Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

72 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

where spirit is really manifest as spirit (Geist als Geist wirklich ist). Wissenschaft

is the productive language of absolute world spirit.

At this point of convergence of subject and object, of spirit and history, Hegel

declares his lectures provisionally “closed.” The passage above continues:

“This is the standpoint of the current age, and the series of spiritual formations

is therewith for the present concluded. Herewith this history of philosophy is

concluded.”^100 Given the architecture and performative dynamics of his argu-

ment, Hegel can be read as concluding not only his lectures on the history of

philosophy but indeed the history of philosophy tout court with his performa-

tive utterance.

State, Religion, and Wissenschaft

In addition to the exhilarating performative power of Hegelian discourse—

which, I am arguing, inflated the Vereinler’s sense of what their essentially aca-

demic pursuits could in fact achieve—specific substantive elements in Hegel’s

theorization of the interrelationships of religion, state, and Wissenschaft in-

spired and authorized the Vereinler’s mission. Hegel’s theorizing of these inter-

relations in texts from the late 1810 s and early 1820 s like Philosophy of Right,

lectures on the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of world history, and

his 1822 foreword to Hinrich’s Die Religion im Inneren Verhältnisse zur Wis-

senschaft further illuminates how Hegel’s thought sustained the Vereinler’s fan-

tasy that Wissenschaft would serve as the means of integrating Jews into the

state.

Hegel’s theorization of the religion-state-Wissenschaft relationship, in the fa-

mous § 270 of Philosophy of Right and in related passages from his lectures on the

topic prior to the book’s publication in January 1821 , articulate a framework that

the Vereinler were able to adapt for their own purposes and self-understanding.

Hegel’s rationalized interpretation of Protestantism and its harmonic relation-

ship with the state offered the Vereinler a model of how to reconcile Judaism and

the state through a philosophically freighted understanding of the function of a

Wissenschaft des Judentums.

Even as Hegel privileged Protestantism as the religion most compatible with

the state, he understood Protestantism in a highly philosophical way and mea-

sured its compatibility with the state in terms of the rationality he understood it

to embody. In contrast to Kant’s theorization of different spheres of rationality

(pure reason, morality, and esthetics), Hegel insists on the proposition, which

underlies all his thought, that there exists a single rationality, even if it is ex-

pressed in different forms. In insisting that the rational core of Protestantism