Supplanting Habakkuk: Bruno Bauer Before and After the Märzrevolution

• In Event: Religion and Political Theory

Abstract

German idealist philosophers met the French Revolution with a sustained ambivalence. On the one hand, Germany was spared its violent upheavals; on the other, there was a distinct sense that the German states had fallen behind France historically. Using Marx’s term for this phenomenon, Rebecca Comay (2011) diagnoses /die deutsche Misère/ as a trauma stemming from a perceived “missed opportunity” in the French Revolution, which German idealists attempted to overcome by various means. Hegel’s solution, at least in part, was to cast 1789 as France catching up to the Protestant Reformation, whose division of political and ecclesiastical powers had long since inoculated Germany against the need for such a revolution. While later left-Hegelians departed from Hegel’s favorable appraisal of the Prussian state, they did affirm his relation of Reformation to Revolution, taking the extraction of religion from politics as a necessary moment in the development of Spirit. It is this view of religious reformation as a prerequisite for political modernization that positions Hegel and the Young Hegelians as early theorists of secularization.

As left-Hegelians faced increasing scrutiny and censorship under Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Bruno Bauer published two satirical treatises denouncing Hegel and his acolytes in the voice of a Calvinist minister. The first of these, /Trumpet of the Last Judgement/ (1841), appointed Hegel to the mantle of Antichrist; the second, /Hegel’s Theory of Religion and Art/ (1842), transferred that honor to Bauer himself. The rhetorical strategy of these texts is straightforward: to claim clerical authorities’ apocalyptic charges against Hegel and left-Hegelians as badges of honor. The Hegel of /Trumpet of the Last Judgement/ is a principled atheist, proper heir to the Jacobins, and utterly determined to dismantle clerical and monarchical power (Bauer 1989).

Bauer’s persistent references to the French Revolution should be read in the context of /die deutsche Misère/. Bauer’s diagnosis was initially the conventional radical one of the period: the embeddedness of Christianity in the Prussian state and the concomitant stunting of civil society renders /Vormärz/ Prussia essentially feudal (Bauer 2003). For Bauer, however, to surmount this backwardness is to pave the way not for socialism, but for a secular bourgeois republic that has resolved the antinomy of universal and particular (Bauer 1849; Moggach 2003). In Bauer’s pre-1848 view, a revolutionary “Antichrist” even “stronger than the French” would be necessary to wrest Prussia free from the grip of clerical authorities (Bauer 1989, 93). After the frustration of 1848, Bauer took a conservative turn. While his anticlerical streak remained intact, his politics ossified into a more conventional civic republicanism, and he began contributing to the national-liberal /Kreuzzeitung/ in the mid-1860s (Stepelevich 1989). This conservative turn was presaged by Bauer’s infamous 1843 essays against Jewish emancipation. It is perhaps unsurprising that after 1848, he increasingly articulated his views on Judaism in racial terms rather than religious ones (Rotenstreich 1959; Carlebach 1978). Bauer’s antisemitic polemic of 1863, /Judaism Abroad/, would ultimately prove a strong influence on Carl Schmitt, although Schmitt saw the Jews as the principal agent behind secularization rather than an obstacle to it, as Bauer did (Rosenstock 2014; Schmitt 1996).

In a broader sense, this paper addresses the conceptual knot of revolution and/as apocalypse in the modern period, an equation Bauer makes freely (if sardonically) prior to 1848. While this equation is generally considered a temporal one, in line with Reinhart Koselleck's conceptual history of /crisis/, a contextual reading of Bauer provides an opportunity to read the metaphor spatially. To draw an analogy of revolution to apocalypse is to render porous the boundaries between the terrains of the political, the theological, and in the context of a social revolution, the economic. At these moments, theological concepts are freed to "migrate into the profane," in Adorno's phrase (cf. Gordon 2020). It similarly provides an opportunity to resist the Schmittian diagnosis of secularization as a unilinear "depoliticization" (a diagnosis that in fact owes some debt to Bauer), reading it instead as a perpetual negotiation over the boundaries between conceptual terrains.

Author

• Asher Wycoff, Graduate Center, CUNY