Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 111

tion of the family in Philosophy of Right. Hegel sees a crucial symmetry and an

important distinction between familial bonds and the substantial ethical ties of

the state. The family is based on natural ties of love and feeling, whereas the state

is based on law and articulated thought. Still, the family parallels the state in its

ethically vital function of drawing individuals out of the egoistic self-sufficiency

that defines them as members of civil society and allowing them to become part

of a greater unity, even as that unity substantiates and confirms their particular

selves.^69 As Hegel describes it, “the disposition [appropriate to the family] is to

have self-consciousness of one’s individuality within this unity as essentiality

which has being in and for itself, so that one is present in it not as an indepen-

dent person [eine Person für sich] but as a member.”^70 In its substantive unity,

marriage transcends the sort of abstract subjectivity characteristic of the legalis-

tic personalities of civil society (the realm of commerce and contracts): “For the

precise nature of marriage is to begin from the point of view of contract—that

is, that of individual personality as a self-sufficient unit—in order to supersede it

[ihn aufzuheben] .”^71

We have already seen in the previous chapter that what makes religion a foun-

dation for the state is its capacity to pull individuals beyond themselves and

to instill a sense of piety before a higher totality. Indeed, overcoming narrow

subjectivity is the defining aspect of all the institutions Hegel characterizes as

foundations for the state. In addition to families, Hegel places corporations in

this category.

The family is the first ethical root of the state; the corporation is the second,

and it is based in civil society. The former contains the moments of subjective

particularity and objective universality in substantial unity; but in the latter,

these moments, which in civil society are at first divided into the internally

reflected particularity of need and satisfaction and abstract legal [rechtlichen]

universality, are inwardly united in such a way that particular welfare is pres-

ent as a right and is actualized within this union.

The sanctity of marriage and the honor attaching to the corporation are

the two moments round which the disorganization of civil society revolves.^72

When Gans theorizes the Jewish community as a kind of family and imagines

the Verein as something between a corporation and the civil service, he draws

on Hegel’s symmetrical stacking of family, corporation, and state.^73 Rethought

as a family, the Jewish community can be reconciled with the state, “the greater

family,” in Gans’s paraphrase of Hegel. Construing the Jewish community as a

family—with the Hegelian Vereinler as its Familienväter—allows Gans to rec-

oncile the Verein’s particular and universal commitments, for in the family, as in