344 } Notes to Chapter 6
- See, for example, Hess’s remark to this effect in European Triarchy, in PSS, 148. For a
critique of Hess’s appropriation of Spinoza for a philosophy of history, see Nathan Rothen-
streich, “Moses Hess—ein ein Jünger Spinoza’s?” - Breckman, DS, 194 ; internal quote (translated by Breckman) from Hess, PSS, 45.
- See Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, III, p 1. In Steven Nadler’s formulation, “Spinoza’s
virtue... does not lead to an ascetic withdrawal from the world, but rather a more knowl-
edgeable and successful navigation within the world and a more efficient use of things in it”
(Spinoza’s Ethics, 228 ). - Breckman, DS, 195. As Breckman also remarks, “Hess’s negation of personality and
property contradicted not only the Saint-Simonians but virtually all his German contempo-
raries as well, including the equally visionary Cieszkowski” (ibid.). - Ibid.
- Hess, HHM, 72 – 73 ; PSS 57.
- Hess, PSS 57.
- Hess, HHM, 73 ; PSS, 57.
- Ken Koltun-Fromm approaches Hess’s writings from his 1837 debut to Rome and
Jerusalem ( 1862 ) as a sustained meditation on the self and Jewish identity but largely ignores
the crucial context of politically and philosophically freighted conceptions of the self in
which Hess formulated his early ideas. Koltun-Fromm characterizes Hess’s ideology of the
1830 s through the 1850 s as based on a relatively uncomplicated “undivided self and whole
identity” (Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity, 30 ), or an identity that is “complete, un-
encumbered by ambiguous attachments, and open to philosophical and scientific scrutiny”
(ibid., 31 ). In Koltun-Fromm’s account, Hess shifts to an unresolved and contradictory view
of the modern self in Rome and Jerusalem, which posits the “structure of the self ” as “mys-
terious to historical beings like ourselves” (ibid., 34 ). It is hard to reconcile Hess’s all-out
attack on the sovereign self, and insistence that we recognize our identity with the other, and
the view of Hess as subscribing to an “undivided self and whole identity.” - Hess proposed his vision of an Anglo-French-German “European triarchy” in re-
sponse to Karl Eduard Goldmann’s Die europäische Pentarchie ( 1839 ), which advocated that
Prussia ally itself with Europe’s reactionary forces (chiefly Austria and Russia) against France.
Goldmann worked under Klemens von Metternich in the service of the Habspurgs and later
in the service of the Russian government. (Hess, PSS, 493 , note 335 ). For the context of the
conflict between reactionaries and liberals (largely Young Hegelians) in which Goldmann and
Hess participated, see Auguste Cornu and Wolfgang Mönke, “Einleitung,” xix–xx. - Hess, PSS, 162.
- See, for example, ibid., 161.
- Hess sees Germany’s great contribution to modernity, Hegel, as engaged in a con-
templative evaluation of the past and sees Claude Henri de Saint-Simon as Hegel’s active,
future-oriented counterpart in France. Hess locates the common source of both of these
modern trajectories in Spinoza, and Spinoza remains the site where they can be effectively
united (see ibid., 148 .). - Ibid., 159.
- Genevieve Lloyd articulates well how for Spinoza an accurate and empowering un-
derstanding of individuality explodes the limits of conventional notions of self-contained
subjects: “At the core of this failure to know ourselves is an inadequate understanding of