Bruno Bauer - Political Ideology

Political Ideology

The first English-language rendering of Bruno Bauer's career was published in March, 2003 by Douglas Moggach, a professor at the University of Ottawa. His book is entitled, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer. Professor Moggach develops a republican interpretation of Bruno Bauer, in which Bauer is portrayed as reaching atheist conclusions because of his political commitments to free self-consciousness and autonomy, and his criticisms of the Restoration union of church and state. Other scholars continue to dispute that portrait.

Bauer's personality was complex. During his career and even after he died he was difficult to classify. The left-wing tried to define him as one of their own. The right-wing tried to define him as one of their own. He was praised by the right-Hegelians, and he was praised by the left-Hegelians.

Bauer had studied directly under the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel. Hegel had awarded an academic prize to Bauer when Bauer was about 20 years old. Hegel died when Bruno Bauer was 22 years old. Perhaps this affected Bauer's personality strongly; he may have seen himself as sitting very close to the highest academic post in Prussia and possibly he imagined that he would one day have that post.

When Hegel unexpectedly died in 1831, possibly of cholera, Bruno Bauer's official connections were drastically reduced. Bauer had very few powerful friends during the academic fallout after Hegel's death.

After the publication of his 'The Trumpet' (1841) he was considered as an important representative of the radicals.

The struggle with David Strauss and especially with the Prussian monarchy had set Bruno Bauer back quite a bit. This also affected Bauer's personality.

Bauer went underground and began to write Hegelian newspapers here and there. In this journey he met some socialists, including Karl Marx, his former student, and Marx' new friends, Friedrich Engels and Arnold Ruge. They were all left-wing radicals. Bauer was not a left-wing radical, but he was happy to be their leader if it could lead them back to a Hegelian understanding of the dialectic. Another member of those Young Hegelians, Max Stirner, became Bauer's lifelong friend. Stirner was no socialist, on the contrary, he was a radical egoist. Although Bauer was not a radical egoist, he preferred the writings of Stirner to the writings of Marx, Engels and Ruge.

Shortly after, Marx and Engels broke sharply with Bruno Bauer and attacked him specifically in a critique of one of his works, "On the Jewish Question" and in other books that were critical of various Young Hegelians including Bauer, The Holy Family, and The German Ideology.

Bruno Bauer met with Marx again in London in the mid-1850s, while visiting his exiled brother Edgar there. According to Marx's correspondence with Engels, Bauer presented him with a copy of Hegel's Science of Logic. Marx referred to this volume while completing his drafts of 'Capital'.

Bauer had already turned away from the socialism and communism of Marx and Engels, so he was immune to the barbs they wrote in The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company by his pupils, Marx and Engels. Nevertheless, he had fallen quite far - from a favorite son of Hegel himself down to an enemy of both the right-wing and the left-wing as well. He found very few friends in this intellectual position aside from Max Stirner. According to some sources he contemplated suicide. According to other sources, his enemies only wished that he contemplated suicide.

Suppressed and condemned by both the right-wing and the left-wing, the once-influential Bruno Bauer finally settled into his family's tobacco shop to earn his living, though he continued to write. He never married, but he wrote books for the rest of his life.