Waszek Hegel After 1831

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4
NOR B E RT WA S Z E K
Philosophy in the Wake of Hegel*
1831 and After

When Hegel died in late 1831, suddenly and unexpectedly, he still reigned,
widely acclaimed, over philosophy – and not just in many German-speaking
territories. The thought of people inspired by Hegel’s ideas continued to
evolve for a long time, from Finland to Naples, from Russia and Poland to
France and further afield. However, there was also some awareness that a
peak had been attained and limits reached. ‘Our philosophical revolution
has come to an end. Its great circle was closed by Hegel’, wrote Heinrich
Heine in his On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1835),1
and with this he might well have been echoing Eduard Gans, who ended his
1831 obituary on his teacher and friend Hegel by saying that, ‘Hegel leaves
many ingenious disciples, but no successor; for philosophy has, for the time
being, completed its circle.’2
For all of that, not even Heine and Gans, who might be considered among
the earliest on the wing of sometime disciples more divergent from Hegel,
so-called Left Hegelians,3 really questioned that ‘Hegelian philosophy’, as
John Edward Toews put it, ‘had embodied the truth’.4 A bridgehead had
been attained, a current state of learning there was no going back on or
from. The work of the pathfinder or pioneer had been done, leaving not a
wake so much as a track, which, though liable in large part to disappear, due
to improvements and further advances the pioneering made possible, raises
important questions about the history and methods and foundations of the
human sciences.
This chapter attempts to show how some of Hegel’s disciples contributed
to changing the contours of philosophy: they developed new academic dis-
ciplines out of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences that soon
* Thanks to the Director of the Centre of Classical German Philosophy at the

Ruhr University Bochum/Germany, Birgit Sandkaulen, for comments on an
earlier version of this chapter.
51
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52
N o r b e rt Was z e k
emancipated themselves from the metaphysical fetters by which they were

previously confined. But to describe the transition as one from metaphysics
to empiricism would oversimplify the issue at stake.
David Friedrich Strauss,5 who would soon revolutionise Protestant the-
ology with his seminal The Life of Jesus (1835–6),6 came to Berlin in 1831
with the principal purpose of listening to Hegel’s lectures. He was able to
hear only a few before Hegel’s death, but this dramatic loss moved him
to stay steadfast in his intention to deepen his knowledge of Hegel’s phil-
osophy. He wrote to an old friend: ‘Hegel has died, but has not died out
here.’7 By ‘here’ he meant the intellectual and institutional milieu within
which Hegel’s philosophy was continued by a ‘school’ of devoted students,
also called a ‘circle of friends’,8 some of them professors already in Hegel’s
lifetime. It is hardly surprising that after Hegel’s death Strauss attended the
lectures of three professors who had been close to Hegel, Philipp Konrad
Marheineke, Leopold von Henning and Karl Ludwig Michelet, as well as
those of Friedrich Schleiermacher.9 A little later, Strauss took an active part
in the debates and events often described as that process of division between
‘young and old’, or ‘left and right’ Hegelianism, nowadays taken as warrant
to speak of the original existence of a ‘school’.
Leaving for a little later details on how that Hegelian ‘school’ emerged,
developed and divided, it should be underlined from the start quite why
Hegel’s philosophy was especially liable, in contrast with others, to
become a ‘school’. This is intimately related to Hegel’s wide conception
of philosophy, his well-known integration into an encyclopaedic system
quite a number of different fields of study already, or soon to become, dis-
tinct academic disciplines. As the full title of the relevant book suggests –
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline – Hegel
sought a systematic account of all ‘philosophical sciences’. Given the
overwhelming richness of material he could of course do so only in ‘out-
line’ even what one translator emphasised as just ‘basic outline’.10 Hegel’s
disciples thus had the opportunity (burden, some might say) of spelling
out consequences of Hegel’s ‘outline’ for whichever respective disciplines
within which each was becoming (or aspired to be) a specialist. As early
as 1844, in his seminal biography of Hegel, Karl Rosenkranz already
articulated the thesis that Hegel’s school had emerged almost naturally,
as a matter of course, out of the philosopher’s encyclopaedic system. As
a member of the inner circle of Hegel’s ‘friends’ and followers (though
never formally a ‘student’ of Hegel in the strict sense), Rosenkranz was
obviously well informed and personally acquainted with most scholars he
mentioned. As we shall see, his thesis might even be read as a reflection
on his own work and its development. Rosenkranz’s discussion of why
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53
Philosophy in the Wake of Hegel
Hegel’s philosophy was particularly liable to create a ‘school’ climaxes in

a passage that warrants quotation in full:
Finally, the encyclopaedic universality [of Hegel’s philosophy] offered
gateways to all particular directions in scientific research. Even when the dis-
ciple renounced any intention to modify any principle [of Hegel’s system], the
option remained open to him to prove himself in the speculative assessment
and penetration of a particular subject matter, to render service to its develop-
ment and thus to foster philosophy itself. The theologian, jurist, natural scien-
tist, linguist, political scientist, historian, aesthetician, all will be called upon
to active cooperation in the great work. The master needed journeymen, and
the journeymen had the prospect of becoming masters in their [respective] dis-
ciplines. This animated assiduity – [to be found] in Marheineke, Gans, Hotho,
Michelet … [and Rosenkranz lists another dozen] – launched itself on the
different sciences with a lust for conquest, and caused in them substantial
transformations that are far from completed.11
We can examine this thesis first with the help of significant examples, from
three different and complementary disciplines – history of law, art history and
the history of literature, associated with prominent Hegelians: Gans, Hotho
and Rosenkranz himself – before looking at what Hegel refers to as ‘one of
the sciences which originated in the modern age’ – political economy, in its
relationship to philosophy (cf. the emblematic §189 of his Elements of the
Philosophy of Right)12 – concluding with Lorenz Stein that something can be
added as regards the emergence of sociology out of German Idealism, what
Herbert Marcuse called ‘the emancipation of sociology from philosophy’.13
Hegel’s School
The existence in his lifetime of a Hegelian ‘school’, when Hegel was at
Berlin, is beyond doubt. An account of its formation and development could
include a lengthy list of former students, friends and followers14 already
transmitting Hegel’s thought to the next generation, and often using Hegel’s
manuals. Another indicator of the existence of a ‘school’, published defences
of its founding figure, can be seen as early as the 1833 foreword (by Gans)
to the first posthumous edition of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Until almost
the end of the nineteenth century, disciples of Hegel continued to pub-
lish texts in an apologetic or critical vein: when the master was attacked,
his former students and friends were ready to reply.15 Other documents
confirming the lively existence of a ‘school’ that had emerged out of Hegel’s
philosophy include the Yearbook for Scientific Criticism (Jahrbücher
für wissenschaftliche Kritik), for over twenty years the leading Hegelian
review, and generally remaining close to the philosopher’s intentions and
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54
convictions.16 The first complete edition of Hegel’s works,17 edited by a ‘circle

of friends of the deceased’,18 is also very relevant. This not only republished
the philosopher’s printed books, it created a new corpus by editing the vast
cycles of previously unreleased lectures. These lectures presented disciples
with difficult tasks, managed differently according not only to the capaci-
ties respective to different editors, but with the condition as well as quality
of the bodies of material they had to work with. Together the editions of
Hegel’s completed books and the posthumous compilations or editions of
other material fulfilled a double function for Hegel’s school. They were
brought and stood together by the need to work together, with greater unity
and mutual cohesion as Hegel’s disciples; and methods of communication
were established presenting more clearly to the outside the presence and
image of the school.
This is not, however, the end of the story for the edition of Hegel’s ‘works’
by his ‘circle of friends’, especially granted our concern here with what
emerged, formed or was developed from within Hegel’s encyclopaedic out-
line. Keen to build upon Hegel’s systematic labours, disciples when they
transformed Hegel’s lectures into books were tempted to exaggerate, can-
onise and maybe even enclose as a system what was systematic but not set
hard in their master’s teaching. Whereas recent editions of student notes
on Hegel’s lectures19 show him experimenting with material and over the
years changed not just details but the very structure of presentation, at least
some of the editors of the first collected works smoothed out differences and
tensions, giving a semblance of closed and rigid system of a kind that Hegel
never advocated. The prime case to explore these difficulties is Heinrich
G. Hotho’s edition of Hegel’s Aesthetics.20 On the one hand, his edition is
an admirable achievement, transforming disjecta membra poetae (Hegel’s
own lecture notes, in disorder and overcharged with later additions; notes
from a variety of former students who attended the lectures in different
years) into a well-written, organised and successful book.21 On the other
hand, and more recently, Hotho’s work has come under some fire, not only
for liberties taken with the material at his disposal, but for burying in the
text changes arbitrarily introduced, and modifications of his own devising.22
The issue need not be settled here; in the end, it might be a question of per-
spective: while some readers appreciate a well-written book, without the
niceties of a critical apparatus, others want to know what the philosopher
said exactly in one year or the other.
While there were of course dissensions between Hegel’s disciples before
1831, Hegel in person had some charisma and an ability to settle disputes or
effect reconciliations well before antagonisms were generated. The cohesion
of his school might even have been reinforced during the period of shock
54
55
and grief at his sudden death, when feelings of gratitude were fresh and
strong and united ‘friends’ to continue collective work on the Yearbooks
and the first edition of collected works. A little later, the inevitable ensued.
Hegel was no longer there to bridge conflicts and the school’s unity was
undermined.
It has been a commonplace of the history of ideas that a ‘split’ or ‘dissol-
ution’ of the Hegelian school ensued, whether twofold (right/old and left/
young) or threefold (criticism-prone left; preserving and defensive centre;
accommodating and conservative right).23 The left/centre/right terminology,
from the seating arrangement in the French Assembly since 1789, came
from David F. Strauss, originally with an irony some of his readers missed.24
It is no accident that it was in his discussions of Christology that Strauss
elaborated this distinction, for questions related to religion played a leading
role in the debates of the 1830s, although not with a huge precedence over
political (in particular constitutional questions) and social issues.
Eduard Gans, the Law of Inheritance

Among disciplines emergent from Hegel’s encyclopaedic system, the first,
chronologically speaking, was in Eduard Gans’25 The Law of Inheritance
in World Historical Development.26 Gans’ study had begun to appear as
early as 1824, when Hegel was still around to comment upon the enterprise.
Within the universal history of civil law, Gans considered the law of inher-
itance as a special development, by no means the side issue it might seem
to some at first glance, but of vital social importance because of its intrinsic
connections. Whereas laws of inheritance (plainly) concern the passing on
of property, rights and obligations upon the death of an individual, Gans
conceived their academic study as necessarily a part of philosophy.27 Since
he made no secret of his adherence to ‘the last, profound and up to date
configuration of philosophy … Hegel’s system’,28 Gans in the realisation of
his project untiringly scrutinised Indian, Chinese, Jewish and Islamic laws of
inheritance, before turning to Greece and Rome. Not averse to the provoca-
tion of the historical school of law and its uncontested leader, von Savigny,
Gans had larger reasons to challenge Savigny’s privileging a single tradition
with his History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages.29
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History30 Hegel followed a
similar course through much the same civilisations attended to by Gans.
When he mentions Gans’ recent publication in a letter, he not only seems
proud of his disciple’s success; commenting on it, he states explicitly that
Gans had based his study in the history of law on his own lectures on
world history.31 This is how Hegel wished his disciples to make productive
55
56
use, each in his own discipline, of the appropriate outline provided in his
Encyclopedia.
Gans was not the only student who, in the spirit of Hegel, turned to a
specialised treatment of a legal subject. Karl Ludwig Michelet, at the time
another doctoral student, relates in his autobiography how Hegel orientated
him towards a law subject for his thesis.32 Unlike Michelet, however, who
later turned to other fields,33 Gans remained a professor of law (he even
advanced to the office of Dean of the Law Faculty in 1831). More important
for the present chapter, he became a pioneer of comparative law in a universal
perspective. It is no exaggeration to say that, building on the mere intentions
or the programmatic statements of such forerunners as Montesquieu, the
elder Feuerbach and his Heidelberg teacher Thibaut,34 Gans really created
that discipline and executed its programme in an exemplary manner with
his Law of Inheritance. In this achievement, his debt to Hegel cannot be
doubted. He declared it often enough and with gratitude. It was almost
inevitable, nevertheless, that this enterprise also led Gans beyond Hegel. On
the one hand, the very richness of the historical material induced Gans, as
he put it himself, gradually to stray from the systematic structure of Hegel’s
philosophy.35 On the other hand, Gans liberated his new discipline from
Hegel’s exclusive retrospect – ‘the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with
the onset of dusk’36 – and opened it to the future.37
Hotho’s Philosophical History of Art

There is no surprise in Hotho’s38 ambition to match Gans’ achievements
in the history of law with his own efforts towards a philosophical history
of art. The two men were in close contact, and indeed friends.39 Belated in
appearance and fragmentary in form the final fruits of Hotho’s work per-
haps were, but the intentions of the discipline he embraced and cultivated
are still clearly outlined in his earlier contributions to the above mentioned
Yearbook.40 In one of his first articles, commenting on a recent inquiry into
justice in its world-historical development,41 Hotho considers the relation
of Hegel’s School to the specific task of furthering new disciplines: ‘While
Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and Fichte required confessors [Bekenner], but
no disciples who were [at the same time] collaborators, it belongs to the
principle of contemporary philosophy [meaning Hegel’s philosophy] that,
considering the breadth and variety of the subjects to be conquered, it cannot
accomplish itself without the help of diversely talented collaborators.’42
According to Hotho, the disciples turned to Hegel’s philosophy when they
sought principles that could assist in their new elaboration of particular
fields. In that perspective it was characteristic of Hotho to privilege Hegel’s
56
57
late Berlin Encyclopedia over the earlier Phenomenology, calling the latter
outdated, of ‘a time, the interests and claims of which lie behind us’. Hotho’s
own enterprise of a Hegelian history of art was elaborated at a period
when a so-called Berlin School of art history, with authors like Aloys Hirt
and Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, was fashionable. Hotho built upon their
work in a concern for descriptive precision and accurate chronology, but
called them ‘spirited [geistvolle] empiricists’. His own concern was for a fur-
therance of Hegel’s philosophy by way of critical development, and against
subordination of works of art under the categories of a stringent system – a
dogmatic procedure that might or might not be called pseudo-Hegelian.
His work here was no abandonment of a project of a world-historical and
philosophical history of art, as he made plain in another review for the
Yearbooks:
The drive towards a treatment of history that is at once world-historical and

philosophical is beginning at last to extend itself to the history of art … The
author of these pages holds the opinion that the history of art, which has hith-
erto flourished in its empirical direction, has not only to be dealt with philo-
sophically, but has to be integrated and carried through as a part within the
science of beauty and art.43
While this sounds indeed Hegelian, Hotho cannot be called a mere epi-
gone, a humdrum or parroting follower, given the important revaluation
of Greek and Roman art and reconsideration of Northern and Christian
art within his project. Throughout his own life Hegel remained under what
E. M. Butler referred to polemically in a famous book as ‘the tyranny of
Greece over Germany’,44 and guilty of neglect or disparagement of con-
temporary art. Hotho too had something of a habit of denigrating contem-
porary artworks, but did not maintain the view of Greek culture as ultimate
standard. It was for him only one epoch (among others); each epoch, Hotho
insists, has its own value. Hence his dedication of so much time and energy
in later life working on Christian painting.45
Rosenkranz’ History of Literature

Karl Rosenkranz’ efforts towards a history of literature, elaborated in
various studies starting in 1830, may here serve as the third example, cul-
minating in the first fundamental study of Diderot in German and a string
of late publications.46 He can also be considered a pioneer, beside J. F.
Herbart, his predecessor at Königsberg in Kant’s former chair, of a system-
atic philosophy of education.47 His two earliest studies (the first from 1830,
when Hegel was still alive) give a good idea of Rosenkranz’ perspective and
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58
intentions. Although Hegel is not explicitly mentioned in the 1830 text –

beside its concentration on poetry of the Middle Ages, this might account
for the book’s warm welcome from Ludwig Tieck and other authors of
the Romantic movement48 – Rosenkranz in his preface already stresses
his desire to provide ‘a history of poetry from the philosophical point of
view’.49 Reflecting on those years, Rosenkranz in his autobiographical
writings makes more explicit the Hegelian connotation of his enterprise,
its principal perspective the pursuit of the ‘history of consciousness and
how it reflected in the poetic productions of the Middle Ages’.50 As if the
allusion to the ‘history of consciousness’ was not clear enough, he added a
little later that he was at the time completely under the spell (Befangenheit)
of Hegel’s Phenomenology. While it was from there, notably the chapter
on the ‘religion of art’, rather than from Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics,
that Rosenkranz took his leading principles,51 he defends himself against
charges of a narrow-minded pseudo-Hegelian scholasticism. Not for him
subjection of empirical material to an already completed system.52 His criti-
cism of the Phenomenology as ‘one-sided and insufficient’ with regard to
the Middle Ages was followed up with an attempt to ‘complete and per-
fect’ its treatment.53 His Handbook of 1832/33 is world-historical in its
scope (from the oriental world, via Greek and Roman antiquity, towards
modern European poetry) with a strong Hegelian flavour and now explicit
references to Hegel.54
Rosenkranz also went beyond Hegel in trying to unite the aesthetic
classifications, e.g. according to the forms of poetry (epic, lyric and didactic),
with a closer attention to individual works of poetry, and handling an
astounding wealth of material. It was probably this quality of his work
that allowed his emancipation of the discipline of the history of literature
from the Hegelian system. He also reinforced the Hegelian perspective on
the development of literature, notably with a conspectus at the end of his
third and final volume55 – a provision decided on as a result of exchanges
between Rosenkranz and Hotho.56 The creation of disciplines out of Hegel’s
encyclopaedic system was a co-operative enterprise. Looking back on his
Handbook in his autobiography, Rosenkranz was well entitled to the proud
claim that his history of poetry was the ‘first completely realized effort in the
field, written according to aesthetic principles and with a world-historical
perspective’.57
Political Economy: A Science that Originated in the Modern Age

The case of political economy is more intricate but probably also of greater
importance. As indicated above (cf. note 12), Hegel himself had celebrated the
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59
discipline as one that ‘does credit to thought’, its recent emergence associated
with the three names of Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo – all
still regarded as its founding fathers. In this new science the quality that
Hegel most appreciated was that ‘it finds the laws underlying a mass of con-
tingent occurrences’. Comparing this science with that of astronomy, Hegel
spelled out the distinct achievement of political economy: ‘it bears a resem-
blance to the planetary system, which presents only irregular movements
to the eye, yet whose laws can nevertheless be recognized’.58 The use Hegel
made of the discoveries of the political economists, whom he had thus
acknowledged his indebtedness in his ‘system of needs’ (§§ 189–208) and
in further sections of his account of ‘civil society’, too, has often attracted
keen interest. This has continued from a famous passage of Karl Marx’s
preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859),59
through twentieth-century Hegel scholarship.60
While that subsequent history is beyond this chapter’s scope, it should
be made clear that Hegel’s disciples were fully aware of this integration
of political economy into his system. In his preface to his 1833 edition of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Gans explains that even the science of polit-
ical economy ‘is given its due place in the treatment of “civil society” ’.61 In
his own lectures, published some years ago now,62 Gans went further along
the same lines by complementing Hegel’s hints to eminent economists with
a fuller, tripartite outline of economic doctrine: (1) Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s
‘mercantile system’; (2) the ‘physiocratic system’ exemplified by François
Quesnay; (3) the ‘now dominant’ and ‘only true’ ‘industrial system’,63
founded by Adam Smith and further elaborated by Ricardo and Say. Gans
explicitly professes the later system and considers it capable of ‘infinite per-
fection’.64 In some later lecture courses Gans appears to have integrated
German authors on economic theory into the third category, notably Karl
Heinrich Rau (1792–1870)65 – according to Friedrich Engels, one of the rare
German economists who Marx had really studied (his main focus was on
the ‘great French and English [authors]’).66 Gans also made a few passing
remarks on Saint-Simonian theories in that context,67 a subject dealt with in
an earlier part of his lectures and in other texts.68
Important here is that Gans clearly saw the need to say more on the new
science of political economy, hence his outline of different stages of eco-
nomic thought. He also acknowledges that a whole new terminology had
been coined by the new discipline.69 Unlike with his own project on the uni-
versal history of the law of succession, he did not, however, think it neces-
sary to separate the discipline of political economy from Hegel’s ‘system
of needs’: the fundamental opening section of the larger part of Hegel’s
system, entitled ‘civil society’, presented in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and,
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60
even more succinctly, in the corresponding paragraphs of his Encyclopedia

(§§523–8).
In contrast, Hegel himself, after having published his Philosophy of
Right (1820/182170), appears to have had second thoughts on the matter.
This becomes evident in his later Lectures on the History of Philosophy,71
where he deals in various places with the changing contours of philosophy.
Already in the context of his treatment of Plato, Hegel says that ‘the word
philosophy has had different meanings at different times’ and among the
eccentric examples he uses to illustrate his point are ‘the English who call
philosophy what we call experimental physics and chemistry’.72 When he
later mentions Newton, he comes back to the different scope attributed to
philosophy in different countries:
Mathematics and physics are called by [‘the English’] Newtonian philosophy.
Also in most recent times this expression is still in use. Observations are being
made on political economy, on the course of wealth; the political economy of
Adam Smith has gained fame in England. Such general principles as the liberal-
ization of trade are there called maxims of philosophy, are called philosophy.73
Hegel goes on to give an example for this use of the term ‘philosophy’
from an 1825 speech by George Canning,74 an example Hegel had found
when reading The Morning Chronicle.75 In passages quoted, Hegel is already
excluding implicitly such uses of the term ‘philosophy’ and at least one set
of students’ notes on his 1825/6 lectures says explicitly, ‘everything that is
derived from general principles is called philosophical. We intend to exclude
all these aspects from the focus of our treatment.’76 Thus, it is only coherent
that Hegel, when treating of Scottish philosophy in his lectures,77 applies
this exclusion: he does not present Smith’s economic ideas, but mentions
him in the context of other authors (Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson,
Dugald Stewart) writing on moral subjects, saying ‘in this sense the econo-
mist Adam Smith is a philosopher too’,78 obviously an allusion to Smith’s
Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), though no definite proof of his first-
hand knowledge of the text. Hegel appears to have been aware that Smith
(like Hutcheson and Ferguson) developed his economic ideas while in a uni-
versity chair of moral philosophy (at Glasgow in his case) and conceived
these ideas initially as branches of that discipline. Of course, Smith subse-
quently did much to emancipate the modern discipline of economics (just
like Ferguson for sociology). Hegel, on the other hand, is writing from the
other side of the divide, seeking a philosophical synthesis after these sciences
had emerged. Political economy, like any other science, is providing him
with material for his philosophical enterprise, but can in itself no longer be
considered part of ‘philosophy’.
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61
Lorenz Stein: First German Sociology

The case of Lorenz Stein is fascinating.79 Herbert Marcuse in his study
Reason and Revolution, written in exile in the United States, devotes around
fifteen pages to Stein, the fourth and final section of a chapter on the tran-
sitional figures (next to Stein stand the utopian socialist Claude Henri de
Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, the French father of sociology and, curiously,
the in most respects extremely conservative Friedrich Julius Stahl80) respon-
sible for the rise of social theory.81 Marcuse goes as far as to refer to the long
introduction to Stein’s History of the Social Movement in France82 entitled
the ‘concept of society’, as ‘the first German sociology’.83 The claim that
Stein was the very first German sociologist might have been, indeed has
been contested,84 but Stein is certainly one of the crucial authors who, as
transitional, belong to Marcuse’s category. Marcuse understands ‘sociology’
to designate ‘a special science, with a [specific] subject matter, conceptual
framework, and method of its own’ and he adds a little later that sociology
‘sets itself up as a realm apart … with a province and truth of its own’.85
The process of ‘emancipation’ of sociology as a ‘special science’ implied for
Marcuse an ‘anti-philosophical bent of sociology’.86 Sociology had to sep-
arate itself from other fields of study too, e.g. economics, in order to gain
recognition as an autonomous discipline. But ‘above all’, says Marcuse,
sociology had to sever itself ‘from any connection with philosophy’.87 The
‘above all’, which Marcuse does not fully explain, probably refers to the
privileged position, even dominance, which idealist systems had acquired in
the German-speaking territories after Kant. In its struggle for ‘emancipation’,
sociology had to throw philosophy overboard (especially any idealist ‘specu-
lation’, taken in the general pejorative and not in the specifically Hegelian
sense). While for several of the founding fathers of the discipline, and for
Comte in particular, it may thus be true that ‘sociology was patterned on the
natural sciences’,88 the case is more complicated for Stein.
Without Stein’s vital French experience,89 the events during his Paris stay
(October 1841 to March 1843), his reading of early socialist literature and
personal exchanges with Victor Considerant, Louis Blanc, Etienne Cabet
and others, he would not have become the thinker as he is now known.
While Marcuse does not belittle the French impact,90 first of all Stein’s
Hegelian heritage remained stronger than Marcuse believed.91 Certainly
Marcuse’s appreciation is wanting of how the two currents of thought,
Hegelian and French, intertwined in Stein’s conceptions. Where the question
becomes tricky and the interaction needs precise determination, Marcuse
contents himself with the vague inadequate image of a Hegelian skeleton in
the clothes of contemporary French social critics.92
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62
Even without room here to analyse in detail Stein’s indebtedness to Hegel,

biographically or systematically,93 we can identify misunderstandings in the
common view that Stein gradually withdrew from Hegel’s philosophy to
turn to empirical evidence.94 It might, however, be said that with Stein’s
History the impact of Hegel increases. While in Stein’s earlier text, Der
Socialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs,95 the organising
principle was the idea of equality, Stein in the History abandons this,96
puts stronger emphasis on the social conditions in which the idea gains
its meaning97 and finally replaces it with the Hegelian idea of the develop-
ment of freedom – ‘[w]orld history is the progress of the consciousness of
freedom’.98
If the basic idea of Stein’s sociology is ‘the antagonism between state and
society’, as Marcuse clearly sees it,99 the distinction between the two entities
goes back to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which these figure as the second
and third elements of ‘ethical life’, the third and final parts of Hegel’s book.
The precise shapes and definitions that Stein gives to society and state are
largely taken from Hegel, even in their terminology, e.g. the ‘system of
needs’100 and in the definition of the concept of state as ‘the actuality [or
‘realisation’; according to the different translations] of the ethical idea’.101
If the concept or idea of the state is incompatible with a lack of freedom, the
abstract idea still requires for its realisation a ‘constitution which addresses
itself to every citizen and guarantees liberty to the individual’.102 Since these
individuals ‘are all members of society; and it is society which determines
their individual positions’,103 the full realisation of freedom depends upon
social conditions. Society thus ‘becomes the true fountainhead of liberty and
dependence’.104 From this stems the necessity of the new discipline of soci-
ology, in order to analyse modern society, a task that implies for Stein, once
again very Hegelian, the study of the history of society.
The history of French society had been such as to establish an antag-
onism between capitalists and proletarians, which Stein diagnosed quite
bluntly – in his diagnosis, unlike his discussion of possible remedies, he
was not far removed from Marx.105 Since the proletarian was unable to
acquire capital and thus deprived of social mobility, he could not develop
his personality. In his apology for private property, Stein emphasises the
intimate relationship between private ownership and personal freedom, and
remains close to Hegel’s ideas on the subject.106 Society is in principle free
because founded on private ownership, but can degenerate into a system of
dependence: drawing this lesson from his study of French conditions, Stein
formulates it in general terms. Freedom can result only from social eman-
cipation, a mere political revolution is not enough.107 That is why Stein’s
‘sociology’ extends to the practical task of creating the social conditions
62
63
that alone can overcome the dependency of underprivileged classes, their

‘acquisition of material and intellectual goods’,108 in other words Stein’s
two capital Bs, Besitz and Bildung, property and education/culture. Stein
awards this task of ‘elevation of the lower classes’, that is, the overcoming
of their dependence, to an enlightened administration.109 In fact, one might
say that Stein here is operating two new disciplines, sociology and the
science of administration.110 The two are related like diagnosis and cure in
medicine.
Who, though, could have the authority to induce an administration to
take the recommended direction, if due to mutual antagonisms within, the
polity had sunk to a tension between polarised classes? Stein’s answer has
often been found wanting, his opting for ‘a kingship of social reform’111
often mocked, looked down upon as an out-of-time apology for a model
or even restoration of monarchy. Yet Stein was not naïve, nor can his views
simply be filed away as yet another conservatism. There are respects in which
Stein’s option might usefully be compared with that of Bettina von Arnim
(née Brentano; 1785–1859) in her almost contemporary This Book Belongs
to the King, and her subsequent but then still unpublished project of a ‘book
on the poor’ (Armenbuch). Bettina also appealed to the King of Prussia to
alleviate the sufferings of the poor.112 Stein, though, was no romantic. More
seriously, he appears to have had in mind Benjamin Constant’s notion of
‘neutral power’ (pouvoir neutre).113 However that may be, Stein is by now
recognised as a founding father of the social state,114 which he could not
have become without Hegel.
NOT E S
1 Heinrich Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany

(published as three articles in the French Revue des Deux Mondes in 1834, and
as a book in 1835). Now in the critical edition, DHA = Düsseldorfer Heine
Ausgabe, 16 vols, ed. Manfred Winfuhr (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe,
1973–97), here vol. 8/1, p. 115. The English translation is Ritchie Robertson’s
from: The Harz Journey and Selected Prose (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006),
here p. 289.
2 Eduard Gans, ‘Nekrolog [of Hegel]’, in Allgemeine Preußische Staatszeitung,
no. 333 (1 December 1831) 1752 (unless otherwise indicated, translations of
German sources are my own).
3 The claim that Young Hegelianism began already with Heine’s History … can
be found in Gerhard Höhn, Heine-Handbuch. Zeit – Person – Werk, 3rd edn
(Stuttgart abd Weimar: Metzler, 2004), p. 350. For Gans, see N. Waszek, ‘War
Eduard Gans (1797–1839) der erste Links- oder Junghegelianer?’, in Die linken
Hegelianer. Studien zum Verhältnis von Religion und Politik im Vormärz, eds.
Michael Quante and Amir Mohseni (Paderborn: Fink, 2015), pp. 29–51, though
arriving at a nuanced conclusion.
63
64
4 John Edward Toews, Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism,

1805–1841 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 5.
5 Cf. N. Waszek, ‘David Friedrich Strauss in 1848: An Analysis of His
“Theologicopolitical Speeches” ’, in The 1848 Revolutions and European
Political Thought, eds. Douglas Moggach and Gareth Stedman Jones (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 236–53.
6 D. F. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 2 vols (Tübingen: Osiander,
1835–1836); English edition: The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined; translated
from the fourth German edition [by Marian Evans, better known as George
Eliot] (London: Chapman Brothers, 1846).
7 D. F. Strauss, ‘Letter to Christian Märklin’ (1807–49), dated 15 November, 1831,
in Ausgewählte Briefe von David Friedrich Strauss, ed. Eduard Zeller (Bonn: Emil
Strauss, 1895), p. 8: ‘hier ist Hegel zwar gestorben, aber nicht ausgestorben’ (the
German is given in order to keep the pun ‘sterben’ versus ‘aussterben’).
8 A group of the philosopher’s friends and former students who constituted them-
selves as an ‘association’ or ‘society’ in order to prepare a complete edition of
Hegel’s works, lectures and other manuscripts on behalf and to the benefit
of Hegel’s family (the editors worked on a voluntary basis, leaving the royalties
to Hegel’s widow and children).
9 As Strauss reports in the same letter to Märklin; Strauss, Briefe (1895), p. 9 f.
10 Cf. G. W. F. Hegel: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, and
Critical Writings, trans. A. V. Miller, Steven A. Taubeneck and Diana I. Behler, ed.
Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1990); Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences in Basic Outline, trans. and eds. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O.
Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
11 Karl Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben (Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot, 1844), p. 381 f.
12 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right [henceforth Hegel, Philosophy of
Right] ed. Allen W. Wood; trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), p. 227.
13 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory
[1941], 2nd edn, with supplementary chapter (New York: Humanities Press,
1954), p. 375.
14 Eduard Gans, Leopold von Henning, Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm Hinrichs,
Heinrich Gustav Hotho, Philipp Konrad Marheineke, Karl-Ludwig Michelet,
Karl Rosenkranz, Wilhelm Vatke. In what follows, three of them (Gans, Hotho
and Rosenkranz) will be commented on in some detail.
15 Among the numerous examples, cf. Rosenkranz’s pamphlet against Rudolf
Haym, which even bears the term ‘apology’ in its title: K. Rosenkranz, Apologie
Hegels gegen Dr. R. Haym (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1858); see also the
eulogy for Hegel’s birth centenary: C. L. Michelet, Hegel, der unwiderlegte
Weltphilosoph: eine Jubelschrift (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1870).
16 Cf. Die ‘Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik’: Hegels Berliner Gegenakademie,
ed. Christoph Jamme (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994).
17 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Werke, Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein
von Freunden des Verewigten, 18 vols. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1832–45).
18 According to the volumes themselves and to the contract with the publisher, the
‘circle of friends’ consisted of Philipp Marheineke, Johannes Schulze, Eduard
64
65
Gans, Leopold von Henning, Heinrich Gustav Hotho, Carl Ludwig Michelet and
Friedrich Förster. Later, other editors were associated: Ludwig Boumann, Hegel’s
son Karl, Karl Rosenkranz and Bruno Bauer. For further details see: Christoph
Jamme, ‘Editionspolitik. Zur “Freundesvereinsausgabe” der Werke G. W.
F. Hegels’, Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 38 (1984), 83–99.
19 The critical edition of student notes on Hegel’s lectures began with Hegel,
Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie 1818–1831, 4 vols, ed. Karl-Heinz
Ilting (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1973–4). Many other
lectures have since been edited in the series: Hegel, Vorlesungen. Ausgewählte
Nachschriften und Manuskripte [different vol. eds.], 17 vols. (Hamburg: Meiner,
1983–2007).
20 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik, 3 vols, ed. H.
G. Hotho (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1835–8) [= vol. 10.1–3 of the Werke;
see above, note 17].
21 The numerous translations of Hotho’s edition (into French, Italian, Russian,
etc.) confirm Sir Malcolm Knox’ verdict: ‘Hotho did his work brilliantly’; Hegel,
Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, ed. and trans. T. M. Knox. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975), vol. 1, p. vi.
22 Cf. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, ‘H.G. Hotho, Kunst als Bildungserlebnis
und Kunsthistorie in systematischer Absicht – oder die entpolitisierte Version
der ästhetischen Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts’, in Kunsterfahrung und
Kulturpolitik im Berlin Hegels [Hegel-Studien Beiheft 22], eds. A. Gethmann-
Siefert and Otto Pöggeler (Bonn: Bouvier, 1983), pp. 229–62.
23 Cf. Toews, Hegelianism, pp. 203–54; in greater detail: Henning Ottmann, Hegel
im Spiegel der Interpretationen (= vol. I of Individuum und Gemeinschaft bei
Hegel) (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 1977).
24 D. F. Strauss, Streitschriften zur Vertheidigung meiner Schrift über das
Leben Jesu und zur Charakteristik der gegenwärtigen Theologie, Heft 3
(Tübingen: Osiander, 1837), p. 95 (for the first evocation of the threefold div-
ision), the whole chapter ‘Verschiedene Richtungen innerhalb der Hegelschen
Schule in Betreff der Christologie’ for its explication, pp. 95–126.
25 Cf. N. Waszek, ‘Eduard Gans on Poverty and on the Constitutional Debate’,
in Douglas Moggach, ed., The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the
Hegelian School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 24–49.
26 Eduard Gans, Das Erbrecht in weltgeschichtlicher Entwicklung: Eine
Abhandlung der Universalrechtsgeschichte [four volumes published in
Gans’ lifetime; two more were projected when Gans died suddenly in 1839]
(4 vols.: I : Berlin: Maurer, 1824; I I : Berlin: Maurer, 1825; III : Stuttgart &
Tübingen: Cotta, 1829; I V : Stuttgart & Tübingen: Cotta, 1835).
27 Gans, Das Erbrecht in weltgeschichtlicher Entwicklung, vol. I , p. xxix: ‘Als
Wissenschaft ist sie [i.e. die Rechtswissenschaft] nothwendig ein Teil der
Philosophie’. Gans’ phrase corresponds exactly to Hegel’s own formula
‘The science of right is a part of philosophy’. Hegel, Philosophy of Right,
p. 26, § 2.
28 Gans, Das Erbrecht in weltgeschichtlicher Entwicklung, vol. I , p. xxxix.
29 Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter,
6 vols. (Heidelberg: Mohr, 1815–31). By the time Gans began his History of the
Law of Inheritance, the first three volumes of Savigny’s book were available. An
65
66
English translation exists of vol. I : The History of the Roman Law During the
Middle Ages, trans. E. Cathcart (Edinburgh: A. Black, 1829).
30 Cf. the older edition of the introduction only – G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on
the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in History, trans.
H. B. Nisbet, with an introduction by Duncan Forbes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1975) – with the recent edition of the 1822/3 lectures: Lectures
on the Philosophy of World History: Manuscripts of the Introduction and the
Lectures of 1822–3, ed. and trans. Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson, with
the assistance of William G. Guess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
31 G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Letter to Karl J.H. Windischmann’ (1775–1839), dated 11 April
1824, in Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler, with com-
mentary by Clark Butler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 565;
cf. Hegel’s enthusiasm about Gans’ nomination in a letter to Cousin, 5 April
1826: ‘Gans has been named Professor of Law at our university, which has
caused me much satisfaction in every respect’. Hegel: The Letters, p. 638.
32 K. L. Michelet, Wahrheit aus meinem Leben (Berlin: Nicolai, 1884), p. 76: ‘From
your specialty [Michelet had completed his law studies in 1822], Hegel said to
me, you ought to take the topic [of your thesis]. He even suggested the precise
subject to me … and this is how I came to write on De doli et culpae in iure
criminali notionibus’ (Berlin: Petsch, 1824).
33 Notably to ancient philosophy and to Aristotle in particular. That he edited
Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy – Hegel’s Vorlesungen über
die Geschichte der Philosophie, 3 vols, ed. K. L. Michelet (Berlin: Duncker
& Humblot, 1833–6) [Werke, vol. 13–15; cf. note 16] – belongs to the same
context.
34 Gans quotes Montesquieu, P. J. A. Feuerbach and A. F. J. Thibaut regularly.
Thibaut followed the career of his former student with a sympathetic interest
and Feuerbach, in a note published shortly before his death in 1833, went as far
as to say that he expected from Gans what he could not realise in his lifetime;
Anselms von Feuerbach kleine Schriften vermischten Inhalts (Nürnberg: Otto,
1833), p. 165.
35 In an autobiographical note he wrote in early 1835 (published in: Hallische
Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst, vol. 3, 1840), p. 902.
36 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 23.
37 Cf. Hans-Christian Lucas, ‘“Dieses Zukünftige wollen wir mit Ehrfurcht
begrüßen”: Bemerkungen zur Historisierung und Liberalisierung von Hegels
Rechts- und Staatsbegriff durch Eduard Gans’, in Eduard Gans (1797–
1839): politischer Professor zwischen Restauration und Vormärz, eds. R.
Blänkner, G. Göhler and N. Waszek (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag,
2002), pp. 105–36.
38 Cf. Elisabeth Ziemer, Heinrich Gustav Hotho (1802–1873): ein Berliner
Kunsthistoriker, Kunstkritiker und Philosoph (Berlin: Reimer, 1994).
39 In 1825 they travelled to Paris together. Their six months there was a formative
period for both. On their way back to Berlin, they stopped over in Stuttgart –
where they met the famous publisher, Cotta, and arranged for both of them
to contribute to periodicals belonging to his empire – and then in Weimar,
where they were received by Goethe. Both left accounts of their travel and
stay: Heinrich Gustav Hotho, Vorstudien für Leben und Kunst (Stuttgart: Cotta,
66
67
1835), for his stay in Paris, see pp. 177–222; Eduard Gans, ‘Paris im Jahre 1825’,
in Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände (Berlin: Veit, 1836), pp. 1–47.
40 Among his later works: Geschichte der deutschen und niederländischen
Malerei, 2 vols. (Berlin: Simion, 1842–3); Die Malerschule Huberts van
Eyck nebst deutschen Vorgängern und Zeitgenossen, 2 vols. [uncompleted]
(Berlin: Veit & Co., 1855–8); Geschichte der christlichen Malerei in ihrem
Entwicklungsgang dargestellt, 3 vols. [uncompleted] (Stuttgart: [s.n.], 1867–72).
His ten contributions to the Yearbooks span the years 1827 to 1833; see Ziemer,
Heinrich Gustav Hotho, p. 372.
41 By a certain J[ohann] Saling, Die Gerechtigkeit in ihrer geistgeschichtlichen
Entwickelung (Berlin: C. F. Plahn, 1827); cf. Hotho’s review of the book in
Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik 31–4 (August 1828), 251–65.
42 Hotho in Jahrbücher 31–4 (August 1828) 252.
43 Hotho, ‘Review of Amadeus Wendt, Über die Hauptperioden der schönen Kunst
oder die Kunst im Laufe der Weltgeschichte. Leipzig: Barth, 1831’, in Jahrbücher
113 (December 1832), 902.
44 Eliza M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany: A Study of the Influence
Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry Over the Great German Writers of the 18th,
19th and 20th Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935).
45 Cf. Hotho, Geschichte der christlichen.
46 Karl Rosenkranz, Geschichte der deutschen Poesie im Mittelalter (Halle: Anton
& Gelbcke, 1830); Handbuch einer allgemeinen Geschichte der Poesie, 3 vols.
[I : Geschichte der orientalischen und der antiken Poesie; II : Geschichte
der neueren Lateinischen, der Französischen und Italienischen Poesie;
I I I : Geschichte der Spanischen, Portugiesischen, Englischen, Skandinavischen,
Niederländischen, Deutschen und Slawischen Poesie] (Halle: Eduard Anton,
1832–3); Goethe und seine Werke (Königsberg: Bornträger, 1847, 2nd edn
1856); Die Poesie und ihre Geschichte: eine Entwicklung der poetischen Ideale
der Völker (Königsberg: Bornträger, 1855); Diderot’s Leben und Werke, 2 vols.
(Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1866); Neue Studien, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Koschny, 1875–8).
47 K. Rosenkranz, Die Pädagogik als System. Ein Grundriß (Königsberg: Bornträger,
1848 – new edition with an introduction by Michael Winkler. Jena: Paideia, 2008).
The text was translated into English as early as 1872 – Pedagogics as a System,
trans. Anna C. Brackett (St. Louis, MO: Studley, 1872) – and is still reprinted.
48 As Rosenkranz relates in his autobiographical work: Von Magdeburg bis
Königsberg (Berlin: Heimann, 1873), p. 426 f.
49 Rosenkranz, Geschichte der deutschen Poesie im Mittelalter (1830), p. vi.
50 Rosenkranz, Von Magdeburg bis Königsberg, p. 424.
51 Ibid., p. 424 and cf. Rosenkranz, Hegel: Sendschreiben an den Hofrath und
Professor Carl Friedrich Bachmann in Jena (Königsberg: Unzer, 1834), pp.122 f.
52 Rosenkranz, Geschichte der deutschen Poesie im Mittelalter (1830), p. viii: ‘Von
einem vor der Durchforschung des Gegebenen bereits fertigen System, dessen
Formeln ich vielleicht nur mit besonderem Stoff von Außen her angefüllt hätte
weiß ich nichts.’
53 Rosenkranz, Von Magdeburg bis Königsberg, p. 424.
54 E.g. Rosenkranz, Handbuch (1832), vol. I , p. 160, 234; vol. II , p. 228; vol.
I I I : pp. iii f.
55 Rosenkranz, Handbuch, vol. I I I , pp. 397–434.
67
68
56 As Rosenkranz himself underlined in his Handbuch, vol. III , p. xi; cf. Ziemer,
Heinrich Gustav Hotho, pp. 184 f.
57 Rosenkranz, Von Magdeburg bis Königsberg, p. 475 f: ‘ein Werk, welches der
erste vollständig durchgeführte Versuch auf diesem Felde nach festen ästhetischen
Prinzipien und mit weltgeschichtlichem Sinn geschrieben war’.
58 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 227 f, § 189 and addition.
59 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859], ed. with
an introduction by Maurice Dobb [1970, 2nd edn 1977] (Toronto, ON: General
Books, 2012), p. 11: ‘the material conditions of life, which are summed up by
Hegel after the fashion of the English and French of the eighteenth century
under the name of “civil society”; the anatomy of that civil society is to be
sought in political economy.’
60 Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and
Economics [1948], trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1975);
Manfred Riedel, Between Tradition and Revolution: The Hegelian Transformation
of Political Philosophy [1969], trans. Walter Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984); N. Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s
Account of ‘Civil Society’ (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988).
61 Eduard Gans, ‘Preface’, in Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 2nd
edn, ed. E. Gans (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1833), pp. v–xvii, here p. viii.
English trans. in Michael H. Hoffheimer, Eduard Gans and the Hegelian
Philosophy of Law (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), pp. 87–92, here p. 88.
62 There are now three editions of Gans’ lectures on natural law and the uni-
versal history of law, a course he repeated frequently and enlarged constantly
from the late 1820s almost to his death in 1839: E. Gans, Philosophische
Schriften, ed. Horst Schröder (Berlin: Aufbau, 1971), here p. 108 ff; Naturrecht
und Universalrechtsgeschichte, ed. Manfred Riedel (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,
1981), here p. 82 ff; Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte: Vorlesungen
nach G. W. F. Hegel, ed. Johann Braun (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2005), here
pp. 164–6.
63 Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte (2005), p. 165.
64 Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte (1981), p. 84: ‘Wir
bekennen uns zum Industriesystem von Adam Smith’; Gans, Naturrecht und
Universalrechtsgeschichte (2005), p. 166: das ‘Industriesystem [ist] einer
unendlichen Vervollkommnung fähig’.
66 Cf. Engels’ Preface to the second volume of Capital (1885); Marx-Engels-Werke,
vol. 24 (1963), p. 14 – English trans. by I. Lasker (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1956), p. 6: ‘Marx began his economic studies in Paris, in 1843, starting with
the great Englishmen and Frenchmen. Of German economists he knew only Rau
and List, and he did not want any more of them.’
68 Cf. Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte (1981), pp. 51 f; Gans
Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte (2005), pp. 58–63. For Gans’ most
detailed account of Saint-Simon and his school, see his text on Paris in 1830,
in Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände [1836], ed. with an introduction and
notes by N. Waszek (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995),
pp. 91–102; cf. N. Waszek, ‘Eduard Gans on Poverty’, pp. 24–49, esp. pp. 35–41.
68
69

70 The front page of his book shows ‘1821’, but the book was already available in
late 1820.
71 Cf. the old edition by K. L. Michelet, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der
Philosophie, 3 vols. (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1833–6) [Werke, vols.
13–15]; reprinted in the widely available Theorie Werkausgabe [TWA], 20 vols.,
eds. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,
1969–71), vols. 18–20, which mixes the lectures of different years, with the
new edition – Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, 4 vols., eds.
Pierre Garniron and Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Meiner, 1986–96) [Hegel,
Vorlesungen, vols. 6–9] – based mainly on students’ notes from the 1825/26
course.
72 Hegel, TWA, vol. 19, p. 34.
73 Hegel, Vorlesungen, vol. 9, pp. 127 f.
74 George Canning (1770–1827), at the time (1822–7) Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs and Leader of the House of Commons under the Earl of Liverpool as
Prime Minister. Canning’s speech was reported as follows: ‘a period has lately
commenced when Ministers have had in their power to apply to the state of the
country the just maxims of profound philosophy’.
75 That Hegel read the relevant article – The Morning Chronicle, 14 February
1825, p. 3 – is proven by his surviving excerpt, first published in Hegel, Berliner
Schriften 1818–1831, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1956),
p. 701; cf. Michael J. Petry, ‘Hegel and “The Morning Chronicle”’, in Hegel-
Studien 11 (1976), 11–80, here 31 f.
76 These notes are to be found in the Polish Academy of Science at Cracow, MS,
no. 57, p. 15. The identity of the student is not firmly established, but the name
of ‘Helcel’ is generally attributed to them.
77 Hegel, TWA, vol. 20, pp. 281–6; Hegel, Vorlesungen, vol. 9, pp. 144–8.
78 Hegel, TWA, vol. 20, p. 285: ‘Auch der Staatsökonom Adam Smith ist in diesem
Sinne Philosoph.’
79 Among the rare English studies of Lorenz Stein is Diana Siclovan, ‘1848 and
German Socialism’, in The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought,
pp. 254–75.
80 Cf. John F. Toews, ‘The Immanent Genesis and Transcendent Goal of
Law: Savigny, Stahl and the Ideology of the Christian German State’, in American
Journal of Comparative Law 37 (1989), 139–69.
81 Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, pp. 374–88.
82 Lorenz Stein, Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in Frankreich von 1789 bis auf
unsere Tage [1850]: German edition by Gottfried Salomon, 3 vols. (Munich: Drei
Masken, 1921, reprinted: Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1959); The so-called English
edition is unfortunately a ‘condensed’ version, omitting more than half of the
original, which alone can be cited below. The History of the Social Movement
in France, 1789–1850, intro., ed. and trans. Kaethe Mengelberg (Totowa,
NJ: Bedminster Press, 1964).
83 Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 375.
84 Cf. for example, Lutz Geldsetzer, ‘Zur Frage des Beginns der deutschen
Soziologie’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 15 (1963),
529–41.
69
70

86 Ibid., p. 376.
87 Ibid., p. 375.
88 Ibid., p. 376.
89 Cf. my article: ‘Lorenz von Steins Frankreicherfahrung im Spannungsfeld von
Idealismus und Soziologie’, in Lorenz von Stein und der Sozialstaat, ed. Stefan
Koslowski (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014), pp. 64–82.
90 Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 379: Stein ‘paid close attention to French
social critics and theorists of the period’.
91 Ibid., p. 382: ‘Despite the retention of Hegelian terminology, Stein succumbs to
the positivist, affirmative tendencies of early sociology.’
92 Ibid., p. 381: ‘Stein clothes the skeleton conception that he took over from
Hegel with the material got from the French critical analysis of modern society.’
93 For further details on this see my presentation of the French edition of Stein’s
theoretical introduction to his History of the Social Movement in France: Stein,
Le concept de société, trans. Marc Béghin, with an introduction and bibliog-
raphy by N. Waszek (Grenoble: ELLUG, 2002), pp. 9–61.
94 For a more intelligent version of that perspective, see Stefan Koslowski, Die
Geburt des Sozialstaats aus dem Geist des deutschen Idealismus: Person und
Gemeinschaft bei Lorenz von Stein (Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1989);
cf. my review in: Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 37 (1996), pp. 378–84.
95 L. Stein, Der Socialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs
(Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1842).
96 Stein, The History of the Social Movement in France, p. 78: ‘the original
moving force in the revolution is not the idea of equality’.
97 The new title, History of the Social Movement in France, was not chosen by
accident.
98 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1975), p. 54.
100 While the German original – Stein, Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in
Frankreich (1959), vol. I , p. 29 – uses Hegel’s expression ‘System der Bedürfnisse’
(cf. § 189 f. of The Philosophy of Right) the English edition: History of the
Social Movement in France (1964), p. 50, misses the parallel and translates
rather freely: ‘set in motion through human needs’.
101 Stein, Geschichte (1959), vol. I , p. 46: ‘die Wirklichkeit der sittlichen Idee’ (cf.
§ 257 of Hegel, Philosophy of Right) – English edition: History (1964), p. 56.
102 Stein, Geschichte (1959), vol. I , p. 37 – English edition: History (1964), p. 52.
103 Stein, Geschichte (1959), vol. I , p. 50 f – English edition: History (1964), p. 58.
105 There exists a rich literature on the relationship of Marx and Stein, from the
late nineteen century onwards; cf. for example, Franz Mehring, ‘Stein, Hess
und Marx’, Neue Zeit X V , no. 2 (1897), 379–82; Herbert Uhl, Lorenz von Stein
und Karl Marx: zur Grundlegung von Gesellschaftsanalyse und politischer
Theorie 1842–1850 (Tübingen: University Press, 1977).
106 For an excellent analysis of Hegel’s views on the matter, see Joachim
Ritter’s ‘Person and Property in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (§§34–81)’,
in Hegel on Ethics and Politics, eds. Robert B. Pippin and Otfried Höffe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 101–23.
70
71
108 Stein, Geschichte (1959), vol. I I I , p. 104: ‘Die Freiheit ist erst eine wirkliche in
dem, der die Bedingungen derselben, die materiellen und geistigen Güter als die
Voraussetzungen der Selbstbestimmung, besitzt.’
109 Stein, Geschichte (1959), vol. I , p. 48 (Stein’s own italics): ‘in der Verwaltung
wird … die Hebung der niederen Klassen zum wesentlichen Gegenstand’. The
term ‘elevation’ (Hebung) is reminiscent of Hegel’s Aufhebung in the three-
fold sense of suppressing (latin: negare), preserving (conservare) and elevating
(levare).
110 When Stein – after being fired from the University of Kiel, when the 1848 rising
of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein against Denmark had failed – finally
settled in Vienna, he undertook to write a multivolume science of adminis-
tration: Die Verwaltungslehre, 7 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1865–8; 2nd edn in
10 vols. 1869–84).
111 Stein, Geschichte (1959), vol. I I I , p. 41: ‘ein Königtum der sozialen Reform’.
112 [Bettina von Arnim], Dies Buch gehört dem König, 2 vols. ([Berlin]: Schroeder,
1843); the critical edition provides a wealth of notes and explanations: Politische
Schriften, eds. Wolfgang Bunzel, Ulrike Landfester, Walter Schmitz and Sibylle
von Steinsdorff (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker-Verlag, 1995).
113 While appreciating the July monarchy, Stein says that it did not ‘succeed in
fully incarnating the neutral power of which Benjamin Constant had spoken’.
Stein, Geschichte (1959), vol. I I , p. 51.
114 Cf. Karl-Hermann Kästner, ‘From the Social Question to the Social state’
(trans. Keith Tribe), Economy and Society 10 (1981), 7–26.
71

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What is the main topic discussed in the passage?

What is the main topic discussed in the passage?

What was Strauss's purpose for coming to Berlin in 1831?

What was Strauss's purpose for coming to Berlin in 1831?

51

Philosophy in the Wake of Hegel*

1831 and After

* Thanks to the Director of the Centre of Classical German Philosophy at the

emancipated themselves from the metaphysical fetters by which they were

Philosophy in the Wake of Hegel

Hegel’s philosophy was particularly liable to create a ‘school’ climaxes in

convictions.16 The first complete edition of Hegel’s works,17 edited by a ‘circle

Philosophy in the Wake of Hegel

Eduard Gans, the Law of Inheritance

Hotho’s Philosophical History of Art

Philosophy in the Wake of Hegel

The drive towards a treatment of history that is at once world-historical and

Rosenkranz’ History of Literature

intentions. Although Hegel is not explicitly mentioned in the 1830 text –

Political Economy: A Science that Originated in the Modern Age

Philosophy in the Wake of Hegel

even more succinctly, in the corresponding paragraphs of his Encyclopedia

Philosophy in the Wake of Hegel

Lorenz Stein: First German Sociology

Even without room here to analyse in detail Stein’s indebtedness to Hegel,

Philosophy in the Wake of Hegel

that alone can overcome the dependency of underprivileged classes, their

1 Heinrich Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany

4 John Edward Toews, Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism,

Philosophy in the Wake of Hegel

Philosophy in the Wake of Hegel

Philosophy in the Wake of Hegel

69 Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte (2005), p. 166.

85 Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 375.

Philosophy in the Wake of Hegel

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