## 1. Career



Bruno Bauer was born on 6 September, 1809 in the town of Eisenberg in
Thuringia, south-eastern Germany. In 1815, Bauer's family moved
to Berlin, where his father was employed in the royal porcelain
factory in Charlottenburg. At the University of Berlin
(1828-1834),he studied under Hegel, Schleiermacher, and the
Hegelians Hotho and Marheineke. On Hegel's recommendation,
Bauer's 1829 essay on Kant's aesthetics won the Prussian
royal prize in philosophy. From 1834 to 1839, he lectured on theology
and biblical texts in Berlin. He was transferred to the theology
faculty at Bonn after publishing an attack on his colleague and former
teacher Hengstenberg. He taught in Bonn from 1839 till spring 1842,
when he was dismissed for the unorthodoxy of his writings on the New
Testament. The dismissal followed a consultation by the ministry of
education with the theology faculties of the six Prussian
universities, but no consensus emerged from the academic inquest. The
order for Bauer's dismissal came directly from the King of
Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who had decreed the suspension from
state employment of participants in a banquet to honour the South
German liberal Karl Welcker, held in Berlin in 1841. On that occasion,
Bauer had proposed a toast to Hegel's conception of the
state.



From 1842 to 1849, Bauer was active in political journalism and
historical research on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. He
argued against the emancipation of Prussian Jews in 1842-43,
seeing this proposal as a political legitimation of particular
religious interests. He was the object of polemical attacks by Marx
and Engels in *The Holy Family* (1844) and *The German
Ideology* (written in 1845-46). With his brother Edgar,
Bauer founded the Charlottenburg Democratic Society in 1848, and stood
unsuccessfully for election to the Prussian National Assembly on a
platform of popular sovereignty.



Remaining in Prussia after the defeats of 1848-49, Bauer
continued to produce work of biblical criticism and political
analysis. He wrote in the mid 1850s for *Die Zeit*, a
government-sponsored newspaper, in which his anti-liberalism took a
conservative turn. He contributed articles on European affairs to
other newspapers, such as *Die Post*, the *Kleines
Journal*, and the *New York Daily Tribune*. From
1859-66 he collaborated with F.W.H. Wagener on his conservative
*Staats- und Gesellschafts-Lexikon*, editing almost all 23
volumes, and writing numerous articles, several with anti-Semitic
themes. In 1865 he acquired a small farm in Rixdorf, on the outskirts
of Berlin. He died there on 13 April 1882.


## 2. Bauer's Writings, 1829-50



Bauer was a prolific writer, publishing a dozen substantial books and
over 60 articles between 1838 and 1848 alone, but no critical edition
of these works exists. They included analyses of Hegel, the Bible,
modern theologies, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution and
its aftermath. The interpretation of Bauer's work is problematic
for several reasons. Because of anonymous, pseudonymous, and
collaborative publication, some attributions are disputed; and
divergences exist between Bauer's published texts and private
correspondence. In the anonymous *Trumpet of the Last
Judgement* (1841) and *Hegel's Doctrine of Religion and
Art* (1842), Bauer spoke not in his own voice, but in the ironic
guise of a conservative critic of Hegel, attributing to Hegel his own
revolutionary views.



Three lines of interpretation of Bauer can be distinguished. These
focus on his early work; his later writings have attracted little
critical attention. The first sees Bauer as a radical subjectivist,
whose social and religious criticism was closer to Enlightenment
rationalism than to Hegel (Sass, 1978; Brudney, 1998). The second,
largely influenced by Marx, insists on Bauer's abandonment of
the Hegelian left after 1843 (Rossi, 1974; Pepperle, 1978). The third
emphasizes the continuity throughout the Vormarz of Bauer's
thought and of his republicanism, based on the Hegelian idea of the
unity of thought and being (Moggach, 2003, 2006, 2011).



Bauer's prize manuscript of 1829, *De pulchri
principiis*, presented the unity of concept and objectivity as the
central idea of Hegel's idealism. It examined this unity as
expressed in art, comparing Hegel's aesthetic theory to
Kant's Third Critique. The manuscript supplemented the
criticisms of Kant from Hegel's Berlin Aesthetics lectures with
the logical analysis of categories provided by the 1827
*Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences*. Bauer argued
that while the *Critique of Judgement* attempted to bridge the
gap between thought and being, and thus opened the way to Hegel, it
reproduced the antinomies characteristic of the first two critiques.
Kant's synthesis failed, since he continued to define the
concept as merely subjective, and the object as the unknowable
thing-in-itself, transcending the cognitive power. Self-consciousness,
or the subject of the transcendental unity of apperception, was
likewise impervious to cognition from the Kantian standpoint. In
Hegel's syllogisms of the idea, objectivity attained rational
form, while the concept acquired an explicit, material existence.
Beauty, life, and idea were moments in the process which constituted
the actuality of reason. As the immediate unity of thought and
objectivity, art illustrated the inexhaustible fecundity of the
philosophical Idea. The manuscript underlined the opposition of faith
and reason in its critique of the religious conceptions of the unity
of thought and being. Faith was taken to be inimical to free inquiry,
which is the element of reason.



Throughout the 1830s, however, Bauer sought to reconcile thought and
being through the idea of rational faith. In *Zeitschrift fur
spekulative Theologie*, which he edited between 1836 and 1838, and
in *Jahrbucher fur wissenschaftliche Kritik*, he
offered a speculative account of Christian doctrines as
exemplifications of logical categories. In the 1838 *Religion of
the Old Testament*, Bauer depicted religious experience as a
product of self-consciousness. He proposed both a transcendental
account, stressing the conditions of possibility of religious
experiences, and a phenomenological sequence of their forms: a
legalistic subordination to an authoritarian deity in the early books
of the Old Testament expressed a merely external relation between God
and man, while the messianic consciousness of later books heralded a
higher form, the immanence of the universal in the community; but this
consciousness could only point up the inadequacy of the law, not yet
propose the effective overcoming of estrangement. The texts of the
1830s located the logical structure which, for Bauer, defined the
religious consciousness: the immediate identity between particularity,
whether of a subject or a community, and the abstract universal, a
unity achieved without self-transformation. By 1839, Bauer deduced the
political implications of this view: the religious consciousness
asserted this immediate identity as a monopolistic, sectarian claim,
excluding other particulars from equivalent status. The essence of
religion for Bauer was now a hubristic particularism, which also
conferred a transcendent status on the universal, as a realm divorced
from concrete social relationships. This position received its fullest
exposition in Bauer's *Christianity Revealed* (1843). He
already sketched this argument in *Herr Dr. Hengstenberg*, of
1839, publicly breaking with orthodox and conservative versions of
Christianity, and stressing the discontinuity between Christianity and
Judaism. By 1840-41, Bauer would present the emancipated
philosophical self-consciousness as opposed to all forms of religious
representation. His political radicalism and republicanism were
cemented by his recognition of the structural identity between the
private interests fostered by the Restoration order, and the
monopolistic religious consciousness.



Bauer's political and theoretical radicalization is evidenced in
his biblical studies. The series is comprised of *Critique of the
Gospel of John* (1840), and the three-volume *Critique of the
Synoptic Gospels* (1840- 42). Together with his 1838 study
of the Old Testament, these volumes criticized the stages of revealed
religion, and forms of self-alienated spirit in history. Bauer's
critique of John's gospel demonstrated the opposition between
the free self-consciousness and the religious spirit. His stated
purpose was to restore the Christian principle to its source in
creative self-consciousness; he did not yet openly oppose the
principle itself, but sought to differentiate it, as a rational idea,
from ecclesiastical dogmatism. The positivity of Christianity derived
from the abstract understanding, rather than from speculative reason,
which led religious experience back to its subjective roots. The
rational core of Christianity was the identity of God and man, but
theology had built an untenable doctrinal system on this foundation.
Speculation now undermined dogma; it was not confirmed by it, as
Bauer's mid-1830s articles had maintained. In his
correspondence, though not in this text itself, Bauer indicated that
this restoration of the Christian principle was also its overthrow, as
the unity of universal and particular could now be grasped in more
tangible and earthly forms. Christianity was a necessary but now
transcended stage in the development of the human spirit, to be
supplanted by new expressions of autonomous self-consciousness.



In his critique of the Synoptics, Bauer's object was more openly
to negate dogmatic Christianity, mobilized in defence of the
absolutist order. The incidents described in the gospels were products
of the religious consciousness, rather than factual reports.
Bauer's critique of John convinced him that the gospel narrative
was a purely literary product, and he now argued that the Synoptics
too contained no historically authentic material. Bauer attempted to
establish the historical priority of Mark, and the specific
elaborations undertaken sequentially by Luke and Matthew. He depicted
miracles as fallaciously displaying the immediate causality of the
universal in nature, and criticized the naturalistic explanations
favoured by theological rationalism. The third volume of the series
denied the historicity of Christ. The Christian idea that God and
mankind share the same essence appeared as the religious
representation of a single empirical individual who assumed the
universal power of spirit. Like his contemporaries D.F. Strauss and
Ludwig Feuerbach, Bauer understood this synthesis instead as a project
immanent in human history. As Bauer's political writings from
this period show, he proposed that the assumption of universality, and
the transcendence of particular interest, were historical tasks,
undertaken by the state and the republican citizenry. In the Synoptics
texts, Bauer explicitly equated Christianity and feudalism, and
defended the freedom and equality of self-consciousness. Religion and
the absolutist state were mutually sustaining, sharing the essential
features of alienation and repression. Christianity represented the
completion of the religious consciousness in pure abstraction, and the
dissolution of all genuine ethical bonds. Bauer contended that Judaism
presupposed the subordination of nature to religious interests, but
still maintained the natural links of kinship and ethnicity.
Christianity eliminated this limited *Sittlichkeit* in favour
of the purely abstract self, thus perfecting alienation and requiring
its definitive resolution.



The political application of the doctrine of self-consciousness can be
traced through two texts on the state, also dating from 1840-41.
In *The Evangelical State Church of Prussia and Science*, Bauer
described the essence of the state as free development. The state was
the dialectical agency of historical progress and of the universality
of the will, manifesting the capacity to abstract from any given
content and express itself in ever new forms. While signalling
empirical tendencies which might limit the state's progressive
function (the prominence of religious interests, and hesitancy before
the social question, the emergence of new forms of urban poverty and
exclusion), Bauer contended that the genuine state, as the expression
of freedom, was in constant transformation. His surface claim was that
the Prussian state is such an institution, though his contemporary
correspondence belied this view. He defended the 1817 union of the
Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia as the political overcoming
of religious oppositions, whose basis had been eroded by the
Enlightenment. Through its (still abstract) grasp of the universal
concept of man, against religious particularity, the Enlightenment had
transformed religious consciousness into self-consciousness. (This
process formed one of the major themes of Bauer's
*Christianity Revealed*, along with a critique of French
materialism for its inadequate grasp of freedom). The churches were
now impotent to perpetuate their own existence without the support of
the state. Countering conservative historians like F.J. Stahl, who
championed the independence of the churches, Bauer's "The
Christian State and Our Times," of 1841, again identified the
state as the focus of ethical life. Stahl's position implied a
derogation of the spirituality of the state, presenting it as an
agency of external constraint, to uphold the orthodox ecclesiastical
and political order against the flow of history, and to defend a
social order governed by irrational privileges and immunities. Bauer
denounced not only the Christian state of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, but
also the formal *Rechtsstaat*, or liberal constitutionalism.
For Bauer, both these positions defined freedom as private interest,
religious or economic; but as particularity, these attitudes had to be
purged away in the name of a new political order. Bauer maintained
that Hegel's view of freedom as universality was far in advance
of liberal views, even if the *Philosophy of Right* was
inconsistent or incomplete. This was Bauer's provocative claim
at the Welcker banquet of 1841, which occasioned his dismissal from
the university. The elimination of egoistic atomism by moral
self-consciousness was the pre-requisite for the republic, or the free
state. Bauer contended that the existing social order could not be
deemed to be thoroughly rational, nor the state to be the institution
of freedom that it ought to be, as long as the social question of
urban destitution remained unresolved. 



The anonymous *Trumpet of the Last Judgement*, or
*Posaune* (November, 1841), and its sequel, *Hegel's
Doctrine of Religion and Art* (1842), interpreted Hegel as
sounding a call for revolution, to bring this state into being. Bauer
claimed that the consequences of Hegel's system were the
overthrow of church and state; and that Hegel's conservative
critics were right to see him as the most dangerous adversary of the
Restoration. Written ironically as pietistic denunciations,
Bauer's two texts attributed to Hegel a theory of infinite
self-consciousness, in which the concept of substance and a
transcendent absolute were necessary but self-annulling illusions.
Recapitulating the issue in his own voice in 1845, Bauer identified a
tension in Hegel's thought between Spinoza and Fichte, between
inert, undifferentiated substance and creative form. The
*Posaune*, however, argued that the Spinozist moment, though
necessary to Hegel's dialectic, was fully assimilated to
infinite self-consciousness. In absolute spirit, properly understood,
all religious pretensions dissipated, while the absolute itself
dissolved into the critical activities of conscious individual
subjects. Nothing transcendent remained. Yet, the *Posaune*
recognized, Hegel also stressed the concept of substance. Its role had
to be accounted for. In its apparent transcendence, substance
disciplined the immediate, particular self. This was necessary
because, as Hegel argued, particularity cannot be the criterion of
theoretical or practical reason; rather, individuals must first
internalize substance, as a principle of universality, as a stage in
reaching infinite self-consciousness. The undifferentiated, pure
universal of substance subsumed all particularity, including the self.
This initial, Spinozist moment created an appearance of pantheism in
Hegel, which misled interpreters like D. F. Strauss. In Bauer's
depiction, however, Hegel proceeded to dissolve substantiality as a
power independent of consciousness. This dialectical resolution was
not equivalent to renouncing objectivity, but meant that substance,
once it had demonstrated to the particular consciousness the need to
transcend itself, might not claim an immediate validity either.
Disciplining their own immediate interests, individuals could then
become the organs through which the universal attained conscious form.
The dialectical illusion of substance was a necessary stage, because
in it the unity of concept and objectivity could first be glimpsed;
but this illusion had to be overcome in further historical and
theoretical development. The subject must appear as potentially
universal, and the objective must show itself as a purposive order,
responding to the subject's striving for rational freedom. This
development entailed transforming substance into the record of the
acts of conscious spirit, an inner relation of self-consciousness to
itself. Subjectivity thus assimilated the principle of universality,
which it now contained as its own character, not as something alien to
it. But this relation was not confined to an inward experience, since,
as Hegel maintained, reason must realize itself in the world. The
externalization of reason produced a historical sequence, including
the forms of alienated life. The stages in this sequence could be
grasped as moments in the unfolding unity of thought and being. Bauer
described self-consciousness, conceived as an immanent and subjective
universality, as the motive force of history, generating historical
content by taking up and transforming the given. As Bauer's 1829
manuscript had also declared, at stake was not only the subjective
realisation of the concept, but the fate of the idea, the unity of
thought and being; and this required that the objectivity of the
historical process be equally emphasized. This historical and critical
idealism, which the Posaune attributes to Hegel, was politically
revolutionary: it affirmed the rights of free self-consciousness
against any positive institution which could not justify its existence
before rational thinking, against state, religion, and social
hierarchy.



Bauer used his central concept of infinite self-consciousness, a term
taken from Hegel's theory of subjective spirit, to reconfigure
the Hegelian absolute, bringing art and philosophy into close
proximity, and excluding religion as a form of alienated reason, while
recognising its past historical necessity. Bauer insisted on the
immanence of the universal in history, as the record of struggles for
liberation, and of alienation, which was necessary to discover the
meaning of rational autonomy. Bauer's ethical idealism resembles
a doctrine that Kant calls perfectionism, or *Vollkommenheit*,
a form of rational heteronomy, one of whose meanings is that action is
validated by its contribution to historical progress. Bauer equated
perfectionism and autonomy, as an uncompromising commitment to remodel
political and social relations and institutions. Subjects acquired
autonomy by freeing themselves from particular interests, and by
repudiating transcendent universals, religious and political
institutions which claimed to be underivable from self-consciousness,
and exempt from history. Bauer denounced the *ancien
regime* and its Restoration surrogates as a feudal system
of tutelage and irrational privileges. Arrogating universality to
itself, the authoritarian state which arose over these exclusive
particulars thwarted the self-activity of its people, and concealed
the source of its authority behind a veil of religious sanctification.
Bauer maintained that the state, and not religion, was the principal
adversary. Against this order of alienated spirit, he insisted that
the decisive political question was the source of the state's
authority, whether in tradition and religious sanction, or in the
popular will. This question was to be resolved without compromise.
Bauer asserted that his objective was not merely political, but social
emancipation. The social question, the polarizations and crises of
civil society to which Hegel had been alert, could be resolved not by
direct appeals to the particular interests of one class, but by a
common republican struggle against multiform privilege. The result of
this combat would be the attainment of justice in all spheres of
social life.



Two texts, dating from late 1842 and early 1843, *The Jewish
Question*, and "The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and
Christians to Become Free," elaborate Bauer's critique of
the religious consciousness and of political reformism. The
consequence of their publication, however, was that Bauer forfeited
his leading position in the opposition movement, as he challenged one
of its central demands. The question was whether the explicitly
Christian state of Prussia could eliminate restrictions on Jewish
participation in civil institutions. While liberals and republicans
advocated emancipation, conservative opponents defended the
state's exclusive confessional allegiance. Bauer's
interventions attacked the state for defending privilege, and claimed
that it used religion as a mask for its interests in maintaining
relations of subordination; but he also criticized Jews and their
supporters for claiming freedom on the basis of a particular religious
identity. Political and social freedom required the renunciation of
all particularistic ties with the past; thus, as a precondition of
juridical equality, Jews must renounce their religious allegiance, as
must Christians. Christianity demonstrated a historically higher
degree of consciousness, since it cancelled the externality of the
deity. But this was not a unilateral progress upon Judaism, because
Christianity, and especially Protestantism, generalized alienation to
encompass all aspects of life. The superiority of Christianity
consisted in its radical negativity, making requisite a transition to
a new and higher form of ethical life. By exacerbating the
contradiction between self-determination and self-abasement, the way
was cleared for an epochal resolution. These interventions were
censured by Marx, and by leading liberal spokesmen. Bauer remained
adamant that his position was the correct progressive stance.



In his studies of the French Revolution and its impact on Germany,
Bauer traced the emergence of mass society, based on conformity and
inchoate particularism. The dissolution of the feudal estates by the
Revolution produced a purely atomistic society, characterized by the
assertion of individual property right. The attachment to private
economic interest made impossible a concerted opposition to privilege
and to the existing order, and had caused the ultimate defeat of the
revolutions that had spawned it. The Jacobinism of the French
Revolution, which Bauer in many ways endorsed, had been directed
against this attitude, but had failed to overcome it; and this
proprietary particularism now threatened the republican movement of
the Vormarz. The masses, encompassing both the proletariat and
the bourgeoisie, represented inertia and stagnation, and formed the
bulwark of the existing order. Their opposition to this order was
merely apparent. Liberalism unconsciously expressed this development
of mass society, defining freedom as acquisition. Bauer criticized
liberal constitutionalism as a vacillating, compromising attitude
toward the feudal regime. Even in its most advanced form, that
endorsed by Hegel, constitutionalism juxtaposed two diametrically
opposed principles of sovereignty, popular and princely, and was
unable to resolve the contention between them. Incipient socialism
shared the same terrain as liberalism, the defence of private
interest, but proposed inconsequent and unacceptable solutions to the
conditions which liberalism simply affirmed. For Bauer, socialism was
irredeemably heteronomous. The socialist movement, he claimed, sought
to organize the workers in their immediate, particular existence, and
not to transform them. He saw in the proletariat pure particularity,
and, unlike Marx, denied that this particularity could transform
itself into a genuine universal unless it first renounced its own
sectional interests. Bauer also anticipated the negative effects of a
socialist organization of labour. While criticizing capitalism for its
irrational competitive forms, he defended the principle of competition
itself as a necessary condition for progress, the independence of
persons, and the possibility of conscious, free self-determination.
Bauer's pre-1848 work revived the classical republican themes of
the opposition of commerce and virtue, but gave them a new shape,
consistent with his Hegelianism. In 1842-43, Bauer confidently
predicted the triumph of republican principles and institutions,
though this confidence waned as the political crisis deepened. In his
two electoral addresses of 1848-49, he defended popular
sovereignty and the right of revolution, demanding that the new
constitution be promulgated as an act of revolutionary will, and not
received as a concession from the king. He also intensified his
critique of socialism for promoting heteronomy and dependency rather
than personal initiative and self-determination, and for appealing to
the existing, discredited absolutist state for the redress of social
grievances, rather than opposing this state with unbending resolution.



## 3. Bauer's Late Work, 1850-1882



While he continued to proclaim the continuity of his thought,
Bauer's late work was characterized by the definitive
abandonment of his Vormarz republicanism. The failure of 1848, he
argued, demonstrated the bankruptcy of the European philosophical
tradition. Instead of the triumph of republics, Bauer now foresaw an
age of global imperialism. The decisive political question after 1848
was the rise of Russia. Bauer predicted that Russian pressure would
promote a pan-European union, as a stage in a movement toward a global
absolutism. The revolutionaries of 1848 still presupposed,
uncritically, that states were independent units. The next historical
period would initiate a genuine continental crisis. Anticipating
Nietzsche, Bauer contended that the impending collapse of European
civilisation would make possible a new beginning, a liberation from
traditional forms and values, together with their metaphysical and
religious sanctions. Bauer's abiding opposition to liberalism
now induced him to collaborate in conservative causes; but his
conservatism was unconventional. Like Nietzsche, he continued to
repudiate tradition and religion. Because of his anti-Semitism, Bauer
was claimed as a precursor by some National-Socialist authors, though
Ernst Barnikol, for example, disputes a direct connection (Barnikol
1972, pp. 350-53).



For Bauer, the revolutions of 1848 were so closely connected with the
Enlightenment, Kantian, and Hegelian projects that their failure
sounded the death-knell of philosophy and its claims to rational
individual autonomy. Bauer's late critique assimilated Hegel
with Spinoza and the metaphysics of substance, understood as the
negation of form and subjectivity. Unlike his Vormarz position,
he asserted in texts of 1852 and 1853 that Hegel had yielded to the
influence of Spinoza, effacing individuality, and submerging concrete
particulars under illusory, abstract logical categories. Bauer now
described the Hegelian idea as being itself a transcendent illusion.
Its inability to admit concrete particulars derived from the
substantiality of the system itself. The result was that Hegel had
discounted individuality in favour of conformity. While prior to 1848
Bauer proclaimed that Hegel had taught "the republic and the
revolution," he now decried the absolutist tendencies of the
Hegelian system, whose oppressive unity paralleled the historical
trend toward an all-encompassing political despotism. Bauer accused
philosophy of contributing to an inexorable process of levelling and
uniformity in the post-revolutionary state (Bauer, *Russland und
das Germanenthum*, I, pp. 40-54). These criticisms
anticipated Rudolph Haym's polemic in *Hegel und seine
Zeit* (1857).



In common with many post-1848 intellectuals, Bauer's abandonment
of metaphysics led him to a new conception of critique as a positive
science or empirical investigation. Bauer no longer contended that
history represents an unfolding dialectic of self-consciousness.
Critique was to permit the observer to examine historical phenomena
without distortion or partiality, and without an a priori systemic
concern. Bauer maintained that scientific research must remain
independent of ecclesiastical and political tutelage. Its objective
was to determine the relation of nature to rights and freedom of the
will (concepts which the late Bauer retained, while rejecting their
metaphysical foundations); but critique did not enjoin practical
intervention in political affairs. The correct stance was now
disinterested contemplation of the inevitable processes of cultural
decay and regeneration, and an attempt to salvage one's own
independence from the general wreckage of philosophical systems and
political life.



The conclusion of this new critique was that the future belonged not
to the republican people, or to separate national states, but to a
transnational imperialism, involving the confrontation of two
absolutist programmes. In one of these, the Western European,
political absolutism arose over modern mass society as its necessary
complement. Bauer had earlier criticized this configuration as an
outmoded form of state, to be supplanted by the republic; he now
described it as the result of an incomplete political development,
which would issue in a contention for world domination. Within the
Western European form, Bauer distinguished two variants:
Bismarck's state socialism, imitating eighteenth-century
Prussian militarism, attempted to subject economic production to
political control, suppressing innovation and personal independence;
while Disraeli's romantic imperialism sought to level and
subordinate English society before a paternalistic monarchy. In
opposition to the west, the second major absolutist form was that of
Russia, a substantial power with limited internal distinctions. Its
cohesiveness derived from the fusion of political and ecclesiastical
power, and the absence of the modern idea of subjectivity. Bauer noted
that Hegel had mistakenly discounted this zone from world history.
Like the anarchist Michael Bakunin, Bauer claimed that Russia owed its
original state formation to Germany; but Russia had otherwise been
impervious to western philosophical influence, adopting only what
served its immediate, concrete ends. Animated by hatred and shame of
its past insignificance, Russia too was ambivalent. It did not
directly provide the solution to the contemporary political crisis,
but elicited a decisive struggle with the west. The vigour of an alien
adversary would force Europe to transform itself, and offered the only
remaining prospects of a cultural renewal. Preceding any such renewal
would be the extension of imperialism across the continent and the
globe, and the clash of rivals for dominance within the new empire.
Bauer concluded that world war was inevitable.



Bauer's prognosis anticipated aspects of Karl Kautsky's
1915 theory of ultraimperialism, though without the latter's
optimism that this trend heralded a reduction in conflicts among
contenders for hegemony. Imperialism, moreover, did not stimulate, but
hampered economic growth, since insecurity and permanent military
mobilization undermined productive activity. The historic function of
the globalizing process was to eliminate national identities, laying
the basis for an eventual cosmopolitan rebirth. Bauer saw nationalism
as a dissipated force. The emerging world order was framed not by the
defence of national interests, but by a struggle for transnational
supremacy among elites with no local loyalties. The growing
centralization of political power was abetted by the levelling forces
of the socialist movement, with its own internationalist pretensions.
This trend also underlay what Bauer called political pauperism, a
generalised disqualification of individuals from participation in
political activity. The conclusion of this process would be to perfect
mass society, which Bauer had analyzed since the 1840s. The principle
of substance, non-differentiation, and conformity would reach its
ultimate extension, and could then be overthrown. World imperialism
would issue in an all-embracing catastrophe, the apocalyptic end of
the old, Christian-Germanic order. Only then would new cultural
possibilities emerge. Though these could not be predicted in detail,
they would involve the emergence of an unprecedented creative
individuality, freed from religious and metaphysical illusions.



Bauer likened the present crisis to the end of the classical world in
Roman imperialism. His studies in the 1850s located the origins of
Christianity in the second century CE, concluding that the first
gospel was written under Hadrian (117-138 CE), though slightly
predated by some of the Pauline epistles. Bauer traced the evolution
of Christian ideas from Hellenism and Stoicism, deriving the logos
doctrine of John's gospel from Philo and neo-Platonic sources.
As in *Herr Dr. Hengstenberg*, he denied that Christianity had
emerged directly from Judaism. More than in his early work, though, he
now stressed the revolutionary power of the early Christian religion,
as a source of liberation for the excluded and impoverished elements
of the Roman Empire. His final book described Christianity as the
socialist culmination of Greek and Roman history. Responding to this
argument in his very positive obituary of Bauer, Friedrich Engels
acknowledged the importance of Bauer's late work for the
socialist critique of religion (*Sozialdemokrat*, 1882). In
1908, Karl Kautsky's book, *The Origins of Christianity*,
applied Bauer's thesis.



Bauer's late writings identified sentiment and pietistic
feeling-certainty, rather than autonomous reason, as the principal
force in shaping modern subjectivity. His studies of the Quakers and
of pietism described passive inwardness and sentiment as the dominant
characteristics of the German Enlightenment. The practical reason of
Kant and Fichte merely translated the inner voice of pietist
conscience into a rationalist idiom. Bauer also described pietism as
the end of Christianity, since it destroyed dogma in favour of inner
illumination and personal moral rectitude. Consistent with his
*Christianity Revealed*, Bauer continued to define positive or
statutory religions by their exclusive dogmas and symbols; and he
still saw the general course of history as dissipating these dogmas,
as mere illusions. He discounted the mobilizing potential of religion
in the modern imperial order. In the Posaune, he had denounced
Schleiermacher's efforts to restore dogmatic Christianity
through an appeal to feelings of dependency. Now he claimed that the
force of sentiment, contrary to Schleiermacher's supposition,
was to dissolve dogmatic religion into personal conviction. The new
world empire would end with the inner erosion of religious belief. Not
rational speculation, but sentiment, would effect this
transformation.



A stringent anti-nationalism and a marked anti-Semitism characterized
Bauer's later thought. He defended German culture against its
political appropriation by the Prussian and Austrian regimes, but
criticized its insufficiencies, in Goethe, for example, who remained
enthralled to the metaphysical tradition. Bauer stressed that Germany
was not a racial unit, but a historical and cultural artefact,
reinforced by racial mixing, and not by racial purity (Barnikol 1972,
p. 393). It is clear, however, that some elements were excluded from
the mix: unlike his earlier treatment of the Jewish question as
historical, cultural, and religious, he now asserted that a natural
distinction of race created an impassable divide between Jews and
Europeans (Bauer, "Present Position of the Jews," 1852).
His claim that the political significance of the Jews throughout the
political spectrum was a testimony to the debility of European culture
and to the approaching crisis was greeted by National-Socialist
authors.



Bauer's late work contains prescient observations on
globalization and world war, and has affinities with a variety of
twentieth-century ideological forms, from socialism to imperialism and
anti-Semitism. In contrast, his early work bespeaks an original,
Hegelian republicanism, and offers cogent analyses of Restoration
political thought and the rise of mass society. His intellectual
legacy is complex and contentious.


## 4. Recent Developments



Bauer's bicentennary in September 2009 was the occasion for a
three-day international conference, held at the
Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat, Jena, and in Bauer's nearby
birthplace of Eisenberg, to examine his problematic legacy for
philosophy, theology, and social thought. The conference sought to
retrieve the complex theoretical debates underlying the collapse of
the Hegelian system. Bauer's reformulation and radicalisation of
Hegel were contrasted with the criticisms of Ludwig Feuerbach, Max
Stirner, and Karl Marx; and the specific character of his Vormarz
radicalism was underlined, whether in his republicanism or in his
theological insights and critique. Disputed issues involved the
content, continuity, and political bearing of Bauer's pre-1848
works, his relations with his contemporaries in the Hegelian School,
the question of his anti-Semitism, and his attitudes toward
imperialism and history after 1848. Also highlighted was the later
Bauer's reception by twentieth-century conservatives such as
Carl Schmitt. The Proceedings of the conference were published in 2010
(Kodalle and Reitz, eds., 2010)



An important dimension of recent
work is a closer specification of Bauer's early interpretation of
Hegel, especially through the recently-published 1828 *Lectures on
Aesthetics* (Schimmenti 2020), and an investigation of Bauer's
relations to Karl Marx in 1839 to 1842 (Kangal 2020). The question of
the politicization of art by conservative forces in Prussia after
1840, and the Left-Hegelian responses to this tendency, including
Bauer's, are examined in Schimmenti 2021.



Another aspect of recent Bauer research is a more thorough elaboration
of his 1840's perfectionist ethic, through the application to
his thought of the concept of 'post-Kantian perfectionism'
(Moggach 2011; Sorensen and Moggach 2020). In Leibniz or Christian
Wolff, pre-Kantian perfectionist doctrines, of Aristotelian
inspiration, stressed the ethical objective of happiness (broadly
understood as material, intellectual, and spiritual wellbeing) and the
complementarity of properly understood individual interests.
Post-Kantian perfectionism acknowledges Kant's critique of these
earlier eudaemonist forms (described by him as 'rational
heteronomy'), with their implications of political tutelage and
paternalistic 'enlightened despotism'. Unwilling to
relinquish the terrain of self-fashioning and self-realisation,
however, which Kant depoliticises but retains in his doctrine of
virtue, post-Kantian perfectionists like Schiller, Fichte, or Bauer
seek a reformulation rather than a complete repudiation of
perfectionist ethics, one that would be compatible with modern
republican forms of life. Instead of happiness, these new versions
stress the central value of freedom as a process or a conquest. The
end in light of which actions, relations, and legal forms and
institutions can be assessed is rational self-determination and the
promotion of the necessary political and social conditions of its
exercise. Whereas the older perfectionism had in general envisaged the
thriving of a relatively fixed human nature, the post-Kantian versions
stress the historical variability of cultural experiences and the
determinability rather than the fixity of the self, its openness to
critique and self-conscious fashioning. In contrast to older views,
the harmony and complementarity of interests is a problematic task, an
aspect of rational self-shaping, rather than a preconceived given. The
diversity and conflictual character of modern life, the culture of
diremption as Schiller and Hegel had described it, must be taken into
account as the material element of a post-Kantian perfectionist ethic.
Bruno Bauer's conceptions of history and emancipation in the
1840s, it has been argued, are consistent with this approach.



A contrasting tendency in recent research is to revive older views of
the Hegelian School as a whole, or in particular of Bauer, as
philosophically vacuous and politically disengaged, or else
politically counterproductive. Such a view originated in Marx's
devastating depictions in the Holy Family, in Arnold Ruge's
polemics with the Berlin Hegelians known as Die Freien ("The
Free") in late 1842-43, and in other contemporary sources
such as Rudolf Haym (1857), who attributed the failures of the
Revolution of 1848 to the excessive radicalism of Hegel's
youthful followers. An analogous judgement has recently been made on
the Hegelian movement (de Vos, 2012), with the New Hegelians being
distanced from Hegel as promoters of mere ideology rather than serious
engagement with philosophical and political issues. While rejecting
such negative judgements on the Hegelian School as a whole, the editor
of a recent important documentary collection from the period is highly
critical of Bruno Bauer, arguing that both his philosophical
importance and his personal prominence in the Hegelian movement have
been inflated in recent research (Hundt 2010, Apparat, pp.
43-44). In his otherwise very positive review, Michael Quante
offers a rejoinder to Hundt's conclusions on Bauer (Quante,
2010, 201-02). In other recent work, Sorensen (2011) validates
Bauer's republican credentials before 1848, and examines his
subsequent disillusionment, along with that of his fellow
Left-Hegelian radicals after the defeat of the revolutions. Greiert
(2020) examines Bauer's anti-Semitism as an adaptation of
Enlightenment rationality, and argues that Bauer's final works, in
depicting early Christianity as a popular revolutionary movement
against the power structures of the ancient world, foreshadow some
forms of contemporary populism.



A recent French edition of *La trompette du jugement dernier*
(trans. Henri-Alexis Baatsch, with a commentary by Nicolas Dessaux
titled "De Marx comme trompettiste") contains a
translation of Bauer's anonymous 1841 text, *Die Posaune des
jungsten Gerichts*. This new translation slightly revises
Baatsch's earlier translation of *La Trompette du jugement
dernier contre Hegel, l'athee et
l'antechrist. Un ultimatum* (1841). Dessaux's
commentary revives the authorship debate surrounding *Die
Posaune* and its continuation, *Hegel's Lehre der
Religion und Kunst* (1842), by attributing much of the earlier
text to Karl Marx, though previous literature has challenged similar
claims. The grounds offered by Dessaux are that Marx possessed the
requisite philosophical and biblical competence to compose the text
himself, and that it contains typically Marxian turns of phrase. The
issue of Marx's potential collaboration on these texts had been
raised previously; for example, the 1967 reissue of *Hegels
Lehre* by Scientia Verlag, Aalen, had identified Marx as the
possible author of the section of that text entitled "Hegels
Hass gegen die heilige Geschichte und die gottliche Kunst
der heiligen Geschichtsschreibung" (pp. 67-227). For
earlier literature that questions the attribution to Marx, see Moggach
2003 (p. 222, note 59). The question of possible collaboration is also
discussed in *Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe* (MEGA1), David
Ryazanov (ed.), 1929, I/2, p XLIV. 

 The relevant literature on a
possible Marx collaboration is detailed in Kangal 2020, n. 9 and 16.