as it effectively
insists that reason can be conceived in separation from the realities with
which it is engaged. Autonomous reason, Adorno charges, is construed as
a unity only by rendering it into a meaningless abstraction, ‘purified of all
externality’ (von allem Äußeren getrennt).19 The parts of the world to which
philosophical reason directs itself – materiality – do not exert any influence
on the operating principle of that reason. Adorno reports Kant’s claim for
that unity as follows:
The terminologically suggested difference between pure theoretical

and pure practical doctrine; the difference between a formally logical
and a transcendentally logical doctrine; finally the difference of the
doctrine of ideas in the narrow sense – these are not differences within
reason in itself. They are solely differences concerning its application,
said either to have nothing to do with objects or to refer to the
possibility of objects pure and simple, or – like practical reason – to
create its objects, the free acts, out of itself. (ND, 234)u
The very definition of unity in this sense, however, is unsustainable. How

could it explain even the different applications of the same reason; that is,
what would induce the exercise of practical reason in one context but not in
another? If there is a distinction between theoretical reason, practical reason
t. ‘Tatsächlich basiert die aporetische Konstruktion der Freiheit nicht auf dem Noumenalen
sondern auf dem Phänomenalen . . . Gegebenheit indessen ist, worauf das Wort anspielt, das
Gegenteil von Freiheit, nackter Zwang, ausgeübt in Raum und Zeit.’ GS (Adorno), vi, 252–3
u. ‘Der terminologisch suggerierte Unterschied zwischen der reinen theoretischen und der reinen
praktischen, ebenso der zwischen einer formal- und transzendentallogischen und schließlich
der der Ideenlehre im engeren Sinn sind nicht Differenzen innerhalb der Vernunft an sich,
sondern einzig solche hinsichtlich ihres Gebrauchs, der entweder überhaupt nichts mit
Gegenständen zu tun habe, oder auf die Möglichkeit von Gegenständen schlechthin sich
beziehe, oder, wie die praktische Vernunft, seine Gegenstände, die freien Handlungen, aus sich
heraus schaffe.’ GS (Adorno), vi, 233
and even reason in its teleological employments (the third Critique) that
distinction must, Adorno claims, refer to its regions of application and the
experience the agent is attempting to negotiate. In this case, however, ‘the
subdivision of reason by objects makes it depend, contrary to the doctrine
of autonomy, on the extra-rational which it is supposed not to be’ (ND,
235).v In other words, the unity of reason, of different functions of reason,
must always point towards the world itself in order to make sense of the
different interests it possesses (normative or theoretical). This disrupts the
claim to unity, though, in that it reveals, according to Adorno, ‘reason’s
inner dependence upon what is not identical with it’ (ND, 235),w i.e. the
objects it attempts to order and form. He also refers to the material with
which reason is engaged as ‘a condition of its [reason’s] own possibility’
(ND, 243; GS (Adorno), vi, 241). This clearly erodes the basis of the claims
for reason’s absolute autonomy. The extra-rational as a condition of reason’s
application would, Adorno argues, ‘make it [reason] heteronomous’ (ND,
243; GS (Adorno), vi, 241).
That conclusion does not specify whether reason’s formal processes are
affected by the objects to which it is applied. Of course, Adorno believes
objects affect reason in that way: he is a consistent critic of formalism. But if
Kant does not – and the reading is immanent – then it is possible to maintain
that it is one and the same reason even in its diverse applications. There are
various options available in interpreting what Kant actually intends by the
notion of reason’s unity. Pauline Kleingeld notes:
it seems that Kant defends three incompatible claims regarding the
unity of reason. It would seem that he cannot consistently hold at the
same time that (1) theoretical and practical reason are one and the same
reason, applied differently, (2) that he still needs to show that they are,
and (3) that they are united.20
It is the material of claim (1) that Adorno had taken as his text for the unity
of reason. In the conclusion of her analysis, to cite its first part, Kleingeld
writes:
Kant’s three claims about the unity of reason are consistent. The claim
that theoretical and practical reason are one and the same faculty,
merely applied differently, should be seen as a regulative principle
v. ‘[D]ie Unterteilung der Vernunft nach ihren Objekten mache sie, wider die Lehre von der
Autonomie, abhängig von dem, was sie nicht sein soll, vom Außervernünftigen’. GS (Adorno),
vi, 234
w. ‘[D]ie inwendige Verwiesenheit der Vernunft auf ihr Nichtidentisches . . .’ GS (Adorno), vi, 234
Table 9.1 Reason’s Doppelschlächtigkeit
Subjective Objective
Theoretical reason (a1) Pure form (b1) Totality of objective validities

Practical will (a2) Spontaneity (b2) Creates its own objects
based on reason’s own interest in systematicity, and not as a claim to

knowledge.21
Adorno’s line of argument diverges from Kleingeld’s minimalist account.

Adorno holds that Kant is committed to prioritising the principles of auton-
omy and unity of reason over the capacity of the world to inform the activities
of reason. And he also wants to claim, in contrast to Kleingeld, that reason
for Kant is an act of constructivism directed towards the world: it is there-
fore tied to knowledge. In other words, the interest in systematicity is at the
same time, in Adorno’s interpretation, an interest in knowledge purely from
within reason’s own competence.
Reason as ontology
That last charge leads us to Adorno’s claim that, on the basis of the autonomy
and unity of reason, Kant grants the rational agent implicit total possession
of objectivity. Reason is inscribed in the subject alone, not in its actions, as
these must refer to states of affairs outside the subject. The special capacity
of the agent to judge or act autonomously is intelligible independently of
the empirical, historical contexts in which those judgements or actions are
undertaken. Reason for Kant, Adorno maintains, is (a1) (my numeration)
‘the pure form of subjectivity’ (ND, 234; GS (Adorno), vi, 233). (It is dif-
ficult to know what part exactly of Kant’s philosophy is being referred to
by Adorno in that proposition.) But according to Adorno there is a further
dimension to Kant’s notion of reason: namely, anything which can be true
falls within the system of reason. Here reason is, as Adorno puts it, (b1) ‘the
totality of objective validities, the archetype of all objectivity’ (ND, 234).x
The co-existence of these two characteristics – reason’s ‘double-edged char-
acter’ (Doppelschlächtigkeit) (GS (Adorno), vi, 234; Table 9.1) – Adorno argues,
collapses objectivity into the subject: the subject, taking on an ontological
role, is reason and anticipates all possible validities. That there might be
x. ‘Inbegriff objektiver Gültigkeit, Urbild aller Objektivität’. GS (Adorno), vi, 233

objectivity in ‘anything opposed to the subject’ is excluded in principle (ND,

234; GS (Adorno), vi, 234). This places pressure, Adorno believes, on the
very notion of ‘the objectivity of truth’ (ND, 234; GS (Adorno), vi, 234) since
truth, in this model, is grounded in subjectivity alone.
This dual structure of reason, Adorno argues, also manifests itself in
Kant’s concept of the rational will. The will is said to be (a2) pure subject:
only as subject, not as object, can it be thought of as spontaneous, not passive
and reactive. Adorno also attempts to map the basic intention of (b1) onto the
will. He suggests (b2) that the will takes on the role of creating objectivity. He
has in mind Kant’s notion that the will of the practical agent makes its own
objects. He writes: ‘Only the will’s a priori ontical nature, which is extant
like a quality, permits us, without being absurd, to make the judgment that
the will creates its objects, the actions’ (ND, 235).y As we can see in Table
9.1, the correlation between the objective orientations of theoretical and
practical reason is not quite as neat as Adorno’s discussion might suggest.
In these two distinguishable deployments of reason the agent becomes
both the efficient – it is free of the influence of heteronomy – and formal cause
of the objects: what is important in objects is that they can be referred back
to the capacities of the agent. Their materiality, whether in the image of the
thing-in-itself or in impulses which are not caused by the agent are, Adorno
claims, ‘banned as heteronomous’ (ND, 235; GS (Adorno), vi, 234). Because
the object is understood through the actions of the agent the ‘differentia
specifica of act and object [Gegenstand]’ (ND, 238; GS (Adorno), vi, 236) are
written out of what we need to account for when we think about objectivity.
Nature in reason
Adorno’s efforts to develop an account of reason’s autonomy are framed
by the conclusions reached in his analysis of Kant. What that account of
autonomy must eschew is any notion of reason as fully explicable as a causal
or instrumental orientation towards the world; the role of materiality –
the extra-rational – needs to be accommodated in explaining the exercise
of reason; the rational agent must be conceived as located in the world. In
order to provide a theory which contains these elements Adorno believes
that we must include, among the conditions of reason’s autonomy, what
Kant had designated as heteronomy: i.e. nature. The challenge this presents
y. ‘Nur dank seiner a priori ontischen Natur, der eines gleich wie eine Eigenschaft Vorhandenen,
kann von ihm ohne Widersinn geurteilt werden, daß er seine Objekte, die Handlungen, schaffe.’
GS (Adorno), vi, 234
is clear: the autonomy of reason can no longer be defended as a thesis about

reason’s separation from nature, yet reason cannot be, either, wholly subject
to nature. Reason will instead be explained, as we shall see, as a ‘dialectical’
phenomenon in that it is both ‘a moment of nature and yet something else’
(ND, 289).z And even its character as ‘something else’ is to be understood as
a natural process.
Adorno introduces this dialectical concept through a speculative story
in which (what look quite like) conventional ideas about the evolutionary
development of human reason are fused with Freudian concepts about the
role of the instincts in the development of the human being. The intellec-
tual sphere that this theorisation occupies is elusive. While Adorno believes
that his descriptions of the development of reason objectively capture the
phenomenon under consideration his method is certainly not one of science.
Furthermore, Adorno may marshal a considerable number of Freudian con-
cepts, but he does not take Freud’s account of the drives/instincts – material
that is central to his own theory – as a final description of the human psyche
(see ND, 273; GS (Adorno), vi, 269). Indeed, Adorno freely adjusts some of
Freud’s conclusions, particularly when they, as Adorno sees it, fall short in
recognising the particular ways in which the drives are socialised (see ND,
349; GS (Adorno), vi, 342). But Freud, nevertheless, is for Adorno a radical
thinker whose theory amounts to no bourgeois ideology. Adorno believes
that Freud’s drive theory does not assume the ultimacy of individuality.
In this regard he is to be strongly differentiated from the neo-Freudians –
Karen Horney in particular – whom Adorno accuses of ‘talking incessantly
about the influence of society upon individuals’, without appreciating ‘that
not only the individual but the very category of individuality is a prod-
uct of society’.aa,22 Devoid of that insight psychoanalysis becomes ‘social
conformism’.23
Adorno regards freedom and reason as aspects of the one psychic phe-
nomenon: the ability to think and act without reflex is at the same time a
capacity to initiate in contrast to being caused to respond: ‘If passive reac-
tions were all there is’, he writes, ‘there could be no thinking’ (ND, 217 ).bb
The emergence of freedom/reason is explained by Adorno within the bio-
logical drive for self-preservation. Somehow the very capacity for reason, as
z. ‘[E]in anderes als Natur und doch ein Moment von dieser . . .’ GS (Adorno), vi, 285
aa. ‘Während sie unablässig über den Einfluß der Gesellschaft aufs Individuum reden, vergessen
sie, daß nicht nur das Individuum, sondern schon die Kategorie der Individualität ein Produkt
der Gesellschaft ist’. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Die revidierte Psychoanalyse’, GS (Adorno), viii, 27
bb. ‘Bliebe es bei den passiven Reaktionen, so bliebe es, nach der Terminologie der älteren
Philosophie, bei der Rezeptivität: kein Denken wäre möglich.’ GS (Adorno), vi, 216
a capacity to think, has ‘genetically evolved from the force of human drives’
(ND, 230).cc He claims that ‘self-preservation in its history calls for more
than conditioned reflexes, and thus it prepares for what it would eventually
transcend’ (ND, 217).dd Conditioned reflexes, presumably, produce merely
uniform responses to the same environmental challenges.
Adorno, arguably, can find room within Freud’s theory for a develop-
mental account of reason, even though Freud himself does not offer a theory
of the development of human cognitive capacities. Notwithstanding, some
broad indications in his work on the drives/instincts might seem to allow
space within which such a theory could be envisaged. In ‘The Instincts and
Their Vicissitudes’ he identifies instinctual stimuli (Triebreize) as demands
which cannot be met in the way that the demands of external stimuli are met,
namely, by ‘muscular movement’. The demands of these instincts or drives
can be addressed only by the organism’s adjustment of some feature of the
outer world ‘to afford satisfaction to the internal source of stimulation’.ee,24
In order to achieve that adjustment it seems that the organism itself must
change. The need to satisfy the instinctual stimulus creates a dynamic for the
development of the organism. Freud writes:
We may therefore well conclude that instincts and not external stimuli
are the true motive forces behind the advances that have led the
nervous system, with its unlimited capacities, to its present high level
of development. There is naturally nothing to prevent our supposing
that the instincts themselves are, at least in part, precipitates of the
effects of external stimulation, which in the course of phylogenesis
have brought about modifications in the living substance.ff,25
Adorno argues that there is a connection between the emergence of reason

and that of self. Non-reflective creatures – those that operate on condi-
tioned responses – display unified responses to whatever threatens them.
The nature of this ‘unity’ is unclear. But Adorno proposes that the evolved
cc. ‘Vernunft [hat] genetisch aus der Triebenergie als deren Differenzierung sich entwickelt . . .’ GS
(Adorno), vi, 229
dd. ‘Selbsterhaltung ihrerseits verlangt, in ihrer Geschichte, mehr als den bedingten Reflex und
bereitet damit vor, was sie schließlich überschritte.’ GS (Adorno), vi, 216
ee. ‘[D]aß sie der inneren Reizquelle die Befriedigung bietet . . .’ Sigmund Freud, ‘Triebe und
Triebschicksale’, in Gesammelte Werke x, ed. Anna Freud (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999), 213
ff. ‘Wir dürfen also wohl schließen, daß sie, die Triebe, und nicht die äußeren Reize, die
eigentlichen Motoren der Fortschritte sind, welche das so unendlich leistungsfähige
Nervensystem auf seine gegenwärtige Entwicklungshöhe gebracht haben. Natürlich steht
nichts der Annahme im Wege, daß die Triebe selbst, wenigstens zum Teil, Niederschläge
äußerer Reizwirkungen sind, welche im Laufe der Phylogenese auf die lebende Substanz
verändernd einwirkten.’ Freud, ‘Triebe und Triebschicksale’, 213–14
capacities of the reflective creature – over the purely reflexive – ‘presumably

emulate the biological individual’s prescription of the form of his reflexes;
the reflexes scarcely would be without any unity’ (ND, 217).gg The unity of
the creature is reproduced in new form in human beings gaining a reflec-
tive (freedom/reason) capacity. As human beings – if, in fact, Adorno means
human beings – moved from pure passivity and receptivity, in which self-
preservative instincts were simply activated, towards reason and freedom
in which some kind of space exists between threat and action – notwith-
standing the persistence of a certain conditioned reflexivity – the original
unity of the instinctive ‘compulsive’ creature carried over into the unity
of the will that is characteristic of creatures like us. The ‘reflective faculty’
takes possession of the challenges of self-preservation and this ‘opens up the
difference that has evolved between the self and the reflexes’ (ND, 217).hh
As Adorno recognises, it is the ego or self that Freud identifies with the
primal drive for self-preservation (‘the self of self-preservation’ (ND, 217;
GS (Adorno), vi, 217)). But this acknowledgement raises a puzzling issue in
Adorno’s appropriation of Freud’s position. Freud distinguishes between
‘the ego, or self-preservative, instincts and the sexual instincts’.ii,26 He also
describes the sublimation of the pleasure principle as ‘the influence of the
ego’s instincts of self-preservation’.jj,27 So how then can we hold, as Adorno
effectively does, that it is a primal act of self-preservation that explains the
emergence of the self? Self-preservation presupposes the self. The position
articulated appears to be, after all, a synthesis of conventional claims about
the development of human cognitive capacities and Freudian drive theory.
Adorno does not hold that the emergent self stands, ultimately, ‘beyond
nature’ (ND, 220; GS (Adorno), vi, 219). Subjects are, he writes, ‘fused
with their own physical nature [Körperlichkeit]’ (ND, 221; GS (Adorno), vi,
220). This contention rests on the idea that reason is inseparable from self-
preservation. Exploiting this suggestive account of reason’s distinctive nat-
ural qualities Adorno rejects the two central planks of the notion of the
autonomy of reason in the Idealist sense, proposing:
gg. ‘Dabei lehnt sie vermutlich an das biologische Individuum sich an, das seinen Reflexen die
Form vorschreibt; schwerlich wären die Reflexe ohne jegliches Moment von Einheit . . . ’ GS
(Adorno), vi, 216
hh. ‘Sie kräftigt sich als das Selbst der Selbsterhaltung; ihm öffnet sich Freiheit als seine gewordene
Differenz von den Reflexen.’ GS (Adorno), vi, 216–17
ii. ‘[D]er Ich- oder Selbsterhaltungstriebe und die der Sexualtriebe . . .’ Freud, ‘Triebe und
Triebschicksale’, 217
jj. ‘Unter dem Einflusse der Selbsterhaltungstriebe des Ichs wird es vom Realitätsprinzip
abgelöst’. Sigmund Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, in Gesammelte Werke xiii, ed. Anna Freud
(Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999), 6
(i) reason is not independent of self-preservation (it thus has interests that
are not typical of its supposed autonomy);
(ii) it is not a power that is independent of nature (independent of instincts
does not mean dualistically other than them).
This quasi-Freudian model is not merely descriptive, then: it provides a

critical standpoint from which to tackle the very idea of reason as standing
outside nature. The mistake is to believe, as Adorno puts it, that reason
‘as the psychological force split off and contrasted with nature’ is ‘nature’s
otherness’ (ND, 217).kk But this is not just a philosophical mistake. It is a
belief which has come to influence the self-understanding of individuals in
modernity. As beings capable of rational autonomy they are directed by the
ego. The implications of this self-understanding are manifest in how human
beings act: as ego creatures they act out of self-preservation, though they
understand themselves to be acting purely rationally. This is a profound
misconception, Adorno argues: ‘if the nature in reason itself is forgotten,
reason will be self-preservation running wild and will regress to nature’ (ND,
289).ll Self-preservation as the interest of the ego will be the exclusive drive
of the organism.
It may seem surprising that Adorno should make that charge of a regres-
sion to nature when he himself urges a reconsideration of the natural basis of
reason. What he has in mind, though, is that the purely reflexive actions of
natural self-preservation are automatic responses. In this regard they make no
differentiations between encountered objects. Ironically, reason’s indiffer-
ence to nature recapitulates the original indifference of the reflexes. Adorno
writes that as reason ‘became autonomous and developed into an apparatus,
thinking also became the prey of reification and congealed into a high-handed
method’.mm,28 It has this character because it refuses to define itself as dif-
ferentiated in its activities or judgements by what it encounters. Hence his
remark: ‘Detached from the object, autonomy is fictitious’ (ND, 223; GS
(Adorno), vi, 222).
How does this materialist perspective enable us to maintain some recog-
nisable sense of the thesis of reason’s autonomy? What that thesis means
kk. ‘Naturhaft ist sie als die zu Zwecken der Selbsterhaltung abgezweigte psychische Kraft;
einmal aber abgespalten und der Natur kontrastiert, wird sie auch zu deren Anderem.’ GS
(Adorno), vi, 216–17
ll. ‘Je hemmungsloser jedoch die Vernunft in jener Dialektik sich zum absoluten Gegensatz der
Natur macht und an diese in sich selbst vergißt, desto mehr regrediert sie, verwilderte
Selbsterhaltung, auf Natur . . .’ GS (Adorno), vi, 285
mm. ‘Aber Denken ist gleichzeitig mit seiner Verselbständigung zur Apparatur Beute von
Verdinglichung geworden, zur selbstherrlichen Methode geronnen.’ GS (Adorno), x/2, 599
is that human beings have the capacity in some sense to control reflexive
responses. Adorno tries to show – necessitated, perhaps, by the conceptual
material to which he is committed – that it is only the ego itself that can take a
view of our self-preservative instincts, instincts that rest, in the first instance,
with the ego. It is a process of a ‘self-reflection in thinking [Selbstbesinnung]’
(ND, 233; GS (Adorno), vi, 232) that must nevertheless also be an act of self-
preservation. In construing reason as capable of taking a view of itself once
it perceives its instinctive interests Adorno aligns his critical position with
that of the therapeutic practice of psychoanalysis. In this context reflec-
tion brings about a change in the individual’s conception of him/herself.
Alfred Tauber provides a salient account of the rationality of the therapeutic
process:
Freud argued, on the one hand, humans are subject to unconscious

activities (framed within a biological conception), and thus subject to a
form of natural determinism. On the other hand, the rational faculty of
the ego permits, given proper support and articulation, the means of
both understanding the deterministic forces of the unconscious as well
as freeing the ego from their authority. Psychoanalysis thus depends
on an implicit notion of autonomy, whereby the interpretative faculty
would free the analysand from the tyranny of the unconscious in order
to pursue the potential of human creativity and freedom.29
Similarly, Adorno holds that the ego can come to a view of its own tendencies:
those which seem to impel it towards acts of violence against itself, acts that
are legitimated by the imperatives of historical forms of self-preservation.
He writes: ‘The ego principle is implanted in them by society, and soci-
ety rewards that principle although it curbs it’ (ND, 297).nn The experience
of this curtailment or constraint is what prompts therapeutic reflection.
Adorno suggests that in psychoanalysis the ‘theory of the ego as a totality
of defence mechanisms and rationalisations is directed against the individ-
ual as ideology, against the . . . hubris of the self-controlled individual . . . ’
(ND, 352).oo The very reality of the ideological ego – the self of unreflect-
ing self-preservation – can be brought into question by the ego itself. It
seems to involve a moment in which the ego attempts to understand that
nn. ‘[D]as Ichprinzip ist ihnen von der Gesellschaft eingepflanzt, und sie honoriert es, obwohl sie
es eindämmt’. GS (Adorno), vi, 292
oo. ‘Die Theorie des Ichs als eines Inbegriffs von Abwehrmechanismen und Rationalisierungen
zielt gegen die gleiche Hybris des seiner selbst mächtigen Individuums, gegen das Individuum
als Ideologie.’ GS (Adorno), vi, 345
the drive for self-preservation – which also constitutes it – is a threat (both

to itself and others with whom it is affectively related). The individual as
ego persists in its current form by denying itself the prospect of that knowl-
edge. As Adorno puts it: ‘For the sake of self-preservation the ego must
always, in the moment of achieving it, suspend the knowledge which, for
the sake of self-preservation, it has itself achieved, it must deny itself self-
consciousness.’pp,30 What Adorno is insisting here is that the ego’s fear of
its own destruction deflects it from knowledge, yet it is only through that
knowledge that self-preservation can be secured.
This unusual theory perhaps helps to explain a controversial feature of
Adorno’s conception of how reason ought to be used under the conditions of
current history. He tasks reason with the negative role of ensuring that we do
not act out of the habitual norms that he associates with the identity thinking
that culminated in the catastrophic events of the twentieth century. The
socialised ego has understood its own health to be preserved solely by acting
within, and perpetuating, those norms. Gaining awareness of the habituated
norms of the socialised ego does not guarantee that one is no longer subject
to them. For that reason a constant vigilance against the compulsion of those
norms is what, ultimately, Adorno thinks of as rational autonomy today.31 By
contrast, a theory of autonomy which represents human beings as operating
in a space above the drive for self-preservation – Kant’s pre-eminently –
misunderstands the interests of reason. In imagining itself to be pure it
divests itself of self-reflection.
It is worth noting, before concluding, that Adorno’s criticism of the Ide-
alist conception of the autonomy of reason actually conserves the terms of
Idealism itself. The freedom/nature dualism of that towering conception is
not abandoned: it is dialectically reconstructed. Reason is both freedom and
nature. Adorno’s effort to convince us of that seems to be precariously con-
jectural. Its broad purpose, though, is clear enough. It is designed to address
the limitations of the Idealist conceptualisation of reason’s autonomy. As
self-reflection reason is not instrumentally orientated, but is involved in the
business of self-understanding, and that self-understanding obliges us to
take ourselves seriously as instinctual beings whose apparently most rational
actions turn out to be marked by self-preservative interests.
pp. ‘Die Erkenntnisleistung, die vom Ich um der Selbsterhaltung willen vollzogen wird, muß das
Ich um der Selbsterhaltung willen immer wieder zugleich auch sistieren, das
Selbstbewußtsein sich versagen.’ Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und
Psychologie’, GS (Adorno), viii, 71
Notes
1. As Dieter Henrich expresses it: the practical autonomy of reason involves both that reason
‘must contain principles of action which state what the will wills’ and that it have ‘the
power to affect actions which take place solely because they are rational’; Dieter Henrich,
The Unity of Reason: essays on Kant’s philosophy, ed. Richard L. Velkley (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1994), 94–5.
2. F. W. J. Schelling, ‘Introduction to the outline of a system of the philosophy of nature’, in
German Idealism: an anthology and guide, ed. Brian O’Connor and Georg Mohr (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 371; ‘Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der
Naturphilosophie’, in F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling, 14 vols.
(Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–61), iii, 277.
3. Schelling, ‘Introduction to the outline of a system of the philosophy of nature’, 368.
4. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature: part two of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences,
trans. A. V. Miller (2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), § 249, 20.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone,
1997), 75.
6. ND: Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge,
1973).
7. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books,
1974), § 107, 167.
8. Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: lectures 1964–65, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 45.
9. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, ed.
Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (2nd edn, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), Letter
117, 29 February 1940, 321.
10. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: interventions and catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 9.
11. For a fuller discussion of Adorno’s reading of Hegel see Brian O’Connor, ‘Adorno’s
reconception of the dialectic’, in Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (eds.), A Companion
to Hegel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 537–55.
12. Influential cases being, as Rowland Stout shows, Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, and
G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention. See Rowland Stout, ‘Two ways to understand causality in
agency’, in Anton Leist (ed.), Action in Context (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 137–53.
13. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor, introduction by Andrew
Reath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) (hereafter CPrR), 69.
14. CPrR, 30 (GS v, 32).
15. CPrR, 71.
16. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
17. CPrR, 71 (GS v, 83).
18. CPrR, 33.
19. Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(Cambridge: Polity Press and Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 186.
20. Pauline Kleingeld, ‘Kant on the unity of theoretical and practical reason’, Review of Meta-
physics 52, no. 2 (1998), 312.
21. Ibid., 338.
22. Translation B.O’C.
23. Adorno, ‘Die revidierte Psychoanalyse’, 29.
24. Sigmund Freud, ‘The instincts and their vicissitudes’, in Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud xiv (1914–16): On the History of the Psychoanalytic
Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud,
with Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 120.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 124.
27. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud xviii (1920–2): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and
Other Works, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, with Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson
(London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 10.
28. Adorno, Critical Models, 127.
29. Alfred I. Tauber, ‘Freud’s dreams of reason: the Kantian structure of psychoanalysis’,
History of the Human Sciences 22, no. 4 (2009), 1–29, at 2.
30. Translation B.O’C.
31. For further discussion of Adorno’s notion of autonomy as a resistance to the norms that
socialise us, see J. G. Finlayson, ‘Adorno on the ethical and the ineffable’, European Journal
of Philosophy 10 (2002), 1–25, and Brian O’Connor, Adorno (Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge,
2013), ch. 5.
10
German neo-Hegelianism and a plea for another Hegel
Andreas Grossmann
According to a celebrated dictum in the preface to Hegel’s Elements of the

Philosophy of Right, philosophy’s concern is to comprehend its own time in
thought.1 Notoriously, this sentence is often misunderstood, as though it
were Hegel’s intention to sanction and legitimate the Prussian state of the
time. Rudolf Haym contributed greatly to this view’s lasting influence with
his lectures on ‘Hegel and His Time’, published in 1857. Haym could dis-
cern in Hegel only the philosopher in service to the Prussian state in the
Restoration period, a philosopher who accommodated that state as a matter
of course, even ‘cuddling up’ to it. Thus ‘the Hegelian system’ and especially
the philosophy of right had become, according to him, ‘the scholarly abode
of the Prussian Restoration’s spirit’.a Friedrich Meinecke, in his major work
Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, which enjoyed numerous editions following
its first publication at the end of 1907, believed he could detect a nearly direct
intellectual historical lineage from Hegel to Bismarck. Meinecke admittedly
reveals himself to be influenced more by Ranke than by Hegel. The former
acted as the intermediary between Hegel and Bismarck, whom Meinecke
greatly admired. On the other hand, Meinecke is concerned that in the work
of Hegel, ‘purely empirical knowledge is once again obscured’ and that
‘this material world [is transformed] into a mere shadow play’ as a result
of ‘his view of nation and state’. The constitutional legal scholar Hermann
Heller drew upon Meinecke in his 1921 book Hegel und der nationale Macht-
staatsgedanke in Deutschland (Hegel and the Notion of the National Power State
For reasons of space, in this chapter German originals are given for only the more substantial and
significant quotations.
a. ‘Angeschmiegt . . . das Hegelsche System . . . zur wissenschaftlichen Behausung des Geistes der
preußischen Restauration [geworden].’ R. Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit (Berlin: Rudolf Gaertner,
1857), 359
232
German neo-Hegelianism and a plea for another Hegel 233
in Germany) when he pointedly characterised Hegel as the ‘first and most

thorough herald of the idea of the modern power state [Machtstaat]’. ‘The
national ideology of the power state’, Heller explained in the introduction to
his treatise, ‘is in fact itself the offspring of Idealist philosophy, and its father
is none other than Hegel’.b ,2 Such a declarative statement does not, how-
ever, indicate any retreat from Hegel. On the contrary, Heller revealed his
assured belief that several aspects of ‘Hegel’s power politics [Machtpolitik]’
would need to become part of ‘Germany’s public opinion . . . if the German
nation is to rescue itself from this painful present into a better future’.3 In
this respect, Heller’s portrait of Hegel is ambivalent. On the one hand, Hegel
appears as ‘the most important pioneer in the German people’s path from a
nation of culture and civilisation [Kulturnation] to a nation as a power state
[Machtstaatsnation]’ and hence as a founder of that ‘ideology of power’ which
had become a reality in the age of Bismarck and Treitschke. On the other
hand, as Heller explained in the introduction to Hegel’s early essay on Die
Verfassung Deutschlands (The Constitution of Germany), the 1920 edition of
which he edited, the study of Hegel made clear the ‘painful truth’ that ‘all
political existence . . . is not, admittedly, force [Gewalt], but, none the less,
power [Macht]’.c,4
Other, more disillusioned notes were sounded by Franz Rosenzweig, a
former student of Meinecke, in the light of the catastrophe of the First World
War. Rosenzweig was almost finished with his large-scale study Hegel und
der Staat at the war’s outbreak, but could complete it only after the end of
the war in 1919. And Rosenzweig did so reluctantly. This is because Hegel’s
concept of the state did not, as Rosenzweig wrote in the preface to his work,
open up an outlook ‘on a inwardly and outwardly ample German future’.
Rosenzweig, who sought to follow that path leading from Hegel to Bismarck
that Meinecke had mapped,5 had been sobered: ‘It ended differently. An
expanse of rubble now marks that space where the Reich once stood. Just as
I would not have written this book were I to take up the project today, it is
equally impossible for me to revise it. The only option left to me is to publish
it as it once was, as evidence, both in its origin and in its intention, of the
Geist of the years before the war, not the ‘spirit’ of 1919.’d
b. ‘Die nationale Machtstaatsideologie ist sogar selbst das Kind der idealistischen Philosophie und
kein anderer als Hegel ihr Vater.’ H. Heller, Hegel und der nationale Machtstaatsgedanke in
Deutschland: ein Beitrag zur politischen Geistesgeschichte (1921), in Orientierung und Entscheidung,
vol. i of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. C. Müller, 3 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1992), 23
c. ‘schmerzliche Wahrheit . . . alles politische Sein . . . zwar nicht Gewalt, aber Macht.’ H. Heller,
‘Einleitung in G. W. F. Hegel, Die Verfassung Deutschlands’ (1920), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. C.
Müller, 3 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1992), i, 15–20, at 19 and 20
d. ‘Es ist anders gekommen. Ein Trümmerfeld bezeichnet den Ort, wo vormals das Reich stand.
Dies Buch, das ich heute nicht mehr geschrieben hätte, konnte ich genausowenig umarbeiten. Es
234 Andreas Grossmann
The ‘renewal of Hegelianism’ as ‘neo-Hegelianism’, the advent of which

was marked by Wilhelm Windelband’s 1910 speech in the Heidelberg
Academy, is also associated with the names of other leading German philoso-
phers. For Windelband, the founder of the south-west German school of neo-
Kantianism, the progress from neo-Kantianism to neo-Hegelianism repeated
the passage from Kant to Hegel, a repetition born of ‘functional necessity’.6
Neo-Kantianism’s lopsided epistemological orientation would be overcome
via a ‘return to Hegel’7 – as would the danger of historicism and relativism.8
Windelband sees a ‘hunger for Weltanschauung’ as the fundamental aspect
of this return to Hegel in contemporary philosophy.9 He hears the ‘call for
a philosophy of action and will’, which is invoked so that ‘the relationship
between philosophy and the remaining disciplines may again be formed in
that profound and fruitful way it existed in Hegel’s time, to the detriment of
none’.10 Similarly, Heinrich Levy, in his 1927 book Die Hegel-Renaissance in
der deutschen Philosophie, discerns the links between Lebensphilosophie and neo-
Kantian schools in the progress ‘towards a markedly dialectical metaphysics
of Hegelian character’.11 This need for synthesis and the ‘trend towards total-
ity’ are characteristic of this Hegel renaissance (which, however, according
to Levy, will have to methodologically overcome, via its turn to Kant, the
‘aporias’, ‘errors’ and ‘absolutisms’ of Hegelian synthesis).12
In 1930 Hermann Glockner similarly spoke of a ‘Hegel atmosphere’ in the
1920s that pervaded ‘philosophical Germany’,13 and he explicitly described
the label ‘neo-Hegelianism’ as a term used by the ‘metaphysical movement
of the most recent past’ to refer to itself.14 It was indeed Glockner who
in 1935 characterised German philosophy and especially the philosophy of
Hegel as the genuine form taken by a ‘union of philosophy and life’ in a pro-
grammatic essay on ‘German Philosophy’ published in the first edition of the
Zeitschrift für Deutsche Kulturphilosophie, the journal he co-edited with the legal
scholar Karl Larenz and which was heralded as the ‘successor to Logos’. Ger-
man philosophy encompasses ‘the entire person’, thus ‘permeating life’ and
‘crowning’ the ‘völkisch community’. In this sense ‘German’ becomes nothing
less than a battle cry. After all, Glockner argued, ‘the German philosopher’
does not indulge in empty abstractions. Being rooted in his ‘Volk’ and in his
people’s ‘Geist’,15 he consciously takes up the decided struggle ‘against the
un-German Geist . . . that has, over the course of the past decades, regrettably
infiltrated our philosophy in numerous ways’.16 The German philosopher
blieb nur übrig, es so herauszugeben wie es einmal war, in Ursprung also und Absicht ein
Zeugnis des Geists der Vorkriegsjahre, nicht des “Geists” von 1919.’ F. Rosenzweig, Hegel und
der Staat (1920), ed. F. Lachmann (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 18
knows that within him resides the ‘soul of a farmer’ and a ‘soldier’s soul’.17
And so ‘just like a soldier’, he cannot but follow the ‘call of the Führer’,18 who
as a ‘German of genius’ belongs, according to Glockner, in the company of
Kant and Hegel.19
Notable lawyers and legal historians demonstrated at the time how a neo-
Hegelian would follow the call of the Führer when it came to legal philosophy
and constitutional law.20 Some, such as Julius Binder and Walther Schönfeld,
are hardly recognised today. Other names, such as Karl Larenz and Gerhard
Dulckeit (both of them students of Julius Binder), are known to lawyers
educated in legal philosophy and legal history, generally not as representa-
tives of that ‘metaphysical movement’, but rather, in Larenz’s case, as the
author of the Methodenlehre der Rechtswissenschaft, which has enjoyed numer-
ous editions and still ranks as an important work, as well as of a legal ethics,21
and in Dulckeit’s case, as the author of the equally relevant and frequently
reissued Römische Rechtsgeschichte (Roman Legal History).22 The reception of
Hegel’s legal philosophy in the movement that had given itself the name ‘neo-
Hegelian’ is not only remarkable because of the involvement of well-known
and influential lawyers who sought, as Hegelians, to comprehend their time
in thought. The pretension involved in this was nothing less than the belief
that they would reveal the ‘true Hegel’ and do so in a way that understood
Hegel better than he had understood himself. However, this Hegel reception
is noteworthy above all because it was in no way a strictly scholarly affair.
Neo-Hegelianism was not at all, as Karl Larenz attempted to suggest later, a
movement confined to the second decade of the last century, concerned only
with ‘surmounting neo-Kantian philosophy’s dualistic approach with the
help of the Hegelian dialectic’.23 Certainly the specific recourse to Hegel’s
legal philosophy in the thematic, juridical neo-Hegelianism under discussion
here belonged to the complex context of the intensive constitutional debates
of the Weimar period – a period experienced as one of crisis and one in which
there were very good reasons for raising questions about achieving national
unity and political homogeneity. Neo-Hegelianism’s profile must be exam-
ined against this backdrop. What was sought in Hegel? What was interesting
about Hegel? The neo-Hegelians’ ‘Hegel’ is a figure who was characterised by
anti-liberalism and anti-individualism from the very beginning and who was
straightforwardly adopted to provide ideological justification for the ‘Third
Reich’ after 1933.24 Accordingly, the neo-Hegelians regarded Hegel’s legal
philosophy as a topic that could not be limited to scholarly debates within
the university. Instead, this philosophy was to serve as the reservoir from
which answers were to be drawn to the ‘fundamental questions of modern
jurisprudence’ (as was programmatically declared in an edited volume pub-

lished by Larenz in 1935).25 Hegel was to be the philosophical forefather
of the national socialist ‘refiguration of law in German Geist’, as Dulckeit
phrased it in his 1936 book to which he gave the subtitle, ‘investigations into
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and its significance for our time’.26
This essay will present several aspects of this Hegel reception in more
detail with reference primarily to the example of Karl Larenz, who had
clearly the most significant profile as a representative of neo-Hegelianism
among lawyers and legal scholars, and who, as has been pointed out above,
remained an influential university teacher in postwar Germany. This is nei-
ther a meditation on a matter dead and buried nor a question of satisfying
an antiquarian interest, as will become clear in the following presentation of
several of the primary features of the philosophy of law shared by lawyers and
legal philosophers who understood themselves as ‘neo-Hegelians’. Instead,
the following discussion will directly address the question of whether their
reception of Hegel can be justified in juridical or political terms. Finally, one
cannot properly understand the intellectual history of the Federal Repub-
lic after the Second World War without a knowledge of the history of this
highly problematic reception of Hegel. A broad outline of prospects for con-
trary, productive exegeses of Hegel in jurisprudence and philosophy will be
offered at the end of this essay.
1 The struggle for the ‘real Hegel’ as a struggle against

liberalism
Karl Larenz’s adaptation of Hegel received its decisive impetuses from his
mentor in Göttingen, Julius Binder, and the lawyer Walther Schönfeld, who
taught in Greifswald at the time Larenz was writing. With his turn away
from ‘dialectical jurisprudence’, Schönfeld effectively provided Larenz’s
catchword, while Binder, whose work had drawn from neo-Kantianism, sys-
tematically developed the fundamentals of so-called ‘objective idealism’.27
According to Schönfeld, jurisprudence ought to take a ‘dialectical’ charac-
ter as an ‘organic theory’ and a ‘doctrine of reality’ that preserves ‘life and
its mysterious connections’ and, out of its commitment to the Geist of the
German people, refines and develops that consciousness for the law that is
rooted in the Volk. ‘Dialectical’ thus becomes nearly a synonym for ‘German’:
German law, Schönfeld writes, is commensurate with ‘German black-and-
white’ and ‘German depth’ and is, in this respect, ‘thoroughly dialectical’.
‘Dialectical jurisprudence . . . is German jurisprudence because to think in a
German way means to think dialectically’.e Defined in this way, the study of
law is a ‘jurisprudence of life’. It is set against that which Schönfeld consid-
ered a ‘one-sided rational jurisprudence’ that he, from his position as a legal
historian, discerned in not only Roman law, which was supposedly overly
self-alienated, but also in contemporary neo-Kantianism, particularly Hans
Kelsen’s Reine Rechtslehre (The Pure Science of Law).28 Towards the end of the
work mentioned above, Schönfeld alluded to Binder’s legal philosophy.29
Larenz also referred to Binder’s work in his book Das Problem der Rechtsgel-
tung (The Problem of Legal Validity), published in 1929 when he was a lecturer
at Göttingen. Invoking Binder’s work as a foil to Schönfeld’s, Larenz artic-
ulated a pronounced criticism of contemporary legal theories – here Larenz
was thinking primarily of Hans Kelsen – and, at the same time, outlined the
alternative of a legal doctrine based on Hegel, or more precisely, on Binder’s
appropriation of Hegel.
Larenz placed positive law in opposition to discredited positivism. He
believed the former to be the realisation of a concept of law valid in all
historical periods and, as such, the ‘objectively moral Geist’. The ‘is’ of positive
law is thus not abstractly opposed by any timeless ‘ought’. While Kelsen kept
‘is’ and ‘ought’ separate in this way, Larenz found that they were much better
thought of in terms of a dialectical ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung). The normativity
that is embedded in the idea of law comes to fruition in positive law. The
‘validity’ of the law thus implies the positivisation of a norm, and the sense
of obligation attached to this norm rests precisely upon the concept of law
as a basis for establishing validity that is itself not bound by considerations
of time. Larenz argued:
Both natural law and positivism are thereby transcended, since natural
law asserts the timelessness of law, positivism the simple temporality
of law. This view’s philosophical form is to be found in Hegel’s
doctrines of the objective Geist and the actuality of the idea.f
Because law is the actualisation within time of something beyond the

boundaries of time, it is, as Larenz phrased it, ‘the actuality of meaning
e. ‘Dialektische Jurisprudenz . . . ist deutsche Jurisprudenz, weil deutsch denken dialektisch

denken heißt.’ W. Schönfeld, Ueber den Begriff einer dialektischen Jurisprudenz (Greifswald:
Bamberg, 1929), 41–2
f. ‘Naturrecht und Positivismus . . . sind damit beide überwunden, . . . , denn das Naturrecht
behauptet die Zeitlosigkeit, der Positivismus die bloße Zeitlichkeit des Rechtes. Seine
philosophische Ausgestaltung hat dieser Standpunkt in der Lehre Hegels vom objektiven Geist
und von der Wirklichkeit der Idee gefunden.’ K. Larenz, Das Problem der Rechtsgeltung (1929)
(Darmstadt:Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967), 26; cf. 22, 31, 36
[Sinn-Wirklichkeit]’.30 An obligation or a sense of ‘validity’ that is not imposed

from without, and not therefore open to contestation, is peculiar to the law
by virtue of that idea of the law that is immanent in itself. It is because of
this, according to Larenz, that the law cannot be open to contest, since the
law, as a reflection of the idea of law, is like an organism, ‘an entity, complete
in and of itself, stable and teleological’. The law aims at ‘entirety’, provided
that the idea of law being drawn upon is not a merely regulative idea as it
is in Kantian thought, but instead a constitutive ‘formal principle for the
community’.31 The law is that of a ‘national character’ (Volksgeist) as directed
by the idea of law, the manifestation of a national community’s ethical will.
Ultimately it is history alone that in deciding on the value of a people decides
on the value of its laws.32
Only a few years later, in a blatant accommodation of the National
Socialist regime, Larenz would make explicit the political orientation of his
thought that was implicit in this early work’s outline of his adaptation of
Hegel. Admittedly, the varieties of ‘dialectical’ jurisprudence devised by
Schönfeld and Binder cannot be considered, upon closer examination, polit-
ically ‘innocent’ either. They are distinguished by a consciously German and
conservative character, anti-liberal and anti-modern. There are even anti-
Semitic tones. The invocation of a German character, German freedom,
German thought, German profundity and even German law is developed in
a thoroughly superficial way during the period of the Second World War in
Schönfeld’s work.33 There, Hegel’s legal philosophy is awarded the dubious
distinction of being ‘ancient’ and ‘Germanic’ in one. The modernity of Hegel
is suppressed. In those cases where it was acknowledged, for example when
Schönfeld referred to Hegel’s support for Jewish emancipation,34 it was
explained away as an instance of the philosopher having neglected to draw
‘the necessary political conclusions’ from his insight (at least as interpreted
by Schönfeld), that the ‘alliance between soul and Geist’ is ‘emblematised by
the racial soul’. (As early as 1933, Schönfeld classified all things Jewish as
‘un-German’, thereby sanctioning the National Socialists’ removal of Jews
from their jobs in the civil service.35 ) In Schönfeld’s own writing, in the
second volume of the series Reich und Recht in der deutschen Philosophie (Reich
and Law in German Philosophy), published in 1943 and edited by Larenz, the
real adversary is identified as Marxism, which Schönfeld considered to be
the political form taken by Judaism and to have perverted Hegelian phi-
losophy, ‘turning it on its very head in the most fiendish manner’. The
arguments fought over Hegel were ultimately portrayed as an existentially
important matter of life and death, a battle fought against ‘Marxist devilry’.
‘All of this’, Schönfeld continued, ‘sooner or later ends in Bolshevism, that
demonic revolt against the spirit of Western civilisation . . . , unleashing its

unreason, which will see its work finally done when all that our fathers have
spent centuries building has been levelled to the ground’.g
Anti-liberal and especially anti-individualistic resentment equally per-
vades Binder’s legal philosophy after 1925. That battle against liberal and
democratic political doctrine, with its appeals to Hegel among other things,
was at its heart a struggle against individualism, which Binder identified
as the ‘root’ of liberalism. Binder contrasted the ‘deformed caricature of a
state created by individualism’, one essentially subjective and based on the
idea of human rights, with the ‘intrinsic meaning’ of a state understood as
a ‘transpersonal community’.36 The aim was to transcend the ‘abstract’ per-
spective of the Enlightenment, and there was a call for mediation between
individual and community, one that would produce a ‘synthesis between
the individual and the whole’.37 This would in turn leave behind the oppo-
sition of community and individual, indeed the latter would be ‘embedded’
in the former.38 It is evident that the source behind this conception is an
organic concept of the state, a combination of Hegel’s doctrine of national
Geist (Volksgeist) with the Historical School of law. Binder insists on see-
ing the community as analogous to a living natural organism, one in which
an interdependency between the individual person and the whole commu-
nity prevails.39 Binder’s firm conceptualisation of the posited ‘transpersonal
state’ as a ‘power state’ alludes to Savigny, but also to Friedrich Julius Stahl.
With reference to Hegel, Binder discards the notion of the sovereignty of a
people and propagates instead the idea of the sovereignty of the state.40 The
concept of power is explicitly awarded an ‘intrinsic value’, thereby making
it possible to conceive of the collectivity, whether labelled a community or
a Volk, as a whole that completely absorbs the individual components. ‘The
power of the community under law over each individual person’ knows ‘no
boundaries’, Binder explained. This was ‘power pure and simple’, which is
why the state may even demand that its citizens sacrifice their own lives for
it. Such a sacrifice must not be understood as an ‘obliteration, but instead
as the most glorious preservation of personhood, the entire reason for the
physical existence of the individual person’.41 If the individual member of
the community exists only in and through the community, and if ‘the essen-
tial principle of law is the living will of the people’,42 then there can be no
g. ‘Teufelei des Marxismus . . . das Ganze . . . ergibt früher oder später den Bolschewismus, diesen
Aufstand des jüdischen Ungeistes gegen den Geist des Abendlandes . . . , um dafür seine
Unvernunft zu setzen, die dann am Ziel sein wird, wenn sie alles dem Erdboden gleich gemacht
hat, was unsere Väter in einer Arbeit von Jahrtausenden darauf gebaut haben.’ W. Schönfeld, Die
Geschichte der Rechtswissenschaft im Spiegel der Metaphysik, vol. ii of Karl Larenz (ed.), Reich und
Recht in der deutschen Philosophie (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1943), 510f., 513f., 519
more talk of an individual’s legitimate claim to freedom. Basic and human

rights are subjective, can ‘no longer play any role’ and indeed must simply
be dismissed as ‘nonsensical’.43
Binder’s transpersonalism, which consciously understood itself to be
proper conservatism, necessarily – and as a matter of principle – rejected
the Weimar Republic. One must place Binder alongside other conservative
intellectuals of the time who could be said to have written the obituary of
the young German democracy even before it was finally laid to rest in 1933.
This was made evidently clear in a small book written by Binder in 1929,
on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Weimar
Republic, entitled Führerauslese in der Demokratie (The Selection of Leaders in
a Democracy).44 Moved by a ‘yearning for the Führer’ and giving voice to the
‘cry for the Führer’,45 Binder questioned ‘whether it is not democracy itself
as a form of government, bestowed upon us by the events of 9 November
and the Weimar National Assembly, that places fundamental obstacles in the
way of the Führer’s emergence among us’.h Binder left no room for doubt
that his question aimed at something ‘beyond democracy’ – it aimed at
‘surmounting’ democracy.46 Democracy, which is liberalism’s individualism
put into practice, and the idea of the leadership of the Führer, understood
as an instance of an organic notion of the state that brings the individual
members and the entirety of the Volk into a ‘dialectical’ relationship, can
only be comprehended as irreconcilable antitheses.47
According to Binder, the ‘selection of a Führer’ is not something that could
be left to democratic elections or parliamentary decision-making. In the case
of democracy, the selection of a leader is a matter of a political process, which
proves that it is ‘essentially incapable of identifying the Führer’.48 Binder
believed that the Führer would rise from the people’s Geist, and thereby
proceed from a ‘higher power’ than would ever be possible were the process
left to democracy. Succinctly stated: ‘The Führer cannot be created; the Führer
creates himself’, in fact, ‘as he understands his people’s history, he knows
himself to be the Führer and embraces this’.i,49 Just like Bismarck50 in years
past or Mussolini at that very hour . . . 51
It is history that is ultimately the deciding factor. History is the instrument
through which the people’s Geist expresses itself and is the perspective of the
Weltgeist, a perspective that transcends the capriciousness and limitations of
h. ‘Ob nicht gerade die Demokratie als die Staatsform, die uns der 9. November und die Weimarer
Nationalversammlung beschert haben, ein ganz wesentliches Hindernis sei, das sich dem
Werden des Führers bei uns in den Weg stellt.’ J. Binder, Führerauslese in der Demokratie
(Langensalza: Beyer, 1929), 6
i. ‘Der Führer kann nicht gemacht . . . werden; der Führer macht sich selbst . . . indem er die
Geschichte seines Volkes begreift, indem er sich als Führer weiß und will.’ Ibid., 51
any particular generation. Binder concludes: ‘It is from history that those
Führer figures of whom we are in need will arise and meet us, and we may
therefore remain confident that a great people will always find its Führer.
Our appeals for a leader will remain futile so long as we continue to delude
ourselves that a parliament can appoint a Führer. But when our Volk wakes
from its current slumber, when it wakes to acknowledge itself for what it is,
when it finds itself again, then it can be certain that it will also find the Führer
whom it needs. We must hold on to the promise of that moment, however
far in the future it may still lie.’j
Of course, it was not long before a particular person was hailed as the
Volk’s ‘born Führer’, as Binder put it.52 And it was not the monarch. Instead,
the Volk made do with a failed art student from Austria.53 The methodological
and conceptual groundwork had certainly been well laid for the eventual
interment of democracy. It was but a small leap from the polemics against
Enlightenment individualism and individualist ‘democratism’ (as it was on
occasion disdainfully referred to in Binder’s work)54 to the propagation of
a ‘völkisch thought’ that was based on the concepts of unity and purity of
blood and race. Julius Binder saw himself contributing as a legal philosopher
to the supposed ‘renewal’ of law precisely by working to quash that civil
law that understood itself as bound to the Enlightenment and liberalism. He
undertook this work in sustained opposition to those two ideals and acted in
the name of the ‘National Socialist Weltanschauung’. The task was understood
instead to be ‘to create something new from this new spirit, from the spirit
of law embedded in the people’s community [Volksgemeinschaft] itself, which
is the spirit of the Third Reich’. If this spirit could be seized, then ‘what will
have been created will be worthy of our scholars’ diligence, of the Academy
for German Law and of the Führer’, Binder wrote in a book published in 1938
‘with a preface by Minister of the Reich Dr Frank’.55
Binder’s student Karl Larenz, a significant representative of the so-called
‘Kiel school’,56 followed the direction laid out by Binder most consistently.
He, too, engaged in an attempt to find answers in Hegel to current questions,
first and foremost under the banner of the struggle against liberalism. With
relative ease he enlisted and adapted for the National Socialist Weltanschau-
ung those fundamental features of a legal doctrine drawing on the work of
j. ‘Nur in der Geschichte können uns die Führer erwachsen, deren wir bedürfen, und darin ist
begründet, daß ein großes Volk immer einen Führer findet. Unser Schrei nach dem Führer hat so
lange keinen Sinn, als wir uns einbilden, ein Parlament könne einen Führer ernennen. Aber
wenn unser Volk aus seinem gegenwärtigen Traum wieder zum Bewußtsein, zum Bewußtsein
seiner selbst erwacht, wenn es sich wiederfindet, dann kann es gewiß sein, auch den Führer zu
finden, den es braucht. Und auf diesen Augenblick, er mag noch so fern liegen, wollen wir
hoffen.’ Ibid., 66f.
Schönfeld and Binder that he had sketched in his early book Das Problem der
Rechtsgeltung.
Larenz makes an emphatic contrast between the ‘boundless freedom of
liberalism’ and the ‘new, positive interpretation of freedom in the commu-
nity’. He thus seeks to initiate a ‘deeper reflection on methodology’, to foster
a new awareness of ‘the meaning and function of the law in all aspects of life’.57
The notion of ‘meaning’ incorporates Larenz’s earlier understanding of law
as an ‘actuality of meaning’ (Sinn-Wirklichkeit) and reformulates it in a more
specific manner to fit the anti-liberal intention of his project. Larenz strictly
divided the notion of ‘meaning’ (Sinn) from any (normatively understood)
‘purpose’ (Zweck) of law, which he would suggest would stem, in criminal
law, from an individualistic positivism. ‘“Meaning” is intrinsic to something,
whereas purpose is something attributed to it. . . . Meaning reflects the thing
itself in its comprehensive, even metaphysical context. Purpose, on the other
hand, isolates the thing itself, wrenches it from its natural context to give
it a new, not organically determined, but rather instrumental association.’k
Accordingly, the ‘meaning’ of law is the ‘character of the community’, imma-
nent in and constitutive of the circumstances of life. Law is essentially not
law of or for individuals, but rather of and for the ‘people’s community’,
which, according to Larenz, ‘being the original community and comprehen-
sive unit of life, carries within itself the foundational laws of its own being,
the expression of its völkisch character’. As such, all man-made, positive law
is dependent on it.58
It is with precisely this accentuation that Larenz adopts Hegelian legal
philosophy. Its contemporary relevance is supposedly to be seen in the con-
cept of the community, obscured not only by Kant’s abstract individualism
but also by the structure of Hegel’s philosophy of right. The neo-Hegelians
were clear from the outset that following Hegel did not in any way mean
repeating him ‘dogmatically’. As Larenz wrote in his book Die Rechts- und
Staatsphilosophie des deutschen Idealismus und ihre Gegenwartsbedeutung (The
Legal and Political Philosophy of German Idealism and its Contemporary Signif-
icance), published in 1933, the intention was instead to take hold of the
‘spirit’ of the legal philosophy, the so-called ‘superior conception of the
essence and dignity of both the law and the state’ in Hegel’s work and render
it productive for one’s own time.59 There is obviously another aspect to this
k. ‘Der Sinn ,wohnt’ einer Sache ,bei’; der Zweck wird ihr beigelegt . . . Der Sinn stellt eine Sache in
übergreifende, letzthin metaphysische Zusammenhänge; der Zweck isoliert sie, reißt sie aus
ihren natürlichen Zusammenhängen heraus, um sie freilich einem neuen, aber nicht
organischen, sondern eben mittelhaften Zusammenhang einzuordnen.’ K. Larenz, ‘Vom Wesen
der Strafe’, Zeitschrift für Deutsche Kulturphilosophie 2 (1936), 26–50, at 26
hostile rejection of liberalism and positivism that has to be called totally

un-Hegelian. Hegel’s state is duty-bound to effect, within the framework of
its institutions, the realisation of the subject’s legitimate claim to freedom –
‘The state is the existence, the power of right’, as Hegel wrote in the Jenaer
Systementwürfe 1805/06 (Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit).l,60 But Larenz
shifts all the weight of his argument on to the people’s community (Volksge-
meinschaft), that ‘most all-encompassing essence of life in all its totality’ that
bestows the ‘final instance of meaning’ or ‘ultimate determinacy’ on all of
the ‘orders’ that are arrayed below it.61 Carl Schmitt’s announcement that
Hegel’s passing coincided with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 leaves little
room for disagreement: ‘One could thus declare that on this day [30 January
1933], “Hegel has died”.’m,62
2 The ‘Concrete Idea of Order’ in Nazi ideology

The concept of a unified people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft), ostensibly
derived from the ‘real Hegel’, acted for Larenz, too, as a bridge to the legiti-
mation, or more precisely, the ideological sanctioning of National Socialism.
‘Within the framework of National Socialist law’,63 the people’s community
becomes the deciding factor against which the subject’s legal status and
capacity are measured. The individual is no more than a ‘member of the
Volk’, to whom he or she ‘is responsible’ − a term that one repeatedly encoun-
ters in Larenz as a foundational ‘ethical’ category.64 He continues: ‘Now
that the concept of community law [Gemeinschaftsrecht] has again assumed
prominence as the principle of law among our people in our time, this con-
cept must shape how we understand all of our contemporary legal institu-
tions. “Abstract law” and “morality” as well as “civil society”, as understood
by Hegel, are none of them any longer separate concepts within the all-
embracing totality of our law. From the point of view of the history of
philosophy they are merely the antecedents of our law, principles of other
legal forms that have been superseded and sublated in the concept of com-
munity law.’n The law that recognised free subjectivity is transformed into
l. ‘Der Staat ist das Dasein, die Macht des Rechts.’ G. W. F. Hegel, Jenaer Systementwürfe iii:
Naturphilosophie und Philosophie des Geistes, ed. R.-P. Horstmann (Hamburg: Meiner, 1987), 225
m.‘An diesem Tage ist demnach, so kann man sagen, “Hegel gestorben”.’ C. Schmitt, Staat,
Bewegung, Volk (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlags-Anstalt, 1933), 31f.
n. ‘Nachdem die Idee des Gemeinschaftsrechts als das Rechtsprinzip unseres Volkes in unseren
Tagen erneut in die Wirklichkeit getreten ist, haben wir alle rechtlichen Institutionen unserer
Zeit aus dieser Idee zu verstehen. Das ‘abstrakte Recht’, wie übrigens auch die ‘Moralität’ und
die ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’ im Sinne Hegels sind damit keine unterschiedenen Bereiche in der
Gesamtwirklichkeit unseres Rechts mehr, sondern liegen ihm als in der Idee des
‘völkisch law’, which, Larenz insinuates, can be understood and affirmed by

appeal to Hegel’s concept of the state, now given real substance by the spirit
of the nation (Volksgeist). Here, then, we have yet another theoretical posi-
tion that the ‘concrete idea of order’ (‘konkretes Ordnungsdenken’) favoured
by Larenz (and borrowed from Carl Schmitt) transforms directly into a facet
of Nazi ideology.65
Larenz’s adaptation of this concept of the national spirit (Volksgeist), how-
ever, actually had little to do with Hegel.66 Herder had adopted the notion
of the people’s spirit from Montesquieu and introduced it into the German
debate; for him as well as for Hegel it was the concept of a quintessence of
human culture (as Franz Rosenzweig still well knew!),67 but in the hands
of Larenz and the neo-Hegelians it was transformed into an ideology per-
meated by racist thought, a requirement, so to speak, to include exclusion
(which meant concretely: of the Jews) in its own definition. Instead, as
Larenz explained in 1935 in his Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie der Gegenwart,
the national spirit, as ‘creative origin and substance’, contained within it an
obligation to align the law with the völkisch community. Rooted as they were
in the notion of the ‘racial’, spirit and blood were to merge into a single
entity.68 Volk and race (as determined by blood) come in fact to coincide as
the bearers of the ‘objective spirit’.69 With that said, the ‘idea of concrete
order’, which was professed with a good deal of force, and the ‘concrete’
concepts of law,70 presented as the ‘consistent, methodical expression of the
völkisch understanding of law’, prove themselves to be forms of Nazi ideol-
ogy trussed up in scholarly embellishment. The purported ‘concreteness’ is
nothing more than a phantom, the ostensible precision of the concepts of
law is sheer imprecision, inviting totalitarian definition in accordance with
the völkisch notion of law.71
Karl Larenz presented his understanding of the ‘German legal renais-
sance’ shortly after the National Socialist ‘revolution’, and so offered it its
legal justification. This ‘real revolution’, embodying the ‘communal will of
the people’ and initiated by the ‘spirited strength of the people’ itself, did
not, it was claimed, mark any break with the law. It represented instead the
‘erection of a new order, the obligations of which or even the spiritual validity
of which, in so far as the older structures and norms of law continue to exist,
rests now on the new will of the community alone’.o Larenz justified the
Gemeinschaftsrechts überwundene und aufgehobene Prinzipien anderer Rechtsgestaltungen
geschichtsphilosophisch voraus.’ K. Larenz, ‘Die Aufgabe der Rechtsphilosophie’, in Zeitschrift
für Deutsche Kulturphilosophie 4 (1938), 209–43, at 235
o. ‘Aufrichtung einer neuen Ordnung, deren Verbindlichkeit oder ideelle Geltung auch, soweit
inhaltlich noch die alten Rechtsnormen bestehen bleiben – nun allein auf dem neuen
Führer state with the National Socialist revolution. The unity of the wills
of the people and of the state was embodied by the Führer – thus ‘none
other’ could ‘take the final decision on whether a certain regulation ought
to be valid’. The Führer is himself the ‘power of his leadership’ and is, as
Larenz wrote, borrowing a phrase again from Carl Schmitt, ‘the constitution’s
guardian’p – albeit not a written constitution, but instead, as Larenz further
explained, ‘his people’s unwritten, concrete notion of the law’.72 This notion
was, in his description, ‘concrete’ as a spiritual force that was based upon
a ‘people’s völkisch identity and connection by blood’, the ‘inner spirit’ and
‘soul’ of a people. While this student of Julius Binder had once written (in Das
Problem der Rechtsgeltung) that the concept of law was immanent in positive
law, he now found its basis in the acts taken by the Volk. And it was suppos-
edly the distinction of National Socialism, its ‘world-historical significance’,
that it ‘realised the specifically German concept of law’. This ‘specifically Ger-
man’ concept of law, that is one which its völkisch character, its basis in blood
and race and in the ‘unified and shared will’ of the people, made specifi-
cally German, heralded a new world-historical epoch which would undo the
mischief (Ungeist) of Western Enlightenment philosophy73 and the French
Revolution.74 This was accompanied by a fundamental paradigm shift with
regard to basic concepts of law and the organisation of the legal order: ‘The
German concept of law places the community [Gemeinschaft] in that space
formerly occupied by the simple co-existence of individuals and replaces
abstract equality with the incorporation of the single individual as one part
among many of the community.’ The space occupied by freedom and equal-
ity was filled by ‘the idea of the community and of responsibility’.q This sense of
a responsibility firmly embedded in and beholden to the community directly
influenced decision-making with the fatal consequence of a relativisation of
‘private’ (that is, civil) law as opposed to public law, and a disempowerment
of subjective right in the face of (community) obligations.75 In his contribu-
tion to the 1930 volume in honour of Binder Larenz had written that the
community (understood in the sense of Hegel’s concept of the state) did not
entail any ‘sacrifice of the moral value of the person’.76 Towards the begin-
ning of his arguments in his work of 1934 cited above, too, he noted that the
Gemeinwillen beruht.’ K. Larenz, Deutsche Rechtserneuerung und Rechtsphilosophie (Tübingen:

Mohr, 1934), 30
p. C. Schmitt, Der Hüter der Verfassung (1931) (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1985)
q. ‘Die deutsche Rechtsidee setzt . . . an die Stelle der bloßen Koexistenz der Individuen die
Gemeinschaft und an die Stelle der abstrakten Gleichheit die Gliedhaftigkeit des Einzelnen in der
Gemeinschaft . . . die Idee der Gemeinschaft und der Verantwortung.’ Larenz, Deutsche
Rechtserneuerung und Rechtsphilosophie, 39; cf. 8f.
relativisation of private law (which, after all, he claimed, only reformulated

an insight from Hegel’s doctrine of the state) did not imply any ‘elimination
of the single person’.77 Despite this, he did in the end sanction precisely this
sacrifice of the individual person for the sake of the Führer-principle that he
now proclaimed.78
The manifesto edited by Larenz and published by the law faculty in Kiel in
1935, Grundfragen der neuen Rechtswissenschaft (Basic Questions in Recent Legal
Theory), sought to present the ‘transformation of foundational concepts in
law’ that he had effected, following Schönfeld and Binder. He was concerned
there to give expression to the conviction ‘that German jurisprudence stands
at a watershed in its development, a moment when it can be rebuilt from the
ground up, but that this jurisprudence is also called upon to forge ahead in
the struggle of our time to found a legal doctrine appropriate to our German
reality, one that is simultaneously “concrete” and “holistic”’.r,79 Larenz’s
own contribution to the volume documents his continuing struggle for a
‘new’ legal system in the name of a ‘concrete’ concept of law. In this, Larenz
goes a step further than he had been willing to go in his work of 1934. While
that work had sought to demonstrate the necessary relativisation of civil law,
now the so-called ‘transformation of foundational concepts in law’ aimed
more directly at the denunciation of civil law as subjective law. ‘Concretely’
understood, law ought to be seen as community law or, as Larenz himself
writes, as a ‘way of life for the people’s community’, as a law that issues forth
directly from the people’s spirit.80
This definition has many implications. To begin with, there is the claim to
have found a route away from ‘abstract’ normativity and positivism towards
a ‘concrete’ conception of law. This is derived from the people’s community
and a law that exists only in and through that community’s own existence.
Legal concepts are not simply descriptions of reality, but instead, as Larenz
emphatically writes (and in agreement with Carl Schmitt), means through
which the reality of life is actively shaped. The ‘origin’ of law, the völkisch
community, is understood simultaneously as the ‘inner meaning’ and the
ideal goal of law. The community and law thus find themselves ‘in a dialectical
and concrete sense to be one’. That is to say that the law bears within itself
the sense of living together ‘in a correct order and true community’ as the
‘final goal of justice’ – indeed, it makes it happen.81
r. ‘daß die deutsche Rechtswissenschaft an einem Wendepunkte ihrer Entwicklung steht, daß sie
von Grund auf neu zu beginnen hat, daß sie aber auch dazu berufen ist, voranzugehen im Ringen
unserer Zeit um das artgemäße deutsche Rechtsdenken, das ,konkret’ und ,ganzheitlich’
zugleich ist.’ K. Larenz (ed.), Grundfragen der neuen Rechtswissenschaft (Berlin: Junker und
Dünnhaupt, 1935) (Vorwort)
The community’s nature as ‘concrete’ and ‘true’ is to be evidenced in its

assignation of each member of the Volk (Volksgenosse) to his or her place. One
was to be a member of the Volk, not an ‘abstract’ individual before the law –
this was what the ‘new system’ was intended to convey.82 This meant, on
the other hand, that the legal capacity of each person – every single person –
was subject to contest. This is because, as Larenz proclaimed, taking the
language almost verbatim from a Nazi manifesto dating from 1920, ‘one is
a member of the community under the law [Rechtsgenosse] only if one is a
member of the Volk; a member of the Volk is one who has German blood’.
And Larenz immediately indicates how this principle could be ‘concretely’
implemented: ‘This sentence could take its place at the very start of our legal
order by replacing the statement on the legal capacity of “each person” found
in § 1 of the German Code of Civil Law.’s,83 It was obvious in 1935 to anyone
who cared to see that this opened the door to Nazi racial ideology and to what
Larenz had no qualms in expressly stating in his 1938 book Über Gegenstand
und Methode des völkischen Rechtsdenkens (On the Material and Method of Racial
Jurisprudence): Jews are not of German blood, they are therefore not members
of the Volk and as a further consequence are not members of the community
under law either. As such, Larenz wrote in his manifesto from 1935, they
were ‘entitled to a certain extent’ to ‘a limited legal capacity’, one that could
under no condition, though, include a position as a judge or a member of a
jury.84 It becomes clear that the spirit to which homage here and elsewhere
was being paid was the spirit of a racist and völkisch ideology which was being
given ultimate legal authority.85
Even the legal status of members of the Volk, however, was subject to
serious reinterpretation under the ‘new system’. The determination of one’s
status was completely dependent upon the so-called ‘place’ (Gliedstellung) of
the member of this community under the law in the people’s community as a
whole as well as upon one’s position in subordinate forms of social organisa-
tion (such as the family or class). These can vary, Larenz explains, so ‘standing’
is to be understood as ‘tiered’ and thus ‘concrete’. It is ‘concrete’, though, in
such a manner that it is concerned first and foremost with obligations and
then only secondarily with ‘rights, too, perhaps’.86 ‘In place of the capacity
granted to each individual as a “person”, which indicates that he is the possible
holder of every conceivable right’, now ‘the concrete legal capacity of the member
s. ‘Rechtsgenosse ist nur, wer Volksgenosse ist; Volksgenosse ist, wer deutschen Blutes ist . . . Dieser
Satz könnte an Stelle des die Rechtsfähigkeit ‘jedes Menschen’ aussprechenden § 1 BGB. an die
Spitze unserer Rechtsordnung gestellt werden.’ K. Larenz, ‘Rechtsperson und subjektives
Recht: Zur Wandlung der Rechtsgrundbegriffe’, in K. Larenz (ed.), Grundfragen der neuen
Rechtswissenschaft (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1935), 225–60, at 241
of the Volk’ must be affirmed, ‘for whom the particular extent of the law is
relative to his particular status and role’.t,87 ‘Legal capacity’ is therefore to
be understood as the ‘capacity to enjoy certain legal statuses’. A ‘legal status’
means first and foremost, however, ‘obligations in a community’ and only
relative to this ‘the possession of rights and entitlements’. In this way legal
status is ‘a means of concretising objective law’.88 In short: persons do not
‘possess’ any rights, but instead ‘exist’ in relationship to hierarchically vary-
ing legal statuses. Thus the ‘natural order of life in the community’ becomes
decisive in matters having to do with the individual, who may very well have
to defer to ‘higher-ranking interests’: the community becomes potentially
all-embracing in its power.89
Karl Larenz adhered to his neo-Hegelian legal doctrine, which was effec-
tively put into practice after 1933, right until the end of the ‘Third Reich’. In
his 1943 study, Sittlichkeit und Recht (Ethical Life and Law), published as the first
volume of the series Reich und Recht in der deutschen Philosophie, he continued
to affirm that the individual, as a member of the Volk, was ‘subject to the val-
ues defined by the Volk’ and must do whatever was demanded by the Führer,
the law and custom.90 And finally it is precisely this ‘ultimate synthesis’ of the
individual and the community that is said to realise the ‘foundational insight
of the ethics espoused in German Idealism’.91 This is not the place to discuss
how far key concepts such as the ‘doctrine of concrete order’ and the theory
of the ‘concrete-universal’ continue to figure even in Larenz’s writings after
the war and represent a subliminal continuity in his work.92 The question,
however, does need to be asked: Is there a direct line to be drawn from Hegel
to Hitler? Is Hegel the antecedent of the authoritarian-totalitarian state and
the prophet of National Socialist legal thought?
3 Epilogue: a plea for another Hegel

The case made by Karl Popper and others against Hegel after the end of the
Second World War, in which he was clearly and unequivocally identified as
a ‘false prophet’ and an enemy of the ‘open society’, is well known. Hegel’s
‘hysterical historicism’, Popper writes, is ‘the fertilizer to which modern
totalitarianism owes its rapid growth’. Thus the new generation ‘should be
helped to free themselves from this intellectual fraud’.93 Other writers emu-
lating Popper, such as Ernst Topitsch, found the origins of National Socialist
t. ‘An die Stelle der jedem Menschen zukommenden Fähigkeit, ‘Person’, und d.h. möglicher Träger
jedes denkbaren Rechts zu sein . . . die konkrete Rechtsfähigkeit des Volksgenossen . . . deren
besonderer Umfang sich jeweils nach seiner Fähigkeit zu bestimmten Gliedstellungen richtet.’
Ibid., 243
ideology and the totalitarian state in Hegel’s philosophy. The title of Top-
itsch’s work, which appeared in 1967, was both significant and a purposeful
reminder of Popper: Die Sozialphilosophie Hegels als Heilslehre und Herrschafts-
ideologie (Hegel’s Social Philosophy as a Doctrine of Salvation and an Ideology
of Power).94 Given the idea of ‘Hegel’ promulgated by the neo-Hegelians,
these types of judgement are not at all surprising. Upon closer examina-
tion, however, they reveal themselves to be untenable. Herbert Marcuse had
good reason to believe it necessary to free the basic concepts of Hegelian
thought from the grasp of the National Socialists, which he did in his por-
trayal of Hegel that was first published in 1941, Reason and Revolution. In
this work he was concerned to rediscover Hegel’s philosophy as the oppo-
site of a ‘fascist Hegelianism’.95 What Marcuse wrote concerning Gentile’s
neo-Idealism (which was the object of his criticism) can be said with equal
justification about the neo-Hegelians in the ‘Third Reich’: ‘The fact of brute
power becomes the real god of the time, and as that power enhances itself
the surrender of thought to the fact shows forth the more.’u,96 Hegel finds a
place in the Frankfurt school, after all, not least because of this objection to
an abdication of thought in favour of an undifferentiated ‘identity’.
Notable authors working in hermeneutics and professing an affilia-
tion with Hegel have drawn attention to a differently nuanced ‘right of
freedom’.97 They share the concern to demonstrate Hegel to be a thinker of
freedom, or more precisely: a thinker not of an abstract freedom, but rather
of a freedom mediated through institutions.
Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, a former member of Joachim Ritter’s Col-
legium Philosophicum at the University of Münster98 and later one of the
most notable judges to sit in the German Federal Constitutional Court,
developed this theme in important essays on the relationship between law,
freedom and the state and especially on the relationship between the state
and religion.99 Böckenförde stated his core belief in a phrase so precisely
formulated that it captures what is often at the heart of discussions of fun-
damental questions of constitutional law and is indeed known beyond the
legal profession as the ‘Böckenförde dictum’: ‘The liberal, secular state is based
upon presuppositions that it cannot itself guarantee.’v Böckenförde argues that
the state is dependent upon resources antecedent to the state, precisely for
u. ‘Die Tatsache der brutalen Macht wird der wahre Gott der Zeit, und in dem Maße, in dem diese
Macht sich steigert, offenbart sich die Kapitulation des Denkens vor den Tatsachen’
v. ‘Der freiheitliche, säkularisierte Staat lebt von Voraussetzungen, die er selbst nicht garantieren kann.’
E.-W. Böckenförde, Recht, Staat, Freiheit: Studien zur Rechtsphilosophie, Staatstheorie und
Verfassungsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 112 (emphasis in original)
the sake of its liberal character – morality, religion, simply put: ethos. Without
these, the state would not long survive as the ‘order of freedom’.100 With
explicit reference to Hegel, the question is thus raised ‘whether the secu-
larised state, too, must rely upon those inner impulses and bonding forces
which its citizens owe to their religious faith’.w But however much the state,
as the order of freedom, might rely upon the ethos and the resources its
citizens bring to it, those citizens are, in their actions, themselves dependent
upon the support of institutions. We must therefore seek to understand what
Hegel called objective mind (objektiver Geist): reason as it is embodied in insti-
tutions. Without this, the subjective freedom of the individual would cease to
exist. Institutions are not organisations for exercising repressive authority.
They are instead the necessary requirement for the actuality of freedom.
Here one could paraphrase the seminal insight of Rüdiger Bubner, one
of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s most influential students, who adopted Hegel’s
concept of the ethical state and used it to oppose contemporary proponents
of contractualism such as Rawls and Habermas. If what Hegel called the
‘freedom of subjectivity’ is the ineluctable principle of the modern world,
then it must also necessarily come into its own in the state itself.101 Bubner
further explains that subjects will then be able to recognise themselves in
those institutions of ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit) that exist precisely so that the
subjects may enjoy their legitimate claims to freedom. The institutions he
refers to are evidently those that ‘survive the critical examination of free
thought’ and possess ‘no actuality that is designed as an end in and of itself’
that would be contrary or in opposition to the subjects’ self-conception.102
‘The recognition of subjectivity in institutions’, Bubner explains, ‘has noth-
ing to do with a form of reciprocal recognition of plural subjects in one
another. It is a matter not of my recognising myself in you, but of the subject
recognising himself in the institution. Identity . . . is the result of existing
relationships to the world embedded in the structures of institutions within
a state’.x In this manner, the ethical state’s institutions are recognised by
Bubner to be forms of freedom and the possibility of freedom, or in Hegel’s
terminology: forms of the objective spirit. ‘Law is in its core, according
to Hegel’s understanding, institutionally guaranteed freedom and nothing
w.‘ob nicht auch der säkularisierte Staat letztlich aus jenen inneren Antrieben und
Bindungskräften leben muß, die der religiöse Glaube seiner Bürger vermittelt.’ Ibid.
x. ‘Wiedererkennen der Subjektivität in Institutionen . . . heißt nicht eine Weise reziproker
Anerkennung pluraler Subjekte im Miteinander. Wiedererkannt wird nicht das Ich im Du,
sondern das Subjekt in der Institution. Identität . . . verdankt sich existierenden
Weltverhältnissen im staatlichen Institutionengefüge.’ R. Bubner, Welche Rationalität bekommt
der Gesellschaft? Vier Kapitel aus dem Naturrecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 164
else’. And insofar as the individual person is free ‘solely as a citizen within
the framework of existing law’ and only ‘in this capacity . . . is (able to be)
more than simply an instance of entitlement and/or a partner in the pub-
lic distribution of available goods’,y then one may agree with Bubner that
Hegel’s conception of the state remains highly relevant to today’s debates
on the nature and future of political life.
It is clear that these liberal post-war thinkers require a reading of Hegel
very different from that of the neo-Hegelians. As they demonstrate, Hegel’s
legal and political thought can and must be comprehended as a philosophy
of freedom and be reformulated as such in any contemporary interpretation
of him.103 After all, if there is anything for which the philosophy of German
Idealism stands, then it is the idea of freedom.
Translated by Ch. Geissler
Notes
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991) (hereafter PR), 21.
2. H. Heller, Hegel und der nationale Machtstaatsgedanke in Deutschland: ein Beitrag zur politis-
chen Geistesgeschichte (1921), in Orientierung und Entscheidung, vol. i of Gesammelte Schriften,
ed. C. Müller, 3 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1992), 25.
3. Ibid., 25.
4. In his essay entitled ‘Hegel und die deutsche Politik’, published a few years later (1924),
the ambivalence to be found in the figure of Hegel is portrayed in a slightly different
way by Heller, writing as a socialist. In that work, the name Hegel is said to stand,
on the one hand, for a national metaphysics of power, for that ‘Germany of blood and
iron’ made famous by Bismarck. At the same time, ‘the intellectual scope of German
socialism [is said to be] the true daughter of Hegelian Idealism’. ‘The idea of the German
nation-state and German socialism’, Heller wrote, ‘both trace their roots back to Hegel.
They could erect no worthier monument to their forefather than to find a shared path
together towards the realization of that idea, developed further by Marx and Lassalle,
of a unified German people organized according to a new national power.’ See H.
Heller, ‘Hegel und die deutsche Politik’ (1924), in Gesammelte Schriften, i, 243–55, at
244, 247 and 255. For Heller’s reception of Hegel and for the posthumously published,
incomplete Staatslehre (1934), see M. Hartwig, ‘Die Krise der deutschen Staatslehre
und die Rückbesinnung auf Hegel in der Weimarer Zeit’, in C. Jermann (ed.), Anspruch
und Leistung von Hegels Rechtsphilosophie (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog,
y. ‘Recht ist im Kern, gemäß Hegels Auffassung, institutionell garantierte Freiheit und sonst
nichts . . . [der Mensch] nur als Bürger im Rahmen des existierenden Rechts . . . mehr sein [darf]
als bloße Anspruchsinstanz bzw. Verteilungspartner bei der öffentlichen Distribution der
vorhandenen Güter.’ R. Bubner, Polis und Staat: Grundlinien der politischen Philosophie (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 170, 173
1987), 239–75, esp. 265ff. For more on Heller’s place in the constitutional and political
debates in the Weimar Republic, see also C. Müller and I. Staff (eds.), Staatslehre in der
Weimarer Republik: Hermann Heller zu ehren (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985).
5. F. Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat (1920), ed. F. Lachmann (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010),
527.
6. W. Windelband, ‘Die Erneuerung des Hegelianismus’ (keynote address at the meeting
of the Akademie of 25 April 1910), Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wis-
senschaften (Heidelberg: Winter, 1910), lecture no. 10, 3–15, at 8.
7. Ibid., 7.
8. Ibid., 11f.
9. Ibid., 7.
10. Ibid., 15.
11. H. Levy, Die Hegel-Renaissance in der deutschen Philosophie, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung
des Neukantianismus (Berlin: Pan-Verlag, 1927), 90.
12. Ibid., 93.
13. H. Glockner, ‘Stand und Auffassung der Hegelschen Philosophie in Deutschland, hun-
dert Jahre nach seinem Tode’ (1930), in Beiträge zum Verständnis und zur Kritik Hegels
sowie zur Umgestaltung seiner Geisteswelt, Hegel-Studien, suppl. 2 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1965),
272–84, at 277.
14. H. Glockner, ‘Hegelrenaissance und Neuhegelianismus: eine Säkularbetrachtung’
(1931), in Beiträge zum Verständnis und zur Kritik Hegels sowie zur Umgestaltung seiner Geis-
teswelt, 285–311, at 289. A short time later, in an essay that appeared in 1933 in the series
Handbuch der Philosophie, edited by A. Baeumler and M. Schröter, Karl Larenz would speak
of the ‘neo-Hegelianism of our time’ as if it were self-evident. See K. Larenz, Die Rechts-
und Staatsphilosophie des deutschen Idealismus und ihre Gegenwartsbedeutung, Handbuch der
Philosophie 4, suppl. D (Munich and Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1933), 186.
15. Glockner, ‘Deutsche Philosophie’, Zeitschrift für Deutsche Kulturphilosophie 1 (1935), 3–39,
at 6f.
16. Ibid., 38. The reference is particularly to neo-Kantianism (represented primarily by Jewish
philosophers).
17. Ibid., 15ff., 39.
18. Ibid., 17.
19. Ibid., 14. In the preface to their journal, the name of which was consciously changed
from ‘Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur’ to ‘Zeitschrift für Deutsche
Kulturphilosophie’, Glockner and Larenz make a prominently situated reference to the
National Socialist ‘movement’, to which the journal was to be linked. They write: ‘This
aims to give voice to the cultural-philosophical will of our time and thereby serve that
great movement that spreads through our Volk and which we most firmly believe to be
a spiritual movement. . . . From these new, contemporary relationships to community
and to the eternal power of the Volk, a new understanding of culture and history as well
as of law, the state and the economy will also arise among us.’ Glockner and Larenz
furthermore articulate their strong belief ‘that a new form of German philosophy will
proceed from the new reality of German life.’ Ibid., 1f.
20. ‘Neo-Hegelianism’ had been a topic in the field of jurisprudence since around 1900 with
Fritz Berolzheimer and Josef Kohler. Wolfgang Schild argues that for Josef Kohler,
Hegel’s philosophy remained ‘a misunderstood foreign body that he would consume

in isolated, undigested bits and then apply’. W. Schild, ‘Die Ambivalenz einer Neo-
Philosophie: zu Josef Kohlers Neuhegelianismus’, in G. Sprenger (ed.), Deutsche Rechts-
und Sozialphilosophie um 1900, Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie Beiheft 43
(Stuttgart: Steiner, 1991), 46–65, at 64.
21. K. Larenz, Methodenlehre der Rechtswissenschaft (Berlin: Springer, 1991); Richtiges Recht:
Grundzüge einer Rechtsethik (Munich: Beck, 1979).
22. G. Dulckeit, Römische Rechtsgeschichte: ein Studienbuch (Munich: Beck, 1995). Though it
has not received much attention, Hermann Heller’s posthumously published Staatslehre
(1934) is a noteworthy example of a Hegel reception that diverges from that of the neo-
Hegelianism under discussion here. Cf. M. Hartwig, ‘Die Krise der deutschen Staatslehre
und die Rückbesinnung auf Hegel in der Weimarer Zeit’, in C. Jermann (ed.), Anspruch
und Leistung von Hegels Rechtsphilosophie (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog,
1987), 239–75, at 265ff.
23. As Larenz wrote in the epilogue of the 1967 special edition of his Das Problem der
Rechtsgeltung, originally published in 1929, which was reissued by the Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft (Darmstadt, 1967, p. 44). The National Socialist infiltration of neo-
Hegelianism was covered over in the historical-critical part of Larenz’s Methodenlehre,
too, to say nothing of the role Larenz himself played in this, which was by no means
insignificant.
24. A detailed examination of, and reflection on, the relationships between the ideologi-
sation of jurisprudence during the ‘Third Reich’ and the debates during the Weimar
Republic can be found in O. Lepsius, Die gegensatzaufhebende Begriffsbildung: Methode-
nentwicklungen in der Weimarer Republik und ihr Verhältnis zur Ideologisierung der Rechtswis-
senschaft unter dem Nationalsozialismus (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994). There is a substantial
amount of available literature on the topic of ‘law and National Socialism’. See especially:
H. Weinkauff, Die deutsche Justiz und der Nationalsozialismus: ein Überblick, Quellen und
Darstellungen zur Zeitgeschichte 16/i (Stuttgart: DVA, 1968); H. Rottleuthner (ed.),
Recht, Rechtsphilosophie und Nationalsozialismus, Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphiloso-
phie, suppl. 18 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1983); E.-W. Böckenförde (ed.), Staatsrecht
und Staatsrechtslehre im Dritten Reich (Heidelberg: Müller, 1985); B. Rüthers, Entartetes
Recht: Rechtslehren und Kronjuristen im Dritten Reich (Munich: DTV, 1988); R. Dreier and W.
Sellert (ed.), Recht und Justiz im ‘Dritten Reich’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989); M.
Stolleis, Recht im Unrecht: Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1994); J. Rückert and D. Willoweit (ed.), Die deutsche Rechtsgeschichte
in der NS-Zeit: ihre Vorgeschichte und ihre Nachwirkungen, Beiträge zur Rechtsgeschichte
des 20. Jahrhunderts 12 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995).
25. K. Larenz (ed.), Grundfragen der neuen Rechtswissenschaft (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt,
1935).
26. G. Dulckeit, Rechtsbegriff und Rechtsgestalt: Untersuchungen zu Hegels Philosophie des Rechts
und ihrer Gegenwartsbedeutung (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1936), 113.
27. Larenz explicitly identified the ‘objective idealism’ represented by Schönfeld and Binder
as the orientation point of his own work, Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie der Gegenwart,
which appeared in 1931. See K. Larenz, Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie der Gegenwart (Berlin:
Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1931), 108f.
28. W. Schönfeld, Ueber den Begriff einer dialektischen Jurisprudenz (Greifswald: Bamberg,
1929), 35, 30, 41–2, 44, 46.
29. Ibid., 47. J. Binder, Philosophie des Rechts (Berlin: Stilke, 1925). For more on Binder
and his work, see R. Dreier, ‘Julius Binder (1870–1939): ein Rechtsphilosoph zwischen
Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus’, in R. Dreier, Recht–Staat–Vernunft: Studien zur
Rechtstheorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 142–67, and E. Jakob, Grundzüge
der Rechtsphilosophie Julius Binders (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1996), in which Binder and his
work are treated in more depth.
30. Larenz, Das Problem der Rechtsgeltung, 31; cf. 25, 28.
31. Ibid., 33, 32.
32. Ibid., 40, 41.
33. Schönfeld, Ueber den Begriff einer dialektischen Jurisprudenz, 31, 39, 40ff.
34. Hegel, PR, § 270 n., HW, vii, 421.
35. A letter sent by Schönfeld to the Protestant theologian Rudolf Hermann on 18 April 1933,
which is held in the Hönigswald-Archiv (Aachen), is as noteworthy as it is disconcerting.
Schönfeld is responding to a letter from Hermann in which the latter requested Schönfeld
to sign a petition that Hönigswald, who was Jewish, was to present, to prevent his
dismissal from his professorship at the university in Munich as a result of the ‘Gesetz
zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums’ law (Law for the Restoration of the
Professional Civil Service) that went into effect on 7 April 1933. Hönigswald’s petition
was ultimately unsuccessful. Schönfeld writes: ‘The law is the law. It falls upon the just
man and the unjust man, good and evil . . . Now that this law, as severe as it may be, has
been passed, it must be carried through lest injustice arise in the cases of those who are
not excepted from it, since not all can be spared. Hönigswald is 58 years old! I do not
know whether he is man and philosopher enough to drink with dignity from the hemlock
cup of dismissal. I would do so were I in his place, and I would be thankful for the release
from having to give lectures and tutorials in a world that spurns me . . . Academia has been
and continues to be too imbued with Jewish influence. Were he to consider the matter,
Hönigswald could not come to any other conclusion. Something must change, and this
change will affect even excellent men like him. The necessities of state and of the Volk
will render it unavoidable that some are ruined who would not have otherwise deserved
it.’ – I would like to thank Stephan Nachtsheim (Aachen) for bringing this document to
my attention. This letter may be compared to Hönigswald’s letters to Hermann from
this period. They have been published in Rudolf Hermann: Aufsätze–Tagebücher–Briefe,
ed. by A. Wiebel (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2009), 305ff. This specific letter can be found
on 318ff.
36. Binder, Philosophie des Rechts, 539, 538; cf. 282ff. (‘Individualismus und Trans-
personalismus’).
37. Ibid., 487.
38. Ibid., 538.
39. Ibid., 433; cf. 444, 487f., 546.
40. Ibid., 326f.; cf. 340. See as well J. Binder, ‘Der autoritäre Staat’, Logos 22 (1933), 126–60,
at 151. Binder identified the ‘authoritarian power of the community of the state’ in the
union between the will of the state and the will of the single member of the community,
since both were ‘necessarily, in the final instance, the same’ (ibid., 157).
41. Ibid., 427. The ‘Enlightenment’s destruction of the notion of the community’ had, in
comparison, misunderstood the essence of the community (ibid., 429).
42. Ibid., 497, 495.
43. Ibid., 538, 280.
44. J. Binder, Führerauslese in der Demokratie (Langensalza: Beyer, 1929).
45. Ibid., 5, 8, 67.
46. Ibid., 31, 30.
47. Ibid., 7f., 11f., 13f. et passim; 48f., 50, 53, 57, 64.
48. Ibid., 53.
49. Ibid., 51.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 5, 53.
52. Ibid., 57. Binder, drawing on Hegel, had already opted for monarchy in his Philosophie
des Rechts as a form of government that was based upon ‘the concept of the Führer and
therefore the communion between ruler and Volk’ (ibid., 539).
53. With explicit reference to his text dating from 1929, Binder acclaimed the ‘Führer’ Adolf
Hitler in 1934. See J. Binder, Der deutsche Volksstaat (Tübingen: Mohr, 1934), 35. Binder
recalled that ‘cry for the Führer’, as he had formulated it, and commented succinctly:
‘This Führer can only be Hitler.’ ‘In Adolf Hitler, the Führer, who has, with inspired cer-
tainty, understood and embraced the essence of the Führer and of the Volk’, Binder saw
‘both the paragon and the realisation of the new Reich’ (ibid., 40). It is striking not only
that these terms that arose in the 1920s were taken up again after 1933 and given new
meaning in keeping with the times, but also how this was done. The term ‘Führer’ is one
such example, but so too is the notion of the ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft).
As recent historical scholarship has demonstrated, the concept is both much more than,
and quite separate from, a simple propagandistic term put to use by the National Social-
ists. It was in fact in currency throughout the political spectrum during the Weimar
Republic – none other than Friedrich Ebert, the first social democratic president of the
Reich, used it repeatedly in his speeches! The vague and even indeterminate meaning
of the term, which few saw the need to pin down, left it susceptible to the ideological
pervasion and co-optation it experienced in the Nazi era, most explicitly among the
neo-Hegelians. See M. Wildt, ‘Die Ungleichheit des Volkes: “Volksgemeinschaft” in der
politischen Kommunikation der Weimarer Republik’, in F. Bajohr and M. Wildt (eds.),
Volksgemeinschaft: neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer, 2009), 24–40; ‘Volksgemeinschaft und Führererwartung in der Weimarer
Republik’, in U. Daniel (ed.), Politische Kultur und Medienwirklichkeiten in den 1920er Jahren
(Munich: Oldenbourg, 2010), 181–204.
54. Binder, Führerauslese in der Demokratie, 30.
55. J. Binder, ‘Die Bedeutung der Rechtsphilosophie für die Erneuerung des Privatrechts’,
in J. W. Hedermann (ed.), Zur Erneuerung des Bürgerlichen Rechts, with a foreword by
Reichsminister Dr Frank (Munich: Beck, 1938), 18–36; 20f., 36.
56. See J. Eckert, ‘Was war die Kieler Schule?’, in F. J. Säcker (ed.), Recht und Rechtslehre im
Nationalsozialismus, Kieler rechtswissenschaftliche Abhandlungen, n.s., 1 (Baden-Baden:
Nomos, 1992), 37–70 – Larenz’s obituary for Binder (who died on 28 August 1939)
emphasised that Binder’s thought on the so-called ‘renewal of law’ was equally relevant
after 1933: ‘Back in that time when today’s renewal of law could not even yet be conceived,
he had already drawn conclusions from the idea of law, as he understood it, which –
however little support they may have found in the world of positive law that then
predominated – have since become practically self-evident to those who uphold the law.’
In other words, Binder had prepared the way for the National Socialist ‘renewal of law’
and, at the same time, this later development validated his work after the fact. See K.
Larenz, ‘Rechtswahrer und Philosoph: zum Tode Julius Binders’, Zeitschrift für Deutsche
Kulturphilosophie 6 (1940), 1–14, at 12. That Binder (and the entirety of Hegelian political
philosophy) could also be viewed in a different, thoroughly critical light by the National
Socialists, and that Binder would find himself isolated towards the end of his life, is a
separate matter. See references in Dreier, ‘Julius Binder (1870–1939)’, 160ff.
57. K. Larenz, Über Gegenstand und Methode des völkischen Rechtsdenkens (Berlin: Junker und
Dünnhaupt, 1938), 8f.
58. Larenz, Über Gegenstand und Methode des völkischen Rechtsdenkens, 27.
59. Larenz, Die Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie des deutschen Idealismus und ihre Gegenwartsbedeu-
tung, 187f.
60. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit: a translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy
of Spirit (1805–06) with commentary, ed. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1983), 141. One can characterise Hegel’s philosophy of right from 1821 as the expression
of this approach towards constitutive power. Cf. G. Zenkert, ‘Konstitutive Macht: Hegel
zur Verfassung’, in Macht: Begriff und Wirkung in der politischen Philosophie der Gegenwart,
ed. R. Krause and M. Rölli (Bielefeld: TranscriptVerlag, 2008), 19–32.
61. Larenz, Über Gegenstand und Methode des völkischen Rechtsdenkens, 33, cf. 39; ‘Die Aufgabe
der Rechtsphilosophie’, in Zeitschrift für Deutsche Kulturphilosophie 4 (1938), 209–43, at
216.
62. C. Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1933), 31f.
Schmitt admittedly formulates his argument not with reference to contemporary Neo-
Hegelianism, but instead as a criticism of Hegel. He suggests that the opposition Hegel
sets up between civil society and the state has been rendered obsolete by the new arrange-
ment of the state, the movement, and the people. Carl Schmitt, however, in his Über die
drei Arten des rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens (On the Three Types of Jurisprudence), published
just one year after the above-mentioned book, would explicitly and assertively attribute
the origins of the notion of a ‘konkretes Ordnungsdenken’ to Hegel (which Karl Larenz,
in turn, would use in his work – see note 65 below). Schmitt writes ‘Hegel’s state is
the concrete order of all orders, the institution among all institutions’ (C. Schmitt, Über
die drei Arten des rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt,
1934; 2nd edn, Berlin 1993), 39). By 1936 Schmitt would speak of a ‘struggle for Hegel’
and in response to his own statement from 1933 would pose the question ‘whether he
[Hegel] still lived or whether he had died, whether the living Hegel could be found today
in Rome, in Berlin or even in Moscow’. See C. Schmitt, ‘Faschistische und national-
sozialistische Rechtswissenschaft’, in Deutsche Juristenzeitung 41 (1936), 619–20, at 620.
63. Larenz, ‘Die Aufgabe der Rechtsphilosophie’, 239.
64. K. Larenz, ‘Vom Wesen der Strafe’, Zeitschrift für Deutsche Kulturphilosophie, 2 (1936),
26–50 38f.; cf. 30f., 32f.
65. See Schmitt, Über die drei Arten des rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens. In this book,
Schmitt claimed Hegel’s philosophy of right was an example of a ‘total and deliberate
doctrine of order’ and saw in what he called a ‘doctrine of concrete order’ a new ‘type’
of legal thought opposed to the positivism that was predominant at the time (ibid.,
38, 55). Larenz was emphatic and thorough in his praise for this approach in his dis-
cussion of Schmitt’s work. Larenz claimed Hegel as well as Schmitt as founders of
this ‘doctrine of concrete order’ when he wrote: ‘It was Hegel, above all, in whom
“the doctrine of concrete order” was most vividly embodied. To his mind, law and
the state were not a system of rules, but concrete political orders with their very own
natures of reality. Hegel’s state looks down from its exalted heights upon the bour-
geois state, which could do no more than uphold external order and security.’ See K.
Larenz’s book review in Zeitschrift für Deutsche Kulturphilosophie 1 (1935), 112–18, at 114.
Otto Pöggeler, however, justly argues: ‘When Binder and Larenz take hold of Hegel’s
concrete notion, they consciously turn it on its head and use it to support something
that Hegel himself treated with nothing but derision: nationalism, a “völkisch” con-
nectedness even, a regress to the notion of the “Germanic”.’ O. Pöggeler, ‘Philosophie
und Nationalsozialismus – am Beispiel Heideggers’, in Heidegger in seiner Zeit (Munich:
Fink, 1999), 195–216, at 200. For Schmitt’s (altogether superficial) engagement with
Hegel, see R. Mehring, Pathetisches Denken: Carl Schmitts Denkweg am Leitfaden Hegels;
katholische Grundstellung und antimarxistische Hegelstrategie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot,
1989).
66. For more, see my conceptual history of the notion of Volksgeist: A. Grossmann, ‘Volks-
geist – Grund einer praktischen Welt oder metaphysische Spukgestalt? Anmerkungen
zur Problemgeschichte eines nicht nur Hegelschen Theorems’, in A. Grossmann and C.
Jamme (eds.), Metaphysik der praktischen Welt: Perspektiven im Anschluß an Hegel und Hei-
degger (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 60–77; also see my article on ‘Volksgeist/Volksseele’,
in J. Ritter, K. Gründer and G. Gabriel (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie
(Basel: Schwabe, 2001), xi, 1102–7 and C. Mährlein, Volksgeist und Recht: Hegels Philoso-
phie der Einheit und ihre Bedeutung in der Rechtswissenschaft (Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 2000), esp. 171ff.
67. See Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat, 197, 449f.
68. Larenz, Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie der Gegenwart, 165, 163, 131; see also K. Larenz,
‘Volksgeist und Recht: zur Revision der Rechtsanschauung der Historischen Schule’,
Zeitschrift für Deutsche Kulturphilosophie 1 (1935), 40–60, at 42f.
69. Larenz, ‘Die Aufgabe der Rechtsphilosophie’, 224.
70. Larenz, Über Gegenstand und Methode des völkischen Rechtsdenkens, 9.
71. Bernd Rüthers described Schmitt’s ‘doctrine of concrete order’ as being characterised
by an ‘ambiguity worthy of an oracle’ and ‘enigmatic indeterminacy’. The same can be
said, mutatis mutandis, of Karl Larenz’s adoption and application of the idea. See Rüthers,
Entartetes Recht, 70, 71.
72. K. Larenz, Deutsche Rechtserneuerung und Rechtsphilosophie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1934), 34.
73. This is, Larenz asserts at the beginning of his work, ‘the greatest temptation to which
German thought has over the course of centuries often willingly yielded’ – most recently
in the incriminated legal theory of Kelsen, which from this point forward would gradually
find itself pilloried as the ‘manifestation of the corruption of the spirit by excessive foreign
influence’. The turn towards ‘truly German law’, would demand a renunciation of and
struggle against any thought categorised as ‘foreign’. Ibid., 3, 11ff.
74. Ibid., 38.
75. Ibid., 39; cf. 8f.

76. Larenz, ‘Staat und Religion bei Hegel: ein Beitrag zur systematischen Interpretation der
Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie’, in K. Larenz (ed.), Rechtsidee und Staatsgedanke: Festgabe
für Julius Binder (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1930), 243–63, at 251.
77. Larenz, Deutsche Rechtserneuerung und Rechtsphilosophie, 9.
78. Ibid., 44. Larenz’s contribution to the ‘renewal’ of civil law within the framework of Nazi
‘ideology’ was thoroughly investigated by R. Frassek, Von der ‘völkischen Lebensordnung’
zum Recht: die Umsetzung weltanschaulicher Programmatik in den schuldrechtlichen Schriften
von Karl Larenz (1903–1993) (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1996).
79. Thus Larenz in his foreword to the volume: K. Larenz (ed.), Grundfragen der neuen
Rechtswissenschaft.
80. Larenz, ‘Rechtsperson und subjektives Recht: Zur Wandlung der Rechtsgrundbegriffe’,
in K. Larenz (ed.), Grundfragen der neuen Rechtswissenschaft, 225–60, at 228ff. – for
more on this, see K. Anderbrügge, Völkisches Rechtsdenken: zur Rechtslehre in der Zeit des
Nationalsozialismus, Beiträge zur politischen Wissenschaft 28 (Berlin: Duncker & Hum-
blot, 1978), 203ff., esp. 215ff., further M. La Torre, ‘Der Kampf wider das subjektive
Recht: Karl Larenz und die nationalsozialistische Rechtslehre’, in Rechtstheorie 23 (1992),
355–95.
81. Ibid., 239f.
82. Ibid., 240.
83. Section 1 BGB reads: “Die Rechtsfähigkeit des Menschen beginnt mit der Vollendung
der Geburt’ (‘Legal capacity of each person begins with the completion of birth’).
84. Ibid., 242. In fact, Larenz’s opening sentence does implicitly cite the 1920 NSDAP party
manifesto and nearly copies it word for word. The manifesto states: ‘Citizenship of the
state is only open to those who are members of the Volk. To be a member of the Volk, one
must be of German blood, regardless of religious confession. Therefore no Jew may be
considered a member of the Volk.’ See B. Rüthers, ‘Die Ideologie des Nationalsozialismus
in der Entwicklung des deutschen Rechts von 1933 bis 1945’, in F. J. Säcker (ed.), Recht
und Rechtslehre im Nationalsozialismus, Kieler rechtswissenschaftliche Abhandlungen, n.s.,
1 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1992), 17–36, at 30f.
85. This topic is up to this day a matter of serious controversy among Larenz’s critics and
students. See B. Rüthers, ‘Personenbilder und Geschichtsbilder – Wege zur Umdeutung
der Geschichte?’ and C.-W. Canaris, ‘“Falsches Geschichtsbild von der Rechtsperversion
im Nationalsozialismus” durch ein Porträt von Karl Larenz?’, both in JuristenZeitung 66
(2011), 593–601 and 879–88.
86. Ibid., 241; cf. 245, 248. Larenz believes he is able to draw upon Hegel to justify this
unification of right and obligation. It is supposed to be the ‘foundational thought of his
ethics of the community’ (ibid., 250 n. 45).
87. Ibid., 243.
88. Ibid., 244.
89. Ibid., 258f., 257.
90. K. Larenz, ‘Sittlichkeit und Recht: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des deutschen
Rechtsdenkens und zur Sittenlehre’, in K. Larenz (ed.), Reich und Recht in der deutschen
Philosophie, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1943), i, 169–412, at 401, 407.
91. Ibid., 409.
92. See on this Frassek, Von der ‘völkischen Lebensordnung’ zum Recht, 185ff.; Anderbrügge,
Völkisches Rechtsdenken, 218; Mährlein, Volksgeist und Recht, 216ff.
93. K. Popper, The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the aftermath, vol. i of The Open
Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1945), 56, 75.
94. E. Topitsch, Die Sozialphilosophie Hegels als Heilslehre und Herrschaftsideologie (Neuwied:
Luchterhand, 1967); cf. Popper’s disciple H. Kiesewetter, Von Hegel zu Hitler: die politische
Verwirklichung einer totalitären Machtstaatsideologie in Deutschland (1815–1945) (Frankfurt
am Main: Peter Lang, 1995).
95. H. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the rise of social theory, 2nd edn (London:
Routledge, 1955), 402. A German translation appeared in 1962 which, like the English
original, was ‘dedicated to Max Horkheimer and the Institut für Sozialforschung’.
H. Marcuse, Vernunft und Revolution: Hegel und die Entstehung der Gesellschaftstheorie (Berlin:
Hermann Luchterhand, 1962).
96. Ibid., 405.
97. See A. Honneth, Das Recht der Freiheit: Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit (Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 2011).
98. For the role of the Ritter school in the debates on self-reflection and understanding in the
post-war era, see J. Hacke, Philosophie der Bürgerlichkeit: die liberalkonservative Begründung
der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006). For more on this and
a further contextualisation of the discussions about the political intellectual history of
the Federal Republic, see Ph. Hölzing, ‘Zur politischen Ideengeschichte der Bonner
Republik’, in Philosophische Rundschau 57 (2010), 33–48 – on Joachim Ritter’s impact and
influence from the perspective of another prominent student, see R. Spaemann, Über
Gott und die Welt: eine Autobiographie in Gesprächen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2012), 80ff.
99. Böckenförde credited Carl Schmitt and Hermann Heller as ‘intellectual sources’ in a
biographical interview, and credited Lorenz von Stein for influencing his thought on
the social dimension of the constitutional state (E.-W. Böckenförde, Wissenschaft, Politik,
Verfassungsgericht (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011), 305–486, at 378, 381 and 367, 369). One
might be surprised that Hegel’s name is not mentioned. But for Böckenförde this is
simply explained by the fact ‘that Hegel . . . was always present’. ‘Hegel’s philosophy of
right has always accompanied me over the course of decades, not just during the time at
the legendary Collegium Philosophicum, but even more so during seminars and lectures,
not the least the lecture “The History of the Philosophy of Law and State”, which I and
Professor Hollerbach alternated in giving between 1977 and 2003 in Freiburg. This led
to continuous contact, meeting and exchange with Hegel’s philosophy of right’ (letter
to the author dated 15 May 2012).
100. E.-W. Böckenförde, Recht, Staat, Freiheit: Studien zur Rechtsphilosophie, Staatstheorie und
Verfassungsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 113.
101. See Hegel, PR, § 273.
102. R. Bubner, Welche Rationalität bekommt der Gesellschaft? Vier Kapitel aus dem Naturrecht
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 159f.
103. See also K. Vieweg, Das Denken der Freiheit: Hegels Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts
(Munich: Fink, 2012).
11
Idealism and the fascist corporative state
Irene Stolzi
1 Corporatism, Idealism and juridical science

This chapter will be concerned with a small but significant part of twentieth-
century Italian legal history: the doctrine of corporatism that developed in
Italy under the influence of Idealism. Prompted by the fascist regime, the
corporatist system was conceived as a specifically Italian ‘third way’. On the
one hand, it was meant to combine private property and private economic
enterprise with the possibility of various kinds of public intervention into the
economy. On the other hand, it was intended to support the establishment of
a structure of power capable of reconciling, in a sharply authoritarian fashion,
the supremacy of the state with the acknowledgement of the institutional
legitimacy of the main expressions of the new mass society (political parties,
trade unions, productive forces). The development of the corporatist system
came in three phases. The first was the trade-union phase, which focused
on the state’s recognition of unions of both workers and employers. This
aimed at abolishing both trade union pluralism and the free economy: only
fascist unions were recognised, and strikes and lockouts were prohibited and
severely prosecuted. The second phase was the properly corporatist one. It
began in 1934, when corporations were instituted; these were state-related
bodies resulting from the combination of elements from trade unions, the
public administration and the Fascist Party. They were the institutions in
charge of managing the relations between the state and economic, political
and social forces – and, therefore, the fulcrum of the new fascist organisation
of power. In fact, however, their concrete activity was quite modest. The
third phase of the development of the system was the institution, in 1939, of
the House of Fasci and Corporations (Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni),
which formally ratified the suppression of the elections of deputies. The
260
Idealism and the fascist corporative state 261
members of the House, in fact, were not elected; rather, they owed their
membership to their being in charge of other bodies of the fascist state (the
party, trade unions, corporations and others).
Idealism, especially as it is represented by its standard-bearers Benedetto
Croce and Giovanni Gentile, is an important episode in Italian twentieth-
century philosophy. Many disciplines were influenced by it, including juridi-
cal science. I shall here refer mainly to Giovanni Gentile and those Italian
jurists who were inspired by his thought. They were close to the fascist
regime, and debated the form which corporatism should take if it was to
match the challenges of the reality of the new century (which it was sup-
posed to regulate). Many authors were involved in that debate, all sensitive
in their own way to the impulse of Idealism. This essay will sketch the main
lines of the discussion through an examination of their various positions.
To be sure, Croce’s relations with fascism are not irrelevant. However,
they must be located at a different level than Gentile’s. Croce’s early criticism
of the regime and of what, in his opinion, was a distinctive trait of Gentile’s
view, namely, the ‘governmental conception of morality’,1 led to the publi-
cation of the Manifesto of the Anti-fascist Intellectuals (Manifesto degli intellettuali
antifascisti) in 1925. Such a criticism caused Croce’s and Gentile’s intellectual
and personal fellowship to break up,2 but also significantly contributed to
bringing about the interpretation of fascism as a mere incident, a perverse
but passing deviation within Italian history (an interpretation which has
been quite influential for many years, and not only in Italy).
Italian idealism presents itself, then, as a complex and articulated theo-
retical framework. It gave rise to many partially overlapping views of law, of
which, however, we may isolate some common traits. On the whole, Italian
juridical science was influenced by Idealism on three different, complemen-
tary fronts.
First of all, Idealism emphasised the necessarily historical nature of juridi-
cal phenomena, which could not be isolated from the process of historical
change, or ossified in the form of written law. Oversimplifying, we may
say that Idealism contributed to the emancipation of juridical thought from
what is commonly called ‘juridical positivism’, that is, from the idea that
law is just what results from, or expressly refers to, statutory rules (the so-
called positive law). A corollary of such a position was the idea that jurists,
judges or anyone interpreting the law, should only produce legal judge-
ments on the basis of given norms – the possibility of any creative or evo-
lutionary contribution to the formulation of laws themselves being thereby
ruled out.
262 Irene Stolzi
It was in the first part of the twentieth century that such an epistemolog-
ical assumption came to be revised. Against a nineteenth-century juridical
system that could not deal with a rapidly changing society, the belief began
to take root that law was something different and broader than hyposta-
tised statutory rules. To be sure, it was not only due to the influence of
Idealism that juridical science started to address such problems. However, in
some authors Idealism undoubtedly played a significant role in determining
their abandonment of positivist formalism. As Paolo Grossi noticed, ‘this is
not surprising: Idealist historicism’, through its ‘emphasis on the concrete
individual’, tended to be ‘suspicious of abstractions and of their first rep-
resentation, law’, and to locate every reference to the necessary superiority
and transcendence of the moment of the state at a different level.3 A juridical
science capable of dealing with the pressures of ‘urgent historical reality’,4
then, had to be able to leave the idolatry of the legislator behind.5 Also, it
had to be prepared to work on reality more than norms, and on the basis of
that work it had to put forward a model of society suitable for the climate of
the new century.
This leads us to the second common trait. On the idealist view, juridical
thought did not have a merely certifying role: that is to say, it should not only
be concerned with registering experiential data. To the authors in question,
fact and value, history and the ethical projects of humanity, were necessary,
correlative dimensions of systematic legal discourse. This is shown by their
crediting their proposed theoretical solutions with an ability to match the
authentic nature of the relevant specific realities (individual, society, state)
and the dynamic of their future development.
From this point of view, Idealism (especially that of Gentile) was quite
appealing, for it presented itself as a philosophical system that put future
history in various ways at the centre of its theoretical horizon. History ceased
to be the domain of sheer non-contemporaneity. That was not because of
the application of a speculative grid intended to purify and thereby distort
it. On the contrary, the idealist claim implied that thought could become
action,6 and so could contribute to designing the future organisation of
society. Legal science, wrote Volpicelli (one of Gentile’s pupils), ‘preserves
its own mandatory critical function’ only if ‘it promotes reality along with
interpreting it – if it commands life as well as obeying it’.7
In relation to juridical thought, such assumptions enabled jurists to avoid
the demon of empiricism: that is, they prevented the rediscovery of historic-
ity both from leading to ‘sociologising . . . answers’8 to the identity crisis of
juridical science, and from being reduced to a mere diagnosis of the crisis.
It was widely accepted that the much-discussed crisis (of the state, of
private law and even of law tout court) in Italy after the First World War
was primarily the crisis of that nineteenth-century model, which imagined
the social order as the result of a harmonious interaction of separate and
non-interfering universes: the public and the private, the political, the
juridical, the economic. However, it was also accepted that the renewed
interest in the function of thought was an important preliminary step in
reaffirming the legitimacy of juridical science itself – disregarding, of course,
local agreements or disagreements.
After all, the new century was opening up so many questions. Consider,
for example, one of the most distinctive traits of the new mass society: the
proliferation of organised social groups – political parties, trade unions,
companies, geographical concentrations of enterprises. These phenomena
demanded a revision of the traditional conceptions of private and public
law. Of private law, because the network of the new groups made the old
conception of society as simply a collection of individuals untenable unless
the problem of the relationship between individuals and groups, between
individuals and social autonomy, was fully confronted. But social organi-
sations forced a rethinking of public law too, for they put pressure on the
state and sought to influence its action; this made the nineteenth-century
picture of a sovereign state, untouched by social and economic dynamics,
obsolete.9
Here is the third common trait. It was not by accident that one of the
key themes of idealist Italian jurists was that of social organisation (and
the organisation of society). The intention was to replace the nineteenth-
century concept of the separation of state and society with the idea of an
order resulting from the necessary interaction between them. Indeed, the
starting point for the rethinking of the identity of the private and the public,
and, more generally, of the system supposedly binding together rules and
obedience, autonomy and heteronomy, was the idea of society as a system of
entities and organisations. The collective dimension of law was credited with
a fundamental role in bringing into focus the new face of civil co-existence
and the bond between historical awareness and prescriptive and systematic
requirements, even in juridical discourse. This was due to two different
views of social entities. On one view, social entities were considered the only
possible ‘truth of the individual’,10 the only place where the authentic nature
of subjectivity could be preserved against the disruptive force of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century individualism. On the other view, although with the
same effect, social entities appeared as a specific product of the twentieth
264 Irene Stolzi
century, one which was bound to experiment with new forms of mediation
between state and society.
2 A frontier of totalitarianism: the state in interiore homine

In this context, it is not surprising that corporatism proved capable of attract-
ing those jurists who were close to Idealism. There are many reasons for the
link between corporatism and Idealism. First, because corporatism was born
as a political and administrative doctrine designed to confront the problem
of the relationship between the state and the economic and social forces
typical of the twentieth century. Second, because it was a project intended
to solve the authority crisis of the state, by guaranteeing the predominance
of the general interest over partial ones, and so of neutralising the centrifu-
gal drive of the latter. Thirdly, because the corporatist project was original,
new, still to be shaped; and therefore capable of being a genuine field for
testing the application of juridical thought to the new politics of inter-war
Italy.
The corporatist project, then, was a child of its time, sensitive to the
imperatives of the new historical age that had begun in Europe after the
First World War. It was also a project that still had to be realised, which
raised above all the question of the organisation of civil co-existence in the
new mass society. One of the answers to that question was the totalitarian
one. That is, corporatism was taken to be a project which, if rightly inter-
preted and fulfilled, would be capable of providing, as Gentile said, the most
appropriate institutional embodiment of the ‘totalitarian character of fascist
doctrine’.11 If, in Maggiore’s words, the ‘totalitarian state’ was ‘necessarily
corporatist’,12 fascism would not be a mere imposition of order through
the old forms of ‘social authoritarianism’.13 On the contrary, fascism, and
its main institutional expression, corporatism, had the task of bringing into
being a state capable of including the whole spectrum of social and political
forces.
In Gentile’s view, in particular, fascism could aim at embodying a gen-
uinely new social and historical age only if it was able to bring about, on a
political and institutional level, that consensus, that overcoming of partic-
ularities and selfishness, which had been realised in the only two glorious
episodes in recent Italian history – namely, the Risorgimento and the First
World War.14 Combating the predominance of selfishness and particular
interests meant celebrating the majesty of the state and so seeing the state (as
Hegel had taught) as the necessary and ultimate moment of the realisation of
individuality: an individuality capable of transcending its own particularity

and of ‘acting as a universal will’.15
However, such an upshot was not seen as fatalistically necessitated by
historical evolution. On the contrary, the victory of the universal over the
particular was conceived as the outcome of a struggle beginning in the indi-
vidual (inhabited by a constant tension between those two opposing ten-
dencies), continuing in society and, finally, reaching the state.16 But if the
victory of the universal was not taken for granted, then it had to be sup-
ported and pursued through all the means at the state’s disposal. In this
sense, it was necessary that fascism should enhance the role ‘of the party
and of the institutions in charge of propaganda’,17 that it should exploit the
‘pedagogical and moralising function of trade unions’,18 that it should view
the corporatist order and the various political, social and economic entities
that comprised it, as resources for bringing back the individual to the state, of
bringing about the perception of the state in interiore homine. If this complex
persuasive machinery could not avoid ‘particularist wills exteriorising them-
selves’, pretending ‘to affirm their superficial will’,19 then the state could, and
indeed should, resort to coercion, which was viewed as a means of preserving
individuals from the dangers of an unrealised subjectivity overwhelmed by
egoistic impulses. Therefore, in Gentile’s system, freedom and coercion were
not ‘incompatible’ dimensions: it was assumed, in fact, that a relationship
had to be established between state and subject analogous to that between
‘teacher [maestro] and pupil’, because ‘education involved the exertion of
a coercive force, which, once internalised, could become an emancipatory
force’,20 a vehicle for the liberation of the subject.
The state in interiore homine was the ideal consequence of this process,
which was conceived as the concrete synthesising of the philosophical and
the prescriptive elements in the idea of the state as both an ideal type of
civil co-existence, and at the same time the institutional apparatus capable
of realising such a type.
This was not a discourse created ad hoc to justify Gentile’s adherence
to fascism; rather, it was already fully developed from the middle of the
1910s.21 Both Ugo Spirito and Arnaldo Volpicelli contributed to it. The
main points of Gentile’s view can be found in their theoretical works, in
which the corporatist doctrine is fully developed. For them, too, the his-
torical and theoretical legitimacy of corporatism and fascism turned on the
ability of these movements to realise the absolute identity of the state and the
individual. It was necessary to think of the individual, and his or her place in
the world, in terms of their belonging to society and the state. Indeed, this
266 Irene Stolzi
kind of reasoning was a common trait of several anti-individualistic theories

of state and society.22 However, in the case of corporatism, the explicit goal
was to do away with the possibility of any dialectic between autonomy and
heteronomy, in favour of a perfect osmosis between the objective and subjec-
tive dimensions of social experience. Such an osmosis was to be pursued by
guaranteeing ‘an increasingly intimate and positive institutional adherence
of the state to that concrete social reality of which the State is the essential
directive personality’.23
The corporatist state, then, had to make contact with actual social and
economic relationships – not, though, in order to realise ‘a fair participation
of all categories in the creation of the State’s will’.24 Such an approach to
the conflicts and complexities of the new mass society would have ended
up reproducing on a larger scale the limitations of outdated models of the
state that tended to deal with conflicts between social forces by means of
an artificial combination of repressive and participatory measures. Such a
policy was ineffective because it simply confirmed the fragility of an authority
perceived as external (if not extraneous) to the self-determination of groups
and individuals. It was imperative, then, to put the necessary ‘superiority’ of
the state over individuals on a different plane, namely that ‘of the [superiority
of an] organism over its organs’.25 In this way, countering a juridical tradition
that had strenuously defended the distinction between law and politics,
Spirito and Volpicelli reasserted the supremacy of the political over the
juridical, and the necessity that politics should become the actual driving
force of law.
Which politics, though? Certainly not, from their point of view, the one
resulting from the confused comparison and assessment of opinions in a
parliament and the quantitative computation of votes. Rather, politics had
to be the unifying dimension where the aims and objectives of the entire
national life were identified, and it had to bring all the moments of social
and individual living back into that national life.26 In the works of Spirito
and Volpicelli there was no explicit indication as to which powers, which
organs or bodies and which procedures were meant to ensure the realisation
of those aims. They treated politics only from the standpoint of the state; the
state, and only the state, could identify both the relevant objectives and the
means by which they should be realised in the lives of the citizens.
Intermediate corporations played a significant role in organising, on
behalf of the state, the whole space of common life, and indeed of the subject’s
interiority. On the one hand, the transmission of objectives and values from
the state to the subjects had necessarily to pass through them. On the other
hand, they were important instruments for the state to organise, control
and rule civil society. They also had to present themselves as created by the
power of the state. The existence of intermediate corporations, then, was a
necessary condition for an effective relationship between the state and civil
society, and between civil society and the individual. In other words, the
aim was to realise, through the new corporatist machinery, ‘the aprioricity
of the system with respect to its members’,27 i.e. the priority of the state
over individuals. At the lowest level, the very personality of the individuals
had to be organised by the state, thereby wiping out any dialectic between
autonomy and heteronomy and, along with it, between private and public
law.
In this sense, corporatism could make sense only if it ratified ‘the state-
related nature and significance of the whole of individual and social life’,28 if
the state proved itself able to ‘organise and control the whole life of society
within its own unitary system’,29 and to be experienced ‘not as an external
limitation and constraint, but rather as an intimate reality and power living
in and from the individual’.30
3 The end of private law

The seizure by the state of power over individuals and society implied dis-
missing the distinction between private and public law, so that all juridical
argument became public. This meant, in turn, rejecting the assumption that
law had a private dimension in which it could be autonomously deployed
by individual citizens, and in which the latter could freely choose the aims
of their own actions. Anything standing in the way of the identification of
individual life with the life of the state was potentially subversive, and, as
such, had to be brought back within the state order. If, therefore, ‘all forms
and forces of the nation’s life’ were ‘legitimate and justifiable only insofar as
they realised and acted according to their statal nature and destination’,31 it
was necessary to set ‘the authority of the State over the whole of the indi-
viduals’ life’, including ‘their economic, religious and moral lives, which the
old State . . . , agnostic and negative . . . , used to leave outside itself, treating
them as natural rights and spheres of action of private individuals in their
unrelated singularity’.32
Indeed, the process of the ‘statalisation’ of individual personality could
be considered complete only when the choices of single individuals became
parts of a system of decisions which did not depend upon on, or originate
from, the individuals themselves.
268 Irene Stolzi
In my behaviour [nel mio agire] . . . I do contemplate certain aims,

which are mine and match my taste; but such aims are not arbitrary,
and can only be explained by locating them as part of the life of the
state. So that, in a different state, there would be different conditions
of life, . . . the tastes of the citizens would be different and so, in short,
would be the aims which anyone was able to contemplate and actually
did contemplate.33
In this view, corporatism was meant to prepare the institutional instruments

through which individual citizens’ perception of authority as something
other than themselves, as an external dimension, could be overcome. In
other words, corporatism should educate people in their consciousness of
freedom and especially in perceiving the state as the only possible vehicle of
a ‘superior freedom’34 – superior, that is, because originated, moulded and
disciplined in the forge of the new totalitarian statehood.
Even the significance of private property, which in the nineteenth century
had been understood as the main point of contact between the private and
the public spheres, was radically redefined by the corporatist philosophy of
law. Fascism, wrote Spirito, ‘leaves property untouched, not because of an
alleged inviolability of the rights of individuals, but only because it takes
property to be the most effective and useful tool with respect to the interest
of the nation’.35 In short, property was stripped of its symbolic value: it
was no longer the inescapable horizon of individual autonomy and freedom.
Instead, it became an instrument that the state could use in order to proclaim
its own conquest of society and its own economic power.
Corporatism was a credible third way only if it proved itself capable of
overcoming the limitations of both the socialist and the liberal systems. The
practice of socialism demonstrated that citizens who had been stripped of
property became increasingly uninterested in productivity and the output
of their own work. Liberal systems, on the other hand, had an unwarranted
faith in an atomistic and competitive conception of the market, which had in
the inter-war years already been rendered obsolete by the greatly increased
size of industrial enterprises. The latter were engaged in an uncontrolled
process of competition that put the safety of the state at risk without guaran-
teeing adequate economic development.36 Once again, for Spirito, the right
answer lay in the state; or, better, the right answer was to endow the state
with a new kind of authority, in order structurally to bind it to the dynamic
of the economy. Spirito’s much-criticised proposal in 1932 for the corpo-
ratisation of property,37 the so-called corporazione proprietaria, was simply
a means to coordinate the authority of the state with the dynamics of the
economy, thereby enabling the development of industrial ‘giants’38 and an

‘all-out industrialisation’ of the Italian economy.39 As an ‘organ’40 of the
state, and, at the same time, a productive reality shaped like a limited com-
pany, Spirito’s corporation was meant to ratify ‘the actual identification of
each individual’s economic life with the State’s economic life’.41 It was also
intended to combine the presence of a systematic centre, namely the state,
orienting and controlling the national economic policy, with the presence
of productive organisations yielding profits and sharing them among the
participants in the productive process, ‘in accordance with their hierarchical
ranking’.42
In Spirito’s view, the upshot of all this would be a complete rationalisation
of the dynamics of the economy, and of national life tout court; a rationalisation
which would finally be centred on the producer, a subject who would be both
spurred to produce at his full potential by his capacity to earn, and supported
in such an activity by the state, which would delimit and determine the
conditions of private economic actions. In this way, ‘the hypothetical ideal
of a general balance, miraculously yielded by the combination of an infinite
number of arbitrary private choices, was replaced by another ideal, that of
a totalitarian organism in which everybody contributed with a conscious
and non-immediate will’43 that, as such, would be one with the will of the
state.
This is the source of Spirito’s criticism of Hegel and the latter’s (allegedly)
contradictory arguments concerning property. According to Hegel, wrote
Spirito, ‘single individuals are only abstractions; in reality, they live as fami-
lies, as civil society, as state’;44 as a consequence, property as a private right
should itself be considered ‘an abstraction’, the private and individualis-
tic shape of which was bound to dissolve in the superior synthesis of the
state. In Hegel, however, this ‘private character’45 was always reasserted, in
contradiction, Spirito believed, to the theoretical premises and the actual
elaboration of his thought.
At root, two distinct interpretations of history were at work in Hegel.
Hegel, indeed thought that ‘the essential traits of that juridical tradi-
tion, which from Locke to Kant . . . had made property inseparable from
freedom’46 were ‘the first step on a path which has to be run by dialectically
overcoming its very starting point’, and whose ultimate ending point was
the state, or ‘freedom made true as the State’,47 and the stages of such a path
were presented as ‘the upshot of a long and triumphal historical process’48 .
However, Hegel also attached to ‘this ideal route, having in the state its
own ending and ultimate point’, a ‘merely cognitive and expositive value: in
270 Irene Stolzi
reality, the state was not the result, but the “true ground”’49 on the basis of
which individuals and society became thinkable.
It seems that, in the authors we are considering, such a favourable (in
bonam partem) depiction of past history and of the development of ideas
has disappeared along with any sense of historical necessity, leaving only
a destructive criticism of the past, and of all the images of order the past
had conveyed. In the works of Spirito and Volpicelli, attention to the con-
structive element, which was shared by all the totalitarian interpretations
of fascism, coexisted with a reading which tended to think of the past as a
mere accretion of irrational and disruptive individualistic impulses. Past and
future, then, were able to communicate only in terms of a drastic mutual
opposition. The problem was not even one of rethinking and transform-
ing the positive heritage of the past in the new totalitarian reality: the very
distinction between a good and bad historical legacy disappeared. This also
represented a significant departure from Gentile’s view.
In this Weltanschauung, everything pertaining to the private, instead of
being conceived as the negative moment in the dialectic to be overcome by the
synthesis of the state, was thought of as the ‘eternal enemy to be fought’, the
sign of an imperfection within ‘the dialectic of life’50 – an imperfection which
had to be expunged by the new totalitarian organisation of the power of the
state. ‘Law’, wrote Volpicelli, ‘does not mark borders between individuals;
rather, it unifies them, it organises them in a system and in a common work’51
and is therefore incompatible with the presence of spheres of autonomy. Even
more radically, it is incompatible with what is conceived of as the irrelevant
intervention of the law.
4 Borders, old and new

This stress on the primacy of the political moment also met with some
dissent. In particular it was maintained, for example by Gentile’s ‘faithful
follower’ Giuseppe Maggiore,52 that realising the new total state did not
require subduing the subject’s interiority. Maggiore was persuaded that the
essence of the totalitarian project was well expressed in the idealist slogan,
‘the state . . . in everything’,53 a slogan which acknowledged and promoted
the absence of limits54 to the power of the state, along with promoting
and acknowledging the possibility of the state’s controlling every aspect of
the subject’s life. However, he believed that references to a state in interiore
homine could open the way to an inappropriate mixture of political and ethical
components.55
Maggiore did not see this as a way of getting rid of any role for ideology
in the construction of the new state. On the contrary, Maggiore was among
the most strenuous advocates of the need for modifying both the traditional
system of the sources of law, which assumed the supremacy of law, and the
whole system of principles grounded on that supremacy. In particular, his
proposal was to maximally emphasise the powers of the judiciary and the
executive, which he considered to be nearer than the written law to the
actuality of society. Those powers were supposedly more capable of finding
effective ways to transmit, more immediately and widely, the values which
the fascist state wanted to promote.56 The actions of judges and the officials,
then, had to have an ideological connotation: they should contribute to the
realisation of fascist principles. For Maggiore, such a realisation might even
be obtained through the abolition of the use of analogy in criminal law – the
basic idea, here, being that every crime was ‘political’ and every criminal a
‘rebel’ to be prosecuted, even in the absence of an explicit norm.57
Therefore, for Maggiore, the political level, which had to proclaim the
key values of the new fascist era, had to embody the absolute supremacy
of the state and to influence and determine all the forms of law. For him,
politics had to be understood as ‘the doctrine of the power of the state’58 ,
as the expression of the – limitless – ‘quantity’59 of power. The structure
of the discourse, however, did not change much. In order to be effective,
the political level, so conceived, needed a complex network of intermediate
entities that had to spread the might of the new state60 to the remotest
recesses of civil co-existence. It also had to exclude any form of either social
or political autonomy. However, it could afford a less iconoclastic attitude
towards the distinction between the public and the private. For one thing,
without this distinction ‘particularity’ and ‘generality’ lost all meaning.61
Not only this. Private law undoubtedly appeared as ‘less valued, or even
disvalued’62 with respect to public law, and therefore coercible at will by
the superior power of the state. But such a power – and here is the main
point – could establish its totalitarian self whether or not the identity of the
individual and the state was fully realised. Not only was the latter difficult to
achieve, but making it a condition for the realisation of the totalitarian state
meant ratifying the dependence of the fascist state on individual citizens and
on their inner adherence to its demands.
Cesarini Sforza, another representative of Idealism-oriented philosophy
of law, made the same point even more clearly.63 He kept his distance from
totalitarianism as a political theory, and even if the social model he promoted
mirrored in many ways the ones this chapter has considered, he vehemently
272 Irene Stolzi
contested the thesis of the identification of the individual and the state. He
contested it first because, since it required juridical life to become entirely
public, it would have made private law and any form of subjective auton-
omy disappear. He also opposed it because, in tearing down the borders
between the public and the private, it risked producing its own opposite, the
dependence of the state on society.64 Cesarini Sforza claimed that the public
and the private were two necessary elements in juridical experience, expres-
sions of two distinct and non-communicating modalities – autonomous and
heteronomous65 – which defined certain real interests. This was the key
point in his attempt to adapt to the new century the old alliance between the
state and the private proprietor, an alliance which it was the task of corpo-
ratism to confirm and ratify. The collective dimension of law and organised
interests was the core of his thought, precisely because it was not supposed
to lead to the statalisation of all legal activity; rather, it had to provide the
conditions for the realisation of a conception of civil co-existence which was
far from mass democracy, and depended instead on an elitist view of ‘social
dominion’.66 Clearly, all Gentile’s and Volpicelli’s references to the authen-
tic democratic and representative nature of the corporatist state originated
from their own view of totalitarianism which, by implying that the corpo-
ratist idea of the state had already been internalised by individual citizens,
made it possible to think of the state as representative of the individual’s gen-
uine will and freedom67 – a freedom which could be obtained only through
the state. However, it is obvious that such a reconstruction of the idea of
freedom, depending as it did on the elimination of any distance between state
and society, was open to being overturned by any resurgence of democratic
voluntarism, i.e. the idea that statehood is grounded on the majority’s will
(which, by that time, meant the will of the masses).
The Italian reception of Idealism, then, generated different readings of
corporatism, which were however all equally concerned with the key political
problem of the twentieth century: how a mass society should be governed.
This was a common feature of all the theorisations of totalitarian corpo-
ratism, even those that were not influenced by Idealism. It was also a typical
aspect of those views, which, though rejecting totalitarianism, saw in corpo-
ratism an institutional instrument appropriate to the peculiar characteristics
of twentieth-century society. This was not, however, the prevailing attitude
in Italian juridical thought: most jurists and philosophers tried to recon-
cile corporatism with the traditional concepts of legality and order. Such
attempts reflected more a difficulty in conceiving of juridical order within
new theoretical coordinates than a deliberate desire on the part of their
authors to distance themselves from the regime and from the intellectuals
who were trying to shape it from within. This is shown by the interpre-
tations that Italian juridical thought gave of fascism and corporatism after
their fall. The influence of corporatism on Italian legal thought was, if not
completely negligible,68 certainly well below the revolutionary expectations
it had been supposed to fulfil. However, the failure of the corporatist exper-
iment was greeted as an opportunity for restating the eternal validity of the
traditional, nineteenth-century conception of the relationship between state
and society. This had significant consequences for the subsequent develop-
ment of Italian juridical thought. Corporatism was stigmatised, even more
than as an expression of fascism, as evidence of the impossibility of setting
the problem of the relations between individuals, social groups and the state
in a new framework. Moreover, the fall of the fascist regime was greeted as
an opportunity for fully rehabilitating the old borders between the public
and the private, and between the political, the juridical and the economic.
The real risk for Italian legal thought, therefore, was that it would radically
ignore the specificity of the twentieth century, and so prevent itself from
understanding the totalitarian nature of some theorisations of corporatist
fascism. The latter, in fact, was simplistically labelled as a minor expression
of some ‘doctrinal digressions’69 that were politically irrelevant and there-
fore unable to influence the actual course of events. Moreover, Italian legal
thought continued to reassert the essential separateness of domains which
both the 1948 Italian constitutional charter and the actual development of
post-fascist Italian society showed to be closely interwoven. The constitu-
tional charter offers a vision of democracy in which the declaration of the
rights and the inviolable autonomy of individuals, and a concrete conception
of individuals, social formations and the state, as well as of the free market
and public intervention in economic matters, constantly intersect with each
other. However, the prevailing attitude of Italian legal philosophy to the
corporatist experiment has not merely served as a justification for an inter-
pretation of fascism in which it boils down to a mere temporary and bankrupt
attempt to open a new chapter in Italian history. More importantly, it has
led to the exclusion of Italian juridical thought from the planning of the new
democratic course.70
Translated by Nicola Spinelli
Notes
1. B. Croce, ‘Elementi di politica’ (1925), in Croce, Etica e politica (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1956),
231.
274 Irene Stolzi
2. F. Perfetti, ‘Giovanni Gentile, una filosofia per lo Stato etico’, in Giovanni Gentile: Discorsi
parlamentari (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), 22.
3. P. Grossi, Scienza giuridica italiana – un profilo storico 1865–1950 (Milan: Giuffrè, 2000),
143.
4. U. Spirito, ‘Verso l’economia corporativa’, Nuovi Studi di Diritto Economia Politica 3 (1929),
233.
5. G. Maggiore, ‘La dottrina del metodo giuridico e la sua revisione critica’, Rivista Inter-
nazionale di Filosofia del Diritto 6 (1926), 385.
6. P. Costa, L’età dei totalitarismi e della democrazia, vol. iv of Civitas – storia della cittadinanza
in Europa, 4 vols. (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2001), 223.
7. A. Volpicelli, ‘I presupposti scientifici dell’ordinamento corporativo’, Nuovi Studi di Diritto,
Economia, Politica 6 (1932), 102.
8. P. Costa, ‘Widar Cesarini Sforza: illusioni e certezze della giurisprudenza’, Quaderni Fioren-
tini per la Storia del Pensiero Giuridico Moderno 5–6 (1976–7), 1048.
9. See V. E. Orlando, ‘Diritto amministrativo e scienza dell’amministrazione’ (1887), in
Diritto pubblico generale (Milan: Giuffrè, 1940), 166ff.
10. Grossi, Scienza giuridica italiana, 164.
11. Giovanni Gentile, ‘Fascismo identità di Stato e individuo’ (1927), in C. Casucci (ed.), Il
fascismo – antologia di scritti critici (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982), 267.
12. G. Maggiore, La politica (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1941), 301.
13. Volpicelli, ‘I presupposti scientifici’, 103.
14. Gentile, ‘Fascismo identità’, 256ff.
15. Giovanni Gentile, ‘I fondamenti della filosofia del diritto’ (1916), in Opere complete ix
(Florence: Sansoni, 1955), 71.
16. Costa, L’età dei totalitarismi e della democrazia, 232–4.
17. Gentile, ‘Fascismo identità’, 274.
18. Ibid., 275.
19. Costa, L’età dei totalitarismi e della democrazia, 234.
20. Ibid., 241.
21. See ibid., 232; Perfetti, ‘Giovanni Gentile’, 45ff.
22. Costa, L’età dei totalitarismi e della democrazia, 490.
23. A. Volpicelli, ‘Dal parlamentarismo al corporativismo – polemizzando con H. Kelsen’,
Nuovi Studi di Diritto Economia Politica 3 (1929), 259.
24. Ibid., 262.
25. A. Volpicelli, ‘I fondamenti ideali del corporativismo’, Archivio di Studi Corporativi 1 (1930),
208.
26. See: A. Volpicelli, ‘Santi Romano’, Nuovi Studi di Diritto Economia Politica 3 (1929), 354;
and U. Spirito, ‘Benessere individuale e benessere sociale’, Archivio di Studi Corporativi 1
(1930), 495.
27. A. Volpicelli, ‘Corporativismo e scienza del diritto – risposta al prof. Cesarini Sforza’,
Archivio di Studi Corporativi 3 (1932), 434–5.
28. Volpicelli, ‘I fondamenti ideali’, 211.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 208.
31. Ibid., 209.
32. Ibid.
33. Spirito, ‘Benessere individuale’, 489.
34. Volpicelli, ‘Corporativismo e scienza del diritto’, 439; in the same sense also U. Spirito,
‘Il corporativismo come liberalismo assoluto e socialismo assoluto’ (1932), in C. Casucci
(ed.), Il fascismo – antologia di scritti critici (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982), 142.
35. Spirito, ‘Dentro e fuori’ (1932), now in F. Malgeri and G. De Rosa (eds.), Giuseppe Bottai e
‘Critica fascista’, 2 vols. (San Giovanni Valdarno: Landi, 1980), ii, 728.
36. U. Spirito, Individuo e Stato nella concezione corporativa (Rome: Tipografia del Senato, 1932),
4ff.
37. The references to ‘corporazione proprietaria’ can be read especially in Spirito, Individuo e
Stato.
38. U. Spirito, ‘Ruralizzazione o industrializzazione?’, Archivio di Studi Corporativi 1 (1930),
149.
39. Ibid., 133.
40. Spirito, Individuo e Stato, 9.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Spirito, s.v. ‘Scambio’, Enciclopedia italiana (Rome, 1934), xxx, 1005.
44. U. Spirito, ‘La proprietà privata nella concezione di Hegel’, contribution to the Third
International Hegelian Conference (Rome, 1933), later published in Spirito, Il comunismo
(Florence: Sansoni, 1965), 111.
45. Ibid., 117.
46. P. Costa, L’età delle rivoluzioni, vol. ii of Civitas – storia della cittadinanza in Europa, 4 vols.
(Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2000), 431.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 439.
50. Spirito, ‘Il corporativismo come liberalismo assoluto’, 790.
51. A. Volpicelli, discussion, in Ministero delle Corporazioni (ed.), Atti del secondo convegno di
studi sindacali e corporativi iii (Rome: Tipografia del Senato, 1932), 88.
52. Grossi, Scienza giuridica italiana, 7.
53. G. Maggiore, ‘L’aspetto pubblico e privato del diritto e la crisi dello Stato moderno’,
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia del Diritto 2 (1922), 141.
54. Maggiore, La politica, 301. More extensively: the state ‘cannot obviously limit its own
authority: everything which is good for its might, is permitted to it. There is no minimal
or maximal activity, for the State: the whole of social and individual life belongs to it, and,
theoretically, it cannot renounce organising it.’
55. Ibid., 271.
56. Maggiore, ‘La dottrina del metodo giuridico’, 384.
57. G. Maggiore, ‘Diritto penale totalitario nello Stato totalitario’, Rivista Italiana di Diritto
Penale 11 (1939), 155.
58. Maggiore, La politica, 13.
59. Ibid., 75.
60. Maggiore, ‘L’ordinamento corporativo nel diritto pubblico’, Il Diritto del Lavoro 2 (1928),
192–3.
276 Irene Stolzi
61. Maggiore, ‘L’aspetto pubblico’, 132.

62. Ibid.
63. See Costa, ‘Widar Cesarini Sforza’.
64. W. Cesarini Sforza, ‘Il problema dell’autorità’, Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia del Diritto
20 (1940), 70–2.
65. Cesarini Sforza, ‘Individuo e Stato nella corporazione’, in Il corporativismo come esperienza
giuridica (Milan: Giuffrè, 1942), 169.
66. Costa, ‘Widar Cesarini Sforza’, 1066.
67. Gentile, ‘Fascismo identità’, 274; Volpicelli, ‘Dal parlamentarismo’, 257.
68. Two recent studies have observed that corporatism, even though it never really determined
the course of Italian political and economic life, had an actual influence which is more
significant than the historiographical tradition believes. Those studies are S. Cassese,
Lo Stato fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012), and A. Gagliardi, Il corporativismo fascista
(Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2010).
69. S. Romano, discussion, in Ministero della Corporazioni (ed.), Atti del secondo convegno di
studi sindacali iii, 97.
70. About the reconstruction of this attitude of juridical science, and for related bibliographic
suggestions, see I. Stolzi, L’ordine corporativo – poteri organizzati e organizzazione del potere
nella riflessione giuridica dell’Italia fascista (Milan: Giuffrè, 2007), 424ff.
12
Love and recognition in Fichte and the alternative

position of de Beauvoir
Marion Heinz
Introduction
The philosophical theories which are generally characterised by the name
of ‘German Idealism’ are united in the task of overcoming the dualisms of
Kant’s critical philosophy – the oppositions of subject and object, theoret-
ical and practical philosophy, mundus sensibilis and mundus intelligibilis – and
thus furnishing a complete system of philosophy. These theories also share
the idea that the principle underlying the entire system of philosophy must
be developed in a way that preserves Kant’s insight that the ‘I think’ is the
highest point of reference for logic as a whole and indeed for transcendental
philosophy itself. But whereas Kant’s doctrine of the analytic and synthetic
unity of apperception serves to ground theoretical philosophy alone, these
Idealist thinkers seek to ground philosophy in its entirety upon a principle –
a single principle – that exhibits the character of subjectivity, that is, of self-
relating activity.1 This programme for a monistic philosophy of subjectivity
also provides the foundation for the theories of recognition that were devel-
oped by the philosophers of German Idealism. Fichte first introduced the
notion of ‘recognition’ as the fundamental concept of social philosophy and
the philosophy of right in his 1796 text Foundations of Natural Right according
to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre,2 and Hegel would present the most
prominent and influential conception of recognition in his Phenomenology of
Spirit of 1807, but in spite of the different philosophical foundations devel-
oped in each case3 both thinkers agree that it is impossible to realise the
true or actual self-consciousness of finite rational beings by starting from
the basis of a solus ipse, and that, on the contrary, it is one’s consciousness
of other individuals, standing in a relationship of mutual recognition, which
furnishes the indispensable presupposition for such self-consciousness. This
277
278 Marion Heinz
connection between the theory of subjectivity and that of intersubjectivity,

so characteristic of the post-Kantian attempts to ground philosophy as sys-
tem, reframes the field of practical philosophy – at least in Fichte’s case –
in comparison both to Kant and to the Enlightenment tradition of natu-
ral law theory. For now the contractual model that serves to ground rights
and duties for natural law and also Kant’s novel attempt to ground practi-
cal philosophy in a purely formal principle, the pure practical law of reason
that categorically commands the law-like adoption of maxims, are both sus-
pended, and the theorem of recognition provides the philosophical basis for
determining right action and rational institutions.4 Not only is it true that
no Ichheit or ‘I-hood’ can be conscious of itself without the consciousness of
other subjects, but the relations of these subjects to one another are for their
part grounded in and defined by the structure of subjectivity. Just as iden-
tity and difference, universal and particular, are mediated in the structure
of subjectivity as self-identifying and self-distinguishing I-hood, to express
this in Hegelian terms, so this must also hold for the relation between the
individuals who are defined by this structure. The subjects in question must
be able to encounter one another as rational individuals, i.e. as equals, in
such a way that at the same time they can preserve the distinction between
the one and the other, i.e. can preserve their non-identity. If we focus specif-
ically on Fichte here, this relation of recognition must be conceived as one
between reciprocally communicating rational beings, as a relation in which
such beings understand themselves both as a ‘community’ of reciprocally
dependent equals and as free individuals who are ‘distinguished from one
another by opposition.’5
The Idealist theories of intersubjectivity thus provide the systematic
framework of a social philosophy that is based upon the structures of iden-
tity and difference internal to subjectivity, and claims to represent a fun-
damental advance upon both the Hobbesian atomistic and the Aristotelian-
teleological models of the social order. And this framework provides the
context for the further elaboration of the Enlightenment discourse on gen-
der that had developed in the course of bourgeois emancipation and the
changes in social structure which accompanied it.6 It is thus no accident that
Rousseau’s problematic of gender, which proved so virulent in the context
of his critique of civilisation, and the novel theory of gender difference which
he elaborated came to provide the principal theoretical point of reference
for Idealist philosophy. The post-Kantian philosophers combined the Ide-
alist programme of Vereinigung or ‘unification’ with a practical and political
interest in securing a liberated and reconciled condition of humanity, an
Love and recognition in Fichte and de Beauvoir 279
interest that demanded careful consideration of the possibilities for realising

the demands of reason within the sensible world. In describing their own
time, and its forms of deformation and diremption, thinkers such as Friedrich
Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt partly follow Rousseau, whose diagno-
sis of the losses entailed by the progress of civilisation is widely accepted:
unhappiness, immorality, alienation from ourselves and our fellow human
beings, are regarded as distortions of our natural endowment or potential
which are produced by human beings themselves in the course of civilisa-
tion. For the post-Kantian generation of philosophers who wish to address
this situation, of course, there is no longer any question of going back to
nature as the source of norms for human action and a properly human social
order. Schiller and Humboldt draw on the theoretical potential of Kant’s
Critique of Judgement, on the resources of aesthetics, or on the concept of
organic nature, while Fichte develops a teleological story of the progressive
realisation of morality that draws on Kant’s theory of culture. Rousseau him-
self had presented the idea, on the basis of an anthropologically grounded
moral philosophy, that it is necessary to establish an order of gender that is
appropriate to nature if a society is to develop in which individuals stand in
an authentic relationship to themselves and thus at the same time can relate
through sympathy with others to the human species as a whole. And the post-
Kantian philosophers take up this approach as well. Against the background
of Rousseau’s specific theory of gender difference, the opposition of the
sexes and the unity between them appear as the anthropological counterpart
to the idea of subjectivity and its determining moments. The loving union of
the sexes should thus be understood as a potential that promises to facilitate
the overcoming of alienation and diremption from the perspective of human
history as a whole. The sexual relationship of man and woman thus comes,
in other words, to represent speculative images of general reconciliation and
simultaneously promises to vouchsafe the effective historical realisation to
this ideal.
It was the Kant of the pre-critical period, ‘set on the right path’ by
Rousseau, who first adopted these convictions, converted as he was to the
image of the natural man who was happy by virtue of his few and simple
needs (the ‘cynical’ image of man in the original sense of the word). On
the basis of an ethics and an anthropology strongly influenced by aesthetic
considerations Kant further developed Rousseau’s theory of gender, and his
widely disseminated work Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the
Sublime helped to gain acceptance for Rousseau’s innovative views, for the
idea of subjects sexually related to one another in a complementary manner,
280 Marion Heinz
and for the concomitant paradigm of a gender relation based on sentiment,

on the feeling of love rather than on an essentially contractual agreement.7
Wilhelm von Humboldt, as we have already indicated, attempted to present
a theory of the cultural and educational development of the human being as
individual and as species, a theory which has the love of man and woman at its
centre. This relationship, according to Humboldt, allows us to overcome the
oppositions of nature and reason within individuals and between the loving
parties defined by this opposition, and to develop ourselves as a totality
of human existence. In his philosophy of history and theory of the state
Humboldt interprets this idea of love as a presentiment and presupposition
of a self-perfecting humanity.
The later Kant of the Metaphysics of Morals, whose moral philosophy is
based on a Platonic principle of practical philosophy, namely the idea of
legislation on the ground of pure practical reason which grounds its own
world beyond the realm of nature, is inevitably forced to distance himself
from Rousseau’s conception of marriage as a loving community of partners.
The relationship of the sexes that is produced and determined by nature
emerges in Kant’s legal and political philosophy as a problem sui generis, the
solution of which requires its own special form of right, a personal right with
respect to things.8 In the commercium sexuale the human being makes himself
into a thing, and this conflicts with ‘the humanity in his person’.a,9 This
conflict can only be resolved through a legal contract regarding the mutual
relation of the partners ‘as things’ and legitimating the reciprocal use of their
sexual organs. Kant’s conception of marriage is egalitarian in character: both
sexes are threatened by a loss of dignity, but through the reciprocal contract
of marriage each becomes an object of possession of the other and at the same
time each receives himself or herself back as a person, so that the sexual life
of each party is made compatible with his or her dignity.
The problem which Kant articulates here, namely that the sexual char-
acter of human beings subjects them to a reification that undermines their
dignity, also emerges as a problem for Fichte. He appeals not to the form
of contract but to a relation of love that complements the relation of recog-
nition, identifying this as a higher form of union that not only renders
sexual relations compatible with human dignity but also permits us to rec-
oncile the opposition between reason and nature in the human being more
generally.
a. ‘[D]er Menschheit an seiner eigenen Person’. Immanuel Kant, Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. Wilhelm
Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1956–62), viii, 390
The ways in which post-Kantian philosophy attempted to unite the inner

subjective oppositions of reason and nature by recourse to the intersubjec-
tive connection between human beings of different sexes, who stand to
one another in the relation of reason (man) and nature (woman), cannot be
grounded in a contract between equals. Rather, it is the inner regulation of
the comportment of individuals according to the norms of the masculine
and the feminine as described in Rousseau’s Émile that are supposed to facil-
itate the union of human beings in marriage as a preliminary form of ethical
life (Fichte) or as a shape of ethical life (Hegel). The feminist rereadings of
the canon have decoded the scandalous political subtext at work behind the
pathos of appeals to love and the exaggerated ethical demands placed on
marriage. For we are concerned here with a fundamental attack upon the
egalitarian principles of the Enlightenment that results in the subordination
of woman. By transferring the difference of reason and nature onto the dif-
ference of man and woman the Idealist thinkers once again position human
subjects – in contradiction to the modern postulate of equality – within the
familiar matrix of a different status in each case.
Beauvoir was the first to recognise the ideological character of these the-
ories that create the illusory appearance of naturalness with regard to charac-
teristics of gender. In order to diagnose the actual inequality and alienation
between the sexes, and at the same time to develop the fundamental outlines
of a humanistic feminism that undertakes to liberate both man and woman
from the flawed forms of humanity defined by their supposed sexual char-
acteristics, Beauvoir draws on the conceptual resources of Hegel’s dialectic
of lordship and servitude and appropriates this dialectic in the concepts of a
feminist ethic: forced on the basis of her sexual-biological nature to partic-
ipate in the reproductive cycle of sheer life, woman in previous history was
prevented from even entering into the struggle for recognition, which is to
say, was denied the status of a freely self-determining subject. This does not
mean that it is simply impossible for woman to negate this actual historical
circumstance, which is conditioned by a biological fact, and to constitute
herself by a deed as subject, as this was possible for man, on the basis of
his different sexual nature, already at the very beginning of the historical
existence of the human species. On the contrary: the historical situation is
defined by the fact that it falls to woman to pursue her self-liberation, and to
unite this feminist engagement with the further political ambition to liberate
humanity as such from forms of economic repression too.
The succeeding generation of feminists have subjected the traces of essen-
tialism and naturalism that still reflect gender stereotypes in the work of
282 Marion Heinz
Beauvoir herself to severe and extensive criticism, and thus concluded that
the philosophical foundations of this kind of feminist philosophy, rooted as
it is in the tradition of the philosophy of subjectivity, are wholly inadequate
for the pursuit of the feminist project. For in the eyes of post-structuralist
theories of feminism the concept of rationally self-determining subjectiv-
ity, which previously served as the fundamental principle of philosophy and
as a crucial means of legitimation, now appears itself as an effect of hege-
monic discourse. Thus Luce Irigaray has attempted to reveal the origin of the
theme of the self-determining subject in the phallocentric logic of European
thought that is defined by binary oppositions, while Judith Butler has devel-
oped the concept of the heterosexual matrix of discourse in order to explain
the production and reproduction of subjects who find themselves compelled
to develop masculine or feminine identities defined in specific physical and
psychological terms.10
The purpose of the following discussion is to investigate the particular
gains and losses incurred by Fichte’s attempt to reframe Rousseau’s contri-
butions in his own philosophical theory of gender in accordance with the
underlying premises of his subjective idealism of freedom. On the one hand,
we are concerned with questions about the inner consistency with which
the premises of this system are applied to the ‘community’ involved in the
gender relation conceived as a relation of human beings that is grounded in
nature. On the other hand, we are also concerned with the question whether
this gender discourse that was introduced by Rousseau can satisfy the pos-
tulates of freedom and equality formulated in the Enlightenment and the
emancipatory aspirations that are involved here. Our analysis of the prob-
lems that arise from Fichte’s doctrine of marriage in both these regards will
lay the ground for an assessment of Beauvoir’s alternative conception, which
is based for its part on Hegel’s theory of recognition.
1 Rousseau’s innovative contributions to the

philosophical theory of gender
In attempting to furnish a philosophical response to the conditions of human
alienation and immorality, both in relation to oneself and to one’s fellow
human beings, as he had described them in his theory of culture, Rousseau
undertakes in Book v of Émile to develop a new paradigm of the relation of
the sexes by appeal to the teleological concept of nature that was entertained
in antiquity. Like Plato and Aristotle in this regard, Rousseau is concerned
to define the identity and difference between man and woman in order to
possess a criterion for how they may ‘fill their place in the physical and
spiritual order’.11 The recognition that two perspectives are required here,
one regarding the species and the other regarding the specific sex, provides
the apparently trivial starting point and the basis for Rousseau’s theory of
gender. ‘Sophie ought to be a woman as Emile is a man – that is to say, she
ought to have everything which suits the constitution of her species [espèce]
and her sex [sexe] in order to fill her place in the physical and moral order’.12 By
modifying the architectonic13 of traditional logical and ontological concepts
with regard to genus and species, essence and properties, Rousseau is the
first thinker to explain sexual gender as the ground of difference itself,
as something by which all human determinations – including the essential
ones – are affected. ‘A perfect woman and a perfect man ought not to resemble
one another in mind any more than in looks, and perfection is not susceptible
of more or less’.14
It is in this way that Rousseau ‘invents’ the bourgeois subjects of man and
woman, bound to their biological nature and thus paradigmatically defined
in their character as human beings and in their respective public and private
roles. The peculiarity of the sexual character of man and woman must be
determined from the perspective of the relative weight of species-specific and
gender-specific attributes: whereas the man is man only at certain moments,
the woman is woman in the whole of her life.15 This is a new conceptual
understanding of sexual difference, one which reproduces the classical image
of man but, with respect to the conception of woman, involves a thorough and
hitherto unprecedented sexualisation of her personality as a whole. Whereas
the sexual attributes of the man possess a merely peripheral significance,
those of the woman constitute the essential core of her nature as a person.
If this difference with regard to sexual character is translated into norma-
tive terms, it indicates essentially different kinds of perfection: ‘As though
each, in fulfilling nature’s ends according to its own particular purpose [des-
tination particulière], were thereby less perfect than if it resembled the other
more!’16 Rousseau’s new systematic conception of the categorical distinc-
tions between species-specific and gender-specific attributes is the decisive
presupposition for asserting the equality, in the sense of the equal value, of
the qualitatively different sexes. Rousseau succeeds in grounding the equal
value of woman, and thus securing the validity of the modern postulate of
the equality of all human beings, precisely through the invention of woman
as an entirely sexualised being. This ability to be equal and equal in value
as, and only as, a sexualised being is the double paradox of the philosoph-
ical construction of the character of woman, the rationally demonstrated
284 Marion Heinz
contradiction of an elevation by means of demotion. It is obvious that this

postulate of the unreservedly equal value of man and woman removes the
basis of the old concept of the household, which has come down to us from
Aristotle, as an internally differentiated form of dominion hierarchically ori-
ented to the role of the male. Rousseau reconceives the shared domestic
community of marriage as a community of love and thus as a fabric of com-
plementary relations of dominion. ‘As her spouse, Émile also became her
master. They must obey as nature has intended. If the woman is like Sophie,
it is nonetheless good if the man is ruled by her. That is also the law of nature.
In order to make her mistress over his [i.e Émile’s] heart, just as his sex makes
him master over her person, I have made you the judge of his desires.’17 The
constitutive relations of dependency between man and woman in their dis-
tinctive and complementary character are thus configured from the perspec-
tive of the difference between species-specific and gender-specific attributes,
whose relative preponderance constitutes the sexual characteristics in each
case: whereas the man as a gendered being is ruled by the erotic power of the
woman, as a subject of right, i.e. as a subject of will, he is free; in the case of
the woman the reverse is true: as a gendered, or more precisely as a sexual
being, she is ‘sovereign’, but as a person she is unfree. Reflection upon the
inner dynamic of these dependencies yields the idea of a dialectical history
of the formation of the individual as a gendered being. Precisely insofar as
the woman becomes the mistress of the man’s desire she mutates into what
is at once a gendered being and a child: she makes herself the object of man’s
desire and thereby forfeits the status of master over oneself, and thus the
status of citizen in the full sense. And on the other side, the man who directs
his instinctive and affective life into the channels of conjugal love is thereby
liberated from rivalries and forms of self-alienation that spring from the
sexual drive and can thus develop himself as a virtuous human being and
citizen.
2 Recognition and love in the philosophy of Fichte
The concept of recognition in Fichte’s Foundations of

Natural Right
According to Fichte, the absolute I, the subject–object identity of the self-
positing I, is the principle of philosophy as such, the principle from which
the theoretical I, as limited by the non-I, is derived through a sequence of
intermediate steps. Fichte’s so-called subjective idealism is characterised by
a radicalisation of the Kantian doctrine of the primacy of practical reason.

The limitation through the non-I which is constitutive for the theoretical
ego – or in other words, nature as opposed to I-hood – can only be derived
by necessity from the practical I. The practical I must posit the object over
against itself as resistance in order to be able to strive, through an infinite
process of approximation, for the freedom that is posited in the absolute I as
an Ought. Fichte’s attempt to overcome the dualism of nature and freedom
through a monism of the I paradoxically depends at the same time on the
persistence of this dualism.
In his text The Foundations of Natural Right according to the Principles of the
Wissenschaftslehre Fichte is essentially concerned with providing a transcen-
dental deduction of the concept of right, that is to say, with demonstrating
this concept as the condition of the possibility of the self-consciousness of
finite rational beings.18 The self-reflective rational being necessarily ascribes
a ‘free efficacy’ to itself, that is to say, necessarily understands itself as a
power of willing: in order to be conscious of itself it must distinguish itself as
subject from the object, i.e. distinguish itself as I from the non-I, by thinking
its activity as restricted solely by itself, and thus as an essentially free activ-
ity. In thus positing itself as a being that acts effectively in accordance with
self-posited ends, the I simultaneously presupposes the sensible world as the
condition of possibility for concepts of ends in the first place, and thereby
posits itself as cognition, which is to say, as determined by the object. But
the self-consciousness of the I as pure unrestricted activity thereby appears
to become impossible. Fichte’s original solution to this problem – a solution
which lays the foundation for the philosophy of intersubjectivity – is pro-
vided by the notion of Aufforderung or ‘summons’ which is introduced in the
‘second theorem’ (§ 3) of the text: ‘The finite rational being cannot ascribe
to itself a free efficacy in the sensible world without also ascribing such effi-
cacy to others, and thus without also presupposing the existence of other
finite rational beings outside of itself’ (FNR, 29).b The summons addressed
to one subject by another is the exemplary case of an Anstoß or ‘impact’
which signifies an enabling rather than a restriction of freedom insofar as
this implies the subject’s ‘being-determined to be self-determining’ (FNR,
31).c The free efficacy of the subject is itself the object once the latter has
been adequately comprehended.19 It is from the necessity of the summons as
b. ‘Das endliche Vernunftwesen kann eine freie Wirksamkeit in der Sinnenwelt sich selbst nicht
zuschreiben, ohne sie auch andern zuzuschreiben, mithin, auch andere endliche Vernunftwesen
ausser sich anzunehmen.’ GNR i, 340
c. ‘Bestimmtseyn des Subjekts zur Selbstbestimmung.’ GNR i, 342
286 Marion Heinz
the condition of the possibility of empirical self-consciousness20 that Fichte

infers the necessary fact of the existence of free rational beings outside of
myself. The human being is thus essentially a communal or ‘species-being’
(Gattungswesen), that is to say, the human being ‘becomes a human being only
among human beings’, and this concretely means that the human being must
be raised or educated to become a human being.21 Thus it is only a reciprocal
relation of efficacy that can furnish the condition of self-consciousness. And
Fichte identifies this relation as a relation of recognition from which the
concept of right must then be derived.
According to Fichte’s ‘third theorem’ the subject must distinguish itself
from the rational being that it must assume outside and beyond itself, that
is to say, it must posit itself as an ‘individual’ (Individuum). Fichte defines the
concept of the individual in action-theoretical terms: the subject constitutes
itself as an individual with regard to its own sphere of efficacy by determining
itself to action within the sphere of efficacy itself that is assigned to it through
the ‘summons’. Thus Fichte writes: ‘The subject determines itself as an
individual, and as a free individual, by means of the sphere within which it
has chosen one from among all the possible actions given within that sphere;
and it posits, in opposition to itself, another individual outside of itself
that is determined by means of another sphere within which it has chosen’
(FNR, 41).d Fichte derives the rational character of both relationships from
the necessity of the summons; and this connects not only the thought of
material freedom, i.e. efficacy according to self-posited ends, but also the
thought of the self-limitation of its material freedom through the ‘concept of
the subject’s (formal) freedom’ (FNR, 41).e Through the summons, therefore,
each rational being posits the other as a free rational being that determines
itself to efficacy through its determined ends, and each member that stands
in this relation of summons by positing the end of another free and rational
being posits itself as a being that limits its own sphere of efficacy through this
end. And this yields the concept of ‘right’ as the idea of the self-limitation
of the sphere of material freedom through the end of the formal freedom of
other rational beings.22 The thought of right is a necessary thought for finite
rational beings; for Fichte however, unlike Kant in this regard, the principle
of right is not an unconditional command of pure practical reason. Finite
d. ‘Das Subjekt bestimmt sich als Individuum, und als freies Individuum durch die Sphäre, in
welcher es unter den, in ihr gegebenen möglichen Handlungen eine gewählt hat; und sezt ein
anderes Individuum ausser sich, sich entgegen, bestimmt durch eine andere Sphäre, in welcher
dieses gewählt hat.’ GNR i, 350
e. ‘Begriff von der (formalen) Freiheit des Subjekts’. GNR i, 351
rational beings must think of themselves as beings that stand to others in

relations of right. They must conduct themselves according to the principle
of right only under the condition that they enter into relation to other finite
rational beings by whom in turn they are recognised as rational beings. The
application of the principle of right is consequently demanded in a merely
hypothetical fashion.23
Fichte’s conception of love and marriage

Now if it is nature, with regard to the community of the sexes, which renders
a relationship between human beings necessary,24 then we must explain how
this can nonetheless be brought into harmony with the freedom of human
beings. Like Kant, Fichte also identifies a contradiction between reason and
the sexual drive, but with this crucial difference: Fichte believes it is woman
alone, rather than the human being as such, who is burdened with this
contradiction. Fichte grounds his view in a conception of natural teleology
that continues the Aristotelian tradition: ‘The specific determination of this
natural arrangement is that, in the satisfaction of the sexual drive or in the
promotion of nature’s end (in the actual act of procreation) the one sex is
entirely active, the other entirely passive’ (FNR, 266).f,25
If these natural determinations are applied to the rational nature of the
human being, we find ourselves confronted with a crude and emphatic dif-
ference between man and woman. For while the natural dimension of the
male sex, qua self-active principle, corresponds to the rational nature of the
human being, the passivity of female nature stands in strict contradiction to
reason.26 If the positing of ends is the expression of reason and the means of
realising freedom in the sensible world, then passivity considered as an end
would entirely eliminate reason itself.
This contradiction, which is presented as definitive for woman, makes it
necessary to ground marriage as a social form that is sui generis. The problem
is how to ground a community of human beings that prima facie must itself
be defined through contradictory relations: on the one hand, through a
relation of subordination that derives from nature – the woman is an object of
masculine power – and, on the other hand, through a relation of equality from
the moral perspective that derives from reason.27 Fichte resolves this problem
by introducing a new concept of marriage as a community of love which is
f. ‘Die besondere Bestimmung dieser Natureinrichtung . . . , daß bei der Befriedigung des Triebes,
oder Beförderung des Naturzwecks, was den eigentlichen Akt der Zeugung anbelangt, das eine
Geschlecht sich nur thätig, das andere sich nur leidend verhalte’. GNR ii, § 2, 97
288 Marion Heinz
superior to the statically conceived relation of recognition thematised in

the philosophy of right insofar as the former can be entrusted both with
ethical cultivation of individuals to become whole human beings and with the
moralisation of humanity itself.28 The starting point for this dynamic process
is woman as the living contradiction between nature and reason: only if
this contradiction is successfully overcome can the relationship between the
sexes be brought into harmony with their rational nature. Fichte describes
this solution to the problem as follows: ‘woman cannot surrender to sexual
desire for the sake of satisfying her own drive. Since she must nevertheless
surrender herself on the basis of some drive, this drive in her can be none
other than the drive to satisfy the man’ (FNR, 269).g On Fichte’s assumptions,
this end is compatible with both nature and reason, and can thus legitimately
be pursued: ‘She maintains her dignity – even though she becomes a means –
by freely making herself into a means, on the basis of a noble, natural drive,
that of love’ (FNR, 269).h Fichte sees no problem in this group of human
beings making itself into a means for satisfying others in the sexual act, and
indeed, astonishingly enough, regards this act as an assertion of the dignity
of woman. Love is not something that can be deliberately produced, but
is something that emerges in a spontaneous and involuntary fashion. The
dignity of woman in the context of sexual association thus springs from a
gracious nature that purifies the crude drive of love, that is to say, sublimates
her biological and sexual passivity through surrender to another, to the
man.29
And since this surrender of the body implies the surrender of the person,
marriage cannot be interpreted as a ‘contract’. Paradoxically, therefore, the
self-assertion of the woman as a rational being requires the complete renun-
ciation of her personality, as the sum of all rights, in relation to the man
she loves. For if – so Fichte reasons – the woman were to hold something
back from the man, this would mean that she valued that more highly than
what she has surrendered; but since qua loving wife she gives herself over as
personality, she would demean herself as a person by any such holding back.
Fichte continues:
Her own dignity rests on the fact that, as surely as she exists and lives,
she belongs completely to her husband and has unreservedly lost
g. ‘[D]as Weib kann überhaupt sich nicht hingeben der Geschlechtslust, um ihren eigenen Trieb zu
befriedigen; und da es sich denn doch zufolge eines Triebes hingeben muß, kann dieser Trieb
kein anderer seyn, als der, den Mann zu befriedigen.’ GNR ii, § 4, 100
h. ‘Sie [die Frau] behauptet ihre Würde, ohnerachtet sie Mittel wird, dadurch daß sie sich
freiwillig, zufolge eines edlen Naturtriebes, des der Liebe, zum Mittel macht.’ GNR ii, § 2, 100
herself to and in him. What follows from this, at the very least, is that
she cedes to him her property and all her rights and takes up residence
with him. . . . She has ceased to live the life of an individual; her life has
become a part of his. (FNR, 271)i
The woman who follows the noble natural drive of love gives her person over
with her body – and the body has already been deduced as the entire sphere
of the free efficacy of an I, the sphere through which the individuality of
finite rational being is defined. The loving wife’s express renunciation of the
capacity to exercise rights which belong to the unmarried woman in almost
the same measure as they do to the man is therefore simply the external con-
firmation of the self-sacrifice that has already inwardly been accomplished.
This entails no contradiction as far as Fichte’s system is concerned since right
cannot command categorically but only hypothetically.30
This complete surrender of the woman to one man is the starting point and
the necessary condition for the emergence of marriage as a ‘perfect union
of two persons of each sex that is grounded upon the sexual drive and has
itself as its own end’ (FNR, 273).j While the woman renounces a sphere of
action that consists in positing ends of one’s own, she receives herself back as
a being that can pursue ends insofar as her beloved husband magnanimously
makes her ends into his own.31 Insofar as the man is considerate of the wishes
of the woman he sustains and promotes her love; insofar as he modifies his
own ends in favour of the woman he surrenders himself too and in the love
of the woman receives himself back as a subject of will.32 In the ideal case,
the relationship with the partner can reach the point where ‘the exchange of
hearts and wills is complete’ (FNR, 272).k Each party loses and finds itself in
the other, so that the united parts complete one another as a whole human
being from the moral perspective too: they are complimenta ad totum, not
already independently as such, but only through the different – active or
passive – relationship to one another in each case. In contrast to the relation
of recognition in the context of right, the individuals in the relation of love do
not constitute themselves through limiting their sphere of efficacy uno actu
with the summons to self-determination that comes from the other. Rather,
i. ‘Ihre eigene Würde beruht darauf, daß sie ganz, so wie sie lebt, und ist, ihres Mannes sey, und
sich ohne Vorbehalt an ihn und in ihm verloren habe. Das Geringste, was daraus folgt, ist, daß sie
ihm ihr Vermögen und alle ihre Rechte abtrete, und mit ihm ziehe . . . Sie hat aufgehört, das
Leben eines Individuum zu führen; ihr Leben ist ein Theil seines Lebens geworden.’ GNR ii, § 6,
102
j. ‘[V]ollkommene Vereinigung zweier Personen beiderlei Geschlechts, die ihr eigener Zweck ist.’
GNR ii, § 8, 104
k. ‘[D]ie Umtauschung der Herzen und der Willen . . . vollkommen [wird].’ GNR ii, § 7, 103
290 Marion Heinz
they constitute themselves by uniting their spheres of efficacy – as they do

their bodies – and this unification, which stands under the primacy of the
man, becomes the source of an enriched individuality in which each party can
borrow something from the other form of human existence and thus develop
itself into a whole human being: the moral character of the woman becomes
rational, and that of the man becomes natural, for love and magnanimity
relate to one another as a natural and a rational view upon morality.
Just as marriage accomplishes a development from nature to morality,
so too marriage promotes the moralisation of humanity in the historical
world. Following Rousseau here, Fichte claims that the re-establishment of
a natural relationship between the sexes is the only possible way to lead the
human species towards virtue by starting from nature: there can be no moral
education except from this point.33 Since love is essentially a unity of reason
and nature, it can furnish the starting point for completing and perfecting the
human being by overcoming these oppositions in relation to the individual
and humanity alike.
An evaluation and critique of Fichte’s doctrine of love and marriage

The view that Fichte has uttered the ‘saving word’ that has banished the ratio-
nalistic and Enlightenment conception of marriage as a contractual relation
based on external ends of one kind or another (propagatio prolis, extinctio
libidinis, mutuum adiutorium) has certainly been defended.34 But feminist phi-
losophy has vehemently challenged such an idea. If the measures developed
to defend the value and dignity of woman require their sexual, legal and
political subjection, then we are dealing with sheer hypocrisy, for the funda-
mental postulate of equality has been violated both in the exposition of the
problem and in the proposed solution.
The question immediately posed from the perspective of the critique
of ideology is this: how can Fichte’s philosophy, which is based upon the
principle of I-hood and the primacy of practical reason, appeal to nature to
justify this inequality? For the ‘fundamental defect’ of woman, the assertion
of which creates the problem and at the same time anticipates the form of its
solution, is the sexual nature of woman which Fichte judges to be ‘the most
repulsive and disgusting thing that there is in nature’.l The sexual nature of
woman is repulsive and abhorrent, as we have observed, insofar as it con-
tradicts the rational nature of woman. That a contradiction between two
l. ‘Grundübel . . . das widrigste, und ekelhafteste, was es in der Natur giebt’. J. G. Fichte, Das
System der Sittenlehre, 289
different kinds of ‘subjects’ – namely between reason and the body – arises
through the categories of actio and passio presupposes the definition of the
body as the ‘instrument’ of reason and freedom, and thus also a teleology
which embraces ends of nature and ends of freedom. The teleology which
Fichte develops in the Sittenlehre of 1798 cannot be interpreted either as a
realist doctrine in the style of dogmatic metaphysics or as a projection of prin-
ciples onto objects that is grounded in the subjective principle of judgement,
as Kant had argued in his third Critique. Since in Fichte’s monistic system
there is no hiatus between nature and freedom, between mundus sensibilis and
mundus intelligibilis, and since on the contrary the possibility of uniting both
spheres under the primacy of practical reason is supposed to be demonstrated
as possible and necessary, the teleology of nature can be grounded on the
demands of praxis, and this is supposed to secure knowledge of a complete
system of all ends. The contradiction we have identified involves a deeper
contradiction within nature itself since the necessary means for attaining the
natural end of propagation contradicts the essential character of nature as a
means for realising freedom. This compels Fichte to characterise the female
drive itself as ‘impossible’m and to demand that we modify our conception
of this drive. The nature which is expedient for attaining the final end of
humanity must be conceived in such a way that the female sexual drive can
be ennobled35 in order to become compatible with reason while still being
able to serve the original end of propagation. Love is the feeling in which this
ennobled drive comes to consciousness, the feeling that ‘saves’ the system of
ends of nature and reason since it is itself ‘nature and reason in their original
union’.n
This solution is supposed to avoid the aforementioned contradictions by
conceiving one term of the opposition, namely nature, as itself mediated by
the other, to express this in a Hegelian way. But Fichte thereby disrupts the
inner systematic structure of his Doctrine of Science, for no internal principle
of a spiritual kind can be ascribed to nature if the latter is understood simply
as an obstacle to praxis that remains to be overcome and as the ‘material’
for the exercise of duty. Thus Fichte writes: ‘Nature possesses no peculiar
principle of its own, but is merely the resulting and emphatic reflection of
the absolute freedom in each of us’.o
m. ‘[U]nmöglich’. Ibid.
n. ‘[R]ettet . . . Natur und Vernunft in ihrer ursprünglichsten Vereinigung’. Ibid., 288f.
o. ‘Die Natur hat in sich durchaus kein eigenthümliches Princip, sondern sie ist bloß der sich
selbst ergebende und auffallende Widerschein der absoluten Freiheit in einem Jeden.’ J. G.
Fichte, ‘Einleitungsvorlesungen in die Wissenschaftslehre’ (1813), in Fichtes Werke, 11 vols.
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971), ix, 1–102, 22
292 Marion Heinz
The conception of marriage as a moral union undoubtedly corresponds

to the fundamental idea behind the Fichtean system – namely that a monistic
philosophy of freedom can only be established and the dualism of nature and
freedom effectively overcome through an ethical relationship to a non-I that
promotes my own freedom, that is to say, one that presents itself as alter ego.
The I is at home with itself in the Other, and the Reason that is dispersed as a
result of nature, of the body, amongst a multiplicity of individuals establishes
the unity of reason in an ethical community of free spirits through the inner
harmonisation of wills and actions.
But this doctrine of marriage also demonstrates that the I which stands
in relation to another I is not merely exposed to self-limitations of freedom
that derive from the demands of other rational beings, but that nature,
understood as a ‘check’ or ‘impact’ or Anstoß, equally makes itself felt in the
sphere of intersubjectivity itself. Fichte interprets the female sexual drive as
a natural given that limits freedom and which can only be harmonised with
reason at the cost of tacitly accepting a principle of spiritualised nature that
does not fully cohere with his system, a harmonisation that is not regarded as
attainable simply through ethical praxis itself. The conception of the sexual
nature of woman thus represents the ultimate presupposition of the dualism
of nature and reason for a monistic system of freedom: practical freedom
must oppose itself to nature if freedom is to realise itself by overcoming this
resistance on the part of nature. As far as the early form of Fichte’s Doctrine
of Science is concerned the natural and the moral dimension of marriage thus
stand for this duplication of the possibility and impossibility of uniting these
oppositions.36
In Fichte’s teleology of nature and freedom, the contradiction between
an end of nature and an ultimate end of human beings – a contradiction posed
by the female sex itself – cannot be resolved by the conceptual means available
to his system. But at the same time this opens up a systematic perspective
that points beyond this position, a perspective that can be interpreted both
as a recourse to Kant’s aesthetic thought and as an anticipation of Hegel’s
system. Since only nature is capable of establishing the true union of man and
woman, the latter is not something simply at our own disposal and for that
very reason is the tenderest form of relation amongst human beings. It is no
accident if this specifically recalls Kant’s idea of the beautiful: in the context
of love human beings experience themselves in relation to other human
beings as a unity of the oppositions that determine them, a unity in which
the instrumental relation of reason to nature – within each of the partners as
well as between them – is ideally transformed into a free relationship. Such
a connection between human beings is governed neither by the necessity of

nature nor by that of pure practical reason, but is rooted in an uncalculated
and unmerited ‘favour’ or Gunst.
3 De Beauvoir’s quasi-Hegelian alternative to Fichte

The fatal consequences which Fichte’s exposition of the opposition between
sexuality and reason and his own attempted solution to the problem present
for the concept and the status of woman are emphatically revealed in the
light of de Beauvoir’s theory of the sexes.
Fichte reduces and demotes not merely woman in her role as wife, but
woman as such. For Fichte, as for Rousseau before him, woman is essentially
defined by her sexual nature, and her consciousness is wholly characterised by
‘feeling’ in opposition to the kind of conceptual thought that is the authentic
expression of reason.37 It is with this claim regarding the sexualised nature
of woman that philosophers invented the myth of the ‘Eternal Feminine’ in
which woman is imagined as an expression of dreaming nature. This myth
involves the idea of a ‘compromise formation’ in which woman is projected
as at once the ideal and inferior counterpart of the man. Thus on the one
hand she is permitted a harmonious unity with nature, while the man is
defined by divisions that diminish him. On the other hand, the woman is
inferior because – independently of the actual form taken by the natural
sexual drive – she cannot achieve parity with the man; her essential lack of
autonomy is precisely manifest in her inability to escape the determinants of
her natural constitution by an act of her own, and in the consequent necessity
that she should make herself dependent on the magnanimity of another. De
Beauvoir’s perspective here, schooled in psychoanalysis as it is, deciphers
this idea of the woman as an ideal projection of masculine ‘Reason’: in the
fantasy of woman as dreaming nature the man imagines a companion who
is at once equal and subject to him, imagines the paradox of a controllable
alter ego.
In opposition to this ‘myth of the Eternal Feminine’ de Beauvoir insists
on the historical process through which the relevant sexual characteristics
have come to be defined as they are, an insight that finds pregnant expression
in her often cited dictum that ‘one is not born, but becomes, a woman’.38
The stratification of society through the category of gender understood in
a Rousseauian way is a historical fact that continues to define the contem-
porary situation, and one that is to be contested and changed since it can be
justified neither by nature nor reason. The feminist and humanist project of
294 Marion Heinz
de Beauvoir is precisely to explain how this conception has come about and
to develop possible ways of liberating us from it, a project that in its way takes
up the ‘old’ emancipatory and egalitarian discourse of the Enlightenment.
De Beauvoir describes the one-sided and historically produced forms
of male and female humanity in the following way: while the man has not
succeeded in integrating his corporeality as the natural dimension which
threatens his status as a subject, and thus splits this dimension off from him-
self, seeking to externalise it in the form of woman as ‘dreaming Nature’,
the woman has not yet attained the status of subject in the first place. What
specifically requires explanation in de Beauvoir’s view is why woman has
been defined and realised in terms of immanence, that is to say, as the Other
of male transcendence which lacks the status of subject, or as the object of the
male subject. The splitting of humanity into the respective sexes understood
in this way is for de Beauvoir neither a simply contingent historical event nor
a consequence of immutable facts or fixed essential features. The biological
differences of the sexes certainly play the decisive role as far as the recon-
struction of the beginning of human history is concerned,39 but in order
to explain the entrenchment and persistence of patriarchy it is necessary
in the primary instance to return to and explore the structures involved in
subjectivity itself. De Beauvoir recognises, with Hegel,40 that a fundamental
hostility towards every other consciousness lies within consciousness itself:
‘The subject can be posed only in being opposed – he sets himself up as the
essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object’.41 In order to
become conscious of itself, the subject must distinguish itself from what is
other than itself, and thus posit something as the other of itself, as object.
Once this is perceived as something posited through and for consciousness,
the subject asserts itself as the essential and makes the object into the inessen-
tial. Although this conflict within consciousness is necessary for the subject,
it also proves disturbing and distressing: the experience of lack and distur-
bance are constitutive for the life of consciousness. It is only the relationship
of mutual recognition between autonomous subjects that can promise peace
and fulfilment in this regard. But the relation between the I and Other as such
also simultaneously implies the threat of reification: the fact that the subject
inevitably becomes an object through its relation to another consciousness
or alter ego, involves the possibility that one’s own claim to essential status
may have to yield before the superior power of the Other, thus resulting in a
relation of domination and servitude. But in addition to this, one’s own sub-
jectivity is also intrinsically exposed to the danger of renouncing itself as the
essential in relation to the alter ego, insofar as the subject understands itself
in the terms of the way it is defined by the Other. This tendency to flee into
self-alienation, a tendency internal to the subject itself, has its origin in the
anxiety before being free as such that is linked to freedom. But if it ever proves
possible, in the relation to the Other, that ‘each [simultaneously posits] both
itself and the Other as object and as subject in a reciprocal movement’,42
this establishes a relationship of reciprocal recognition in which the subjects
are realised and restored to themselves through being at home in the Other,
thereby replacing conflict and struggle with reconciliation.43
True liberation is only possible if the productive existential result of
unfreedom, including the anxieties created by the losses involved, is brought
to light through close and searching analysis. It is not only the woman, but the
man as well who represents a deficient form of freedom: insofar as the striving
for recognition is still bound up with permanent conflict and struggle, with
endless subjection to the dialectic of domination and servitude, the man
seeks, as we have seen, to flee this restless predicament. He dreams of a
certain ‘rest in restlessness’. As de Beauvoir puts it: ‘This embodied dream
is, precisely, woman; she is the perfect intermediary between nature that is
foreign to man and the peer who is too identical to him.’44 Once we consider
the man’s relationship to his own nature, to the body, the deeper reasons for
this absolutisation of the male subject, which is harboured in the structure
of consciousness, can be revealed: as a sexual being the man here encounters,
according to de Beauvoir, the abyssal ambivalence of his own being. However
much the man may succeed in making the nature outside him and his own
body into the means and instrument of his activity and self-assertion, he still
inevitably discovers himself, through his sexuality itself, as passivity, finds
himself determined as nature and animal life. This Other of himself, which
threatens his own subjectivity and may on no account be admitted, though
it simultaneously belongs to him as his own, is externalised in the form of
woman, and thus becomes something that can be grasped and controlled. If
the man attempts to flee from nature, the woman attempts to escape from
her freedom.
Concluding remarks
De Beauvoir’s alternative to the Idealist theories of gender operates with
the Hegelian theme of recognition, which she employs on the one hand as
a diagnostic means for reconstructing the history of the subordination of
women, but which she also reads as the normative anticipation of a strictly
reciprocal relationship between the sexes. According to Fichte, in contrast,
296 Marion Heinz
it is impossible for man and woman to recognise one another reciprocally

as sexual beings; instead of such an egalitarian relationship, grounded in
reason, his philosophy proposes a community of love that is grounded in
nature, where the woman must begin by turning herself one-sidedly into a
part of the man’s life. This incorporation of the woman’s life is supposed to
be the starting point for a further development within marriage, where the
individuals concerned receive themselves back enriched in each case by the
respective Other of themselves.
According to de Beauvoir, both the starting point and the telos of a
relationship between man and woman conceived in this manner are basically
wrong: if men and women are to encounter one another as human beings
in a free relationship of equals, then the previous one-sided, reduced and
mutually alienated forms of human existence must be changed and completed
through a process of self-liberation. Authentic selfhood in the tensions and
difficulties of an intersubjective relationship of freedom and facticity can
only be accomplished through the exercise of choice and decision in each
individual case, and cannot simply emerge from an intersubjective relation
in a merely spontaneous fashion.
Translated by Nicholas Walker
Notes
1. Cf. Ludwig Siep, Praktische Philosophie im Deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1992), 67.
2. Cited here as GNR i = Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre, in
J. G. Fichte-Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. R. Lauth and
H. Jacob, vol. i/3 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1966), 313–460, and
GNR ii = Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre ii: Angewandtes
Naturrecht, in ibid., i/4, 1–165. English translation Foundations of Natural Right, ed. and
trans. Frederick Neuhouser and Michael Baur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000) (hereafter FNR).
3. On the different approaches adopted by Fichte and Hegel with regard to the principle
of subjectivity, cf. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Arbeit und Interaktion. Bemerkungen zu Hegels
Jenenser Philosophie des Geistes’ in Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1968).
4. Cf. Siep, Praktische Philosophie. Siep argues that this is also the case for Hegel.
5. Ibid., 52. The citations from Fichte are drawn from GNR i, 349.
6. In terms of a theory of modernity oriented to Habermas, Sabine Doyé has interpreted the
philosophical theories of gender developed under the influence of Rousseau as ways of
legitimating the social order that appeal to pre-modern theoretical resources. From the
perspective of the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ such an appeal cannot indeed simply be
regarded as an anachronism. Thus the recourse to nature as a source of normativity that

attempts at rational grounding must already presuppose should rather be interpreted as a
(miscarried) response to the deficiencies of a rationality that has become merely subjective.
Cf. Sabine Doyé, ‘Einleitung’, in Marion Heinz and Sabine Doyé (eds.), Geschlechterordnung
und Staat: Legitimationsfiguren der politischen Philosophie (1600–1850) (Berlin: Akademie,
2012).
7. For further discussion of this issue, cf. Marion Heinz, ‘Das Gegenverhältnis der
Geschlechter: zur Geschlechtertheorie des vorkritischen Kant’, in J. Hoffmann and A.
Pumberger (eds.), Geschlecht-Ordnung-Wissen: Festschrift für Friederike Hassauer zum 60.
Geburtstag (Vienna: Praesens, 2011).
8. Cf. Adam Horn, Immanuel Kants ethisch-rechtliche Eheauffassung, ed. M. Kleinschneider,
with an afterword by Hariolf Oberer (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1991) and
Wolfgang Kersting, ‘Immanuel Kant: vom ästhetischen Gegenverhältnis der Geschlechter
zum rechtlichen Besitzverhältnis in der Ehe’, in Heinz and Doyé (eds.), Geschlechterordnung
und Staat.
9. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, introduction by Roger Sullivan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 427.
10. Cf. Friederike Kuster, ‘Kontroverse Heterosexualität’, in S. Doyé, M. Heinz and F. Kuster
(eds.), Philosophische Geschlechtertheorien: ausgewählte Texte von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002).
11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books,
1995), 357.
12. Ibid.
13. There are essentially two conceptual innovations involved here: (1) the ontological dif-
ference in status between essence and attributes or accidents is levelled down; and (2) no
definition of the essence of the human being is provided in this connection. For further
discussion of these issues, cf. Heinz and Doyé (eds.), Geschlechterordnung und Staat.
14. Rousseau, Emile, 358.
15. Ibid., 361f.
16. Ibid., 358.
17. Ibid.
18. See GNR i, § 1.
19. Cf. Christoph Binkelmann, Theorie der praktischen Freiheit. Fichte – Hegel (Berlin and New
York: De Gruyter, 2007), 114.
20. Cf. Axel Honneth, ‘Die transzendentale Notwendigkeit von Intersubjektivität’, in Jean-
Christophe Merle (ed.), Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Grundlage des Naturrechts, Klassiker Auslegen
24 (Berlin: Akademie, 2001), 63–80, for a discussion of the question whether the priority
of this fact implies that Fichte has already renounced the idea of monological reason
in favour of the primacy of other rational beings over the solitary achievements of self-
consciousness.
21. Cf. GNR i, 347; FNR, 37.
22. Ibid., 30.
23. Cf. Siep, Praktische Philosophie, 1992, 74.
24. Cf. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Das System der Sittenlehre nach den Principien der Wissenschafts-
lehre, in J. G. Fichte-Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. R. Lauth
298 Marion Heinz
and H. Gliwitzky, vol. i/5 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977), 1–317,

at § 27.
25. Fichte discusses organic nature in the context of his doctrine of right in order to deduce
the human body as the sort of appearance within the sensible world that is necessary for
reciprocal recognition of one another as rational beings. And here Fichte makes emphatic
use of the Kantian doctrine of the natural product or the end of nature which was first
presented in the Critique of Judgement (cf. GNR ii, § 6; FNR, 271). But in contrast to Kant,
for Fichte the teleological order of nature is not merely a projection of purposiveness
as a purely subjective principle of the faculty of judgement upon the object ‘nature’.
Fichte believes that it is possible to cognise a priori the ‘fit’ between nature – which is
transcendentally possible through the achievements of subjectivity – in its objective and
theoretically identifiable ends and the posited ends of the subject. Fichte develops this
idea further in his Sittenlehre of 1798. Cf. Peter Rohs, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Munich: Beck,
1991).
26. Cf. GNR ii, § 3, 97f; FNR, 266f.
27. Cf. GNR ii, 98f.; FNR, 266f. Marriage must be deduced as a ‘natural and moral association’
and this deduction ‘is necessary in a doctrine of right, so that one will have some insight
into the juridical propositions to be established later’ (GNR ii, 95; FNR, 264). In §§ 1–
4 Fichte discusses marriage as a natural association; and in §§ 5–9, as a moral association.
28. Cf. Fichte, Das System der Sittenlehre § 27.
29. Cf. ibid., 289.
30. Cf. GNR i, 359f.
31. Ibid. ii, § 7, 103f.; FNR, 272. This process of losing and finding oneself in the other also
represents a form of self-perfection: the woman presents herself from a moral perspective
as a whole human being insofar as she integrates the morality proper to the man, namely
‘magnanimity’, into her own being. If we understand magnanimity as ‘conscious sacrifice
in accordance with concepts’ (‘Aufopferung mit Bewußtseyn und nach Begriffen’) (GNR
ii, § 7, 103; FNR, 271), this implies that the feeling of love as natural and non-reflective
surrender to another is completed by duty produced through reason (cf. GNR ii, § 7,
102ff.; FNR, 271ff.)
32. This relationship also implies a self-enriching experience for the man himself: the mascu-
line heart opens itself to love, ‘to a love that gives of itself without restraint, and loses itself
in its object’ (‘der sich unbefangen hingebenden, und im Gegenstande verlornen Liebe’)
(GNR ii, § 7, 103; FNR, 272).
33. Cf. GNR ii, § 7, 104; FNR, 273.
34. Cf. Stephan Buchholz, ‘Recht, Religion und Ehe: Orientierungswandel und gelehrte
Kontroversen im Übergang vom 17. zum 18. Jahrhundert’, Ius Commune, special volume
36 (Frankfurt am Main: Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte, 1988),
424f., 432f.
35. Cf. Fichte, Das System der Sittenlehre, 289ff.
36. I am indebted to Dr Christoph Binkelmann for some valuable observations in this regard.
37. GNR ii, 99, 135.
38. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-
Chevallier (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), 293.
39. For de Beauvoir the decisive factor here is the capacity for childbearing which binds
the woman into the eternal selfsame cycle of natural processes. This is the reason why
the woman has not yet succeeded in realising herself as a free being, a being capable of
self-transcendence that can project a new future.
40. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer
and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–71), iii, 145ff.;
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 111ff.
41. de Beauvoir, Second Sex, 7.
42. Ibid., 163.
43. The Other that is posited by the masculine subject in the first instance is the external
nature which the subject appropriates for itself, that is to say, which the subject consumes
and thus destroys. Through this assimilation of nature the subject certainly asserts itself
as the essential term, but since it does not thereby find itself confirmed in its freedom
through another consciousness, it inevitably falls back into the empty immanence of its
own consciousness.
44. Ibid., 103.
13
Hegel’s concept of recognition and its reception in the

humanist feminism of Simone de Beauvoir
Sabine Doyé
Hegel’s theory of recognition stands at the centre of a debate whose ultimate

aim is to find a categorical basis for a critical social theory. Hegel’s theory of
recognition enables later theorists to construct a concept of intersubjectivity
for a theoretical programme that is not limited to the boundaries of empirical
and descriptive science.
It is the young Hegel from the Jena years whose concept of recognition
can be utilised in this way. Of course, this concept frames an issue that was
also central for the mature Hegel, that is, the critique of the atomistic assump-
tions, coming mainly from Hobbes, of the social philosophy of his time. As
early as the 1807 Phenomenology, this concept is developed with the clear
intention of founding a subject-centred philosophy of reason, which reaches
its completion in the Phenomenology at the level of ‘absolute knowledge’ (das
absolute Wissen).1
Characteristic of this philosophy of reason, as it appears from the critical
distance provided by post-Idealist thought, are the intellectualist distortions
caused by an exclusive focus on the logic of the subject–object relationship.
This concentration ultimately means that understanding between subjects is
seen purely as an achievement of a self-oriented subject. The critical reception
of this philosophical tradition by feminist philosophy decodes its gender-
specific subtext and sees it as an expression of androcentric illusion. This
insight interprets what, particularly from a post-modern point of view, is
the definitively and fundamentally repressive nature of the modern concept
of reason, in terms of binary gender definitions.
Of course, it is the methodological machinery involved in the process
of phenomenological experience that allows the Hegel of the Phenomenology
to structure his early criticism of contemporary subjective idealism so
that Kant and Fichte’s philosophical assumptions, which seem to him to
300
Hegel’s concept of recognition in de Beauvoir 301
preserve the atomistic thought patterns of modern social philosophy, can

be incorporated as necessary steps in the experience of consciousness.
The dialectical method is what brings Spirit’s journey (Bildungsgang des
Geistes) to the stage at which, in the chapter ‘Self-Consciousness’, the
movement of recognition is directed into the master/slave dialectic. It is
this chapter that has had such a decisive influence on leading schools of
thought in the twentieth century, particularly because of its refusal to stay
within narrow disciplinary limits (considerations of practical philosophy
are brought to bear on epistemological questions, and these claims in turn
are supported with evidence from social history). Georg Lukács wished
to appropriate the key role of the slave who frees himself through work
for Marxist ends, and existentialism made use of Alexandre Kojève’s
interpretation to appropriate the attitudes of the master, which were also
of central importance for the presuppositions of Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex.2
From the point of view of social theory’s interest in the idea of inter-
subjective understanding and its traces in the concept of recognition in
Hegel’s early Jena writings, these illustrious theoretical developments offer
little direct encouragement: they simply continue the logocentric premises
which Hegel subscribed to in his turn to the philosophy of consciousness, a
turn which had already been completed by the time the Phenomenology was
written.3 Even Simone de Beauvoir’s humanist feminism leaves itself open
to criticism from later feminist philosophy, which sees Beauvoir’s gender-
theory-driven reading of the master/slave dialectic as a mere affirmation of
unexamined androcentric assumptions that are definitive of Idealist philos-
ophy as a whole.4
In Hegel’s pre-phenomenological writings of the Jena period,5 the topic
of recognition is discussed in the context of a concept of ethical life (Sit-
tlichkeit) which encompasses the concrete social and cultural forms and
societal institutions in which Spirit manifests itself and articulates its self-
understanding – that is, forms which, in Hegel’s mature system, belong to
the philosophy of objective spirit. To the extent that intelligence and will
are thematised as properties of Spirit independently of their appearance,6
and that the structure of spirit itself is conceived in the context of Kant
and Fichte’s philosophy of consciousness, the central idea of the Phenomenol-
ogy as detailed in the ‘Preface’ – that the true is to be understood both as
subject and as substance – takes effect.7 The moments of the substantial
give way to the insight that essence (Wesen) is also form and self-movement,
and that the whole is simply ‘the essence consummating itself through its
302 Sabine Doyé
development’.a,8 The concept of Spirit, i.e. that it is ‘just this movement of

becoming an other to itself, i.e. becoming an object to itself, and of suspending
this otherness’,b,9 determines the direction and telos of its developments,
and with it the idea of true knowledge. ‘Spirit, that knows itself as thus
developed, is Science’,c,10 and ‘it is this coming-to-be of Science as such or
of knowledge that is described in this Phenomenology of Spirit’.d,11 In other
words, it depicts ‘the path of the natural consciousness which presses for-
ward to true knowledge’.e,12 Since the ‘standpoint of consciousness’ consists
in ‘[knowing] objects in their antithesis to itself, and itself in antithesis to
them’,f,13 the task is to describe the unfolding of consciousness’ journey as
a reconstruction of the experiences consciousness has with itself and with
its object.14 The goal of this story of experiences is the overcoming of that
opposition: in absolute knowledge, Spirit understands itself as the unity of
truth and certainty.
The constitutive meaning of the concept of recognition is expounded on
the level of self-consciousness. In what follows, I sketch out in its essential
features the argument that leads up to the point at which Beauvoir begins. It
is self-consciousness in whose structures Spirit first decisively grasps itself.
The Absolute generates itself through opposition and otherness, and self-
consciousness is such that it is self-identity in knowing itself as the unity of
its contents of thought: ‘for its own self, it is a distinguishing of that which
contains no difference, or self-consciousness’.g,15 Since consciousness has
entered into ‘the native realm of truth’h,16 as self-consciousness – since, that
is, the truth no longer looks outside itself to otherness – it is possible at this
point to formulate the central insight (which can at this point belong only
a. ‘[D]as Ganze . . . nur durch seine Entwicklung sich vollendende Wesen’. G. W. F. Hegel,
Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus
Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–71) (hereafter HW), iii, 24
b. ‘Diese Bewegung [ist], sich ein Anderes, d.h. Gegenstand seines Selbsts zu werden und dieses
Anderssein aufzuheben.’ Ibid., 38
c. ‘Der Geist, der sich so entwickelt als Geist weiß, ist die Wissenschaft.’ Hegel, Phänomenologie des
Geistes, in HW iii, 29
d. ‘Dies Werden der Wissenschaft überhaupt . . . ist es, was diese Phänomenologie des Geistes
darstellt.’ Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in HW iii, 31
e. ‘[D]er Weg des natürlichen Bewusstseins, das zum wahren Wissen dringt’. Hegel,
Phänomenologie des Geistes, in HW iii, 72
f. ‘[D]er Standpunkt des Bewusstseins, von den gegenständlichen Dingen im Gegensatze gegen
sich selbst, und von sich selbst im Gegensatze gegen sie zu wissen.’ Hegel, Phänomenologie des
Geistes, in HW iii, 30
g. ‘[F]ür sich selbst, es ist das Unterscheiden des Ununterschiedenen oder Selbstbewusstsein.’
Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in HW iii, 134
h. ‘[D]as einheimische Reich der Wahrheit.’ Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in HW iii, 138
to us, the philosophers observing the process): ‘Self-consciousness exists in-

and-for-itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it
exists only in being acknowledged.’i,17
Fichte had already shown that self-consciousness cannot be understood
as a monological, solipsistic, self-contained subject – although he used the
intersubjective constitution of self-consciousness only to deduce a basic
norm of all legal relationships.18 For Hegel, the proof that self-consciousness
exists only so far as it is recognised becomes a decisive turning point in the
story of the experiences of consciousness.
Self-consciousness demonstrates to itself its certainty that it is a pure
self-relation, an I=I (and so is the truth), in the experience that the opposing
object is a nothing, that it sees it as a mere thing or not-I. The type of nega-
tion changes when the self-consciousness sees in the object not an Other, but
something structurally identical. Life is like this – like self-consciousness,
it is a species in itself, something infinite, a pure self-relation, which posits
its Other as the individual example of its species and sublates it to secure
the continued existence of the species. The difference between this living
object and self-consciousness consists in the type of self-relation: like life,
self-consciousness, qua species, is a simple universal which unifies all dif-
ferences in itself but for itself it is species and so proves its self-certainty
to itself by its active sublation of the living object. In relation to the living
object, it is a desiring self-consciousness, and it achieves satisfaction only by
incorporating this object into itself, that is, by devouring the object. This sat-
isfaction, however, is temporary and short-lived, and ends with the renewed
appearance of desire. The decisive experience consciousness has between
the appearance of the desire and the satisfaction of that desire is that of the
object’s independence: ‘Desire and the self-certainty obtained in its gratifica-
tion, are conditioned by the object, for self-certainty comes from superseding
this other: in order that this supersession can take place, there must be this
other.’j,19 The independence of the Other consists in its being a living object
which negates and nevertheless preserves itself – it objectifies itself and thus
is identical with itself: it is, therefore, another self. Both self-consciousnesses
now stand over against each other as independent and each can only prove
its independence from the other by entering into a struggle with it.
i. ‘Das Selbstbewusstsein ist an und für sich, indem und dadurch, dass es für ein Anderes an und für
sich ist; d.h. es ist nur als ein Anerkanntes.’ Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in HW iii, 145
j. ‘Die Begierde und die in ihrer Befriedigung erreichte Gewißheit seiner selbst ist bedingt durch
ihn, denn sie ist durch Aufheben dieses Anderen; daß dies Aufheben sei, muß dies Andere sein.’
Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in HW iii, 143
304 Sabine Doyé
The philosopher’s ex ante conception of the intersubjectivity of self-

consciousness – that this is ‘the unity of the different independent self-
consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and inde-
pendence: “I” that is “We” and “We” that is “I”’k,20 – is only comprehensible
to self-consciousness as a result of a struggle for recognition. This struggle is
described in section A of the ‘Self-consciousness’ chapter, ‘Independent and
Dependent Self-consciousness; Lordship and Bondage’. Not only in 1930s
France did these passages come to be known as the ‘secret centre’ of the
Phenomenology.21
The movement of recognition concludes in the doubling of self-
consciousness. What this actually is – namely, the differentiation of the self-
knowing I – comes into view and becomes the real difference between the one
self-consciousness and the other. To attain self-certainty, self-consciousness
must sublate the other which appears to it as an ‘independent being’. In this
way, it resembles the desire that negates its object, but with one difference –
in this negation, it is not only the self which is confirmed as free, but also the
other whose freedom is discovered. ‘Each is for the Other the middle term,
through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself . . . They
recognise themselves as mutually recognising one another.’l,22 This mutuality
of recognition begins, for self-consciousness, in the demonstration of the
willingness to fight to the death, and in the proof that freedom means more
to it than life. Since each self-consciousness wants, in its disdain for mere
life, to be recognised by the Other, this fight cannot end with death, but
leads initially to a one-sided recognition: the one who prefers life gives up,
and recognises in the Other the freedom he has proven and attained with
his willingness to risk his life. This is the recognition of the slave, through
which the Other is granted its independence and its position as master.
It is at this point that Simone de Beauvoir takes up the story and sees in
the relationship of the master and the slave the reflection of the true nature
of male–female relationships. Whereas the position of the slave results from
his defeat in the fight to the death, the woman is from the outset denied a
situation of symmetrical combat: between the man and herself, no fight takes
place. Because of her biological constitution, she is unable to loosen the chain
that ties her to life itself, and the possibility of ‘setting Spirit against life by
k. ‘[D]ie Einheit . . . verschiedener für sich seiender Selbstbewusstseine . . . ; Ich, das Wir, und Wir,
das Ich ist.’ Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in HW iii, 145
l. ‘Jedes ist dem Anderen die Mitte, durch welche jedes sich mit sich vermittelt und
zusammenschließt . . . Sie anerkennen sich als gegenseitig sich anerkennend.’ Hegel, Phänomenologie
des Geistes, in HW iii, 147
risking that life’ remains closed off to her, because ‘the woman is fundamen-
tally a creature which gives life, but does not risk its life’.23 In the simple
universal that is the mere continuation of the life of the species, the woman
as child-bearer is merely the giver of life in general, she is not a subject, a
species for herself, but a medium for life. Her biological condition precedes
each individual female experience and is inscribed on the female individual
as her gender. Therefore, the capacity that the human species believes enti-
tles it to the dignity of rational beings, the capacity to transcend the natural
context of immanent life, must seem to her counter to her nature. Whereas
the man’s biological sex is tangential to his being, a peripheral feature of his
subjectivity, the woman is, in her substance, her biological sex. Her existen-
tial problem is not, therefore, the threat of a decline from transcendence to
immanence, but the overcoming of immanence itself. Therefore unlike the
Hegelian slave, who recognises his own inferiority by the disdain for pure
life manifested in the master’s actions, she cannot recognise the man’s legit-
imate superiority – rather, she defends the sphere of feminine immanence
against this superiority. She also does not share in the experience of the slave,
who lives in ‘the fear of the Lord’; that is, by restraining desire, learning not
to destroy the object but to bear the burden of its independence and only
to change its form, that is, to work on it: ‘Work . . . is desire held in check,
fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing.
The negative relation to the object becomes its form’. In the formed object,
‘consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the
object] its own independence’.m,24 The woman’s ‘domestic duties’, which are
closely bound up with the ‘burden of motherhood’, ‘are limited to repetition
and immanence’.25 There is therefore no sign of the fundamental feature of
shaping work, whose discovery Karl Marx, in the Paris Manuscripts, praises
as ‘the greatness of the Hegelian phenomenology’: ‘that he grasps the essence
of work and understands objective man, true, because real, man, as the result
of his own work.’26
It is this feature of Beauvoir’s humanist feminism – her demonstration of
the inferiority of the female sex when measured, as in androcentric discourse,
on the scale of the masculine human Spirit – that has astonished difference-
feminists and others. The principles of existentialist ethics, adopted by Beau-
voir as by Sartre, do not in their application allow for differentiation between
m. ‘[D]ie Arbeit hingegen ist gehemmte Begierde, aufgehaltenes Verschwinden, oder sie bildet. Die
negative Beziehung auf den Gegenstand wird zur Form desselben und zu einem
Bleibenden . . . das arbeitende Bewußtsein kommt also hierdurch zur Anschauung des
selbständigen Seins als seiner selbst’. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in HW iii, 153
306 Sabine Doyé
the sexes, and become in Beauvoir’s discussion a reason for excluding women.
Because of their essential deficiencies, women cannot even be candidates for
moral demands that require them to transcend the purely empirical condi-
tions of their existence. Thus, Beauvoir also comes into conflict with her
central, oft-repeated conviction that women are not born women, but rather
become such – an insight that brings the historical, political and socioeco-
nomic circumstances of the female condition into the foreground.27
This ambiguity seems to reflect the influence of A. Kojève and his famous
interpretation of the Phenomenology with its focus on the ‘Self-consciousness’
chapter. He begins the debate about the relative primacy of master and slave:
whilst the Marxist interpretation sees the slave’s labours as the decisive motor
for civilisation’s progress, the existentialists see the master’s consciousness
of the nothingness of his own life as the real humanising force. According
to Fulda and Henrich, this claim brings ‘fascist overtones’ to the ears of left-
wing critics.28 Kojève himself highlighted the proximity of the Hegelian
‘idea of death’ to Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein.
Ultimately, Beauvoir’s choice is clear: since she maps the relationship
between the sexes on to the existentialist opposition between immanence
and transcendence, she remains in debt to the Idealist tradition which sees
the negating power of Spirit as the essential feature of humanity. Thus, she
remains stuck in the grooves of a philosophy of the subject which Hegel
intended to counter with his concept of recognition: Spirit is the mediating
universal, which makes individuals into community, a medium that makes
possible the relationship between independent subjects through reciprocal
recognition, and has therefore to be seen as a necessary condition of the
intersubjective structure of self-consciousness, and not as the distinguishing
feature of self-regarding subjectivity.29
Admittedly, as consciousness moves through the various stages of its
journey, the mediating function of Spirit is itself mediated in the process
of the Absolute’s coming-to-itself, for it comes to see itself as that which it
really is only when, in the Spirit as the unity of truth and certainty, the stage
of absolute knowledge has been reached.
Along with this move towards the philosophy of the subject comes the
unfolding of the categories that determine Hegel’s own gender theory.
In the chapter on Spirit, we find Hegel’s famous reception of Sophocles’
Antigone. In Hegel’s view, this can be read as the world-historical defeat of
Greek ethical life. Man and woman are represented as the agents of two
warring laws, that of man and that of the gods. Antigone embodies the lone
figure of the woman as sister who, by burying her brother against Creon’s
decree, sets the divine law against the modern law of man, and defends the
ethics of the family against the law of the state. That Hegel’s concept of
progress should link the beginning of modernity with the development of
the gender dichotomy follows logically from his construction of a speculative
philosophy of the subject and from his appropriation of the methodological
tools for that task. In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel returns to the Antigone
passages in the Phenomenology and interprets the differences between the
sexes as a manifestation of the difference between free universality and
concrete particularity, between self-consciousness and the interiority of
feeling.
The one is therefore spirituality, which divides itself up . . . the other is
spirituality which maintains itself in unity . . . Man therefore has his
actual substantial life in the state, in learning, etc., and otherwise in
work and struggle with the external world and with himself, so that it
is only through his division that he fights his way to self-sufficient
unity with himself. In the family, he has a peaceful intuition of this
unity, and an emotive and subjective ethical life. Woman, however, has
her substantial vocation in the family, and her ethical disposition
consists in this piety. In one of the most sublime presentations of
piety – the Antigone of Sophocles – this quality is therefore declared to
be primarily the law of woman, and it is presented as the law of
emotive and subjective substantiality . . . n,30
This constellation of the sexes means that no progress can be expected

from the side of the female; any attempt to negate her substantial role and
become active in the spheres of politics, science and art is written off by Hegel
in the Zusatz to §166 with the stereotyped attributes of failed femininity.
Simone de Beauvoir summons up similar notions when she describes the
opaque movement between ‘obedience’ and ‘refusal’, between submission
and defiance, which is part of the cliché of the woman as an eternal child, in
connection with women’s attempts to defend their own sphere of life in a
n. ‘Das eine ist daher das Geistige, als das sich Entzweiende . . . das andere das in der Einigkeit sich
erhaltende Geistige . . . Der Mann hat daher sein wirkliches substantielles Leben im Staate, der
Wissenschaft und dergleichen, und sonst im Kampfe und der Arbeit mit der Aussenwelt und
mit sich selbst, so dass er nur aus seiner Entzweiung die selbständige Einigkeit mit sich
erkämpft, deren ruhige Anschauung und die empfindende subjektive Sittlichkeit er in der
Familie hat, in welcher die Frau ihre substantielle Bestimmung und in dieser Pietät ihre sittliche
Gesinnung hat. Die Pietät wird daher in einer der erhabensten Darstellungen desselben, der
Sophokleischen Antigone, vorzugsweise als das Gesetz des Weibes ausgesprochen, und als das
Gesetz der empfindenden subjektiven Substantialität, der Innerlichkeit, die noch nicht ihre
vollkommene Verwirklichung erlangt . . . dargestellt.’ Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des
Rechts, in HW vii, 318–19
308 Sabine Doyé
female ‘counter-world’.31 In the Phenomenology, these characteristics are seen

as consequences of the world-historical victory of the state and, as yet still
free of any negative connotations, are put under the heading of ‘the eternal
irony of the polity’. Since that polity ‘only gets its existence through its
interference with the happiness of the family . . . it creates for itself in what
it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it an internal enemy:
womankind in general’.o,32
But here, again, this enmity does not lead to any productive distur-
bance, since it is born out of the separation between family and civil society
and therefore belongs to the eternal and ineluctable socioeconomic cost of
modernity. Civil society, ‘a system of ethical life, lost in its extremes’,33
acquires its male members by separating them from the ethical sphere of the
family. Only in the concrete universal of the state does the male truly find his
ethical existence. The sphere of female life belongs to this form of objective
spirit only negatively, as sublated.
To the extent that the man becomes detached from his relation to the
‘other’ sex, the natural form of the male sex becomes, for the woman, the
embodiment of human being and thus of the ‘Spiritual’ altogether – a pro-
cess which encloses her within her own gender and excludes her from self-
conscious subjectivity. The fact that these mutual naturalisations are con-
nected with a theory that sees the ‘Spiritual’ not as the locus and medium
of mutual recognition, but as the distinguishing mark of a self-reflexive,
self-contained subject, is therefore invisible to Beauvoir as an existentialist.
Nevertheless, she acknowledges it indirectly by means of her relentlessly
critical approach. When she makes reference to the necessity of the ‘libera-
tion of the woman’, and to the fact that this cannot be done by individual
efforts, but only by those of the collective,34 she sketches a project that
broadens the context for an existentialist ethics to include the demands of
intersubjectivity. The project of female emancipation is, however, for Beau-
voir, closely connected to ‘a philosophy of history designed towards the
liberation of humanity’. This idea, implying as it does the elimination of
gender difference, admittedly forms only the utopian horizon of a social and
cultural reality whose basis is the ‘agreed complicity of the sexes’. In the
‘flight from the unease and fear that freedom brings’, Beauvoir discerns the
o. ‘Indem das Gemeinwesen sich nur durch die Störung der Familienglückseligkeit und die
Auflösung des Selbstbewusstseins in das allgemeine sein Bestehen gibt, erzeugt es sich an dem,
was es unterdrückt und was ihm zugleich wesentlich ist, an der Weiblichkeit überhaupt seinen
inneren Feind.’ Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in HW iii, 352
anthropological bonds which for the present do not so much unite the sexes,
as chain them to each other.35
Translated by Emily Clarke
Notes
1. In The Struggle for Recognition: the moral grammar of social conflict (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1996), Axel Honneth appropriates the Jena texts with the intention of develop-
ing ‘a normatively substantive social theory’. In the ‘concept of recognition in ethical
life’, he sees this in social relationships which are defined by the concept of solidarity
which have, through the ‘categorical focus on the philosophy of consciousness’, lost
their place in the system. A similar interest guides Ludwig Siep’s much earlier Anerken-
nung als Prinzip der praktischen Philosophie: Untersuchungen zu Hegels Jenaer Philosophie des
Geistes (Freiburg: Alber, 1979). Siep wishes to demonstrate that the principle of recog-
nition Hegel develops as superior to the ‘basic principles and norms of contemporary
practical philosophy’ reaches its limit where Hegel’s philosophy of spirit ends up being
determined by speculative logic and the categories that are developed through that logic.
He observes a ‘theoretical foundation of consciousness’ in ‘mutual action’. This runs
contrary to Jürgen Habermas’ earlier (1968) work, ‘Arbeit und Interaktion: Bemerkun-
gen zu Hegels Jenenser Philosophie des Geistes’, in Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 9ff. (trans. by John Viertel, as ‘Work and
Interaction – remarks on Hegel’s Jena “Philosophy of Spirit”’, in Theory and Practice
(London: Routledge, 1974)), which emphasises the difference between the concept of
spirit in the Jena lectures and that in the Phenomenology and Encyclopaedia and sees the
early concept as particularly promising for a practically oriented social theory. Thus the
foundation is laid not in the Phenomenology, but as early as 1803.
2. Cf. L. Siep, Der Weg der Phänomenologie des Geistes: ein einführender Kommentar zu Hegels
‘Differenzschrift’ und ‘Phänomenologie des Geistes’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000),
99f.
3. On the traces of communicative reason in Hegel’s early writings and the mobilising of
the ‘uniting power of intersubjectivity’ against the ‘authoritarian embodiment of subject-
centred reason’, see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: twelve lectures
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
4. On the criticism of ‘differential feminism’ in the work of Simone de Beauvoir, see Susanne
Moser, Freedom and Recognition in the Work of Simone de Beauvoir (Frankfurt am Main:
Peter Lang, 2008). Admittedly this criticism runs the risk of itself making a similar one-
sided criticism of modernity as Hegel: just as he wished to subvert the inadequacies of
modern practical philosophy by fleshing it out with an Aristotelian concept of ethical life,
humanist equality of the kind proposed by Beauvoir demonstrates an affinity with liberal
concepts of justice. This stands in direct conflict with difference feminism’s idea of the
good life, whose main orienting principle is gleaned from communitarian conceptions
of community and family. Cf. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: gender, community and
postmodernism in contemporary ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 1992).
310 Sabine Doyé
5. That is, the System der Sittlichkeit [System of ethics] (1802/3), ed. G. Lasson, Philosophische
Bibliothek 144a (Hamburg: Meiner, 1967); the Jenaer Systementwürf i: Das System der speku-
lativen Philosophie (1803/4), ed. K. Düsing and H. Kimmerle, Philosophische Bibliotheck
331 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1986), and the Jenaer Realphilosophie (1805/6), ed. J. Hoffmeister,
Philosophische Bibliothek 67 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1969).
6. Siep, Der Weg der Phänomenologie des Geistes, 59.
7. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)
(hereafter PS).
8. Ibid., § 20.
9. Ibid., § 36.
10. Ibid., § 25.
11. Ibid., § 27.
12. Ibid., § 77.
13. Ibid., § 26.
14. Ibid., § 86.
15. Ibid., § 164.
16. Ibid., § 167.
17. Ibid., § 178.
18. Siep, Der Weg der Phänomenologie des Geistes, 59.
19. PS, § 175.
20. Ibid., § 177.
21. S. H. F. Fulda and D. Henrich in the preface to their edited volume, Materialien zu Hegels,
‘Phänomenologie des Geistes’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 27.
22. PS, § 184.
23. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-
Chevallier (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), 72.
24. PS, § 195.
26. Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, in Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Werke, suppl., pt I (Berlin: Dietz, 1974), 574.
27. Cf. Judith Butler, who gives other reasons for the ambivalent nature of gender identity in
Beauvoir’s work – she understands the Sartrean ‘thrownness’ as the free choice of gender
in the sense of an eternal ‘becoming’. The relation of gender to this choice is ‘culturally
constructed’, and thus questions the relationship of sex and gender; ‘Variationen zum
Thema Sex und Geschlecht: Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault’, in G. Nunner-Winkler (ed.),
Weibliche Moral: die Kontroverse um eine geschlechtsspezifische Ethik (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1995), 56ff.
28. Fulda and Henrich, Materialien zu Hegels, ‘Phänomenologie des Geistes’, 27 – ‘Die große
Rückkehr zu Hegel ist nur ein verzweifelter Angriff gegen Marx . . . ein Revisionismus
faschistischen Charakters’ – as quoted by Iring Fetscher in his edition of Alexandre Kojève,
Hegel: Kommentar zur ‘Phänomenologie des Geistes’, mit einem Anhang: Hegel, Marx und das
Christentum (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975) (229 n. 4), the judgement of the French
Marxists as reflected in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 3, no. 3 (1955), 357.
29. For the early Habermas (see note 1), it is the very concept of self-consciousness and
its intersubjective constitution that points to the ultimately monological structure of
Spirit. Certainly, Spirit is conceivable as a mediating phenomenon, but no longer as ‘the

organization of equally fundamental media’ (Habermas, ‘Arbeit und Interaktion’, 23) that
are not conceived of as steps of a formative journey, but rather as the three basic elements
of this journey: namely, language, work and interaction, which determine the concept of
Spirit ‘dialectically’ (10).
30. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) (hereafter PR), § 166.
32. PS, § 475.
33. PR, § 184.
34. de Beauvoir, Second Sex, vol. ii, pt 2, ch. 10, ‘Woman’s situation and character’.
35. Marion Heinz, ‘Humanistischer Feminismus: Simone de Beauvoir’, in Sabine Doyé,
Marion Heinz and Friederike Kuster (eds.), Philosophische Geschlechtertheorien: ausgewählte
Texte von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 2002), 429.
14
Giving an account of oneself amongst others: Hegel,

Judith Butler and social ontology
Liz Disley
The concept of recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has had, and

continues to have, a profound effect on twentieth-century philosophy.
Emerging as a key topic in mid-twentieth-century Continental thought, the
concept is more relevant than ever to early twenty-first-century philosophy
on both sides of the Atlantic. Whilst philosophers writing in the Continental
tradition have been more interested in the ontological conditions of recog-
nition and the relation of this issue to questions of, as Lévinas would put it,
first philosophy,1 the political connotations have not been neglected, and the
question of the concept of recognition as a way of understanding the polit-
ical has been explored in the works of Axel Honneth,2 Jürgen Habermas,3
Edith Düsing and Michael Theunissen, as well as Alexandre Kojève’s original
seminal interpretation4 .
These accounts and criticisms of Hegel’s concept have attempted, to a
greater or lesser extent, to flesh out the concept so that it might be useful in
today’s political world. Receptions of Hegel’s concept of recognition in the
English-speaking world have focused more strongly on the directly political
and less on the concept of recognition as a part of Hegel’s system in general,
that is, less, if at all, on the ontological and epistemological aspects of the
concept. One focus of this kind of interest in recognition is what Nancy
Fraser calls the ‘identity model’, whose proponents
transpose the Hegelian recognition schema on to the cultural and

political terrain [and] contend that to belong to a group that is
devalued by the dominant culture is to be misrecognized, to suffer a
distortion in one’s relation to one’s self.5
This is one locus of the continued feminist interest in Hegel’s theory of

recognition, particularly combined with Miranda Fricker’s recent work on
312
Giving an account of oneself amongst others 313
epistemic injustice,6 although Simone de Beauvoir’s more ontologically

inclined analysis has remained influential, and the target of much criticism.
The political debate on recognition has been truly international, and has
crossed traditional disciplinary and subdisciplinary borders. An excellent
example of this crossing can be seen in the 2003 volume, Redistribution
or Recognition?, coauthored by Fraser and Honneth.7 Whilst the question
of whether a Hegelian concept like recognition can be divorced from its
ontological and dialectical scheme remains one which divides analytical and
Continental philosophers, it would not be true to say that there are two
separate and unconnected discussions taking place.
Judith Butler’s work on recognition is a vital meeting point for the
analytical and Continental debates surrounding recognition. Her argument
that moral responsibility does not require complete autonomy provides a
challenge to moral philosophers working within the analytical tradition, and
her criticism of the Hegelian system in general one to Hegel scholars on both
sides of the analytical/Continental divide, and with a particular interest for
post-structuralists, given her earlier work on Hegelian dialectic. The analysis
in her 2005 Giving an Account of Oneself is a careful and rich situating of Hegel’s
concept of recognition within the ‘identity’ debate, but also in contemporary
debates about compatibilism and freedom.
Despite their varying aims, scopes and approaches, most, if not all, of the
discussions of Hegelian recognition in the past half-century or so have con-
cerned the nature of the social, and the nature of the self within that social
sphere. The feminist approaches to Hegelian recognition and related topics
such as freedom in German Idealism form part of this examination of the
social self, and not a separate, special-interest topic. The connection to con-
temporary social ontology, also referred to with terms such as the ‘philosophy
of sociality’ or ‘philosophical social theory’, is, in the context of recognition
debates, only emerging now. There is a clear connection between the con-
cerns of the more ontologically oriented accounts, analyses and criticisms
of Hegelian recognition and Hegelian social theory in general, and emerg-
ing questions in social ontology such as the social constitution of reality,
the ontological constitution of the social world, the ontological basis of self–
other relationships (a key topic in relation to Hegel’s work), and topics of par-
ticular interest to the cognitive scientist such as joint intentionality. Another
profoundly Hegelian topic of central importance in social ontology, which
can only be touched upon here, is the ontological nature of social institutions.
Judith Butler’s insight about the nature of moral responsibility in
the light of restricted autonomy is, when understood in the light of
314 Liz Disley
contemporary social ontology, a continuation of the recognition debate

which brings the debate back to the heart of tensions within German Ideal-
ism itself. The central question is this: what is failing or going wrong when
recognition fails? Can we make recognition into something to strive for or
work towards and, if so, what are the ontological conditions and presup-
positions? Do these conditions and presuppositions stand up to empirical
scrutiny? It is these, and other, questions which I will examine in this essay.
My starting point here is Simone de Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel’s
master/slave dialectic, which maps human relationships on to the sub-
ject/object dichotomy. This dichotomy, according to Beauvoir, would have
to be sublated in order for there to be genuine relationships, and genuine
recognition. On her account, there is a sense in which the struggle for
recognition is a struggle for subjecthood, but recognition can only really be
achieved when each party views themselves and the Other or interlocutor as
both subject and object at the same time. Scholars of Beauvoir have called this
phenomenon ‘ambiguity’, using this term for Beauvoir’s own work.8 Recog-
nition fails to get off the ground when one person fails to view the other
as even a candidate for subjecthood, as happens, for her, with relationships
between the sexes. The Cartesian understanding of the self breaks down,
and the ‘master’ identifies himself with a non-corporeal I, and identifies
the slave in turn with a corporeal object. Given that Hegelian recognition is
reciprocal by definition, recognition then fails in both directions. But what is
so bad about a failure of recognition? For Hegel, recognition is necessary for
self-consciousness, but this answer has left critics unsatisfied for a number
of reasons. What is at stake here for current debates, in Hegel scholarship
and in broader terms? In this essay, I provide two potential answers, one
from the work of Judith Butler, and one from the field of social ontology.
The French reception of Hegel in the 1940s, both in Beauvoir’s and
Sartre’s versions, paints a very negative picture of the possibilities of some-
thing like Hegelian recognition. We are left with either a fight for subjec-
tivity, as in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, or a struggle to be seen as even
a candidate for such a thing. The result is ultimately alienation – from the
self and the Other – and bad faith. This contrasts sharply with a view of
recognition as an ethical model, and failure to recognise as a discriminatory
moral failure. Part of the answer, at least, lies in a line of enquiry about the
nature of social reality and the social individual. This is explored to particu-
larly interesting effect in recent work on recognition by Judith Butler, and
in the relatively new tradition of social ontology (growing out of Searle’s The
Construction of Social Reality9 ).
Two central questions (or groups of questions) can be raised at this

point: (1) What does recognising the other person actually consist in? How
do you have to see the Other, and what do you have to do? (2) In what sense,
for Hegel and for us, is the individual fundamentally social? How does the
question of recognition boil down to the epistemological, the ontological
and the ethical? Epistemologically speaking – is recognition a precondition
of knowledge, social or otherwise (the answer for Hegel being yes)?
Ontologically – is the very fact that something has a particular ontological
status a reason to recognise it as such (Hegel’s answer being yes, probably,
but this is tightly bound up with the epistemological angle)? Ethically –
is recognition a model of how we ought to treat each other, does refusing
to recognise inflict some harm? One political casting of recognition (in the
philosophy of race or philosophy of gender) tends to think such refusal is
harmful. It’s tempting to think so, but one must be careful not to conflate a
failure to recognise with a phenomenon like epistemic injustice as elucidated
by Fricker, where the failure to recognise someone’s status refers not to the
subject/object dichotomy, but to a refusal to recognise someone’s ability to
provide testimony.
1 The French reception of Hegelian recognition

Given that it has inspired such a wealth of feminist commentary, one strik-
ing feature of Simone de Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel’s master–slave
dialectic is the apparent confusion between the biological and the ontolog-
ical. The fact that the woman is made ‘the prey of the species’, apparently
because she ‘gives Life’ suggests a strongly biological account of feminin-
ity – the woman understands that her biology means she takes a secondary
role in an androcentric society.10 This is directly at odds with the central
claim of Beauvoir’s feminism, namely, that one is not, but rather becomes,
a woman – gender and biological sex are not the same, and women are not
defined by their biology. The woman of Beauvoir’s second sex is a frustrated
figure whose ‘misfortune is to have been biologically destined for the repe-
tition of Life, when even in her own view life does not carry within itself its
reasons for being, reasons that are more important than the life itself’.11 The
man wishes to transcend Life through existence, and the woman shares the
desire for transcendence and the resultant self-justification, for this impulse
is present ‘regardless of sex’; but, because she cannot risk her life in the fight
to the death in the master–slave dialectic, this option remains closed off
to her.
316 Liz Disley
Beauvoir’s analysis is deeply pessimistic, but there is strong (and confus-

ing) evidence that she thinks things could have been otherwise. Early in The
Second Sex, she reflects that:
phenomena [like war, class division, lack of mutual understanding]

would be incomprehensible if in fact human reality were simply a
Mitsein based on solidarity and friendliness. Things become clear, on
the contrary, if, following Hegel, we find in consciousness itself a
fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness; the subject
poses himself only in setting himself up against another – he sets
himself up as the essential, and constitutes the other as the inessential,
the object.12
Societal conflict arises from the development of self-consciousness, from

the desire to turn the Other into an object – but this is only the first two
moments of self-consciousness, the abstract consciousness of itself as a sin-
gle ‘I’ and the perception of the Other as object, as described by Hegel,
which is what leaves Beauvoir with such a negative view. Hegel proceeds as
follows:
(1) Self-consciousness is the abstract consciousness of the self as a single ‘I’.

(2) Abstract identity results from the negation of the (independent) other-
ness of the object.
(3) This is Desire, in truth the duplication of self-consciousness: both
the subject and the object are self-consciousness, but this ‘other’
of self-consciousness must always necessarily appear as another self-
consciousness.
As self-consciousness proceeds to absolute knowledge, it is necessary for

mutual recognition to take place, which involves the subject seeing itself
as an object and a subject at the same time, and recognising the Other as
subject as well as object. The master, or man, who wins in the fight to the
death – even if by default, as the life-giving woman is unable to risk her
own life due to her biological constitution – has achieved what Beauvoir
would call transcendence, the transcending of Life through Existence; he
has certainly not achieved self-consciousness and is not, of course, properly
recognised.
Later in The Second Sex, Beauvoir argues that Hegel could have argued
otherwise. In the section on women in myth and literature, Beauvoir gives
an account of female characters in the work of Stendhal, and contrasts
them quite wistfully with her woman-as-slave account of the master–slave

dialectic:
Test, reward, judge, friend – woman truly is in Stendhal what Hegel

was for a moment tempted to make of her: that other consciousness
which in reciprocal recognition gives to the other subject the same
truth that she receives from him. Two who know each other in love
make a happy couple, defying time and the universe; such a couple is
sufficient unto itself, it realizes the absolute.13
This has a clear parallel with Luce Irigaray’s Hegelian-inspired ethics of

the couple.14 On Beauvoir’s account of recognition earlier in The Second
Sex, she seems to exclude the possibility of mutual recognition entirely –
in Hegelian terms, how could the woman, a slave to her biology, be the
sort of creature who could recognise? Yet in the case of Julien and Mathilde,
Beauvoir does discern a possibility of a mutually recognitive relationship.
The male characters, Julien, Fabrice and Lucien, have their relationship with
the world and themselves mediated by the woman-as-Other; they ‘work
out their apprenticeship in dealing with the world and themselves’ only
through the female characters.
What is Beauvoir pessimistic about? Is it Hegel’s view of women? She
does not discuss Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and the exclusion of women from
civil society, so this seems unlikely. Is she merely bemoaning the woman’s
inevitable biological condition, a condition which Stendhal’s fictional char-
acters do not share? This would sit awkwardly with her key claim, that gen-
der is in some way constructed and not co-extensive with biological sex. Or
does she simply misunderstand Hegel’s discussion of the progress towards
self-consciousness, and the possibility of the master’s self-liberation? Again,
she realises that the possibility of mutual recognition is there, and wishes
Hegel could have cast a woman in a mutually recognitive role, so this seems
unlikely. It is Hegel’s reading itself which she sees as the pessimistic one.
Despite her wistfulness, she has delivered an example of the kind of Mitsein
she called for at the beginning of the work. It must therefore be true, as
Eva Lundgren-Gothlin claims, that there is, for Beauvoir, a ‘possibility of
transcending the conflict through mutual recognition – in accordance with
Kojève’s philosophy’.15
What Beauvoir’s analysis does do, however, is give a first hint of how
embodiment will become important in later discussions of recognition.
Judith Butler takes up this theme in her first work on Hegel, Subjects of
318 Liz Disley
Desire. I discuss this in the next section. As well as engaging with the theme
of biology and desire, Butler makes an interesting historical point about the
mid-twentieth-century reception of Hegel, with particular reference to the
concepts of desire and recognition:
The Phenomenology’s vision of an active and creating subjectivity, a

journeying subject empowered by the work of negation, served as
source of hope during those years [of the Second World War] of
political and personal crisis. Hegel provided a way to discern reason in
the negative, that is, to derive the transformative potential from every
experience of defeat.16
Whilst Beauvoir and Sartre’s reception of Hegel seems to betray a serious

pessimism about the possibility of genuine mutual recognition and a mutu-
ally beneficial intersubjectivity, Beauvoir at least suggests and points to a
route to positive recognition. Butler’s comment refers perhaps more to the
work of Kojève, but in Beauvoir’s work too there is a sense of defeats point-
ing the way to future success. The question remains, however, of whether
the ideal of the loving couple as constituting a positive, mutually recognitive
relationship can be expanded to operate on the wider level of society as a
whole. Beauvoir does not attempt to answer this question, but then it is not
within her remit in The Second Sex. To examine this possibility, I will now
move to discuss Judith Butler, and then social ontology.
2 Judith Butler – mutual recognition and

social constitution
Judith Butler’s engagement with Hegel’s thought stretches back to her
doctoral dissertation at Yale, which was subsequently published as Subjects
of Desire. As well as making important remarks on the nature of embodiment
in the context of desire and recognition, she focuses on the importance
of the subject/object dichotomy, making reference to the concept of
ambiguity:
As it becomes clear that the same truths hold true of the Other’s
relationship to the self, the Other is also viewed as the author of the
subject. Desire here loses its character as a purely consumptive activity,
and becomes characterised by the ambiguity of an exchange in which
two self-consciousnesses affirm their respective autonomy
(independence) and alienation (otherness).17
Desire, according to this existentialist/Marxist analysis (cf. the reference to

alienation), is not characteristic purely of a struggle for subjectivity, but of a
mutual emergence of recognition. This move is legitimate; in not recognising
oneself and the Other as both subject and object, the self is in some way
hidden from the self. The Marxists and the existentialists see alienation as a
negative state of affairs in the actual world, as opposed to the positive role
it seems to play in the world of the master–slave dialectic. Here, we have
the first potential answer to the question of what the negative consequences
might be of a failure of recognition. A failure to recognise means that both
the self and the Other are alienated from themselves. But what does this
mean in reality? Can a failure to recognise during a fleeting encounter lead to
alienation as a persisting state? Or is it just that repeated failures to recognise
lead to permanent alienation for those who constantly fail to be recognised –
that is, in the context of what Butler calls the ‘identity’ question? Or, on a
more psychological level, is it within significant relationships that a failure
to recognise becomes significant? Butler’s later works point us towards an
answer.
In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler emphasises the importance of
the reciprocity of recognition in Hegel’s thought – part of recognition is the
insight that the other is ‘structured in the same way I am’, and this is never
a ‘pure offering’ but always something that I ‘receive . . . in the act of giving
it’.18 Recognition is, by definition, mutual, but not quite as Hegel has it. For
Hegel, something simply does not count as recognition if the recogniser is
not also recognised. The slave cannot recognise the master, for the master
does not see him as the sort of being that can recognise, and therefore
the master is also not truly recognised. Without definitively pronouncing
on the way the master–slave dialectic is to be understood, it is difficult to
understand the status of this claim: can we see it in terms of alienation and
autonomy, as Butler casts the master–slave dialectic in Subjects of Desire? This
is one possible answer – it is not only by failing to be recognised that one
can be alienated, but also in failing to recognise. Butler’s characterisation
of the mutuality of recognition in her 2005 work defines recognition itself,
however, as necessarily mutual. In the Hegelian context, this is easily
comprehensible. If part of recognition is giving as well as receiving, a
recognition that in some way purely aims to receive will always fail.
To withhold recognition is not, therefore, to punish someone or to elbow
them out of the way in the sense of a Sartrean struggle for subjectivity. In
refusing to recognise, there is no gaining an advantage over someone by
failing to accord them a status one accords to oneself – refusing to recognise
320 Liz Disley
would lead only to the alienation of the self. This seems to give the lie to the
‘identity’ conception of recognition and its operation in the social world.
Refusing to recognise is not an ethical failure, but a self-defeating act. If
recognition has an ethical dimension, whether that is supposed to appeal
particularly to feminists or to moral thinkers of a communitarian bent, this
isn’t it. However, whilst the identity argument might fall short of the mark,
recognition remains something I can do, or not do, to the other person. As
Butler says, social structure certainly does play a role:
Although I have argued that no one can recognize another simply by

virtue of special psychological or critical skills, and that norms
condition the possibility of recognition, it still matters that we feel
more properly recognized by some people than others.19
Recognition, for Butler, is not purely on the level of the abstract, even if
the identity theorists are wrong. It is possible, and undesirable, for recog-
nition to fail because of the actions of one of the pair. In order to clarify
what is at stake here, it is necessary to ask what recognition actually is – a
question which so much writing, particularly from the Continental point
of view, fails to do. As Butler points out, it is not judgement – ‘indeed, we
may well judge another without recognizing him or her at all’.20 Pointing
out that recognition is not a purely intellectual function, but something
that involves genuine interaction, is important in a debate that often focuses
excessively on higher cognitive functions. How are we to understand the
encounter between two self-consciousnesses, as Hegel, Butler and Beauvoir
put it? For Butler, the encounter is a physical and biological phenomenon.
The fact that consciousness is embodied shapes the encounter in a funda-
mental way; it conditions freedom’s concrete determination, since the body
is practically necessary for freedom, and at the same time makes the body
of the Other relevant as a potential limit on each other’s freedom – ‘corpo-
reality signifies limitation’.21 It is because of the body that the conscious
subject can never ‘get beyond its own life’.22 In a 1986 essay, Butler to some
extent reads Beauvoir against Beauvoir.23 Whilst Beauvoir’s aim, at least in
the ‘History’ section of the Second Sex which discusses Hegel’s master–slave
dialectic, is to ‘understand how the biological and economic condition of
the primitive horde must have led to male supremacy’,24 Butler takes Beau-
voir’s own account to show how the man’s quest for disembodiment is ‘self-
deluding and, finally, unsatisfactory’.25 His mastery of sorts over the woman
is only possible because the woman, according to Beauvoir, is imprisoned
by her biological condition. The man transcends his biological condition, or
embodiedness, but in doing so both makes the woman ‘Other’ and leaves the
biological sphere to the woman. He becomes not a sex, but beyond sex. Thus,
he is alienated from himself, as he nevertheless projects himself socially as
biological and embodied, and, of course, simply is embodied and must inter-
act with his surroundings and the Other in a physical way. Male supremacy
is a truly Pyrrhic victory. The woman in this interaction does not fare any
better: ‘women become the Other; they come to embody corporeality itself.
This redundancy becomes their essence, and existence as a woman becomes
what Hegel termed “a motionless tautology”.’26
Man’s quest for disembodiment has a direct effect on the woman in this
narrative. There is interesting empirical work to be done, if one accepts this
theoretical framework, on whether the quest for disembodiment on the part
of the man (and perhaps, in a less gendered society, not just on his part) is
socially or psychologically conditioned: the pessimistic existentialist might
well claim it is simply a (perhaps inevitable) instance of bad faith, the man
acting out a role to which he believes himself condemned, rather like Sartre’s
waiter.
If Butler’s, Beauvoir’s and indeed Hegel’s analyses of recognitive failure
are to be of more than historical importance, there is an important question
to answer, quite apart from the apparent assumption that biological sex is co-
extensive with gender. Why is it that relationships between members of the
same sex sometimes – indeed, often – lead to alienation, lack of autonomy,
and so on? Is it possible that women also attempt to disembody themselves
in interactions with others, to construe the Other, who might be male or
female, as a mere physical object – in another vocabulary, to objectify them –
thus unwittingly leading to their own alienation?
Butler points towards an answer as she underlines a particularly useful
distinction between two types of self-other interaction, or intersubjectivity,
which runs as follows. In what we might call ‘subsuming’ interaction, the self
subsumes or submerges the Other in its encounter with it, and assimilates
what is external into a set of features internal to itself. This is true even when
recognition has not failed, because in the master/slave dialectic, the master
sees the slave as inessential to himself. Subsuming is, in fact, recognition of
a sort, although the self ‘appropriates’ the Other – but the self is changed by
the Other on the way, which involves a certain recognition of the Other’s
subjectivity. Michael Theunissen makes an argument that is similar in many
ways – Hegel’s monistic ontology cannot support a sufficient separation of
individuals for genuine sociality, and therefore his account of recognition
cannot be a satisfactory account of such sociality.27
322 Liz Disley
In ecstatic recognition, however, the I continues to find itself outside

itself – I am always Other to myself, and transformed by the encounters I
undergo. I can never truly return to myself. I lose part of myself in recognition
and become other. The self is compelled outside itself. The I is constantly
moving and shifting, the first person perspective distorting. This picture
of recognition and interaction is strongly present in the work of Jean-Luc
Nancy, whom Butler quotes: ‘I can only recognize myself recognized by
the other to the extent that this recognition of the other alters me; it is
desire, it is what trembles in desire.’28 Desire, for Butler, Hegel and Nancy,
is a non-cognitive phenomenon, or certainly something that involves more
than cognition. Like recognition, it does not have to involve judgement;
moreover, it is an embodied pursuit (Butler criticises Kojève for treating it
as disembodied).29
Butler’s analysis, in both Giving an Account of Oneself and in Subjects of
Desire, accords well with Nathan Rotenstreich’s insights about alienation
in Hegel’s philosophy of nature. Nature, claims Rotenstreich, is the sphere
of alienation: ‘in this context [of Hegelian alienation] nature is understood
as the idea estranged from itself, the externality of nature being its very
characteristic’.30 In nature, the idea both is and is not itself. The idea identi-
fies itself with nature, but is not that nature. On the level of the idea, therefore,
there is an ambivalent relationship with the embodied and the physical. See-
ing oneself as purely embodied (an object) or purely disembodied (a subject
transcending nature) will lead to alienation, but this alienation is part of the
process of self-knowledge. So it is with the ecstatic mode of recognition. The
self is forced outside of itself and alienated from itself by the encounter with
the Other. It does not then return to that same self, but becomes an altered
self. In many ways, this strikes a blow to the heart of its autonomy.
The ecstatic perspective, therefore, seems more hopeful in terms of the
contemporary relevance of subjectivity than the subsuming perspective for
a number of reasons. The thorny question of embodiment is, with the dis-
cussion of the ecstatic, tackled head-on, and in a way which seems psycho-
logically realistic and appealing. It is a more positive concept of recognition,
without the ‘imperialist’ overtones Butler mentions – it is not confronta-
tional on an individual level.31 Perhaps most importantly, it points towards
a way in which we can account for ‘the social dimension of normativity that
governs the scene of recognition’.32 Recognition as a positive ethical con-
cept does not come from an isolated encounter with the Other, but repeated
encounters with different Others, each changing the self in a fundamental
way.
Does the ecstatic account risk transcending the subject/object dichotomy

by denying traditional, stable subjectivity? If traditional, stable subjectivity
is not possible, what is at stake here? Butler and Hegel and, to a certain
extent, Beauvoir are agreed that the traditional ‘dyad’ of the subject/object
dichotomy is inadequate as a frame of reference for understanding social
life – although in the case of Beauvoir, it is her particular interpretation of the
embodied as biologically conditioned gender difference that means she does
not think that Hegel’s concept of recognition, as it stands, can serve as a model
for interaction between the sexes. Butler, as a post-structuralist, certainly
does not want to cling to the philosophy of the subject. Would Hegel’s
monistic ontology be compatible with a non-stable form of subjectivity, a
constantly changing, ultimately therefore indefinable subject? If not, Butler’s
analysis takes Hegel’s concept of recognition a long way from its ontological
framework. If so, a further question concerns the ramifications for a broadly
German Idealist concept of autonomy.
The question of autonomy is tightly bound up with questions of ethics.
Butler’s insight and main line of argument in Giving an Account of Oneself is
that the self does not have to be truly autonomous for moral responsibility
to be possible.33 The fact that we are socially constituted is not a barrier to
being a free, in some sense, ethical agent. The decisive move is to contrast
once more the phenomenon of recognition with the epistemological practice
of judgement. Traditional moral responsibility sees the subject as account-
able for its actions, but Butler wishes to extend the practice of ‘accounting’
to include the narrative of the subject and the sense in which the subject
is socially constituted. A judgement, to be valid, must always consider the
consequences of its address. Rather than being a barrier to the possibility
of moral responsibility, recognising the extent to which the self is socially
constituted during the narrative of its life is a precondition for honest moral
judgement. This account would not satisfy anyone who wished to propagate
a Kantian idea of rational autonomy, but the Hegelian narrative of the struc-
tures of self-consciousness could be used to support such a theory, even if
Butler finds Hegel’s own account of reciprocal recognition wanting in some
respects. Whether a convincing or satisfying epistemology is possible in the
absence of a fixed, autonomous subject is a further question.
3 Recognition, social ontology and moral responsibility

One of the main tasks of social ontology has been to examine the relation-
ship between others, and to find an account of intersubjectivity which is
324 Liz Disley
philosophically and psychologically appealing. It goes a significant step

beyond the problem of other minds to ask the following: given that we
do have an understanding of our social world, how is this possible? The top-
ics involved in social ontology underlie, and do not generally extend to, an
account of how ethics works in the social world. Butler’s account of recogni-
tion makes it clear that, if recognition is to function as some kind of positive
concept in ethics or social theory, we need a clear picture of the social norms
that govern one-to-one interaction as well as a clear picture of the way in
which we encounter the Other. These questions are likely to be intertwined.
The application of concepts in social ontology – a term coined by John
Searle in his The Construction of Social Reality – to the concept of recognition as
defined by Hegel and those continuing that tradition is an extremely recent
phenomenon. The 2011 edited volume, Recognition and Social Ontology, was
the first and remains to date the only scholarly examination of the two topics
together.34 To a great extent, this reflects the fact that recognition – at least
for those who wish to retain a strong ontological basis for it – has been a
key concern of those working in the Continental tradition, whereas social
ontology has been largely (but by no means exclusively) an analytical concern,
reaching out more to cognitive science than to German Idealism. There have
certainly been crossovers, such as the communitarian philosopher Charles
Taylor, whose work is strongly influenced by Hegel and who also has an
interest in the emerging field of social ontology.
A key division in social ontology is that between the ‘simulation theory’
and ‘theory-theory’ views of empathy and interrelations. The definitions are
the subject of some discussion, but run broadly as follows:
Simulation theory – We understand others’ behaviour by activating

mental processes in ourselves that simulate that behaviour (and, if
followed through to a certain extent, would cause or produce similar
physical processes to those we are observing). This is often supported
by biological evidence such as the phenomenon of mirror neurons.
Theory-theory – We understand others’ behaviour by means of a theory
of mind that extrapolates from ourselves, our motivations, desires and
beliefs, to the Other and (on some versions of the theory) we ascribe to
others a similar theory of mind.
There is also a substantial ontological basis of assumptions at play in the sim-

ulation theory, most notably that mental events cause physical events. This
is obviously particularly congenial to Idealism. It is a mental process that is
involved in our perception, interpretation and understanding of the Other’s
actions. Since these mental processes would, if taken to completion, produce

similar physical processes to the ones we are observing the Other perform –
in the case of mirror neurons where the same neural activity can be observed
in the observer as the one performing the action, this is attestable by obser-
vation – the order of causality can be observed. One should not be too quick
to draw this conclusion, however: whilst the neural correlates of conscious-
ness can be observed, the point at which the understanding begins cannot.
Nevertheless, the simulation theory can form part of an Idealist picture. An
argument against the theory-theory is that it sets a very high bar for the social
self, and is quite demanding about what counts as understanding the Other,
or interacting with the Other. Young children and people with some autistic
spectrum traits and developmental disorders find it much more difficult, or
impossible, to ascribe a theory of mind to the Other or interlocutor.
At first glance, the theory-theory seems as if it might reflect a Hegelian
theory of recognition better than the simulation theory. Whilst embodi-
ment is crucial to Hegelian accounts of recognition, as Butler points out and
Beauvoir is also aware, the scientific explanation involved in the simulation-
theory account of human interaction does not easily map on to the account
of perceived or felt corporeity in the appropriation of Hegel’s master–slave
dialectic. Understanding the self and the Other as both subject and object, as
Butler, and to some extent Beauvoir’s appropriation of the dialectic, demands
we do, in fact sounds just like using a theory of mind to understand and inter-
act with the Other. Hegel’s concept of recognition as a necessary step on the
path to self-consciousness simply is demanding – it is not just existentialist
transcendence that the subject is aiming at, but self-consciousness and ulti-
mately, on the Hegelian account, absolute knowledge. Recognition also, to
a great extent, involves working against one’s simple instincts, and holding
desire in check. It does not happen automatically, or we would not need a
positive ethical concept of recognition. Perhaps the theory-theory version is
the suitable basis in social ontology for an account of recognition.
However, if Butler, along with Nancy, Rotenstreich and, of course,
Lévinas – who favour the ‘ecstatic’ view – are right, then recognition is
not a purely cognitive phenomenon. We experience the Other rather than
understanding her purely cognitively. Lévinas’ account is perhaps the clear-
est in this regard. For him, the Other calls to the self, sometimes without
words, and presents itself as something to be recognised. The human face,
for Lévinas, ‘orders and ordains’ us. As Butler underlines with her claim that
recognition and judgement are not co-extensive, recognition is simply not a
cognitive process, and it is certainly not a disembodied one.
326 Liz Disley
Whatever the biological basis of the simulation theory, it is in some way

an answer to the Beauvoirian analysis – the master’s identification of himself
with a non-corporeal I, or the man’s ill-fated quest for disembodiment, is a
spectacular act of bad faith. Only the embodied, on the ecstatic, simulation-
theory view of recognition, can actually recognise and be recognised. Whilst
some explanatory work is certainly required in order to make room for
biological discoveries such as mirror neurons, this can help to combine the
ecstatic view of interaction and recognition with the simulation theory. The
firing of neurons instantiates a physical as well as mental change, however
subtle, in the interacting subject. It can never again be that which it once
was.
If Butler is right about the extent to which the opacity of the self and
the view of self as not fully autonomous have consequences for freedom
and responsibility, and if the self is fundamentally social in the relevant
way, then she has provided an ethical basis for recognition. It is not purely
individual freedom that is at stake, because to approach the question in
this way is a misunderstanding. To treat the social self as preformed would
be to give a false account of autonomy and of moral responsibility. Here,
again, Lévinas underlines what is at stake – for him, there is no ethical
subject prior to the encounter with the other, no subject as a ‘pre-established
ontological reality’.35 To treat subjects in the ethical sphere as if they were
fixed and asocial is an error. We do not have to accept Lévinas’ advocation
of ethics as first philosophy in order to accept this view, and with it the
ecstatic-simulation account of human interaction as a basis for recognitive
relationships.
This insight fits in to the general framework of Idealism, since it is onto-
logically motivated, and aims to find a basis at the most fundamental level
for recognitive relationships. Idealism can thus feed back into social ontol-
ogy as well, by providing an ontological basis for something that is often
argued about at the empirical level. A transcendental or ‘world-disclosing’
argument, similar in structure to that of Kant’s refutation of idealism, is
possible – given that recognition succeeds, what must be the case about the
priority of mental and physical events? The account given here suggests that
mental events must be prior, since we have examples of successful human
interaction and recognitive relationships, and therefore that the simulation
account must be correct.
The affirmation in this sense of the ecstatic view shows again why Butler
feels Hegelian recognition cannot tell the whole story. This is true at least
on the individual, epistemological level, as ‘[t]he Hegelian Other is always
found outside; at least, it is first found outside and only later recognized to
be constitutive of the subject.’36 This does not mean, of course, that it is not
always in fact constitutive of the subject. We can look again at the moment
when self-consciousness emerges:
Only so and only then [with the completion of the notion of

self-consciousness and its three moments] is it self-consciousness in
actual fact; for here first of all it comes to have the unity of itself in its
otherness. The I which is the object of its notion, is in point of fact
not ‘object’. The object of desire, however, is only independent, for it
is the universal, ineradicable substance, the fluent self-identical
essential reality. When a self-consciousness is the object, the object is
just as much I as object. With this we already have before us the notion
of Spirit. What consciousness has further to become aware of, is the
experience of what Spirit is – this absolute substance, which is the
unity of the different self-related and self-existent self-consciousnesses
in the perfect freedom and independence of their opposition as
component elements of that substance: I that is ‘we’, and ‘we’ that is a
single I. Consciousness first finds in self-consciousness – the notion of
spirit – its turning-point, where it leaves the parti-coloured show of
the sensuous immediate, passes from the dark void of the transcendent
and remote supersensuous, and steps into the spiritual daylight of the
present.a,37
The turning point is when the Other is recognised as a component of the

self, and this, for Hegel, is the emergence of self-consciousness. Crucially,
for the account I am proposing here, consciousness is not yet aware of what
it, as part of Spirit, is – Spirit is the unity of self-consciousnesses in all
their differentiation. This shows that an ecstatic view of recognition and a
simulation view of human interaction in fact accord well with a basis in a
a. ‘Es ist ein Selbstbewußtsein für ein Selbstbewußtsein. Erst hierdurch ist es in der Tat; denn erst
hierin wird für es die Einheit seiner selbst in seinem Anderssein; Ich, das der Gegenstand seines
Begriffs ist, ist in der Tat nicht Gegenstand; der Gegenstand der Begierde aber ist nur
selbstständig, denn er ist die allgemeine unvertilgbare Substanz, das flüssige sichselbstgleiche
Wesen. Indem ein Selbstbewußtsein der Gegenstand ist, ist er ebensowohl ich wie
Gegenstand. – Hiermit ist schon der Begriff des Geistes für uns vorhanden. Was für das
Bewußtsein weiter wird, ist die Erfahrung, was der Geist ist, diese absolute Substanz, welche in
der vollkommenen Freiheit und Selbstständigkeit ihres Gegensatzes, nämlich verschiedener für
sich seiender Selbstbewußtsein, die Einheit derselben ist; Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist. Das
Bewußtsein hat erst in dem Selbstbewußtsein, als dem Begriffe des Geistes, seinen
Wendungspunkt, auf dem es aus dem farbigen Scheine des sinnlichen Diesseits, und aus der
leeren Nacht des übersinnlichen Jenseits in den geistigen Tag der Gegenwart einschreitet.’
G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden , ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols.
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–71), iii, 140
328 Liz Disley
monistic ontology. As part of a single substance and subject, the subject is

changed only on one level by its encounter with the Other, since they are both
part of the same Spirit. The subject or self-consciousness is also not aware of
the relationship which it ultimately bears to the Other, underlining the fact
that the self-relation to the Other is not a cognitive one, but pre-cognitive
(and shaped by the two self-consciousnesses’ embodiment). Despite Butler’s
post-structuralist intent, and despite the fact that the simulation theory of
human interaction has a quite different goal in mind, it seems that an analysis
that argues for an ecstatic, simulation-based account of human relationships
and recognition can remain fundamentally Hegelian.
Conclusion
Further questions remain about autonomy and freedom. Hegel’s specific
view of freedom, which requires the self-conscious subject to exist in a
particular social framework,38 would be difficult to reconcile with accounts
of freedom and free will offered by contemporary analytical philosophers.
It would involve an extremely carefully considered form of compatibilism
to reconcile typical contemporary accounts of moral responsibility with
Hegelian freedom where the subject is in a constant state of flux.39 This
is not, however, an argument against the compelling view put forward by
Lévinas, and in a slightly different form by Butler, that a useful ethics in fact
demands we always see the subject, not as fixed, but as socially constituted.
Indeed, if the analysis put forward in this essay has merit, it will have much
to say to those concerned with the ethics of institutions. If the ethical subject
is constituted by its relations with others, and if we have to understand moral
responsibility in this context, it will be vital that institutions help to shape
ethical subjects by providing them with a framework for human interaction.
The most obvious example here is educational institutions, but in general
a critical analysis of what Hegel would call civil society would be called
for by a view of the moral self as constantly shifting and developing in
reaction to its relationships with others. On the ecstatic view, the influence
does not stop at a potentially fleeting empirical level, but pervades to the
level of the subject itself. At the same time, the idea of the changing and
shifting subject might provide fresh insight into how institutions can be
seen as ethical subjects themselves. Instinctively, perhaps as a reaction to the
traditional picture of the individual human with a fixed moral character and
the institution as made up of its members, shaped by an ethos that might also
be in flux, institutions are seen as completely different kinds of entities for the
purposes of moral philosophy and general ethical considerations. The ethics

of the subject in flux might change this view, and give us a way of according
moral responsibility to institutions, which are always changing in response
to various interactions, societal conditions and changes in membership. Such
an analysis lies outside the scope of this piece, but is a potential direction for
further research.
Notes
1. E. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1969).
2. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: the moral grammar of social conflicts (Cambridge
MA: MIT Press, 1996).
3. A. Giddens, ‘Labour and interaction’, in J. B. Thompson and D. Held (eds.), Habermas:
critical debates (London: Macmillan, 1982), 149–61.
4. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel / by Alexandre Kojève: lectures on the
‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1980).
5. N. Fraser, ‘Rethinking recognition’, New Left Review 3 (2000), 107–20, at 109.
6. M. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: power and the ethics of knowing (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007).
7. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A political-philosophical
exchange (London: Verso, 2003). See also S. Thompson, ‘Is redistribution a form of recog-
nition? Comments on the Fraser–Honneth debate’, Critical Review of International Social
and Political Philosophy 8 (2005), 85–102.
8. S. de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press,
1976).
9. John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995).
10. Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 231 (translation L.D.).
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 16 (translation L.D.).
13. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Howard Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1972), 277.
14. L. Irigaray, ‘This sex which is not one’, in R. R. Warhol and D. Price Herndl (eds.),
Feminisms: an anthology of literary theory and criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1997), 363–9.
15. E. Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’, trans. Linda
Schenck (London: Athlone, 1996).
16. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire – Hegelian reflections in twentieth century France (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1987), 62.
17. Ibid., 51.
18. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005),
27.
19. Ibid., 33.
330 Liz Disley
20. Ibid., 45.

21. Ibid., 51.
22. Ibid.
23. Judith Butler, ‘Sex and gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’, Yale French Studies 72
(1986), 35–49.
24. de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, 231.
25. Butler, ‘Sex and gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’, 43.
26. Ibid., 44.
27. Michael Theunissen, ‘The repressed intersubjectivity in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’,
in Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Carlson (eds.), Hegel and Legal Theory
(1991), 3–63.
28. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Restlessness of the Negative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002), 64, cited in Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 26.
29. Butler, Subjects of Desire, 78.
30. Nathan Rotenstreich, ‘On the ecstatic sources of the concept of “Alienation”’, Review of
Metaphysics 16, no. 3 (1963), 550–5.
31. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 27.
32. Ibid., 23.
33. Ibid., 9.
34. Heikki Ikäheimo and Arto Laitinen (eds.), Recognition and Social Ontology (Leiden: Brill,
2011).
35. Annika Thiem, Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, moral philosophy, and critical responsibility
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 98.
36. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 27.
37. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979),
145–6, § 177.
38. See e.g. M. Westphal, Hegel, Freedom, and Modernity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).
39. An excellent starting-point would be Robert B. Pippin, ‘Naturalness and mindedness:
Hegel’s compatibilism’, European Journal of Philosophy 7 (1999), 194–212.
15
Idealism in the German tradition of meta-history
J örn R üsen
This chapter will consider the impact of the Idealist tradition on a key ele-
ment in the development of both the philosophy of history and the historical
profession in Germany: the idea of meta-history. By meta-history is meant a
more or less systematic reflection on the principles and procedures of histor-
ical thinking, mainly in its academic professional form. In most languages
other than English this form of reflection is described as ‘scientific’. In the
German discourse on this reflection, the term Historik is used.
The development of the German tradition of meta-history goes along
with the formation of the professional or scientific character of histori-
cal scholarship in Germany.1 This process of professionalisation started in
Germany at the end of the eighteenth century and ended with the institu-
tionalisation of historical studies as an academic discipline in the first half
of the nineteenth century. This transformation took place in many differ-
ent forms and places like specialist journals with a discourse on historical
research, and academic teaching in historical seminars, where the students
were taught how to examine historical sources in a professional way. In terms
of scholarship the scientific character of historical studies became manifest
in extensive editions of historical sources like the Monumenta Germaniae His-
torica (founded 1819) or the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum (founded 1815).
Meta-history has had a long tradition in intellectual life, not only in West-
ern history,2 but in recent forms as well, where it has adopted new elements
in the formation of modern historical thinking. The most remarkable of
these elements is the modern philosophy of history. In Germany it received
its classical form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in a
special discourse among historians and philosophers, the most prominent
All translations J.R. unless indicated otherwise.
331
332 Jörn Rüsen
of which were Kant, Herder, Schlözer and Schiller. This discourse on what
history means as the temporal form of human life in the past did not refer
to an already established academic discipline, but cleared the ground for a
new way of thinking about the past, so that a specific academic form and
institution could come into being.
The idea of history as a professional discipline of study was developed
in meta-history in the form of a methodology. Here meta-history explicated
the rules of historical research.
The success of research in bringing about reliable knowledge of what
happened in the past, however, did not abolish the philosophy of history as
a form of knowledge in its own right, but tended to marginalise it as the
sphere of specifically philosophical knowledge about history. The philosophy
of history concerned itself with the unreflected conceptual preconditions of
historical thinking in its professional form. In its place, history as an academic
discipline moved to defend its claim to communicate reliable knowledge
about the past and succeeded in claiming a monopoly of historical knowledge
by research. Meta-history in turn had to justify the specific form of this kind
of knowledge against the domination of the natural sciences as a paradigm
for scientific thinking per se. In fulfilling this role meta-history became the
epistemology of the historical discipline.
From the end of the eighteenth century up to the present day we find a
complex mixture of different forms of argumentation in meta-history: phi-
losophy of history, methodology of historical research, and epistemology of
historical cognition. Two further modes of reflection have played a role as
well: an overview of the field of historical knowledge, called ‘encyclopae-
dia’, and a reflection on historiography, focusing on the form of presenting
historical knowledge by historiographical writing.
The most influential and paradigmatic presentation of meta-history in the
German tradition is Johann Gustav Droysen’s Historik.3 Originally this was
delivered as a course of lectures teaching students of history the principles
and procedures of their discipline as a whole. The course was first delivered
in 1857 and ended in the winter term of 1882/3. Droysen himself only
published an outline of this course for his audience. The first publication of
his complete series of lectures took place in 1937; a critical edition started in
1977 and is still in the making.4
By Idealism in history is meant an interpretation of the past in its temporal
dimension which refers to mental or spiritual basic factors (geistige Grund-
lagen) as the main causes for temporal change in the human world. Very
often it uses the term ‘ideas’ in order to address the core issues of historical
Idealism in the German tradition of meta-history 333
thinking. For this tradition ‘ideas’ are the most important forces that shape
the reality of human life. All forms of human life have to be understood as
manifestations of ideas.
This form of historical idealism dominated the German tradition of meta-
history from its very beginning at the end of the eighteenth century until
the end of the nineteenth. In the form of the recent linguistic and cultural
turns in the humanities it still shows its power today. This remains the case
despite the critiques of Marxist materialism, sociological functionalism, and
many other approaches to history which have emphasised other than ‘ideal’
factors, such as the economic, material or social conditions, as determinants
of human life, its dependence upon natural resources, the influence on the
course of history of unconscious forces striving for power or the fulfilment
of sexual desire.
The Idealist tradition in the German discourse on meta-history may be
considered from four perspectives. These perspectives emphasise the main
dimensions of meta-history: (a) philosophical, (b) methodological, (c) epis-
temological and finally (d), poetical and rhetorical.
(a) Idealist concepts of history

Idealism in German philosophy of history can be studied in the works of most
of the prominent German philosophers and historians who have reflected on
the subject matter of modern historical thinking. In fact, specifically modern
historical thinking was first presented on this reflective level in an Idealist
way.
For the Idealist tradition in the philosophy of history, the idea of
modernity is conceptualised and related to the discipline of historical study
in two principal ways. First, from the very beginning of Idealism in the
eighteenth century, history was conceptualised as the temporal dimension
of universal human experience. Some paradigmatic texts demonstrating
this idea of history are the following: Johann Christoph Gatterer’s ‘On the
Plan of History in Relation to the Writing of Historical Narrative’,a Isaak
Iselin’s On the History of Humanity,b August Ludwig von Schlözer’s Idea of
a Universal History,c Immanuel Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History from a
Cosmopolitan Point of View’,d Johann Gottfried Herder’s Another Philosophy
a. ‘Vom historischen Plan und der darauf sich gründenden Zusammenfügung der Erzählung’ (1767)
b. Über die Geschichte der Menschheit (1770) c. Vorstellung einer Universalgeschichte (1772)
d. ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’ (1784)
334 Jörn Rüsen
of History for the Education of Humanity,e and Ideas for a Philosophy of the History
of Humanity,f Friedrich Schiller’s inaugural lecture as professor of history in
Jena on ‘What Is, and to What End Should We Study, Universal History?’,g
and, of course, Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History,h which
were first presented as a lecture course in Berlin in the winter term of
1822/3.
The second characteristic of modern history is the assumption that this
universal history can be understood by rational means, i.e. by conceptual
constructions and methodical rules. This assumption is best represented
by Leopold von Ranke’s famous characterisation of the object of historical
scholarship as the quest to discover ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ (‘how it
really was’).5 These words are used in his first book in 1824 Geschichte der
romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494–1514 (to which he owed his
professorship at the Friedrich Wilhelm University at Berlin; this renowned
university was founded in 1810 under the influence of the Idealist thinkers
Humboldt and Schleiermacher).
In the explicit form of philosophy the Idealist character of this idea of
history as temporalised humanity is evident. It is the human spirit, – seen as a
gift of nature to the human race liberating humankind from the domination
of nature – which sets human life into its peculiar historical movement. Of
course, the Idealist philosophers did not deny the fact that human life was
also partially determined by non-ideal factors such as material interests, the
struggle for power, social conflicts and so on. They were not blind to the
forces which effect temporal change in human lives. But for them change was
not yet history. Only if it has a meaningful orientation towards the present,
only if it appears as Entwicklung (development) can change be perceived as
history. Change is meaningful only if the temporal dimension of change is
brought into a comprehensive perspective, which combines the past with
the future perspective of present-day human life. The extension of this
perspective can be seen as the idea of humanity. This idea, however, becomes
manifest only in a vast variety of different life-forms and their changes. Its
substance – which might also be called its intention – is the human mind.
This mind or Geist is defined by freedom and reason. Through freedom
human beings are able to create their own ways of life according to their
e. Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774)
f. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1782–91)
g. ‘Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?’ (1789)
h. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (1822–3)
own ideas and intentions, and through reason these ideas and intentions
give rise to a culture of argumentative communication. The idealism of
this philosophy of history may be characterised by one sentence from
Herder and another one from Humboldt. In his essay Another Philosophy of
History Herder said, ‘All physical and political aims decay like fragments
and corpses; what prevails is soul and spirit, content of the totality of
humankind.’i Humboldt put the essence of his philosophy of history in the
single sentence,
All history is the realisation of an idea. In the idea there resides both its
motivating force and its goal . . . The goal of history can only be the
actualisation of the idea, which is to be realized by mankind, in every
way and in all shapes, in which the finite form may enter into a union
with the idea.’j,6
For the professional historians the explication of this philosophical founda-

tion of historical thinking did not belong to the discourse of their discipline.
On the contrary, they rejected it as not being based on reliable knowledge,
which could be produced only by a solid treatment of the sources. But as a
series of basic presuppositions about human history and the significance of
its study, this philosophical foundation remained a necessary condition for
their professional work. This can easily be proved by an analysis of exemplary
works of historiography: here the key word and concept which constitutes
the past as history is ‘idea’. General and fundamental allusions to the power of
ideas in history are legion. An especially telling example is Ranke’s statement
in his lectures to King Maximilian of Bavaria in 1854, ‘In attracting differ-
ent nations and individuals to the idea of humanity and culture, progress is
unconditional.’k
i. ‘Alle bloß körperliche und politische Zwecke zerfallen wie Scherb und Leichnam: die Seele, der
Geist, Inhalt fürs Ganze der Menschheit – der bleibt . . . ’ Johann Gottfried Herder, Auch eine
Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit. Johann Gottfried Herder, Zur Philosophie der
Geschichte: Eine Auswahl in zwei Bänden (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1952), i, 523
j. ‘[A]lle Geschichte [ist] nur die Verwirklichung einer Idee, und in der Idee liegt zugleich die Kraft
und das Ziel . . . Das Ziel der Geschichte kann nur die Verwirklichung der durch die Menschheit
darzustellenden Idee sein, nach allen Seiten hin, und in allen Gestalten, in welchen sich die
endliche Form mit der Idee zu verbinden vermag . . .’ Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘Über die
Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers’, in Werke, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel, vol. i: Schriften
zur Anthropologie und Geschichte (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960), 605
k. ‘[I]n der Herbeiziehung der verschiedenen Nationen und der Individuen zur Idee der
Menschheit und der Kultur ist der Fortschritt ein unbedingter.’ Leopold von Ranke, Über die
Epochen der neueren Geschichte, aus Werk und Nachlaß, ed. Th. Schieder and H. Berding (2nd edn,
Munich: Oldenbourg, 1971), 80
336 Jörn Rüsen
(b) Idealist methodology

The second characteristic of modern historical thinking is the principle of
cognisability. The peculiar temporal direction in the change of human affairs
in the past is brought about by the power of ideas based on the general
and fundamental human ability to create a cultural world, which is shaped
according to the possibility of giving sense and meaning to an objective
historical situation.
Wilhelm von Humboldt – addressed by Droysen as ‘the Francis Bacon
of historical studies’7 – described this as the ability of the human mind to
look into the essence of historical development in a hermeneutical way. His-
torians can understand the course of history as moved by the spirit, since
their intellectual means of cognition belong to the same spirit (Geist) of
humankind as the one that gave temporal change in the past a historical
direction to the present and the future. Because of its cultural dimension,
manifest in the expression of the action-guiding intentions of human beings,
every historical development is open to our understanding. We humans can
have insight into the driving forces (bewegende Kräfte), which constitute the
temporal character of development. This is the Idealist basis of historical
hermeneutics. ‘All understanding presupposes an analogue of that which
will actually be understood later, in the person who understands, as a con-
dition of its possibility: it is an original, antecedent congruity between sub-
ject and object.’l,8 Humboldt left no doubt that this idealism was the most
important principle in the generation of historical meaning: ‘Everything
depends on this mutual assimilation of the researching power and its subject
matter.’m
According to Humboldt the historian has to identify and explicate a
metaphysical movement in the temporal changes of the human world in
the past, which defines the historical character of these changes, ‘. . . the
aspiration of an idea to achieve a real existence’.n It is the same aspiration
which moves the historians’ minds in their cognitive work, and their interest
in understanding historical change in the past. Both aspirations are two sides
of the same spirit.
l. ‘Jedes Begreifen einer Sache setzt, als Bedingung seiner Möglichkeit, in dem Begreifenden ein
Analogon des nachher wirklich Begriffenen voraus, eine vorhergängige, ursprüngliche
Übereinstimmung zwischen dem Subjekt und Objekt.’ Humboldt, ‘Über die Aufgabe des
Geschichtsschreibers’, 598
m. ‘Auf diese Assimilation der forschenden Kraft und des zu erforschenden Gegenstandes kommt
allein alles an.’ Ibid., 588
n. ‘[D]as Streben einer Idee, Dasein in der Wirklichkeit zu gewinnen’. Ibid., 605
With this Idealist philosophy of history and hermeneutics of historical

understanding modern historians were able to place their cognitive work
at the centre of history as something that has really happened. When
Ranke said that he only wanted to show ‘how it really was’, the word
‘really’ carried in itself a whole Idealist philosophy of history and historical
understanding.
Meta-history as a reflection of the principles and procedures of academic
or ‘scientific’ historical thinking was not at all satisfied with this fundamen-
tal principle of historical understanding. So it elaborated it into a system
of methodical rules of historical research. This elaboration transferred the
concept of historical understanding, derived from the ontology of history as
temporalised humanity, into the daily work of professional historians. For
them, the disciplinary character of their cognitive work consists of proce-
dures of research. Research is a strategy for gaining solid knowledge about
the past from its evidence, its empirical remains, the so-called sources. This
strategy is guided by methodical procedures, which render the process of
cognition empirical and provide its outcome with intersubjective reliabil-
ity (often and misleadingly called ‘objectivity’). In its essence, the core of
the historical discipline, its method of cognition or rational cognisability, is
Idealist hermeneutics.
(c) Idealist epistemology

From the very beginning of the formative period of modern historical think-
ing, epistemological argument in the discourse of meta-history was commit-
ted to the justification of the rational and methodical character of historical
cognition.9 By doing so, meta-history confirmed the Idealism of the phi-
losophy of history by stressing the constitutive role of the subjectivity of
the historian. It is he or she who transfers the power of ideas in the actual
process of historical change and development into the mental process of
self-reflection. Therefore the historian’s work of understanding mirrors the
history-constituting power of the mental and spiritual powers of humankind,
which create culture in its various and changing forms.
After the philosophical conceptualisation, and the ensuing methodolog-
ical conceptualisation, of historical understanding a more subject-specific
epistemology was needed to explicate the achievements of historical studies
as an academic discipline. The purpose of this explication was mainly one
of legitimation. In the context of the other academic disciplines, especially
the natural sciences with their technological application, the peculiar
338 Jörn Rüsen
cognitive status of historical knowledge had to be defended. The fact

that such knowledge could be shown to be the product of rigorous and
epistemologically legitimated research was therefore an argument against
the epistemologically paradigmatic role of the natural sciences.
It was therefore the task of epistemology to confirm the Idealist
understanding of the significance of both history and historical knowledge.
Epistemology was necessary not only to defend this Idealist character of
historical knowledge, but to legitimate such knowledge in terms of general
standards of intersubjective validity. The issue was the link between the
methodological basis of historical knowledge and an Idealist understanding
of the distinctive nature of historical thinking. Epistemology disclosed the
specific logical difference between the rational character of historical think-
ing and that of the natural sciences. Droysen presented this as a difference
between explanation and understanding.10 Dilthey took over this dichotomy
between explaining and understanding, deepened it by a hermeneutical
psychology and extended it to a general theory of the humanities;11
Windelband distinguished nomothetic and idiographic thinking;12 Rickert
based the logic of the humanities on the fundamental difference between
generalisation and individualisation,13 and Max Weber extended Rickert’s
argument and gave it a methodological turn by his theory of ideal types as
specifically historical concepts.14 For Weber, the human capacity to generate
meaning through interaction with the world is a necessary (epistemological)
condition for the humanities and social sciences: ‘Each discipline of the
cultural sciences has the transcendental precondition, that we are cultural
beings, gifted with the will and capacity to define ourselves in relation to the
world and to bestow sense and meaning upon it.’o In most, if not all, of these
cases historical Idealism played an important role. The peculiarity of histor-
ical thinking and its difference from the natural sciences were defined by a
constitutive reference to values (Rickert and Weber call this Wertbeziehung),
or principles of sense and meaning, in a world which would otherwise
have no prior epistemological structure. This is clearly expressed by Max
Weber’s statement about the importance of ideas for historical change:
‘Not ideas but (material and intellectual) interests directly dominate human
activity. But the world-views, which were created by ideas, have very often
o. ‘Transzendentale Voraussetzung jeder Kulturwissenschaft ist . . . , daß wir Kulturmenschen

sind, begabt mit der Fähigkeit und dem Willen, bewußt zur Welt Stellung zu nehmen und ihr
einen Sinn zu verleihen’. Max Weber, ‘Die “Objektivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher und
sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes
Winckelmann (3rd edn, Tübingen: Mohr, 1968), 180
determined the paths along which the dynamic of interests directed this
activity.’p
(d) The poetics and rhetoric of history writing

In recent times, reflection on history writing or historical representation has
dominated the discourse of meta-history in the West.15 It has made insight
into the narrative character of historical knowledge the basis of a poetics and
rhetoric of historiography. Here traditional Idealism has taken the form of
subjectivism. From this perspective it is the creative power of the historian’s
mind which defines the essence of history, by defining the sense and meaning
of the past as pure fiction.
In the traditional German meta-historical discourse historiography has
not played a dominant role. It was not overlooked, but very often only
marginally reflected in a functional relationship to the procedures of
cognition.16 But there is an interesting exception, The Writing of History (His-
torik), by Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1837).17 Here the issue is indeed the
writing of history, and from this perspective too ‘ideas’ are now presented
as the dominating principle of historical representation: ‘The historian has
to learn how to distil the pure form of events, in order to single out the truly
important matter from the contingent context. What is really important in
history is what is attached to a historical idea.’q
It is evident that this theory of history writing follows the main Ideal-
ist trend shaped by the traditional German meta-historical discourse in its
ontological, epistemological and methodological dimensions.
Conclusion
The fundamental elements of the Idealist tradition of meta-history retain
their credibility. They may have lost their immediate relevance to historical
method, but the hermeneutic tradition has remained, as well as its focus on
p. ‘Interessen (materielle und ideelle), nicht: Ideen, beherrschen unmittelbar das Handeln der
Menschen. Aber: die “Weltbilder”, welche durch “Ideen” geschaffen wurden, haben sehr oft als
Weichensteller die Bahnen bestimmt, in denen die Dynamik der Interessen das Handeln
fortbewegte.’ Max Weber, ‘Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Einleitung’, in Gesammelte
Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie i (Tübingen: Mohr, 1922), 252
q. ‘Der Historiker soll die reine Gestalt des Geschehenen erkennen lernen, um aus den
anhängenden Zufälligkeiten das wahrhaft Wichtige kühn und sicher herauszuheben. Wichtig
aber ist in der Geschichte, was sich einer historischen Idee anschließt.’ Georg Gottfried
Gervinus, ‘Grundzüge der Historik’ (1837), in Schriften zur Literatur (Berlin: Aufbau, 1962), 84f.
340 Jörn Rüsen
the mental energies of humankind, which have produced a vast variety of

forms of life and transformed the fact of historical change into a meaningful
process of development. Indeed, the recent cultural turn in the humani-
ties has emphasised the continuing relevance of that tradition. The idea of
‘culture’ as the basic category for conceptualising history and guiding his-
torical understanding includes spiritual and mental forces; it even includes
counterfactual hypotheses (history as ‘what if . . . ?’). Without this idealism
of culture the human past cannot be adequately perceived or interpreted.
The meta-historical discourse on the historiography of today may be called
a subjectivist form of pure Idealism since it refers exclusively to the men-
tal power of the human mind in making sense out of the experience of the
past.18
However, historical Idealism today can no longer be thought of as stand-
ing in unbroken continuity with its tradition. This tradition underwent a
rupture around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. This
was caused chiefly by a general loss of confidence in the ability of ideas to
shape the human world, which also reflected a fundamental change in the
living conditions and social and economic status of the educated middle
class. It was this class which produced historical Idealism as an expression
of its ambitions and used it as a critique of pre-modern forms of life and in
support of the emergence of modern civil society, nation states and liberal
parliamentary democracy. When their cultural autonomy and superior social
status were threatened, the bourgeoisie also lost their cultural idealism, and
the power of philosophical idealism weakened. Thus this world-view and
self-understanding lost their supremacy among professional historians as
well and were more or less relativised or even replaced by other principles
or ideologies, which powerfully referred to non-spiritual forces of change in
the human world. Two of the most remarkable witnesses to this change and
promoters of it were Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx.
What of the Idealist tradition in the philosophy of history and the prac-
tice of historiography today? As long as historians’ work is grounded in the
hermeneutics of the forms of human life and their historical change, and
as long as historical writing needs a coherent narrative form, the concepts
generated by the Idealist tradition in historical thought will remain crucially
relevant. ‘Idealist’ concepts will always be necessary to explain the relation-
ship of humans to their world, but they cannot now be systematised as
they once were by a meta-historical discourse which systematically applied
the conceptual framework of philosophical idealism to the task of historical
explanation. A new path must now be taken.
The Idealist tradition in historical thinking cannot simply be continued

and renewed, for three main reasons: first, there is a growing awareness of
the dependency of the history of humankind on non-ideal factors of life;
second, the anthropological fact of the radical inhumanity of human kind
can no longer be overlooked as a feature of historical experience; and, third,
there is an urgent need for a new category in the intellectual work of the
humanities and social sciences. They must develop a thoroughly realistic view
of suffering as intrinsic to human life. An intellectually honest recognition
of the historical experience of inhumanity and suffering, which ‘Idealist’
categories once served to suppress, must now become central to both the
philosophy and practice of history. We have still to discover what kind of
idealism this new kind of historical realism will require. However, it is clear
that earlier German Idealism still has an impact in historical thought. We
continue to need its insights, not least because we are confronted with the
necessity of humanising this new realism by our own work in the humanities.
Notes
1. Horst Walter Blanke, ‘Von Chytraeus zu Gatterer: eine Skizze der Historik in Deutschland
vom Humanismus bis zur Spätaufklärung’, in Horst Walter Blanke and Dirk Fleischer,
Aufklärung und Historik: Aufsätze zur Entwicklung der Geschichtswissenschaft, Kirchengeschichte
und Geschichtstheorie in der deutschen Aufklärung (Waltrop: Spenner, 1991), 113–40; Horst
Walter Blanke, Dirk Fleischer and Jörn Rüsen, ‘Theory of history in historical lectures:
the German tradition of Historik, 1750–1900’, in History and Theory 23 (1984), 331–56.
2. Two examples from pre-modern times, H. Homeyer, Lukian: wie man Geschichte schreiben
soll (Griechisch und Deutsch) (Munich: Fink, 1965); Michael Quirin, Liu zhije und das zhun qiu
(Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1987).
3. Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik: historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Peter Leyh (Stuttgart-
Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977); Historik ii (in two parts): Texte im Umkreis
der Historik, ed. Horst Walter Blanke (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog
2007) (vol. iii is still in preparation); Historik: Supplement, Droysen-Bibliografie, ed. Horst
Walter Blanke (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2008).
4. Droysen published only an outline for students (1858 as a private, 1868 and 1875 as an
official publication). This outline was quickly translated into English and French. Later
on we find translations into Spanish, Italian, Japanese and other languages. The outline
deeply influenced the handbooks of historical method in the late nineteenth century,
like Bernheim’s and Langlois and Seignobos’: Ernst Bernheim, Lehrbuch der Historischen
Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie, mit Nachweis der wichtigsten Quellen und Hülfsmittel zum
Studium der Geschichte (5th/6th edn, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1908), first published
in Leipzig 1889 with the title Lehrbuch der Historischen Methode (repr., New York, 1960);
Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques (Paris,
1898); C. V. Langlois and C. Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History, trans. G. G.
342 Jörn Rüsen
Berry (London: Duckworth, 1932; repr., 1966). Longer versions of Droysen’s Historik were
translated into different languages, including Chinese, but never into English. This is the
reason why this important and influential meta-historical work never had any impact on
the English-speaking academic world. This is only one of the many examples of a general
gap between the ‘Continental’ and the Anglo-Saxon discourse on conceptualising the
principles and procedures of humanistic study. A recent example of the scale of this gap
is Finn Fuglestad, The Ambiguities of History: the problem of ethnocentrism in historical writing
(Oslo: Academic Press, 2005). The author addresses the main problems of conceptualising
history as a temporal process of the human world in the past, without any reference to
the hermeneutical tradition of the nineteenth century in continental Europe. See Jörn
Rüsen, ‘The horror of ethnocentrism: westernization, cultural difference, and strife in
understanding non-western pasts in historical studies’, in History and Theory 47 (May
2008), 261–9.
5. ‘Man hat der Historie das Amt, die Vergangenheit zu richten, die Mitwelt zum
Nutzen zukünftiger Jahre zu belehren, beigemessen: So hoher Ämter unterwindet sich
gegenwärtiger Versuch nicht: er will bloß zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen.’ (‘History
has been allotted the task of judging the past, to teach the contemporary world for the
benefit of the future. Our present effort does not claim for itself such a prestigious task: it
only aims at showing, how matters really were [what matters were really like; how things
really happened]’); Leopold von Ranke, Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker
von 1494–1514, in Sämtliche Werke xxxiii (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1855), viii.
6. Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘On the historian’s task’, in Leopold von Ranke, The Theory and
Practice of History, ed. Georg G. Iggers and Konrad von Moltke (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1973), 22.
7. Leyh, in Droysen, Historik, 418.
8. Von Humboldt, ‘On the historian’s task’, 15, revised by Inge Rüsen (2012); also in History
and Theory 6 (1967), 57–71.
9. Representative for this beginning is Johann Martin Chladenius, Allgemeine Geschichtswis-
senschaft (Leipzig, 1752; repr., Wien: Böhlau, 1985).
10. See note 3, p. 403, passim.
11. Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie’, in Die
geistige Welt: Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens, in Gesammelte Schriften v (Stuttgart:
Teubner, 1957); Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das
Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte, in Gesammelte Schriften i (1st edn, 1883; 5th edn,
Stuttgart: Teubner, 1962); Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften,
in Gesammelte Schriften vii (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1958); Descriptive Psychology and Histori-
cal Understanding (1911), trans. Richard M. Zamer and Kenneth L. Heiges (The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1977).
12. Wilhelm Windelband, Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft (3rd edn, Strasburg: Heitz,
1904).
13. Heinrich Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung: eine logische Ein-
leitung in die historischen Wissenschaften (Heidelberg, 1896).
14. Max Weber, ‘Die “Objektivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erken-
ntnis’, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (3rd edn,
Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck), 1968), 146–214; ‘“Objectivity” in social science’, in Sociological
Writings, ed. Wolf Heydebrand, The German Library 60 (New York: Continuum, 1994),
248–59.
15. A recent example is Frank Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth and Reference in Historical Represen-
tation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
16. See Jörn Rüsen, ‘Geschichtsschreibung als Theorieproblem der Geschichtswissenschaft:
Skizze zum historischen Hintergrund der gegenwärtigen Diskussion’, in Zeit und Sinn:
Strategien historischen Denkens (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1990), 135–
52.
17. See Hayden White, ‘Droysen’s Historik’, History and Theory 19 (1980), 73–93.
18. A typical example is Daniel Fulda, ‘Strukturanalytische Hermeneutik: eine Methode zur
Korrelation von Geschichte und Textverfahren’, in Daniel Fulda and Silvia Serena Tschopp
(eds.), Literatur und Geschichte: ein Kompendium zu ihrem Verhältnis von der Aufklärung bis zur
Gegenwart (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002), 39–60. ‘Geschichte . . . wird im Medium narrativer
Textstrukturen allererst gewonnen’, 45.
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absolute spirit, 177 Butler on, 320–1

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on autonomy of reason, 210–11, 212–13, on gender, 296, 316–17
215–20, 229 as master–slave relationship, 304–5,
nature’s relation to reason, 226–7 316–17
reason as ontology, 222–3 male desire for disembodiment, 320–1
Zwang, 216–19 women as defined by biological sex,
on autonomy of will, 223–9 305
on developmental reason, 225–6 on recognition, 302–3, 315–17
on Hegel’s views on nature, 212 master–slave dialectic, 314
on instrumental reason, 193–4 on self-consciousness, 316
on Kant’s ethics, 201–2 on Stendhal, 316–17
on late capitalism and autonomy of reason, Second Sex, The, 316–17
213–14 being, 138, 145
on reification, 214–15 Berger, Johann Erich von, 102
alienation, 94–5, 98–9 academic career, 111
Marx on, 91–2, 94–5 Allgemeine Grundzüge zur Wissenschaft,
nature as sphere, 322 127–9
recognition and, 318–19 early thought, 111–17
ambiguity, 314, 318 Hegel’s influence on, 125–9
anti-Semitism, 154 Herder’s influence on, 116
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 2 in Jena, 117
association, 84 in Kiel, 111–12
astronomy, 124 in Zürich, 119–20
Aufforderung, 285–6 influence on Trendelenburg, 110–11,
Auschwitz, 47 128–9
autism spectrum disorders, 325 ‘Letters on Nature’, 121–2
autonomy, 63 Literary Society of Free Men, 117–18
restricted, 313–14, 323, 326 Matters of the Day, The, 118
Mnemosyne, 121–2
Basedow Institute, 116 natural sciences and, 120
Bauer, Bruno, 84, 89, 90 on class, 113–14
Beauvoir, Simone de, 281–2, 293–5, on education, 118–19, 127
313 on reason, 113
373
374 Index
Berger, Johann Erich von (cont.) Christian communities, 75

‘On the Condition of Servants’, 112–16 civil servants, 37, 38
‘On the Distinctiveness of Peoples’, 125–7 civil society, 88–9
on the infinite and the harmony of the von Berger on, 126–7
whole, 124 Vormärz republicans, 89
‘On the Preconditions of an Improved women and, 308
National Educational System’, 118 class, 113
patriotism, 119 class consciousness, 102
Philosophical Account of the Harmonies of the coercion, 214–15, 264–5
Universe, A, 124 cognisability, 336
Bergson, Henri, 162, 163, 167 cognition, 177
Deleuze on, 171–2 Kant on, 187
Introduction à la métaphysique, 173 Simmel’s critique of Kant, 177
Kant’s influence on, 175 Cohen, Herman, 139–40, 141, 154
L’Évolution créatrice, 169, 175 Cohn, Jonas, 149, 151
on antiquity and modernity, 175 collective bargaining, 84
on biology and evolution, 170–1 collective property, 84
human intelligence as product, 172–3 commodity trading, 191
on time, 168–9 communism, 2
Plotinus’ influence on, 174–5 concept, 93, 95
Schelling and, 174 concrete labour, 97–8
Schopenhauer’s influence on, 174 concrete order, 243, 244–7
sense of method, 171–2 consciousness
spiritual realism and, 173–4 Beauvoir on, 294
Berkeleyan idealism, 12 Bergson on, 169
Binder, Julius, 236, 238–40 cultural, 144
on requirement for a Führer, 239–41 opposition to other consciousnesses,
biological processes, 170 294
Bismarck, Otto von, 232 consequentialism, 201
Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang, 248 constitution (of a state), 51, 52–3, 74
Bollnow, Otto Friedrich, 163 Hegel on, 74–5
bonum-durch-malum-Gedanke, 42 Kant on, 59
Bourbon monarchy, 53 Schelling on, 65–6
bourgeoisie, 97 co-operatives, 154
Boyle, Nicholas, 41 corporatism, 260–4
Brelage, Manfred, 140, 154 idealism and, 264
Bubner, Rüdiger, 248 influence and reception, 272–3
Butler, Judith, 313–14, 326–7 intermediate corporations, 266–7
Giving an Account of Oneself, 313, 319 politics, 266
on Hegel’s Phenomenology, 318 primacy of state power, 270–2
on reciprocity of recognition, 319–20 private law and, 267–8, 271
Subjects of Desire, 317–19 private property and, 268–9
sense of history, 270
Calvinism, 188–9, 198 Sforza on, 271–2
Cassirer, Ernst, 137, 142, 146, 147, state, conception of, 264–5, 266
178 counter-Enlightenment, 54
Logic of the Cultural Sciences, 178 critical theory
causation, 195–6 interest in autonomy of reason, 209–10
phenomenal, 219–20 critique of knowledge, 5
Zwang and, 218–19 Croce, Benedetto, 1, 3
childbearing, 304–5 relationship with fascism, 261
Index 375
cultural philosophy, 340 education, 328

Kant, 142, 217 neo-Kantian influence, 153
neo-Kantian, 142–3 Trendelenburg on, 110
cultural consciousness, 144 von Berger on, 118–19, 127
spheres of culture, 146 efficient causation, 195–6, 200
turn toward, 142 ego, 226, 228–9
state of, in late ninteenth century, élan vital, 171
150–1 Émile, 282–4
empathy
Dahlmann, Friedrich Christoph, 125 simulation theory, 324
Deleuze, Gilles, 171 theory-theory, 324, 325
on Bergson, 171–2 empiricism, 85, 137, 156
democracy Engels, Friedrich, 101
gulf between governors and governed, Enlightenment (historical period), 51
26–7 emergence of notion of the state, 52,
intellectuals and journalists as bridge, 57
27 sociological account, 54–6
Judt on, 26 flaws, 57
Weimar Republic, 239 enlightenment (state of consciousness), 35,
Descartes, René, 175 118
destiny, 22–3, 27 entelechy, 170
dialectic, 128, 129 epistemic injustice, 315
communism vs capitalism as, 2 epistemology
Engels’ dialectics of nature, 101 Dilthey, 166–8
Idealist tradition as, 2 Fichte, 93
in Marx, 97 Kant, 13–14
Diederichs, Eugen, 162 neo-Kantian development, 140
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 162, 163, 338 Lebensphilosophie, 164
early work, 166 meta-history, 337–9
Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, ethics and morality
163 abstracted from concrete facts of moral
epistemology, 166–8 life, 3
‘Erfahren und Denken’, 167 education and, 110
‘Formation of the Historical World’, Hegel, 69
167–8 Kant’s, 58, 197–8, 200–1, 202
Gadamer on, 165 rationalisation and, 198
historical work, 165–6 marriage as basis, 290
on Schelling, 166 of recognition, 315, 323, 326
on spirit, 168 Protestant, 201
discourse without domination, 2–3 religion and, 39
disembodiment, 320–1 ethnography, 195
division of labour, 40–1 Eucken, Rudolf, 150, 151
double reflexivity, 76 European Labour Academy, 152
Driesch, Hans, 173 evil, 42–3
Droysen, Johann Gustav, 332, 338 evolution, 170–1
Dulckheit, Gerhard, 234 human intelligence as product, 172–3
duration, 169 executive power, 271
Durkheim, Émile, 56 existentialism, 300–1
experience, 92–3
Economy and Society, 188 Kant on, 93
ecstatic recognition, 322, 323, 326–7 expressivism, 86
376 Index
fascism, 260, 264–5 moral freedom, 69

private property and, 268 Marx on, 72
fate, 34 of individual citizens, 63–4
feminism, 281 post-Kantian perfectionism, 100
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 84 Schelling on, 65
Marx’s critique, 94 spontaneity and, 86–7
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 277 French Revolution, 46
Closed Commercial State, The, 92 Freud, Sigmund, 194
Doctrine of Science, 292 theory of drives, 224–6
epistemology, 93 Fricker, Miranda, 312–13
Foundations of Natural Right, 92, 277, Führer principle, 239–41
285–6 Fukuyama, Francis, 2
influence on Bergson, 174 functionaries, 37, 38
influence on Marx, 92
influence on von Berger, 117 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 165
Lectures on the Vocation of a Scholar, 40–1, Gans, Eduard, 84
117 Gatterer, Johann Christoph, 333
On the destiny of human beings in Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 124
society, 118 Gehlen, Arnold, 43
on gender and sexuality, 280, 290–1 gender and sexuality, 278
on love and marriage, 287–90 as ground of sexual difference, 282
on recognition, 284–7 as master–slave relationship, 304–5
on scholars, 40–1 Beauvoir on, 281–2, 293–5
on self-consciousness, 303 civil society as male ethical sphere, 308
political philosophy, 61–5 obedience and refusal, 307–8
Sittenlehre, 291 Fichte on, 280, 287–90, 295–6
finalism, 170 Hegel on, 306–7
Fischer, Kuno, 140 in Antigone, 306–7
Flottbeck, 121 Kant on, 280
forms (Platonic), 186 male desire for disembodiment, 320–1
Foucault, Michel, 36 male sexual desire, 295
Frankfurt school, 102, 191 myth of the ‘eternal feminine’, 284–5
critique of instrumental reason, 192–3 Rousseau on, 282–4
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 44 same-sex relationships, 321
Fraser, Nancy, 312 German Revolutions (1848), 83
Redistribution or Recognition?, 313 German Volk, 245–6
Frederick the Great, 37 Germany, 232–3
free speech, 20 development of meta-history, 331–2
free will, 17, 169 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 339
gender and sexuality and, 284 Geschäftsleute, 38
freedom, 13 Geschichtszeichen, 46
as Kantian Idea of Reason, 16 Geschlecht (race), 28
as Lyotard’s universal idea, 45–6 Gierke, Otto von, 151
Beauvoir on, 295 Glaube (faith), 13–14
fascism and, 264–5 in Critique of Practical Reason, 14–16
Fichte on, 62, 63–4 Glockner, Hermann, 234
gender, sexuality and, 291 God, 187
gender, sexuality and, 284 as source of law, 65
Hegel on, 67–8, 70–1, 74, 87–8, 328 impossibility of proof of existence, 13
implied critique of other accounts, 70–1 on trial for allowing evil, 42
legal freedom, 69 Goddard, Jean-Christophe, 174
Index 377
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 176–7 scientific inadmissibility of Hegelianism,

Greece (classical), 75 136–7
Grossi, Paolo, 261, 262 Sittlichkeit (ethical life), 87
Grundfragen der neuen Rechtswissenschaft, 244 Spirito on, 269–70
Heidegger, Martin, 152, 179
Habermas, Jürgen, 2–3, 27, 43–5 Heller, H., 232–3
criticism of Marx, 102 Hegel und der nationale Machtstaatsgedanke
philosophy of history, 43–5 in Deutschland, 232
Haller, Carl Ludwig von, 75 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 140
happiness, 100–1 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 86, 333, 335
ends, spontaneity and, 101 influence on von Berger, 116
harmony, 124 heteronomy, 87
Hartmann, Nicolai, 147, 152, 154 historical study, 1–2, 331–2
Haym, Rudolf, 232 as a priori construct, 22–3
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 43 cognisability, 336
Butler on, 318 contemporary state, 340–1
conservative criticism of, 83 Dilthey’s work, 165–6
criticism of Fichte, 177 epistemological concerns, 337–9
Feuerbach on, 94 idealist concepts of history, 333–5
gender theory, 306–7 modern idealism’s break with tradition,
influence on Lebensphilosophie, 162 340
influence on Lenin, 101 rational comprehensibility of history, 334
influence on von Berger, 125–9 research rules, 332
Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, 242 historicism, 54
Kojève’s interpretation, 306 Historik, 332
legal philosophy, 67–8 Historikerstreit, 44
modern influence, 248–9 historiography, 332
Nazi co-option, 241–2 Holbach, Paul-Henri Baron d’, 53
master–slave dialectic, 294–5, 301–4, 306, Holk, Countess Anna, 123
314 Honneth, Axel, 2, 3, 102
moral philosophy, 69 Redistribution or Recognition?, 313
on freedom, 67–8 Horkheimer, Max, 193–4
on general will, 71, 72 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der
on Kant, 187 Aufklärung), 194, 210, 214
on labour, 92 on Kant’s ethics, 201–2
on modernity, 88 on Schopenhauer, 203
on nature and reason, 211–12 Horney, Karen, 224
on recognition, 294–5, 300–3 House of Fasci and Corporations, 260–1
influence, 312 Hülsen, August Ludwig, 119, 123
on self-consciousness, 303, 316 human race, 28, 286
Phenomenology of Spirit, 92, 93, 199, 277, Kant on love for, 28–9
300 moral progress, 29–30
Butler on, 318 human reason
Philosophy of Right, 83, 87–8 Kant’s limits, 13–14
political and historical philosophy, 1–2, Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 279, 280, 336
66–71, 74, 75 philosophy of history, 335, 336–7
distinction between state and civil Hume, David, 55
society, 88–9 Husserl, Edmund, 151
influence on Prussian state, 232–3
Spirito’s criticism, 269–70 idealism (philosophical position)
Popper and Topitsch’s criticism, 247 contemporary relevance, 3–4
378 Index
idealism in history, 332–5 impact of corporatist and idealist thought

Idealism, German on legal profession, 272–3
as tradition, 1, 4–5 post-First World War crisis, 262–3
critical theoretic interest in, 197
relationship of philosophy to cultural Jäger, Georg, 173
sciences, 3–4 Jena, 117
transcendental condition of possibility, 4 Jews, 154
Ideas of Reason, 16 judicial powers, 271
identity model, 312–13 Judt, Tony, 26
immortality justice
of the soul, 15 Kant’s views, 20
individual human beings
as legal persons, 67–8 Kant, Immanuel
autonomy, 63 Bergson on, 175
education into humanity, 127 concept of the state, 58
Fichte on, 286–7 Conflict of the Faculties, 37–40, 46–7
duties, 40–1 Critique of Judgement, 291
state legitimacy arising from, 63–4 Critique of Practical Reason, 14–16, 219
subsumed by corporatist state, 267–8 Critique of Pure Reason, 12, 217
vocation according to Fichte, 40–1 cultural philosophy, 142, 217
individualism, 238 epistemology, 13–14
insects, 172–3 necessity of moral progress, 29–30
instinct, 225–6 history and human destiny, 22–3, 30–4
intellect and, 172–3 Idea for a Universal History from a
instrumental reason, 191–6 Cosmopolitan Point of View, 17, 30–3,
Frankfurt school on, 192–3 34, 92, 333
Kantian conceptual antecedents, 200–1 Ideas of Reason, 16
non-instrumental reason, 202–3 influence on von Berger, 116
pathological, 193–4 Metaphysics of Morals, 280
reification, rationalisation and, 196–7 moral philosophy, 197–8, 202
relation of ends to means, 192–3 compared to Sade, 200–1
intellect, 172–3 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful
intellectuals, 27, 35, 38 and the Sublime, 279–80
Habermas’ view, 43–5 on autonomy of reason, 208, 215–16
public discourse, 44–5 reason as ontology, 223
public/private distinction, 37 unity of reason, 220–2
social role, 36–7, 38 Zwang, 216–19
intercultural dialogue, 2–3 on Basedow Institute, 116
intermediate corporations, 266–7 on cognition, 177
intersubjectivity, 102, 301 on Enlightenment, 35
of self-consciousness, 304 on experience, 93
recognition and, 321–2 on faith (Glaube), 14–16
subjectivity and, 277–8 on free will, 17
subsuming, 321 on gender, 280
intuition, 93 on intellectuals, 35
Bergson on, 171–2 public/private distinction, 37
Kant on, 93 social niche, 36–7
Irigaray, Luce, 282, 316–17 on labour, 92
Iselin, Isaak, 333 on love for human race, 28–9
Italy on progress, 17–19
evolution of concept of the state, 263–4 on rational will, 223
Index 379
on spontaneity, 86–7 Lasswitz, Kurd, 152

on transcendental realism, 12 law (academic subject), 38
political philosophy, 19–20, 73–4 impact of neo-Kantianism, 152
distinction between idealism and law (system of civil rules)
realism, 21–3 as actuality of meaning, 241
Schelling’s critique, 65–6 corporatist, 271
postulates (concept of), 14–15 ethical and judicial, 59
role of intellectuals, 35 Fichte on, 62–3
Simmel’s essay on Goethe and, 176–7 God as source, 65
‘Theory and Practice’, 99–100 modern influence, 248–9
‘What Is Enlightenment?’, 35–6 Hegel on, 67–8
Foucault on, 36 modern influence, 248–9
Kant Society, 153 Kant on, 58–9, 73–4
Kelsen, Hans, 152, 236 legitimacy of, 59–60
Kiel University, 125 relation to law, 59–60
Kieler Blätter, 125, 127 Larenz on, 237
‘On the Distinctiveness of Peoples’, 125–7 mass society social groups and, 263
Kingdom of Ends, 33 Lebensphilosophie, 147, 161
Kleingeld, Pauline, 221 Hegel’s influence on, 162
knowledge Scheler’s essay, 162
von Berger on, 112–13 Schelling’s influence on, 162
Kojève, Alexandre, 301, 306 Left Hegelianism, 83–4
König, Georg Ludwig, 108 critique of religion, 83–4
Kroner, Richard, 151, 154 socioeconomic engagement, 84
legal persons, 67–8
labour legal philosophy
Calvinism and, 198 Italian, 261
Fichte on, 92 appeal of idealism, 262
Kant on, 92 Julius Binder, 238–40
relation to intuition and concept, 94 Karl Larenz, 241–2
Marx on, 91–2, 94 doctrine of concrete order, 244–7
as creative force, 91–2 legitimacy (of a state), 55, 59–60, 62, 66–7
concrete labour, 97–8 arising from individual citizens, 63–4
duality, 97 Fichte on, 62, 63
qualitative character, 95 Hegel on, 66–7
Langbehn, Julius, 148 as condition of ethical life, 70–1
Rembrandt as Educator, 148 Kant on, 59–60, 61
Lange, Friedrich Albert, 138, 148, 153 Marx on, 72
language, 147 moral personality, 60
Larenz, Karl, 234, 236, 238, 241–2 Schelling on, 65–6
Das Problem der Rechtsgeltung, 236, 241, Leibniz, Gottfried, 42
244 concept of self, 85–6
legal justification of National Socialism, on biological organisms, 170
243–4 Lenin, Vladimir, 101
Methodenlehre der Rechtswissenschaft, 234–5 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 325, 328
Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie des deutschen Levy, Heinrich, 234
Idealismus und ihre Liebert, Arthur, 152
Gegenwartsbedeutung, 241–2, 243 Liebmann, Otto, 138, 148
Reich und Recht in der deutschen Philosophie, life, 179
238 Literary Society of Free Men, 117–18
‘Sittlichkeit und Recht’, 247 Locke, John, 55
380 Index
Logos, 151, 154 men

Lotze, Hermann, 138 desire for disembodiment, 320–1
love, 280, 291 sexual desire, 295
Adorno on, 213 Mendelssohn, Moses, 29
Fichte on, 280 meta-history, 331, 339–41
for human race, 28–9 development of tradition, 331–2
marriage as community, 287–8 epistemology, 337–9
Lovejoy, A. O., 171, 173 forms of argumentation, 332
Luhmann, Niklas, 43 idealist concepts of history, 333–5
Lukács, György, 152, 190, 301 rhetoric, 339
on reification, 191, 199 metaphysics
Luxemburg, Rosa, 101 Lebensphilosophie and, 164
Lyotard, Jean-François, 43 life as foundation, 179
on progress and intellectuals, 45–8 neo-Kantian rejection, 138
Schelling, 65
Maggiore, Giuseppe, 270–1 Schopenhauer, 203
Makkreel, Rudolf, 168 Simmel, 164, 177
Manifesto of the Anti-fascist Intellectuals, Mill, John Stuart, 201
261 mirror neurons, 326
Marburg school, 136, 140, 152 misanthropy, 28–9
Marcuse, Herbert, 247 Mnemosyne (journal), 121–2
Reason and Revolution, 247 modernity
markets, 89 Hegel on, 88
Marquard, Odo, 42–3 monads, 85–6
marriage, 280, 284 monarchy, 36–7
Fichte on, 287–90, 292 Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 331
virtue and, 290, 292 moral personality, 60
Martens, Georg Friedrich, 111
Marx, Karl, 71–3, 340 Napoleonic wars, 123
Capital, 95, 98–9 Natorp, Paul, 151, 153
concept of alienation, 91 Social Pedagogy, 153
debt to Hegel, 98–9 natural law, 53, 65, 278
Fichte’s influence on, 92 natural rights, 52
German Ideology, The, 95–7 nature
Hegel’s influence on, 98–9 as sphere of alienation, 322
homology to Hegelian logic, 98–9 Fichte on freedom and, 291
influence on Beauvoir, 305 opposition to reason, 211–12,
markets, 190 226–7
on labour, 91–2 repression by civilisation, 193–4
on reification, 190 von Berger’s interest in, 120, 121–2
on republicanism, 90 nature’s plan, 33–4
On the Jewish Question, 72 Nazism, 237, 243–4
Paris Manuscripts, 95 doctrine of concrete order, 244–7
perfectionism, 100 neo-Hegelianism, 233–5
Theses on Feuerbach, 93–4 Julius Binder, 238–40
Marxism, Althusserian, 102 Karl Larenz, 236–8
master–slave dialectic, 92, 301, 306, 314, neo-Kantianism, 136
319, 325 as cultural movement, 148–52
Mehlis, Georg, 151 as means out of crisis of systematic
Meinecke, Friedrich, 151 philosophy, 138
Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, 232–3 as systematic philosophy, 141
Index 381
attitude to post-Kantian German idealism, political power, 53

137–8 political realism, 19
contemporary impact, 152–5 Kant and, 20–1
on politics, 153 politicians, 26
on socialism, 153–4 politics
philosophical, 152, 154–5 corporatist, 266
post-First World War, 154–5 Popper, Karl, 247
post-Second World War, 154 positivism, 68–9, 137, 166
criticism of, 147 postmodernity, 48
culture and, 142–3 post-structuralism, 282
validity and, 143–8 poverty, 84, 89
current state, 155–6 power (interpersonal and political), 239
relevance to current philosophical practical reason, 14–15
debate, 155–6 as source of legal legitimacy, 62
development beyond Kant, 139–40 distinct from empirical practical reason,
epistemology, 140 87
founding of Logos, 151–2 ideas of, 15–16
Marburg school, 136, 140, 142 private law, 267–8, 271
motivating factors, 136–7 Sforza’s view on interaction with public
rejection of metaphysics, 138 sphere, 271–2
spheres of culture, 146 private property
theory of validity, 145 corporatisation, 268–9
validity and, 140, 142 progress
opposition to being, 138 Fichte on, 40–1, 42
Niemann, August Christian, 111–12 Habermas on, 43–5
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 161, 162, 340 in historical study, 334–5
Nolte, Ernst, 44 Kant on, 27–8, 30–4, 41–2, 46–7
noumenon, 218–19 as nature’s plan, 33–4
Lyotard on, 45–6
objective self-legislation, 67 moral, 28–9
objective spirit, 168 dependence of morality on notion of,
observing reason, 199–200 29–30
O’Neill, Onora, 5 rejection of ideal by Marquard, 43
organicism, 123 von Berger on, 118–19
proletariat, 97
patriotism, 119 Left Hegelians and, 89
people’s spirit, 242–4 property, 89
perfectionism, 99–101 collective, 84
post-Kantian, 100–1 Protestantism, 201
pre-Kantian, 99–100 Prussia, 36–7
Philanthropisches Archiv, 116 Prussian Gymnasium, 108
philosophy psychoanalysis, 194, 224, 228–9
as academic subject during public reason, 27
Enlightenment, 38–40 public sphere
theology and, 39–40 Habermas on, 44–5
Plato, 186 Kant on public/private distinction, 37
political idealism, 58 Sforza’s corporatist view on interplay
as sociological account of state, 74, 75–6 with private sphere, 271–2
political parties, 26, 263 pure reason
political philosophy as Zwang, 217
Kantian critique of knowledge and, 5 Pütter, Johann Stephan, 111
382 Index
Ranke, Leopold von, 334, 335, 337 self-consciousness and, 302–4, 314
rational will, 223 social ontology and, 323–4, 328
rationalisation, 188–90 simulation theory, 324–5
antecedents in Kant, 197–8 social structure and, 320
as part of trend toward assessment in withholding, 319–20
terms of ends-efficiency, 189 Recognition and Social Ontology, 324
conceptual overlap with reification and reification, 190–1, 294
instrumental reason, 196–7 autonomy of reason and, 214–15
Kant’s ethics and, 202 Hegelian antecedents to concept,
Weber, 188 198–200
rationalism, 186 instrumental reason, rationalisation and,
rationality 196–7
principle of right and, 285–7 Lukács on, 191
Ravaisson, Félix, 173 Marx on, 190
realism reifying judgements as coercion, 214–15
transcendental, 12 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard, 102
reason Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, 111
as ontology, 223 religion
autonomy, 208 as alienated spirit, 83–4
Adorno on, 10, 211, 212–13, 223–9: morality and, 39
Freud’s theory of drives and, 224–6 revolution, 20, 22, 46
effect of objects on formal processes, Rickert, Heinrich, 146, 162–3,
221–2 338
intellectual convention and, 209–10 right, 285–7
opposition to nature, 211–12 rights of human beings
pure reason and, 208 happiness and, 100–1
reifying judgements as coercive, 214–15 Riquier, Camille, 175
unity of reason and, 220–1 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 43
validity and, 145 Roman law, 69, 70
critical theoretic treatment, 210 Rosenzweig, Franz, 233
unity, 220–1 Rotenstreich, Nathan, 322
von Berger’s concept, 113 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Rechtsstaat, 60–1 as proto-sociologist, 56–7
recognition, 277, 315 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 56
alienation, ambiguity and, 318–19 on gender difference, 278, 282–4
as experiential phenomenon, 325–6 Social Contract, 56–7
as positive ethical concept, 322 Ruge, Arnold, 84, 89
Beauvoir’s theory of gender and, 295
Butler on, 313, 319–20 Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis
moral autonomy with restricted de, 201, 202
responsibility, 313–14 same-sex relationships, 321
ecstatic, 322, 326–7 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 314
epistemological, ethical and ontological Being and Nothingness, 314
questions, 315 Savigny, Friedrich Carl von, 239
ethical basis, 326 scepticism, 14
fundamental nature, 320 Schelling, Friedrich, 65–6, 162
Hegel on, 300–3 Bergson and, 174
Sittlichkeit and, 301 concept of the absolute, 177
intersubjectivity and, 321–2 Dilthey on, 166
master–slave dialectic and, 314 influence on Lebensphilosophie, 162
reciprocity, 319 metaphysics of nature, 65
Index 383
on nature and reason, 211 Locke on, 55

political philosophy, 65–6 von Berger on, 126
Schöpferisches Handeln, 162 social forgetfulness, 54
Schiller, Friedrich, 279, 333 social groups, 263
Schlegel, Friedrich, 86 social ontology, 313, 323–8
Schleswig-Holsteinische Provinzialberichte, 112 social order
Schlözer, August Ludwig von, 111, 333 von Berger on, 113–14
Schmitt, Carl, 242 social value, 188–9
Schnädelbach, Herbert, 154–5 social vocation, 40–1
scholarly discourse, 36–7 socialism, 90
as arbiter of reason, 40 neo-Kantian influence, 153–4
Kant’s conflict of the faculties, 38–40 sociology, 54–5
scholars critical theoretic concept, 195–6
Fichte on, 41 Enlightenment and, 54–5, 57
Schönfeld, Walther, 236, 237–8 neo-Kantianism and, 152
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 162 Rousseau and, 56–7
Bergson and, 174 Schelling and, 65–6
metaphysics, 203 Sophocles Antigone, 306–7
moral philosophy, 203 species being, 72
science, 41 Spencer, Herbert, 174
rejection of Hegelian philosophy, 136–7 spirit (Geist), 83–4, 301–2
sociology modelled on, 195–6 Dilthey on, 168
Searle, John, 324 nature as objectification, 122
Seekamp estate, 122–3 philosophy of history and, 334–5
self religion as alienated, 83–4
Fichte on, 284–5 self-consciousness, recognition and, 327
German Idealist notions, 86 self-objectification as culture, 178–9
self-consciousness, 277, 285–6, 302–4 von Berger on, 125–6, 129
as pure self-relation, 303 Spirito, Ugo, 265
Beauvoir on, 316 criticism of Hegel, 269–70
Hegel on, 303, 316 spiritualist realism, 173–4
recognition and, 302–4, 314, 327–8 spontaneity, 85, 86–7, 101
self-harmony, 40 end of happiness and, 101
self-preservation, 226 Fichte’s state and, 92
sensation, 167 Kant on, 86–7
Servant Statutes, 112 Lenin on, 101–2
servants, 112 markets and, 89
sexual desire, 295 Stadler, August, 152
Sforza, Cesarini, 271–2 Stahl, Friedrich Julius, 238
Simmel, Georg, 150, 151, 162, 163, state
176 as condition of Sittlichkeit, 70–1
Lebensanschauung, 179 Böckenförde dictum, 248
metaphysics, 164, 177 corporatist, 264–5, 266, 271
on Kant and Goethe, 176–7 development of notion of, 52, 54
Philosophische Kultur, 179 Enlightenment conception, 51
simulation theory of empathy, 324 Fichte on, 61–5, 92
Sittlichkeit (ethical life), 2–3, 70, 87, 301 as arising from individuals, 64
Smith, Adam, 55 Hegel on, 67, 88
social contract as distinct from civil society, 88–9
as Kantian Idea of Reason, 16 Vormärz republicans’ critique, 89
Kant’s views, 20, 59 intellectuals’ relation to, 36–7
384 Index
state (cont.) concept of state, 109–10

Kant on, 58 early life, 102, 108
legitimacy, 59–60 Elementa Logices Aristotelicae, 110
Marx on, 72 ethics of immanent teleology, 109–10
republican, 89–90 Logische Untersuchungen, 129
Rousseau on, 56–7 on education, 110
separation from government, 51–2 Troeltsch, Ernst, 151
Trendelenburg on, 109–10
Staudinger, Franz, 152, 154 United States, 44
Steffens, Henrik, 121, 123 universities
Stegmüller, Wolfgang, 154 Kant’s conflict of the faculties, 38–40
Main Currents of Contemporary Philosophy,
154 validity, 138
Stendhal, 316–17 autonomy of reason and, 145
Stirner, Max, 84 cultural, 143
Strumpf, Carl, 167 neo-Kantian concept of culture and,
Sturmfels, Wilhelm, 152 143–8
subjectivism, 177 main features, 145
subjectivity, 85 neo-Kantian concern with, 140
intersubjectivity and, 277–8 opposition to being, 138, 145
subsuming self–other interactions, 321 unity, 145
suffering, 203 vitalism, 170
suffrage, 126 völkisch law, 242, 245–6
supreme supervision, 41 Volksgemeinschaft, 242
surplus value, 98 Volpicelli, Arnaldo, 262, 265, 270
Svarez, Carl Gottlieb, 53 Voltaire, 53
systematic philosophy, 155 Vorländer, Karl, 152
Vormärz, 83, 89–90
Tauber, Alfred, 228
Taylor, Charles, 324 Walzer, Michael, 3
Tenbruck, Friedrich, 155 wasps, 172
terror, 46 wealth distribution, 84
theodicy, 42, 43 Weber, Max, 151, 152
theology, 38 on Kant’s ethics, 198, 201–2
conflict with philosophy, 39–40 on labour, 198
impact of neo-Kantianism, 152 on rationalisation, 188, 196
theory philosophy of history, 338–9
as material force, 90 Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism,
thick and thin description, 3 The, 188
thing-in-itself, 187 Weimar Republic, 239
time will
Bergson on, 168–9 Hegel’s concept, 71
Topitsch, Ernst, 247 Kant’s rational, 223
transcendental analytic, 144, 177 Schopenhauer’s, 162
transcendental condition of possibility, 4 Windelband, Wilhelm, 137, 139, 142, 146,
transcendental idealism, 12–13 151, 338
transcendental realism, 12 on development of modern cultural
Trendelenburg, Adolf Friedrich, 112 consciousness, 148–9
Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf Preludes, 150
academic career, 108 Wolff, Christian, 99–100
Berger’s influence on, 110–11, 122, 128–9 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 151
Index 385
women World War, First, 233

as sexualised being, 283–4, 290–1 World War, Second, 237–8
Beauvoir on, 293–5 Worms, Frédéric, 175
as child-bearing, 304–5, 315
capacity for recognition, 317 Zeitschrift für Deutsche Kulturphilosophie,
Fichte on, 287–8, 289 234
inferiority, 293 Zeller, Eduard, 140
freedom and free will, 284 Zwang, 214–15, 216–19
Rousseau’s concept, 283–4 pure reason as, 217

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The Impact of Idealism

Volume II. Historical, Social and Political Thought

Nicholas Boyle is the Schröder Professor of German Emeritus in the

General editors Nicholas Boyle and Liz Disley

Associate general editor Ian Cooper

Volume I. Philosophy and Natural Sciences

General editors Nicholas Boyle and Liz Disley

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2013

Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

isbn 978-1-107-03983-4 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of

List of contributors page vii

Introduction: Idealism in historical, social and political thought 1

1 From transcendental idealism to political realism 12

2 The public of the intellectuals – from Kant to Lyotard 26

3 Idealism and the idea of a constitution 51

4 German Idealism and Marx 82

6 The concept and philosophy of culture in Neo-Kantianism 136

7 After materialism – reflections of Idealism in Lebensphilosophie: Dilthey,

8 ‘Rationalisation’, ‘reification’, ‘instrumental reason’ 186

9 Freedom within nature: Adorno on the idea of reason’s autonomy 208

10 German neo-Hegelianism and a plea for another Hegel 232

11 Idealism and the fascist corporative state 260

12 Love and recognition in Fichte and the alternative position of

13 Hegel’s concept of recognition and its reception in the humanist

14 Giving an account of oneself amongst others: Hegel, Judith Butler and

15 Idealism in the German tradition of meta-history 331

This series of studies of the influence on the humanities of German Idealist

There is no clearer indication that Idealism is a tradition, and that the

within the original movement of German Idealism, conceived as a distinctive

powerful and powerless alike and so links intellectual to political progress.

thought in late nineteenth-century Germany. Stephan Nachtsheim considers

the instrumental reason of modern technology and the societies it serves.

Marion Heinz’s and Sabine Doyé’s chapters present feminist critiques

From transcendental idealism to political realism

we must do so on the basis of a range of indispensable presuppositions. We

3 The postulates of pure practical reason

the existence of a cause of all nature, distinct from nature, which

And also that:

This endless progress is, however, possible only on the presupposition

to undertake either scientific investigation of the natural world or practical

freedom is only an idea of reason, the objective reality of which is in

The most difficult thing to understand about Kant’s Ideas of Reason is

Since human beings in their endeavours do not behave merely

However, if human freedom prevents us from knowing or predicting the far

I shall therefore be allowed to assume that, since the human race is

6 Human destiny and political realism

In other passages it is apparent that Kant writes as a political realist, who

if a public law is so constituted that a whole people could not possibly

7 Kant and political realism

disappointingly sober and dispassionate. The moral ardour that

Or is Kant ultimately a realist at least in politics, because he takes instrumental

permissions, not to make exceptions to the rule of right but to postpone

Moreover, ‘permissive laws of reason . . . allow a situation of public right

If it is a duty to realize the condition of public right, even if only in

der Wissenschaften (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1900–) (hereafter GS), v, 147.9–24. This is a

The public of the intellectuals – from Kant to Lyotard

Democracies corrode quite fast . . . They corrode because most people

Is the human race as a whole to be loved, or is it an object such that one

knowledge or well-grounded assumption that humanity as a whole has