Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Concluding Remarks { 273

The role that philosophy played in political theory and strategy in Germany

also diminished markedly in the 1840 s. Over the course of that decade the

radical, highly philosophical antiphilosophy of the Young Hegelians yielded to

more economically grounded analytic models, such as Marx’s “scientific” the-

ory, and to more palpable forms of political activism and party organization. In

the decades following 1848 , industrialization, rising economic prosperity, liber-

alism, and positivism predominated, and little remained of the vibrancy, innova-

tion, and political urgency that had characterized German philosophical culture

in the period between Kant and the Young Hegelians. Both the key negative

and key positive inspiration for the intellectuals whose work I have explored

in this book to invest tremendous faith in the political efficacy of philosophical

thought—the relative lack of possibilities for political participation for Jews, and

the spectacular developments in German Idealism, respectively—had lost their

force.

Hess’s meditation, in the theoretically abstruse epilogue to Rome and Jeru-

salem, on what he characterizes as the “last antagonism”—that between “labor

and speculation”—underscores how far he had moved from his Spinozan com-

munism of the 1840 s.^5 He now opposes “speculation,” on the economic and

industrial plane, to labor, which it exploits for capitalist profit. On the theoreti-

cal plane, he opposes “speculation” to conceptual productivity via investigation

and experimentation. The idiom of Hess’s understanding of both economic and

epistemological productivity would be out of place in his essays of the early

1840 s. Yet the fact that Spinoza is still the lens through which Hess ultimately

understands the movement and meanings of modern European and Jewish his-

tory and politics reveals the extent to which his early theorizing established a

scaffolding on which he could later hang ideas inspired by subsequent eco-

nomic realities, nationalist movements, discourses of race, and developments

in the empirical sciences. Even though in the 1860 s he no longer articulates his

messianic hopes through a critique of the cogito, for example, his earlier Spi-

noza-inspired assault on the philosophical subject still provides an indispens-

able window onto the preoccupations that animate his proto-Zionism.

The question of the afterlife of Hess’s early philosophical politics in his later

theorizing of Jewish nationalism can open onto the broader question of the

resonance of Jewish philosophical politics in Germany between 1789 and 1848

with intellectual and historical dynamics of other moments animated by highly

politicized theory. What can the channeling of political aspirations through the

needle of philosophical discourse by German-Jewish intellectuals of the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries help us discover about the efficacy

and limitations of politicized theory in the late twentieth and early twenty-first