Douglas Moggach

Italian receptions of Hegel's political thought analysed in Fernanda Gallo's careful study, can be examined through Fichte's concepts of 'positing' or taking up extrinsic material within a pre-existing conceptual scheme, but in this reciprocal interaction, both elements, receiver and received, are changed. Gallo shows both how Hegel is filtered through Italian philosophical traditions and how Hegel's thought in turn challenges these traditions. While early German receptions of Hegel raise the state's relation to economic issues as the defining problem of the modern age, Italian interlocutors appear to stress cultural renewal.

The political ethics of the Hegelian School is characterized by post-Kantian perfectionism, an approach which differs from earlier perfectionist theories because it takes as its object the promotion of freedom and the conditions of its exercise. Ideas of spontaneous or self-initiated activity displace older views of happiness or thriving (eudaimonia), based on fixed conceptionsof human nature. The new theories are also attentive to conflicting interests in emergent modern civil society, and the need to transform its institutions and practices. Two of the variants within this approach in the 1840’s are distinguished, those of Bauer and Marx, and their respective metaethical and normative commitments are examined.

El republicanismo alemán en el período que va de 1790 a 1850, aplica la idea kantiana de la autonomía moral a las relaciones e instituciones políticas. Pueden distinguirse dos modelos de pensamiento republicano que reconocen el problema de la diversidad y el conflicto de intereses en la sociedad civil moderna, así como la necesidad de su conciliación política. Uno de ellos, el de Schiller, sostiene que tales intereses, a pesar de dar lugar a conflicto y alienación, son, en último término, susceptibles de autolimitación, armonización y ajuste mutuo y voluntario en un Estado bien constituido. El otro, una variante más rigorista, desarrollada en la década de 1840 por Bruno Bauer, defiende un ideal estricto de transformación propia. Los intereses privados no pueden ser traspuestos inmediatamente a la esfera política, sino que han de someterse a la crítica, a la decisión sobre su admisibilidad y compatibilidad con los requisitos del progreso histórico. Ambas posiciones representan formas de una nueva ética perfeccionista post-kantiana que se propone promover la libertad personal y política, así como las condiciones de su ejercicio.

ABSTRACT The historical context of early post-Kantian debates on politics reveals the emergence of a new type of perfectionist ethics no longer based on the state-sponsored promotion of happiness, as the dominant German tendency in the eighteenth century had been, but on individual freedom. Post-Kantian perfectionism focused on maintaining and enhancing the conditions for rightful interaction among self-defining individuals. Rather than isolating and alienating, Kantian negative freedom enabled a new conception of social interaction based on the idea of right and the progressive extension of rightful relations. Humboldt, Schiller, Fichte, and Marx exemplified this new approach, despite their differences.

Der Band versammelt philosophische Beiträge, die den Theorietyp des Autonomieperfektionismus in historischer und systematischer Perspektive beleuchten. Im Zuge von Kants Kritik an früheren perfektionistischen Ethikentwürfen entsteht ein neuer Theorietyp, der nicht wie die früheren Konzeptionen auf die Beförderung von Glück abzielt, sondern auf die Beförderung von Freiheit, die Bedingungen ihrer Ausübung sowie eine Bestimmung der Grenzen staatlicher Interventionen. Die Beiträge beschäftigen sich in historisch-systematischer Absicht mit Positionen des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts und bieten Darstellungen zu Fichte, Schiller, Humboldt, Hegel, den Britischen Idealisten und anderen Autoren. The volume collects philosophical contributions dealing with a "perfectionism of autonomy" in a historical and systematic perspective. Unlike former perfectionist approaches focusing on Eudaimonia, the ethical conceptions developing in the 18th century and beyond in the course of a Kantian critique focus on the realization and promotion of freedom as well as on the legal and social conditions of people's exercise of freedom.

Die Philosophische Fakultat der Berliner Universitat stellte im Jahr 1828 eine Preisaufgabe, an deren Losung alle Studenten der Universitat teilnehmen konnten. Einem Vorschlag Hegels folgend ging es um eine Auseinandersetzung mit den "Prinzipien des Schonen" bei Kant. Nach anonymer Bewertung der eingegangenen Arbeiten wurde die von Bruno Bauer mit dem Preis geehrt. Wahrend die im Laufe der Jahre gestellten Aufgaben und erteilten Gutachten fast vollstandig erhalten sind, ist das Vorhandensein der von Bauer handschriftlich in lateinischer Sprache verfaten Arbeit eine wissenschaftliche Raritat. Diese Schrift, deren Original sich im Archiv der Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin befindet, wird hier erstmals publiziert. Eingeleitet durch eine philosophiegeschichtliche Betrachtung der Quelle (D. Moggach) und eine historische Einordnung der Preisschrift (W. Schultze) gestattet die synchrone Gegenuberstellung von lateinischem und deutschem Text dem Leser ein kritisches Studium der Quelle. Dieser Band soll den Auftakt fur weitere Publikationen wissenschaftlich und wissenschaftshistorisch interessanter Quellen des Archivs der Humboldt-Universitat bilden.

An examination of the intellectual context in which Fichte develops his ethical program in the Jena period and its immediate aftermath (1794–1800) reveals the determining presence of Leibniz, and the complex heritage of Leibnizian perfectionist thought from which Kantian, and post-Kantian, ethics seek to extricate themselves. While Kant blocks any reversion to the older, Leibnizian perfectionism, his criticisms leave open a space for a new kind of perfectionist ethic, one whose object is the promotion not of any determinate notion of eudaimonia or thriving, but of the possibility of free agency itself. The aim of post-Kantian perfectionism is to sustain the conditions of free, spontaneous action. Fichte’s ethical system is one example of post-Kantian perfectionism.

Students of the Hegelian school must acknowledge an abiding debt to Ernst Barnikol. Upon his death in 1968, he left uncompleted a voluminous manuscript on Bruno Bauer, representing over forty years of research. Of this manuscript, conserved at the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, only a fraction has been published, but even this fraction, in its almost six hundred pages, continues to set standards in the field for meticulous scholarship, rigorous analysis, and balanced criticism. Barnikol's interests were primarily theological, though he recognised clearly that Bauer's religious critique was politically motivated. Barnikol also discovered, but did not publish, Bauer's 1829 Latin manuscript on Kant's aesthetics. This text, adjudicated by Hegel and awarded the Prussian royal prize in philosophy, had been deposited among Hegel's correspondence in the archives of the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. It was first published in 1996, in the original Latin, with German translation and commentary. In referring to his discovery, Barnikol made a substantive claim which must be disputed here, that Bauer's early text remained without influence on his subsequent work. Focusing on Bauer's depiction of art, and on the relation of art and religion as manifestations of spirit, we can trace lines of continuity and development in his thought, from his 1829 manuscript to his writings of 1841-42. The central idea of the early manuscript, a Hegelian conception of the unity of thought and being, is the key to deciphering the complex and elusive meaning of Bauer's critical theory in the Vormdrz.

In his early text, The Limits of State Action, Wilhelm von Humboldt raises the Kantian question of the permissibility and legitimate extent of political and juridical coercion, as his contribution to a debate amongst Kantians launched by the publication in 1785 of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In arguing for a minimal state, concerned exclusively with internal and external security of its members but not at all with their felicity, Humboldt inflects Kantian political thought in the direction of a liberal laissez-faire state, in marked contrast to the strong interventionism that his fellow-Kantian Fichte derived from similar Kantian grounds. The article argues that the underlying conception of the individual retained by Humboldt has markedly Leibnizian traits, namely the notion of freedom as the spontaneous unfolding of a highly personal, monadic developmental trajectory toward perfection, which ought not to be impeded or homogenized by unnecessary state intervention. Humboldt thus represents not only a ‘rightist’ libertarian reading of Kant, but a particular appropriation of significant Leibnizian themes. His combination of these sources is compared with that of other contemporary theorists like Hufeland and Fichte.

This is a comprehensive study in English of Bruno Bauer, a leading Hegelian philosopher of the 1840s. Inspired by the philosophy of Hegel, Bauer led an intellectual revolution that influenced Marx and shaped modern secular humanism. In the process he offered a republican alternative to liberalism and socialism, criticized religious and political conservatism and set out the terms for the development of modern mass and industrial society. Based on in-depth archival research this book traces the emergence of republican political thought in Germany before the revolutions of 1848. Professor Moggach examines Bauer's republicanism and his concept of infinite self-consciousness. He also explores the more disturbing aspects of Bauer's critique of modernity, such as his anti-Semitism. This book will be eagerly sought out by professionals in political philosophy, political science and intellectual history.

Elster's work unstably combines Leibnizian and utilitarian conceptions of action and offers various deconstructions of rationality and individuality. His method ological individualism gives an inadequate account of its privileged object, individual teleologies, and a distorted account of the relational framework of social reproduction and transformation. Elster has not properly conceptualized the relation of the teleological act to patterns of material and social causality, and his rational choice theory proves unable to accommodate the interactions of his postulated monadic individuals. His most recent work dearly illustrates the limits of an individualist approach, while remaining committed to its principles.