In contrast to the juxtaposition of representative democracy and Confucian meritocracy that is currently being discussed in international political theory, we start from the hypothesis of a historical, intercultural and logical, simultaneous provenance of democracy and meritocracy in the evolution of the modern constitutional state. To this end, we examine the reception of Confucianism in the republican history of ideas of European Enlightenment using selected examples ranging from Leibniz to the classical constitutional and government theory of Sieyès. The widespread ignorance (...) of the Confucian elements in the classical core of modern republicanism that we have evaluated here is attributed to the needs of political legitimacy and the methodical ahistorism and historical amnesia of academic discourse. (shrink)

On the basis of the finding that perfectibility for Pufendorf had a cultural as well as an anti-essentialist meaning, the perfectibility debate of the early German Enlightenment will be discussed. Central to this debate is the principle of “generative absence”, one that has heretofore received little attention, but proves to be constitutive of both Pufendorf′s and Pietism′s argumentation in opposition to mechanical materialism and religious orthodoxy. My account of this context will go over the positions of Christian Thomasius′s empirical eclecticism (...) and Christian Wolff′s rationalist metaphysics and end with Georg Forster′s and Immanuel Kant′s reception of the Rousseauian concept of perfectibility. In so doing, I will advance the thesis that, much more extensively than most have assumed, the German Enlightenment prepared German Idealism′s dialectical constitution of the modern concept of progress. (shrink)

This article investigates forms of excerpting and their variations as used by Marx. It compares two convolutes of excerpts from the early period of Marx’ work. The first form of excerpting is represented by the “Hefte zur epikureischen Philosophie” (1839/40), which Marx originally created for his dissertation. These booklets aim to reconstruct the history of post‐Aristotelian classical philosophy, with Epicurus at its centre, from fragments and testimonies of third authors, which themselves are often excerpts from excerpts. A second variant is (...) represented by the so‐called Gülich‐excerpts (1846/47), an extensive source collection of economic history. These excerpts later served as a comprehensive and easily accessible basis for the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that Marx was already planning at that time. Both variants of excerpts are analysed with regard to the source‐critical method and the acquisition of knowledge in the situation of the new formation of philosophical, social and economic history. This allows for the in‐depth examination of the self‐reflexive practice of excerpting and to shed light on the constitutive tension between copying, critical selection, commentary and autonomous text production. (shrink)