288 } Notes to Chapter 2
to which Hegel obfuscated his political views in his preface to Elements of the Philosophy of
Right (hereafter PR) out of fear of the consequences remains contested. Karl-Heinz Ilting
argues at length that Hegel’s political philosophy was more boldly liberal in his lectures on
the philosophy of right than in the book (“Die ‘Rechsphilosophie’ von 1820 und Hegels
Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie” and “Hegel’s Concept of the State and Marx’s Early
Critique”). Franco, in contrast, finds claims about this discrepancy “highly exaggerated”
(Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, 123 ). Toews agrees with Ilting that Hegel’s “fear of perse-
cution and desire for peace... led him to modify and mystify some of his positions in the
1820 s,” in particular in his infamously ambiguous Doppelsatz in the preface to PR—“what is
rational is actual; what is actual is rational”—which was immediately widely criticized “as a
philosophical justification of the recently instituted political repression” (Toews, Hegelian-
ism, 96 ). Gans would vigorously argue that this interpretation was misguided (Preface), yet
in Toews’s view “Hegel himself had contributed to this misunderstanding to a not inconsid-
erable degree by failing to provide adequate or obvious guidelines for the interpretation of
some of his more cryptic and ambiguous phrases and by attacking some of the recent victims
of repression with excessive ardor” (Hegelianism, 96 ). It is important to note, however, that
the “victims” whom Hegel attacked in the preface to PR included Fries, an outspoken anti-
semite. This sort of accommodation to the state probably looked very different to the Verein-
ler than to non-Jewish liberals and academics. See also note 38 in this chapter.
7. For selections of Krochmal’s posthumously published Guide of the Perplexed of the
Time with introductory remarks, see Krochmal, “A Philosophy of Jewish History.” See also
Krokhmal [Krochmal], “Selections from Guide to the Perplexed of our Time.” On Krochmal’s
relation to Hegel and (possibly) Giambattista Vico, see Nathan Rotenstreich, Jews and Ger-
man Philosophy, 143 – 51 ; Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times, 136 – 48 ; and Tradition and
Reality, 37 – 48.
8. Noah H. Rosenbloom, “The ‘Nineteen Letters of Ben Uziel’—A Hegelian Exposition.”
9. For selections from Samuel Hirsch’s magnum opus, Das System der religiösen An-
schauungen der Juden ( 1842 ), in English, see Samuel Hirsch, “Selections from The Sys-
tem of the Religious Perceptions of Jews and its Relationship to Paganism, Christianity and
to Absolute Philosophy.” On Hirsch and his relationship to Hegel, see, for example, Emil
Fackenheim,“Samuel Hirsch and Hegel”; Gershon Greenberg, “Samuel Hirsch: Jewish
Hegelian” and “Religion and History According to Samuel Hirsch”; and Rotenstreich, Jew-
ish Philosophy in Modern Times, 120 – 36. For selections from Formstecher’s magnum opus,
Die Religion des Geistes ( 1841 ), in English, see Formstecher, “Selections from Religion of the
Mind/Spirit.” On Formstecher and Hirsch, see also Meyer, Response to Modernity, 70 – 74 ,
and “Reform Jewish Thinkers in Their German Intellectual Context.”
10. Toews, Hegelianism, 119.
11. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Frühe Schriften, vol. 1 of Werke in 20 Bänden mit
Registerband (hereafter TWA) and Early Theological Writings. In his 1795 “The Positivity of
the Christian Religion,” Hegel, philosophically still essentially a Kantian, attacked Judaism
along with Christianity as examples of positive religions—that is, religions based on coer-
cion and heteronymous law rather than the exercise of free practical rationality. Hegel’s ugli-
est assessment of Judaism comes in the section “The Spirit of Judaism” in “The Spirit of
Christianity and its Fate” ( 1798 – 99 ). By then Hegel had broken with Kantian moral philoso-
phy and now contrasted Christianity, as the religion of love and community, with Judaism,