Ian Hunter. Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 425 S. EUR 65.59 (gebunden), ISBN 978-0-521-79265-3.

Reviewed by John Holloran (Department of History, Oregon Episcopal School)
Published on H-German (June, 2005)

Rival Ideologies: Ideas Out of Context

Ian Hunter is a professor of humanities at Griffith University (Queensland, Australia) who has written extensively about education and early modern political theory. According to his preface, his immediate concern with Rival Enlightenments is "the early modern university." The "rival" enlightenments of the title refer to competing ways of understanding the world and the role of the educated man in society: "university metaphysics" vs "civil philosophy." Were Rival Enlightenments a work of intellectual history, one might presume to learn more about the institution of the university, key personalities, intellectual politics, or some of the key debates of the early years of the debate about "enlightenment" and all it entailed. Unfortunately Rival Enlightenments is not historical writing in any familiar sense of the word. Rival Enlightenments is a theoretical polemic against modern liberalism posing as a study of early modern German intellectual history.

Hunter describes the prime objective of his book: to "reinstate a marginalized intellectual culture to its proper place in the intellectual history of early modern Germany" (p. ix). By this he means he wants people to reject modern liberalism in favor of a rival "civil philosophy." Hunter eschews familiar methods of historical argumentation--source criticism, archival research, contextualization--preferring rather to "criticize and reject a dialectical historiography," he claims was "designed to erase" the existence of the intellectual movement he seeks now to rehabilitate. After so serious an accusation--of intellectual revisionism, as it were--it comes as a surprise to learn that the intellectual culture he rediscovers is that of two relatively well-known German writers and professors, Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius. While by no means household names, Pufendorf and Thomasius nevertheless loom large in the pantheon of early modern German intellectuals. More puzzling still, after a long series of philosophical contortions designed to wriggle out of the hold of post-Kantian historiography, more than half of the book is devoted not to Pufendorf and Thomasius, but to their alleged rivals, Leibniz and Kant. Despite what the author suggests about reinstating Pufendorf and Thomasius to their "proper" status, he is more intent on taking down Kant. But why the great concern about Kant, a philosopher removed more than three generations from the days of Pufendorf and Thomasius?

The answer is that Hunter discusses the work of Samuel Pufendorf, Christian Thomasius, Gottfried Leibniz, and Immanuel Kant in bad faith, not with a design to set these thinkers in historical context, but rather as a part of an a-historical political program. The author's critique of Kant's "authoritarian liberalism" and post-Kantian "dialectical historiography" is all in the service of an attack on "modern liberalism," such as the ethics presented by John Rawls. Hunter makes it clear early on that his critique is inspired by the work of Carl Schmitt, Gerhard Oestreich, and Reinhard Koselleck, and he associates himself with the school of historiography occupied with "confesionalization and deconfessionalization" (i.e., Heinz Schilling et al.). The author's stated affiliations suggest that the real rivalry at issue here has more to do with modern political conservativism than with early modern intellectual history.

The core of Hunter's thesis is that, unlike the French and English enlightenments (which were often profoundly secular), Kant's enlightenment program was essentially religious or soteriological in nature (i.e., concerned with personal salvation). According to Hunter, Kant's philosophy had at its core a full-blown, all-encompassing educational program, or paedeia. Kant's mission was to reconcile "moral philosophy and revealed theology within a single discipline in accordance with the apologetic purposes of Christian metaphysics itself" (p. 349).

Hunter argues that the "metaphysical tradition" Leibniz passed down to Kant was "neo-confessional" in nature. By confessional, Hunter means that Leibniz and Kant envisioned a complete plan for society--cradle to grave, peasant to prince--in which the study of a rational metaphysics leads to both personal self-improvement and social progress. Thus Kant (as well as Leibniz and Wolff, for that matter) offered a full-fledged educational program that competed almost point for point with the universalizing claims to conscience and ethical state governance of the older, theocratic, confessional visions. Hunter insinuates that Kant intended his metaphysics to take the place of the Bible as the guide to spiritual growth and basis of legitimate government. By subjecting the State to some external ethical standard, liberal metaphysics advances a confession of sorts, whose dictates provide the foundation for society. Kant's intellectual culture, Hunter insists, in turn, has become the basis of this modern form of "liberalism"--a vision of an ethical society in which the government encourages the moral development of its citizens, and in which the citizens expect that the government will act morally. As Hunter states: "Kant and his modern followers regard his rational theological doctrines as ultimately grounded in a fully rational principle--the formal idea of the moral law--hence as supplements to an autonomous ethics" (p. 353).

In effect, Hunter says that Kant stripped religion of its theistic trappings and reformulated it into an entirely rational, totalizing cultural movement, one whose democratic ideal allows no room for individual privacy or freedom of conscience. Ironically, according to Hunter's read, Kant's heir--modern liberalism--is as dogmatic, if not more so, than the theologies of the older confessional states. Far from being secular and individualistic, he continues, Kant's metaphysics was profoundly spiritual and communal in its scope, and Kant's vision of government was profoundly idealistic. Hunter claims that Kant insisted that a state gains its legitimacy through ethics, and his ideal of the philosopher king actually granted the state remarkable powers to direct and educate individual consciences; indeed, according to Hunter, Kant set the ethical self-cultivation of individuals as the State's primary mission.

As the heirs to Kant's liberal philosophy, so Hunter explains, "dialectical historians" have brainwashed us and kept us from properly seeing its confessional character. He insists that if we could only rouse ourselves from our dogmatic slumber, we would see that despite liberalism's implicit claim to support the separation of church and state, such claims, begun with Leibniz and Kant, obscure the extent to which liberalism exists within its own intolerant, exclusive, singular moral universe. Like Kant's confessional metaphysics, modern liberalism, Hunter alleges, presents a set of values, which in the confessional sense, asserts its priority over all competing notions of individual liberty or state sovereignty, including--especially--competing confessional systems. Hence, according to Hunter, liberalism intolerantly wants to be the only game in town.

In contrast, Hunter sets up "civil philosophy" as a vital alternative system in its own right, one with its own educational program. As such, "civil philosophy" is and was a conscious rival to the metaphysical tradition of Leibniz that Kant inherited; indeed its culture has supposedly lived on, maintaining crucial points of distinction and offering an important alternative to metaphysics. Amid Hunter's elaborate interpretation of Pufendorf's and Thomasius's thought, by far his most prized revelation is that the civil philosophers advocated a profound separation of church and state. Hunter's "civil philosophy" offers a vigorous defense of civil liberties and freedom of conscience, something that Kant, in his liberalism, allegedly rejected. Unlike Kant, Hunter argues that Pufendorf and Thomasius acknowledged the absolute supremacy of the sovereign over all secular matters of government, but insisted thereby that the State had to relinquish jurisdiction over all matters of morality, personal growth, spiritual development and conscience. As Hunter explains, Pufendorf and Thomasius sought to create a "juristic civil consciousness" in which "civil natural law enabled its bearers to separate their own deepest religious and moral convictions from the formulation of laws aimed solely at civil security"; they envisioned the cultivation of a "specific intellectual deportment," "one characterized by private piety and public acceptance of the civil sovereign's political supremacy" (p. 28).

Apart from his depiction of a zealous defense of the individual's freedom of conscience put forth by Pufendorf and Thomasius, Hunter largely defines civil philosophy in terms of what it opposed rather than what it contributed. Hunter, for example, underscores the civic enlightenment thinkers' dissatisfaction with metaphysics. He writes: "It is no surprise, therefore, that civil natural law was profoundly and vehemently anti-metaphysical" (p. 127). He praises Thomasius's "remarkable cultural diagnosis" of the "ruination of the civil sciences" by metaphysics (p. 64). And he proposes that "given the clarity with which Thomasius grasped the historical need for a civil philosophy, the great puzzle confronting its modern historian is this philosophy's present obscurity" (p. 65).

Fast-forward to the postscript and one finds that Hunter's reinterpretation of Kant zeroes in on modern neo-Kantian "liberal" ethics, such as that of John Rawls (pp. 372-373). Far from liberating philosophy from its Christian trappings, Kant succeeded, Hunter argues, in incorporating a self-transformative, self-perfecting, self-governing ethos into a view of politics that presupposed the withering of the state as it gave way to a democratic public sphere. In this sense, modern liberalism, in its insistence that the state be ethical and provide for the ethical self-realization of its citizens, stands opposed to the separation of church and state. Hunter admits that he hopes his read of Pufendorf and Thomasius will offer a clear theoretical counterpoint to modern "authoritarian liberalism"--a term, he admits, he borrowed from Carl Schmitt (p. 367).[1] Hunter further warns that the continued, almost unopposed reign of neo-confessional liberalism becomes that much more dangerous as theorists lose sight of the long-recognized dangers of the confessional state:

"Under such intense pressure to make the state ethical and accountable, the hard-won separation of moral regeneration and the exercise of civil authority threatens to collapse, at least in 'thought.' Here too the gap between civil and metaphysical culture is at its widest. For while the former treats this separation as the condition of governing a liberal society, the latter regards it as something to be overcome in order to facilitate self-governance and self-perfection of a democratic moral community" (p. 376).

While Hunter's contention that there was and continues to be an "ongoing civil war between civil and metaphysical philosophy" appears on the surface to be neutral, from the tenor of the book, it is clear that he thinks this long-standing opposition to Kant's liberalism has important presentist implications (p. 264).

Whether there is a consistent metaphysics to modern liberalism--Kantian or otherwise--it is hard to see the attraction of Hunter's civil philosophy and its call for absolute secular sovereignty and an amoral state in the manner of Carl Schmitt's Fhrerstaat. If Hunter's point is that there is still much work to be done piecing apart the social and political threads of enlightenment intellectual history, it is well taken. To be sure, German historians often lumped together Pietist, Rationalist, and Prussian elements into a single modernist amalgam, all pitted against more "conservative," "anti-modern," "anti-democratic" Lutheran elements intent on checking the ambitions of the modern centralized Machtstaat. This tired model of conservative anti-modernism poised against liberal enlightenment certainly deserves to be toppled (if it has not been already), for too many interesting and vexing details get lost in historians' ideological battles. But it deserves to be replaced by something more historically nuanced than what Hunter puts forward.

Aside from the fact that Rival Enlightenments misrepresents itself as history, the primary objection to the author's argument begins with his presumption that the "intellectual culture" of early modern Germany has been marginalized in scholarly circles because of the "epochal philosophy of Immanuel Kant." There has been a huge amount of work done on early modern German intellectual history in which Pufendorf and Thomasius figure prominently. It is simply wrong to give the impression that historians overlook their ideas or their influence. To say that historians who study them suffer from a kind of false consciousness for not embracing their vision of philosophy suggests that history is about taking sides in past debates. If this is the case, then why bother doing any real research? Why bother to question what we know and how we know it? Why bother to read new documents? New information would either agree with our politics or would be deemed irrelevant in their inability to support them.

Hunter's conspiracy-theory framing device sets the book off on the wrong foot and forces all its interpretations into a too-narrow mold. It over-simplifies and over-selects material to support an argument that has little to do with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In that sense the book offers surprisingly little new information about the period it sets out to discuss. The book's very premise itself is overly dramatic. Certainly Kant studies take up a disproportional share of attention in eighteenth-century studies, but not, as Hunter would have us believe, because of a great devotion to his ideas per se, but because so many people took up Kant to begin with. People have heard and written about Kant, and students want to know why. Thomasius's students, on the other hand, did not devote a great deal of ink to Thomasius, so whether he was influential or not is simply more difficult to trace. To do justice to Thomasius's legacy would require a closer look at the writing of his students to see what, if anything, they took away from his way of thinking. With respect to Pufendorf, Locke, for one, read and discussed Pufendorf's philosophy, and accordingly Pufendorf's works were widely translated into English already by the eighteenth century. Could it be that Locke was better able to communicate the ideas he drew out of Pufendorf than Thomasius was? Yet rather than doing any work dealing with the reception of Pufendorf and Thomasius in German-speaking territories, Hunter instead conjures up an elaborate intellectual conspiracy to marginalize Pufendorf and Thomasius. The evidence the author provides comes from a selected reading of twentieth-century histories of the German Enlightenment. The author hopes, perhaps, that by adding a bit of mystery and conspiracy he will stimulate interest in the early years of the eighteenth century. Indeed such attention-grabbing might better explain the author's drive to rehabilitate Pufendorf and Thomasius as part of his twentieth-first-century program to paint liberals as the true authoritarians.

Hunter's resort to a conspiracy of silence about the "anti-metaphysical civil philosophy" of Pufendorf and Thomasius does a disservice to the fact that there were competing visions of enlightenment. Hunter is right to see rivalry at work first between Pufendorf and Leibniz, and later between Thomasius and Wolff. They were definitely rivals in many senses of the word. But they were also, at times, allies and colleagues. Thomasius and Wolff competed for students and competed for the appointment of protgs to university posts until Wolff was banished from Halle in 1723. The difference is that Thomasius died in 1728, whereas Wolff lived to return to Halle and died in 1754. Wolff taught for almost fifty years and found ways to connect with scholars all over Europe. Wolff's skill at textbook writing far outpaced Thomasius's and, by the end of the eighteenth century, Wolff's mode of teaching completely permeated the academic landscape. Ironically Wolff's banishment did far more to get his books read than all of Thomasius's and Pufendorf's teaching combined.

Hunter again is right to note the anti-metaphysical language in Pufendorf and Thomasius and their distrust of theological authority. What Hunter fails to address is the historical context for their struggle against metaphysics--for example, the fact that Pufendorf and Thomasius ran afoul of theology professors at their respective universities and were forced to flee on charges of heterodoxy. It was not metaphysical liberalism they were concerned about per se, but intolerant political behavior couched in terms of the authority of orthodoxy, be it theological or metaphysical. When professors of metaphysics began to act like orthodox theology professors, they reacted to the behavior as much as to the philosophy per se. Ironically, when in positions of power they acted in ways that resembled the powers that opposed them (so much for the tolerant ethos of the "civil philosophy").

Hunter is also right that Thomasius had a vision of Enlightenment inspired by Pufendorf (although he leaves out the fact that both Pufendorf and Leibniz shared the same teacher, Erhard Weigel). He is right that Thomasius's placed a legal studies-based education at the forefront of educational reform. But writing about a vision and lecturing about it in one's house is different than fathering a whole school of thought. Whereas Thomasius had to fight battles early in his career before being expelled from Leipzig, Thomasius's students, who taught at Halle and later at Gttingen, did not have the same battles to fight as Thomasius and Pufendorf did--the generation of professors who opposed Thomasius in the 1670s, 1680s, and 1690s died out, and by the 1710s and 1720s even the University of Leipzig envied Thomasius's ability to draw students to Halle and tried to entice him back. Much good work has been published discussing the ways that Thomasius's students went on to influence intellectual life, but by merely asserting the continuity of a "civil philosophy," Hunter does little to add to this scholarship. As it stands, if Hunter is unable to trace the continuity of the "civil philosophy" beyond the writing of Thomasius, how then can he conclude that it rivaled Kant?

Hunter is also right to notice that Thomasius's ideas were marginalized, but by attributing this marginalization to Kant's philosophy and the subsequent intellectual stupor of intellectual historians, he misses the point and the real action. The real coup of metaphysics was not fought with educational programs, but at court in Potsdam and in the classrooms of the Prussian universities of Halle, Knigsberg and, later, Berlin. Hunter is also right to emphasize the contradictions between Wolffian and Kantian metaphysics and emerging ideas about academic freedom. Both professors claimed academic freedom for themselves by virtue of their metaphysics while at the same time endorsing limitations on other freedoms for people they deemed less concerned with truth than they were. Similarly, both Wolff and Kant defended authoritarian governments that would help guarantee them their monopolies, privileges, and immunities, but so did Pufendorf and Thomasius! If one looks at the professional and political behavior of these four, at their correspondence with court officials, and at their attempts to silence rivals and detractors, one finds great similarities and an all-too authoritarian, monopolistic approach to political culture without regard to their "rival" educational programs.

Hunter, so dedicated to rehabilitation, misses the big picture. He loses sight of the very political culture he supposedly wants to recover--that is, he overlooks the stakes of the rivalries and the ways in which these rivalries played out in early modern Germany. An unfortunate consequence of omitting any historical foundation for the period is that Hunter misses the contingencies in Leipzig, Halle, Dresden, and Berlin that ended up favoring what he defines as Kant's peculiar philosophical program. An example of this oversight comes in his otherwise striking reinterpretation of Wllner's edict: Wllner was famously Frederick William II's minister of education who called Kant to task for heterodoxy, as explained in Kant's Conflict of the Faculties. Hunter suggests that Wllner, far from being a Pietist, as some historians allege, was actually a partisan of the seemingly eclipsed "civil philosophy" (p.341-342). The theory, although intriguing, as yet lacks a proper foundation. This lack of historical foundation begins much earlier, however, with Hunter's initial framing of the debate. Hunter's mistake is his attempt to tie all things together into a polemic aided and abetted by conservative theorists and directed at a target as distant as modern liberalism (as if John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is somehow responsible for Pufendorf's continued obscurity). A discussion of eighteenth-century texts is simply not the right context to play out a debate about twentieth-century political theory, especially in a new series devoted to discussing "Ideas in Context."

Rival Enlightenments is a frustrating book for an historian of early modern Germany to read. A good work in history begins with a real question--a question that research can attempt to answer. This book is a classic example of what happens to history when its writers know too well what to look for before hitting the books.

Note

[1]. Lest there be any doubt of his relationship to Schmitt, in his introduction Hunter stipulates his "indebtedness" to Schmitt and Schmitt's student, Reinhard Koselleck, whose work "is an important precondition of the present book" (pp. 11-12).

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Citation: John Holloran. Review of Hunter, Ian, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany. H-German, H-Net Reviews. June, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10663

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