Notes to Chapter 2 { 28 7Wohlwill (to use the name Wolf later adopted) correspondence is the subject of the final
section of chapter 3.
2. Becoming Citizens of Hegel’s State
- Hanns Reissner, Eduard Gans, 50. Five of the seven founding members had belonged
to a seminar (Wissenschaftszirkel) that Moses Moser, Immanuel Wolf, and Eduard Gans
started in fall 1816 to discuss Plato’s Dialogues and other classics. Within a year, the Wis-
senschaftszirkel had grown to twenty-three members, nearly all Jews, who met regularly to
present and discuss papers on a range of subjects, almost none of them Jewish. See Ismar
Schorsch, From Text to Context (hereafter TC), 206. When the group was reconstituted as
the Verein, its orientation was no longer merely academic but also sociopolitical, as its new
name conveys. - Friedrich Rühs published Über die Ansprüche der Juden an das deutsche Bürgerrecht
in 1816 , which prompted Jacob Fries to publish his review essay Über die Gefährdung des
Wohlstandes und Characters der Deutschen durch die Juden. Rühs followed up with a second
pamphlet, Die Rechte des Christenthums und des deutschen Volkes. On writings by Rühs and
Fries’s about the Jews, see Jonathan Karp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce, 190 – 200. On
Rühs’s anti-Jewish writings as an impetus for Leopold Zunz’s formulation of a new aca-
demic approach to Jewish history in “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur” (first published
in 1818 ), see Schorsch, TC, 219 – 21. In 1817 Rühs attacked the business practices of Eduard
Gans’s father, Abraham, during the recent war as an example of war profiteering and Jewish
usury. In his refutation of Rühs’s charges (reproduced in Ludwig Geiger, “Aus Eduard Gans’
Frühzeit [ 1817 ]”), Gans rooted ethics in the rule of objective laws that apply equally to all
members of society. In this way Gans opposed, in the words of John Toews, “the Christian-
German revival in his immediate environment” and “continued to defend the conception
of a secular state based on universal rational principles that he saw embodied in the ideals
and activities of the Prussian reform movement” (Hegelianism, 110 ). On Rühs and Gans on
Gans’s father, see also Reissner, Eduard Gans, 42 – 44. Though Abraham Gans had been a
well-to-do banker and Court Jew, when he died in 1813 he left the family in debt. - See Breckman, “Eduard Gans and the Crisis of Hegelianism,” 556. On the Lex Gans,
see Johann Braun, “ Die ‘Lex Gans’”; and Waszek, “Vorwort,” 15 – 18. - Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity, 67.
- Todd Presner writes: “World history has a direction and finality, which, at its telos, is
also the last judgment of the world. For Hegel the end of history is the truth of the European,
Christian state” (Mobile Modernity, 127 ). In his “General Introduction” to G. W. F. Hegel:
Political Writings, Laurence Dickey reminds us that “one of the great shortcomings of Hegel
scholarship is that it has been so convinced that Sittlichkeit is an anti-liberal conception that
it has forgotten the challenge which the philosophy of Sittlichkeit posed to that reaction-
ary alliance of throne and altar that dominated Prussian public policy during the Restora-
tion” (ix). - Paul Franco notes that the view of Hegel as a progressive liberal “has long become the
consensus view of Hegel’s political philosophy, shared, as Allen Wood notes, by ‘virtually
every responsible scholar in the past generation’” (Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, 364 , note
10 ). Franco also lists the most salient scholarship on Hegel’s liberalism (ibid.). The degree