Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

246 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

content, its eternal spirit, continued to live, conquered the world, triumphed

over death. This spirit has won! The old Law, whose body had been buried

with Christ, has been clarified and resurrected in Spinoza. The kernel of a

new covenant resides in the Master’s [that is, Spinoza’s] teaching of salva-

tion. Just as the ancients had a constitution of a holy state [Staatsverfassung],

so we shall receive a constitution of a holy empire [Reichsverfassung], be-

cause Christ has triumphed!^13

Spinozan universalism was not mystified or abstract but rational and encom-

passed the concrete world. Drawing on Spinoza’s definition of the most fun-

damental good as that which promotes “the knowledge of God,” Hess locates

human essence in sociability and social equality, since knowledge is best pur-

sued as a collective enterprise.^14 In this way, in the first socialist work written in

Germany, Hess mobilizes Spinoza’s pantheism against possessive individualism

and the related and equally atomizing institutions of heritability (Erblichkeit),

money, and property: “The reign of full equality comes into being only where

there exists communal ownership... in all goods, internal as well as external,

where the treasures of society are open to all and nothing is tied to a person as

exclusive property.”^15 If property was a prime target of Hess’s Spinozan commu-

nism, it was suspect above all because it was tied to the ontologically false and

socially deleterious category of personality. More fundamental for Hess than the

negation of property, in other words, was the negation of the sovereign personal-

ity that could lay exclusive claim to it.^16 Warren Breckman notes the Spinozan

inspiration for Hess’s radical critique of personality and distinguishes between

Heine’s interpretation of pantheism in History of Religion and Philosophy in

Germany and Hess’s more rigorously Spinozist views: “Because Hess believed

human society to be one divine substance, he hypostatized humanity in the form

of one unitary ‘individual.’ Where Heine envisioned a future democracy of ‘ter-

restrial gods,’ Hess imagined the realization of Gesammtmenschheit, collective

humanity, in a future of perfect unity and equality. In the grammatical difference

between Heine’s plural and Hess’s singular, we see reflected the philosophical

difference between a vision of harmony that contains a notion of individual-

ity and one that depends on its erasure.”^17 Breckman sees Hess’s Spinozism

as obliterating any notion of individuality. In contrast, I argue that Hess draws

on Spinoza not to erase individuality but to redefine it and rescue it from the

illusion of autonomous subjectivity that he sees as a pernicious threat to true

individuality and freedom.

Because Hess has been of greatest interest to scholars concerned with the

origins and history of Marxist thought—who have often written from within