Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Moses Hess { 24 7

that tradition—there has been a pronounced tendency to belittle and dismiss

Hess’s peculiarity vis-à-vis his Young Hegelian radical contemporaries. There

is certainly truth in the charges frequently leveled at Hess that his thought was

idiosyncratic, unsystematic, often self-contradictory, or simply naive. Hess was

an autodidact and tended to use terms and concepts strategically rather than

systematically. Yet a significant part of what has made him appear to his de-

tractors as both strange and incoherent is that he approaches a constellation of

questions about subjectivity, property, religion, and politics via Spinoza, in a

decidedly different way than his Hegelian contemporaries or later readers did.

Whether Hess got Spinoza “right” is less important than the fact that his read-

ing of Spinoza, in a thoroughly Hegelian discursive climate, significantly distin-

guishes his social theory from that of his contemporaries. Given Hess’s explicit

identification with Spinoza, some nod to his Spinozism is common, yet scholars

have generally ignored how Hess’s engagement with Spinoza extends beyond

the vague admiration of the self-proclaimed disciple to the creative deployment

of identifiable concepts and moments in Spinoza. Hess says that Spinoza could

not have seen the ramifications or implications that he claimed to derive from

Spinoza’s thought.^18 He is aware that he is elaborating his own vision of Spi-

noza’s contemporary relevance. I argue that Hess’s Spinozan idiosyncrasies are

not grounds to dismiss Hess but the very reason why we should pay attention

to him, for they are what make him such a singular thinker on the periphery of

the Young Hegelian movement. Like Bendavid, the Vereinler, and Auerbach,

he creatively uses philosophy to reimagine a more inclusive polity. Yet whereas

Bendavid and the Vereinler draw on German philosophers, and Auerbach on

Spinoza, to imagine a place for Jews in the German polity, Hess sees Spinoza as

a quintessentially Jewish philosopher who shows the way to realizing a cosmo-

politan “human” community. For Hess the main point is not that philosophy

can be mobilized to reshape both the polity and Jewry so as to reconcile the two.

Instead, it is that Judaism, particularly as distilled in Spinoza, holds the key to a

nondualistic, supra-individualistic mode of existence that can liberate everyone.

Hess was doubtless the most radical of all his contemporaries in his as-

sault on what he considered false conceptions of the autonomous individual.

His position in The Holy History differs not only from Heine’s but also from

August von Cieszkowski’s elaboration of a philosophy of the deed in his in-

fluential “Prolegomena to a Historiosophy” of 1838. Breckman contends that

Cieszkowski preserves a tension between divine process in history and human

consciousness and agency—a gap between “freedom and necessity”—but that

Hess collapses this distinction entirely: “Hess envisioned action as an extrusion

of humanity’s identity with God necessarily pressing toward its full realization