ABSTRACT
Bruno Bauer (1809-82), theologian, philosopher, and historian, was a leader of the left-Hegelian or republican school in the 1840s. The left Hegelians, such as Feuerbach (1804-72), Arnold Ruge (1802-80), and the early Marx, went beyond Hegel in their demand for popular sovereignty and in their explicit criticisms of irrational religious beliefs and practices.1 Bauer developed an idea of republican freedom based on what he called universal self-consciousness, the capacity of thought to be self-determining not only in the maxims it adopted (as in Kantian morality), but in its ability to shape the external world, struggling against all obstacles to freedom posed by outmoded political, social, and religious institutions and relations. Genuine freedom depended on the capacity of subjects to rise above their particular desires and to subject these to rational control, thus promoting a universal interest in their own lives and actions. Bauer wrote extensively on the origins of Christianity and its relation to the culture of classical antiquity. In Herr Dr. Hengstenberg2 and Religion des Alten Testaments,3 Bauer attacked conventional depictions of the continuity between Christianity and Judaism. Viewing religion as the unfolding of human self-consciousness, he distinguished the irrational prescriptions of the Mosaic law, and its particularistic appeal to a chosen people, from the new, inclusive, universalistic spirit of the gospels. By 1840, and notably in his three-volume Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (1841-42),4 Bauer’s attitude toward Christianity became increasingly
The authors express their thanks to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its generous support for this article. 1 See Douglas Moggach (ed.), The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005. 2 Bruno Bauer, Herr Dr. Hengstenberg. Ein Beitrag zur Kritik des religiösen Bewußtseins. Kritische Briefe über den Gegensatz des Gesetzes und des Evangeliums, Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmler 1839. 3 Bauer, Kritik der Geschichte der Offenbarung. Die Religion des Alten Testaments in der geschichtlichen Entwicklung ihrer Prinzipien dargestellt, vols. 1-2, Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmler 1838. 4 Bauer, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, vols. 1-3, Leipzig: Otto
negative, as he identified it practically as a bulwark of the oppressive Restoration political order and theoretically as a self-denial of freedom. In further studies, Bauer traced the evolution of Christian doctrine from Stoic and late Hellenistic sources, dating the earliest gospel to the reign of the emperor Hadrian (117-38).5
