Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Becoming Citizens of Hegel’s State { 65

as contributing to the realization of Hegel’s vision of the modern state. Rather

than as the Prussian civil servant that he was, Schulze preferred to see himself in

the role of the civil servant of Hegel’s political theory. Like Förster and Henning,

Schulze had welcomed Prussia’s progressive reforms and turned to Hegel after

Restoration Prussia’s reactionary orientation had become clear. It was Hegelian

theory that lent Schulze’s work in the Prussian government’s educational bu-

reaucracy in the early 1820 s “historical and metaphysical justification and sig-

nificance,” in Toews’s formulation.^76 The Vereinler were thus by no means alone

in projecting themselves into the role of Hegelian civil servants.

The apologetic stance that Schulze and, eventually, Förster and Henning

adopted toward the Prussian state was bound up with their desire to preserve

their own Hegelian self-image.^77 Only if they could see Restoration Prussia as

consistent with Hegel’s theory of the state as the embodiment of realized free-

dom could they maintain their ideal image of themselves as the universal bu-

reaucrats of Hegelian theory.^78 Paradoxically, they protected their self-image

at the cost of supporting the retrograde Prussian political realities from which

they sought to protect their self-image in the first place. It makes perfect sense

that, as Toews notes, to the extent that Hegelianism made inroads into the Prus-

sian state, it appealed to civil servants and the educated elite^79 —precisely to the

bureaucrats and academics whose importance Hegel so exalts. The Vereinler’s

tendency to exaggerate Prussia’s similarity to Hegel’s state was part of this wider

tendency, though arguably more was at stake for the would-be civil servants of

the Verein than for their non-Jewish counterparts. The Vereinler’s Hegelian self-

interpretation provided them not with a preferable vision of the service they

were actually rendering to the state, but with the vision of performing state ser-

vice at all.

The range of political orientations among Hegelians shows how various and

malleable Hegelian assessments of the Prussian state could be: Hegelians con-

strued Prussia, apologetically, as the embodiment of Hegel’s theory of the state

(Schulze and, eventually, Förster and Henning) or viewed it, critically, as falling

short (Leo and Gans, after the Lex Gans).^80 Moreover, Hegelians in the early

1820s sometimes used seemingly apologetic remarks to in fact criticize Prus-

sian policies. For example, Förster stated that the new journal to which he and

Henning contributed, Neue Berliner Monatsschrift für Philosophie, Geschichte,

Literatur, und Kunst, would “ally itself completely with the spirit of the Prus-

sian government.”^81 Yet what Förster identified as the essence of the Prussian

state clearly challenged the Prussian status quo. In 1820 – 21 Förster and Hen-

ning envisioned the Prussian state as part of an epochal historical shift. Al-

though they allied themselves with the Prussian state, they held that Prussia had