Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
2 } Introduction
cal social and political change, German intellectuals felt keenly that they were
reduced to theorizing about the sort of historical transformations being enacted
across the Rhine. Yet their tantalizing proximity to such political upheaval also
led German intellectuals to interpret their reflections in highly politicized ways
and to ascribe powers of historical agency to their theoretical interventions. As
Bernard Yack has shown, the shadow cast by the Revolution of 1789 led a gen-
eration of left Kantians to interpret Kant’s philosophy in a politicized key and
to endeavor to realize Kantian freedom, in spite of the impossibility of such a
project from Kant’s own point of view.^2 Hegel, too, assigned the act of cognition
privileged agency in the historical process, a tendency that Left Hegelians in the
1830 s and 1840 s both savaged and radicalized.
Subjectivity had been a, if not the, central focus of modern epistemology
from Descartes’s Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations on First Phi-
losophy; 1641 ) to Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason;
1781 ); however, the nature and demands of subjectivity took on great political
urgency in the reception of Kantian thought after 1789. While the autonomous
subject is the hero of Kantian moral philosophy and its politicized heirs, Hegel
and Hegelians deemed Kant’s formal conception of subjectivity an obstacle to
ethical community. Definitions of what constituted salubrious or toxic forms
of subjectivity were protean, yet subjectivity persisted as a nodal point around
which philosophical and political debates crystallized in German culture be-
tween 1789 and the Vormärz. For Jewish thinkers, historical and communal
bonds and commitments complicated the task of theorizing ( Jewish) subjectiv-
ity and reconciling it with available political and philosophical models.
Freighting the issue further for Jewish intellectuals was the fact that “the Jew”
not infrequently figured as the embodiment of deficient and socially corrosive
subjectivity, whether as heteronomous rather than self-legislating, in Kant’s
sense; as abstract and unreconciled to objective spirit, in Hegel’s sense; or as
basely egoistic, in the understanding of various Young Hegelians, including
Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Karl Marx. The discourse of Jewish ego-
ism also reached beyond the philosophical Left in Germany to include a range
of conservative and reactionary critics of Heinrich Heine and other Jewish writ-
ers, for example. Even as they tried to imagine narratives of Jewish history and
forms of Jewish identity and community that could allow Jews to play a role
within the wider polity, the thinkers and writers I study had to negotiate real or
discursively constructed forms of Jewish specificity that presented obstacles to
citizenship.
A substantial body of scholarship from the 1950 s to the present has dealt with
the way German Idealism theorizes Judaism, and more recent scholarship also
