Abstract

Bruno Bauer has been the subject of intense controversies since the 1830s, yet his work remains inaccessible and his meaning elusive. He is most familiar as the object of Marx’s sharp polemical attacks in the Holy Family and the German Ideology, though Albert Schweitzer, in his widely-noted Quest of the Historical Jesus, gives him a receptive and sensitive reading. Bauer is a far more complex figure than the caricature that Marx’s denunciations make of him. In the decisive political circumstances of the German Vormärz, the prelude to the revolutions of March 1848, Bauer, inspired by Hegel, speaks for an original republicanism. He is a theorist of revolution, of its causes and its failures. Analyzing the political and social crisis of the Restoration, he criticizes both the old order and the oppositional currents of liberalism and socialism. Bauer attributes an epochal significance to the revolution he theorizes. It is a fundamental political, social, and cultural transformation that completes the unfinished tasks of the French Revolution; but it also addresses the unprecedented challenges posed by the emergence of modern civil society. Its aim is the creation of a republican league of equal right, eliminating irrational privileges, refashioning social relations, and eradicating religious and political alienation. As the culmination of modernity’s emancipatory strivings, it fulfills the promise of the transcendental project initiated by Kant and perfected by Hegel. This post-Kantian philosophical context shapes Bauer’s understanding of the political struggle. His ethical idealism has as its object the unity of thought and being, to be secured by reshaping the forms of objective life in accordance with the insights of critical judgment. Based on history as the record of self-consciousness, the judgment takes a special form. Our purpose here is to analyze this judgment.