“The True Practice is Theory”: Edgar Bauer, Republicanism, and the Young Hegelians

ABSTRACT

The recent past has witnessed a significant amount of new interest in the intellectual history of the Vormärz, or the period in German history immediately prior to the 1848 Revolutions, and especially in the theories of republicanism developed among those who are variously known as the Young, Left, or New Hegelians. At the same time, scholars have reopened the question of Marx’s relationship with republicanism and the republican conception of freedom. But one figure who has been conspicuously overlooked in this context was arguably the most radical and revolutionary republican of the period: Edgar Bauer. This paper fills a gap in the extant literature by providing a survey of Edgar Bauer’s work during the crucial years of 1841–1843. It shows that his position differed in important ways from that of his brother Bruno and explains the political stakes of his equally vehement attacks on the Christian state, on the one side, and its liberal opposition, on the other. It proposes that his position developed rapidly over the course of the three years in question, until he was finally arrested, put on trial, and imprisoned for insulting religious society, mocking the law, arousing dissatisfaction with the state, and offending the majesty of the king.

KEYWORDS:

• Edgar Bauer
• Young Hegelians
• republicanism
• Jacobinism
• Marx

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All the quotations from German references in the following are translated by author.

2 While I will use the term “Young Hegelian” throughout, there is a significant and ongoing debate as to how best to characterise and categorise the Hegelian philosophers of the Vormärz, and whether one must distinguish between “Young Hegelians,” “New Hegelians,” “Left Hegelians,” “Radical Hegelians,” and so forth (Eßbach 1988; Bunzel and Lambrecht 2011; Lambrecht 2013). While I will not attempt to resolve this debate, my own approach is to think of such terms, not as categories that contemporary scholars might use accurately to group together past philosophers, but as speech acts or weapons used by those philosophers to accomplish specific polemical and political tasks. What should concern the historian is less their semantic content in the present than their practical effects in the past, or what J. L. Austin would call their “illocutionary force.” I make this argument more extensively in Barbour (2021, 660–661).

3 While very little literature is available on Edgar Bauer, what is agrees that he was the most radical of the Young Hegelians and presents him as an early advocate of anarchism (see Pepperle 1978, 97; Stepelevich 1983, 263–264; Luft 2006). I agree with the first claim but withhold judgment on the second. If Edgar’s work after 1843 can be called an anarchist, it must be acknowledged that this position emerged out of his republicanism as much as it represented a break with that republicanism. It would perhaps be more accurate to say he pursued a social rather than exclusively political republic.

4 In an essay on Arnold Ruge, Warren Breckman develops a similar distinction between two types of republicanism among the Young Hegelians, although he emphasises the ethical but not the juridical aspect of what I call ethico-juridical republicanism (Breckman 2015). Under the influence of Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, and their effort to compose a republican response to Isaiah Berlin’s classic distinction between “positive” and “negative” liberty, much recent discussion has revolved around developing a republican conception of “negative” freedom as the negation of arbitrary power, or “non-domination” as opposed to “non-interference” (Pettit 1997; Berlin 2002; Skinner 2008). But I would be reluctant to map ethico-juridical and radical political republicanism of the Young Hegelians across this axis too readily, or to consider the former “negative” and the later “positive.” All Young Hegelians placed the active participation of citizens in public life at the centre of their political agenda and understood freedom in terms of public action and political community.

5 I should emphasise that it is the Jacobin interpretation of Rousseau, or even better the popular understanding of that interpretation in the nineteenth century, that undergirds the radical political republicanism of the Young Hegelians, not any authentic account of Rousseau’s thought. The emphasis throughout is on popular sovereignty, civic virtue, and the general will. Richard Tuck has recently proposed that Rousseau’s political theory turns on a distinction between “sovereignty” and “government,” with the former largely dormant except at moments of crisis, and the latter charged with the day-to-day operation of public life (Tuck 2016). As we will see in what follows, Edgar Bauer, for one, would have neither recognised nor countenanced this distinction.

6 For the sake of concision, I leave aside two significant pamphlets that Edgar wrote in 1843. Both take similar positions to the one set out in Bruno Bauer und Seine Gegner. In Georg Herwegh und die literarische Zeitung (Bauer 1843e), Edgar defends the political poet Herwegh against an attack levelled in the official Prussian state journal. In doing so, he champions public freedom and develops a critique of those who conceive of the state as “a mere private institution” and “a private agreement.” Edgar says with reference to the editors of the Literarische Zeitung,

He who pays homage to such a lack of vision, cannot understand what true freedom entails. He only knows the freedom of the private person, the independence that I enjoy in the particular; but not that I also want freedom in general (Allgemeinen), freedom as a citizen (Staatsbürger). And this freedom consists in the fact that I recognise my own will in the laws of the state and common reason in its institutions; that my true existence is not inhibited by paternalism and raw power, and my spirit is not supressed. (Bauer 1843e, 27)

In Staat, Religion und Parthei (State, Religion and Party) (Bauer 1843f), which was published anonymously, Edgar opposes the liberal “state of common sense” and the conservative “state of individuality” (that is, a state founded on the individuality of the king) to the radical “state of principles.” He writes,

In the principled state private consciousness and political consciousness coincide. Everything I do I do as a citizen, and it is the overall unity of the state that occupies my whole being. For me, the state is not a rigid, abstract power, which governs and administers in my best interest, nor an otherworldly being to which I bow in humility. Here I do not know any such higher alien ideality, since the purpose, performance and essence of state life is woven into my personality, and its ideality has passed into my flesh and blood. (Bauer 1843f, 19)

7 While de Vriese does not mention it, there is a larger debate concerning who belonged to “the Free” and what their relationship was with other figures associated with Young Hegelianism (Eßbach 1988, 213–225; Bunzel and Lambrecht 2011, 35–36). This is not the place to take up that question. Here it is enough to acknowledge that Edgar and Marx held distinct and often opposing positions on question of political tactics and strategy. I will address the issue in more detail in a future article.

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Charles Barbour

Charles Barbour is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia. His research explores the philosophy of the secret and the intellectual history of the German Vormärz. His monographs include: The Marx-Machine: Politics, Polemics, Ideology (Lexington, 2012) and Derrida’s Secret: Perjury, Testimony, Oath (Edinburgh, 2018).