German Moral and Political Philosophy, 1785-1908

This book provides an overview of the works of the most influential German moral and political philosophers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, starting with Immanuel Kant's Groundwork for a Metaphysic of Morals, published in 1785, and ending with Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, published posthumously in 1908. Throughout this period, under the impact of the French Revolution and the transformation in political thinking which it effected, the German philosophers examined here confronted, in one way or another, the issue of citizenship and the duties it entailed. This is most explicit in Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, where the issue of rebellion comes up, and again in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, where he grounds morality in a social context, writing about people's duties to family, the community, and the state. In other examples from this book, it may be noted that Max Stirner repudiated the state altogether, thus having no use for any notion of citizenship, while Karl Marx, by interpreting every state as the organ of a particular class, shifted people's loyalties from the state (citizenship) to their specific class (class consciousness). The main currents represented here are rational idealism, romanticism, anti-Enlightenment reaction, and communism. Two of the chapters look beyond the boundaries of the German lands: the chapter on the Young Hegelians, which places them in the context of continent-wide radical currents; and the chapter on Marx, which takes note of Marx's interpreters, especially V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin. Schleiermacher was one of the two or three most prominent German theologians of the nineteenth century (Adolf von Harnack would also be counted here). But the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes that, while "Schleiermacher (1768-1834) perhaps cannot be ranked as one of the very greatest German philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...he is certainly one of the best second-tier philosophers of the period (a period in which the second-tier was still extremely good)."