A Wealthy Young Man

In February 1808, Schopenhauer turned twenty-one, the age of majority. Later that year, he moved away from his family, from Weimar in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, where his mother and sister lived, to Göttingen in the short-lived Kingdom of Westphalia, where he would begin his studies at the venerable university. In the early spring of 1808, he also received his part of his father’s inheritance, a third of the remaining funds and assets from Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, although his mother would have preferred to keep managing it on his behalf.¹ At the age of twenty-one, Schopenhauer was given about 19,000 taler. With an annual return rate of about 5 percent, he could expect to receive about 950 taler per year in interest.

Schopenhauer’s yearly income from interest was a good amount of money at the time. Few inhabitants in the Duchy earned as much in the first decades of the nineteenth century. We can see this by looking at figures in his family’s Weimar circle of academics and men of letters. The philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer (1774–1845), an assistant to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and a frequent guest in Johanna Schopenhauer’s home, earned an annual salary of 600 taler as a professor at the Weimar gymnasium in 1812.² Christian August Vulpius (1762–1827), a prolific author of now-forgotten dramas and novels, the brother of Goethe’s wife, and a peripheral figure in the milieu of Schopenhauer’s mother, earned 200 taler for his work as a librarian. In 1810, Goethe argued for a salary raise for Vulpius to 460 taler.³ A professor at the university of nearby Jena would also earn less than what Schopenhauer earned from interest on his inheritance.⁴

The small group of Weimar luminaries who sometimes made appearances in Johanna Schopenhauer’s salon and met with the young Schopenhauer typically did earn more. Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), an important author and publisher of the German Enlightenment and a former teacher of the ruler, Duke Carl August, received a pension of around 1,000 taler from the court.⁵ In 1815, one source informs us, Goethe himself earned 1,800 taler a year at the Weimar court,⁶ but from 1820 on, another source claims, he was paid 3,100 taler.⁷ In 1820, however, only around 2 percent of the population of Weimar, with about 9,000 inhabitants, enjoyed more than an annual income of 1,000 taler,⁸ and this exclusive group consisted mostly of courtiers, ministers, high civil servants, and a few bankers.⁹ Another 7 percent of the residents earned about 400 to 1,000 taler.¹⁰ The young Schopenhauer thus belonged in the upper region of this well-to-do stratum. As a comparison, a lowly clerk, such as a copyist in a municipal office, might earn 50 taler annually,¹¹ and a servant in a professor’s home could earn less than that, around 40 taler.¹² A textile worker involved in sock production in Apolda, a village close to Weimar, would earn about the same.¹³

Schopenhauer possessed the funds to cover his costs and live well, and despite a few financial scares throughout his life, he was never in acute need.¹⁴ The annual funds from interest consistently placed him somewhere in the top 5 percent of the population – in his mother’s Weimar, in Berlin as a student and aspiring academic, and later in Frankfurt, where he lived for decades toward the end of his life.¹⁵ In Berlin in the 1820s, he rented an apartment for 13 talers every month, a sum he reliably and punctually paid;¹⁶ about 15 percent of his annual income seems to have gone to housing.

Written by sympathetic readers and followers of Schopenhauer, the first biographies provided glimpses of the philosopher’s finances and habits that quickly gave him the reputation of being a “rentier” and nothing much beyond that.¹⁷ In a long 1862 review of the first biography, the liberal author, journalist, and editor Karl Gutzkow (1811–78) caustically presented Schopenhauer as someone who spent decades living off his inheritance, nervously did his utmost to protect it, and never submitted himself to the demands of honest work.¹⁸ Having read the biographer Wilhelm Gwinner’s early portrait of Schopenhauer, Gutzkow claimed that the philosopher’s creed of self-denial concealed a cozy and carefree existence in an elegant part of Frankfurt.¹⁹ Schopenhauer used to wake up between seven and eight in the morning, wash himself, have coffee and smoke his pipe, and then lie down on the sofa to read. After the morning reading, Schopenhauer would play the flute for some time and stroll over for lunch at Englischer Hof, a fine Frankfurt establishment, for a hearty meal and some light conversation. After having several courses, he would return to his apartment, drink more coffee, smoke his pipe again, and resume reading but choose lighter material. In the late afternoon, Schopenhauer would take a long walk around the city with his poodle, and, in the evening, attend a Beethoven concert, see a play, or perhaps go to a reading room to peruse the English newspaper the Times. The evening would end with a light meal, again at his favorite restaurant, along with half a bottle of wine. Around ten in the evening, he would go to bed. This was not a life of an Anchorite in the Egyptian desert, a Stylite in the Syrian desert, or any other recluse or hermit living in some catacomb, cave, or mountain.²⁰ Schopenhauer’s “theory of renunciation,” Gutzkow concluded, was merely a “false label.”²¹ Behind the philosophical validation of ascetic practices of self-mortification there was only the egoism typical of a wealthy man in a capitalist society.²²

The image of Schopenhauer as a comfortable rentier soon became well-established. Karl Kautsky claimed that Schopenhauer never acquired an understanding of the challenges of a professional career or even of adult life, since he became a rentier when he was “still almost a boy [fast noch ein Knabe].”²³ And Schopenhauer, Kautsky continued, was acutely aware of the fact that his existence depended on the “integrity and augmentation of his annuity [Unversehrtheit und Vermehrung seiner Rente].”²⁴ This commitment to financial independence was not in itself a problem. Great figures of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire and Lessing, had also striven for self-sufficiency, to avoid making compromises with feudal or courtly patrons. Yet Schopenhauer was not heroically fighting for his independence in a troubled world, Kautsky argued, but simply wished to maintain his distance from all social and interpersonal duties and enjoy the benefits of his modest but sufficient fortune; he remained a lifelong “egoistic eccentric.”²⁵ At least in middle and old age, Schopenhauer’s days went by at an unhurried pace, his existence unburdened by the responsibilities of a regular office job and his bachelor routines undisturbed by noisy children or demanding family members. Living neither in luxury nor in need but enjoying a bourgeois existence without any of its nuisances, he remained throughout his entire life a “little rentier” with a tenuous grasp on the social and political world of his time.²⁶

This chapter will discuss Schopenhauer’s political positions against the backdrop of his social background and financial situation. Schopenhauer’s view of society’s composition and dynamics, his conceptions of sovereignty and statehood, and his rejections of the era’s ideologies and movements are more easily grasped when informed by a sense of his social location and biographical trajectory. Schopenhauer was indeed an independently wealthy gentleman, someone who sustained himself by returns on his inherited capital, and his financial situation did matter. Yet the image of the philosopher’s class background and later societal position must be fleshed out to provide more context for his critical attitude to the dominant political ideas of his own time. He came from a historically successful and cultured merchant family but wanted to study at the university and thereby qualify for a different type of career. He tried, in effect, to move from the commercially oriented and propertied bourgeoisie, or Wirtschaftsbürgertum, a group to which his father proudly belonged, to the educated and credentialed, often state-oriented Bildungsbürgertum in the professions, academia, and the civil service.²⁷ However, his intended transition from one bourgeois milieu to another remained incomplete, as his studies in philosophy never led to a position at the university, nor to any other career, for instance, as a state-employed administrator or as an author or journalist. Suspended between his own family’s long traditions of business and the guild-like stratum of academic professionals, he fell back on his inheritance. He was never seriously threatened by the prospect of poverty or downward mobility but remained shut out from a conventional bourgeois existence.

Even this quick sketch of Schopenhauer’s predicament can indicate how he came to relate to the politics of his era. Brought up as a son of the patrician bourgeoisie and then menaced by any social turbulence that would affect the stability of his finances, Schopenhauer rejected radical progressives as dangerous demagogues. Any kind of plebeian movement or socialism was anathema to him. Yet as the legatee of a self-confident merchant class, he was also distant from the still-significant nobility in Germany, and never engaged in any traditional conservative apologetics. He remained a modern liberal as opposed to a reactionary in the sense that he supported a centralized state presiding over a society of uniform and legally equal individuals – a sharp contrast to a feudally stratified and polycentric social whole with noblemen as local patrimonial lords.²⁸ He did have a lot of appreciation for businessmen and cherished his father’s values. Focused on appropriating and reshaping the dominant philosophy of his time and gaining recognition in academic milieus, however, he never developed an extensive analysis or defense of commercial life and its benefits. He never became, in other words, an effective mouthpiece of his father’s class. Failing to secure a university position or enter a profession, and therefore effectively barred from full inclusion in the circles of the Bildungsbürgertum trained at state-funded German universities, he also never adopted the celebratory attitude to the state that was common in educated circles in German lands. Rather than see the state as a point of identification, a supreme embodiment and organ of community, and a vehicle of a shared spiritual or ethical mission,²⁹ Schopenhauer understood it pragmatically as a device to protect the material interests of individuals. Looking at his whole career, or rather non-career, the sparse character of his political thinking seems correlated with his peculiar in-between position – he abandoned his parents’ world but never quite found a place in another social context, and his allegiances and interests were not shaped by any of his era’s dominant professional and ideological communities. He remained deeply influenced by his bourgeois background but never settled in another milieu and never fully adopted a different set of values.

The Material Basis of an Intellectual Life: Businessman, Author, Academic, Rentier

Growing up among well-to-do merchants, Schopenhauer was supposed to follow in his father’s footsteps. After the family’s return from a two-year European tour in 1804, Heinrich Floris placed his then teenage son in a sequence of apprenticeships in trading offices in Danzig and in Hamburg.³⁰ But the young Schopenhauer was bored, even felt oppressed by his practical training, and tried to find small ways to resist or evade his tasks. He smuggled books into the office to read at the desk where he was supposed to compose letters to business associates.³¹ In an 1819 vita, he even called himself the worst business apprentice of all time.³² Throughout the two-and-a-half-year stint as a businessman in training, he yearned for intellectual stimulation. Reflecting on this dominant trait of “intellectuality [Intellectualität]” in private notes from the early 1830s, Schopenhauer stated that he was from the very beginning destined for a life in pursuit of knowledge and understanding; he wished to enjoy his “world of thoughts [Gedankenwelt]” rather than the pleasures of material comfort and sociable company or, one could add, the excitements of successful deals and smart investments.³³ His life goal was to realize the potential of his mental gifts and share his finest achievements with all of humankind – to be recognized and celebrated for the greatness of his mind.³⁴

Yet such an “intellectual life [intellectuelles Leben]” must still be supported.³⁵ In his own familial and social environment of his youth, Schopenhauer found a few models for how to secure a material foundation for the life of the intellect. To be sure, his businessman father simply ruled out the option of an intellectual life. To support himself adequately and avoid poverty, the son would have to follow the family tradition and work in business, despite the intellectual gifts and aspirations of which the father was not ignorant. But his mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, embodied an alternative: after her spouse’s death, she broke with family conventions, left the merchant environment, and used her inheritance to host a regular salon in the culturally illustrious Weimar. Yet she eventually found herself in a precarious financial situation, and in some way came to exemplify the downward mobility that Schopenhauer’s father predicted and feared. To gain an income beyond her vanishing inheritance, she then became an independent author writing for the growing book market, with literature as a (nonreliable) source of income. Finally, Schopenhauer’s own model of an adequately funded intellectual life was steady university employment: becoming a qualified academic with a professorship would be a way to turn philosophical thinking into a salaried profession. Yet as Schopenhauer would come to realize, the university world attracted too many hopeful competitors and demanded too many compromises: it offered a secure financial position for a small group only, Schopenhauer not among them, and obliged the lucky few to think and teach in line with state policy.

For the mature, middle-aged Schopenhauer looking back at this biography and education, each of these models seemed flawed and unsatisfying. His father’s pragmatic vision for his future was understandable, but it would have kept him in an environment for which he was completely unsuited. His mother’s life choices seemed increasingly irresponsible and risky. And the world of the university appeared corrupt, since its promise of a securely funded intellectual existence involved the debasing experience of state service along with lifelong self-censorship. From around 1803 to about 1833, from his early teenage years to his early forties, Schopenhauer nonetheless sought to find ways to live according to these contrasting ideals. He was for briefer or longer periods a merchant in training, an aspiring man of letters, and an applicant for university positions. His eventual solution – to become a philosophizing rentier – did not perfectly follow any of the established scripts. He cherished the memory of his businessman father but clearly departed from his father’s wishes; he did follow his mother’s example up to a point but distanced himself from her way of life; and the university world became a frequent target of his caustic criticism. His rentier existence was a kind of retreat position, the option that remained when the others had been tried and exhausted.

Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer wanted his son to be well-educated, but for a specific purpose, namely, that of continuing the family tradition of business, first established by Arthur Schopenhauer’s great-grandfather almost a century before Arthur’s birth.³⁶ Business required a great deal of training and experience. School-aged Schopenhauer learned modern languages such as English and French for international commerce, practiced a sober and legible handwriting for business communication, was trained in vital skills such as accounting, and was taught to comply with the pietist-tinged ethics that was transmitted to many merchants’ sons in his milieu. For these purposes, Schopenhauer’s parents enrolled him in a private school in Hamburg (in 1799) that was known for educating the sons of the port city’s bourgeoisie, but they also sent him to live with a business family in France (in 1797) and to school in England (in 1803), and even allowed him to join them on a grand European tour (1803–4). For a merchant family in a Hanseatic city, London was more important than Vienna or even Berlin.³⁷ This expansive early education was crowned by multiyear apprenticeships with well-established businesspeople in two cities (starting in 1805), the final step of preparation before joining the family business.³⁸ Schopenhauer’s education was broad and cosmopolitan but also focused on practical utility.

Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer was neither uncultured nor anti-intellectual. A supporter of republican constitutions and an avid Anglophile, he read Rousseau and Voltaire and followed international news through the Times.³⁹ Schopenhauer was brought up to achieve a bourgeois ideal of worldliness and versatility, which included an appreciation for art.⁴⁰ Throughout his youth, he would practice riding, fencing, and drawing, and he would go to the theater and visit museums. Heinrich Floris also supported his son’s flute playing.⁴¹ Yet it was clear that Schopenhauer was not meant to lose himself entirely in a world of elegance and artistry. The goal was instead always to prepare him for a life as a respected member of a port city business elite, someone who would have the sensibility and of course the means to patronize the arts but would not actually practice them himself.⁴² In his last letters to his son in the fall of 1804, Heinrich Floris promised he would pay for riding lessons and a new flute yet added sternly that Arthur must practice his handwriting and his posture at the writing desk in the trading office, because a businessman cannot live from “dancing and riding.”⁴³ The musicianship, the sophisticated skills, and the appreciation for art were meant to contribute to a rounded personality, not to serve as a source of income.⁴⁴

Schopenhauer did not resent his father for his concern with the financial future. His father, Schopenhauer wrote, never coerced him into a career as a merchant, and even after the unexpected death of Heinrich Floris in 1805, the desperately bored but dutiful son continued to apprentice with a firm in Hamburg.⁴⁵ Schopenhauer also retained a lifelong appreciation and respect for the business world. He had none of the snobbish attitude to mere traders and dealers that was prevalent among the university-trained representatives of the ideal of Bildung,⁴⁶ and in fact liked to subvert the hierarchy of status. In Parerga and Paralipomena, he exclaimed that all the “knights, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests” and even philosophers supposedly committed to ideals of justice, public welfare, religious piety, or truth only wear masks under which they hide their moneymaking ambitions (PP II: 192). Businesspeople, by contrast, do not participate in the masquerade of a fraudulent civilization, since they conduct transactions for a living and acknowledge their focus on profit; they go about their lives “unmasked” (PP II: 192). Used to years and even decades of neglect, Schopenhauer was also proud to learn in 1853 that his philosophy had set foot in England and been discussed in the English “commercial and industrial weekly” the Economist.⁴⁷ In a letter to his prolific disciple Julius Frauenstädt, however, Schopenhauer neglected to mention that the Economist article reported only that his philosophy was “not worth much notice” and would not “have much effect” outside Germany, where he also was “not popular.”⁴⁸ In its breezy but underinformed summary of his works, the weekly – at once a commercial times, banker’s gazette, and railway monitor – claimed anachronistically that Schopenhauer was a metaphysical follower of Charles Darwin (1809–82), but that neither of them offered “well-founded” theories.⁴⁹

For all his appreciation of his father’s world, however, Schopenhauer clearly did not honor his father’s wishes. In an 1821 draft of a dedication written to his father’s memory, he praised his father’s bourgeois thrift and concern for the future, which had left enough savings for him to pursue a life of philosophical contemplation.⁵⁰ Schopenhauer even celebrated his father for being a “proud republican” who would never have wanted him to depend on government institutions and ministerial favor for his sustenance.⁵¹ He understood that he enjoyed the fruits of his father’s business activities and even was the direct beneficiary of his political commitment to bourgeois autonomy, but he still thought that a life of business was a soul-destroying imposition on his precious mind and that actual republicanism was too anarchic, volatile, and taxing for a quiet and peaceful philosophical life.⁵² He was eternally grateful for his inheritance but did not want to follow his father’s path or uphold his political values.⁵³ The dedication to his father was ultimately a paean to the mechanism of inheritance itself rather than an endorsement of the spirit of free commerce and political liberty. Schopenhauer, one could say, appreciated the trust fund more than the republican spirit of independence that had inspired the father to establish it.

If Schopenhauer departed from his father’s plans for his future, it was his mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, who first encouraged him to conclude the merchant apprenticeship and prepare for university studies. More broadly, it was she who effectively showed him how to deploy the family fortune for other ends. As Schopenhauer’s German biographer Rüdiger Safranski points out, Johanna liberated her son from a lifetime of tedious office work by liquidating her deceased husband’s company in 1806.⁵⁴ Without a family business to take over, Schopenhauer was free to pursue other options. About half a year after the liquidation, he could, with his mother’s blessing, begin to work through the gymnasium curriculum for the purpose of obtaining a qualifying diploma, an Abitur, something only a few thousand pupils did annually in the first decades of the nineteenth century.⁵⁵ Schopenhauer commenced gymnasium studies in the summer of 1807 in Gotha, a town close to his mother’s new home in Weimar.

Even though his mother released him from the family tradition and his place at the business office “writing desk”⁵⁶ and showed how the funds generated through commerce could be spent in the pursuit of intellectual and cultural distinction,⁵⁷ Schopenhauer never viewed her as an inspiration. He refused to acknowledge her liberating interventions partly because he found her profligate, and unable to make prudent investments. Mother and son even quarreled openly over money. She wished to keep control over his inheritance and he criticized her spending patterns and way of living. Schopenhauer’s first biographer, Wilhelm Gwinner, claims, perhaps out of prejudice, that the widow Johanna Schopenhauer did not sufficiently reduce her costs after her husband’s passing: while in Weimar, she kept two servants at home, purchased art and expensive dresses, went on vacations, and even had an elegant carriage for personal use.⁵⁸

Over time, Johanna’s investments would prove risky. After an 1819 bankruptcy with the Danzig firm of A. L. Muhl, Johanna and Adele Schopenhauer lost 70 percent of the capital, and the annuity for the two of them together dropped to 300 taler.⁵⁹ Schopenhauer, by contrast, had a more diversified portfolio, with less than a third of his capital managed by Muhl. He also fought harder to retrieve the complete funds from the supposedly insolvent banker; once others affected by the firm’s downfall had forgone large portions of their capital, he managed to retrieve all of his.⁶⁰ After 1819, Johanna Schopenhauer was forced to lived more modestly, and in 1829, she moved from Weimar to spend winters in Bonn and summers in Unkel, a village south of Bonn.⁶¹ Schopenhauer had little sympathy for his mother in her period of financial stress. The problem was not that she had somehow betrayed her husband’s legacy by dissolving his firm and relocating to another German land – Schopenhauer had benefited tremendously from her resolute transformation of their family life. But he objected sharply to her mismanagement of the remaining fortune. Schopenhauer thought it possible to live on an inheritance for an entire life, but then only by means of lifelong frugality. Above all, it was important for him not to marry, since a union with a woman would mean, in Schopenhauer’s misogynistic understanding, that around half of the annual income might very well go to “fashion retailers, tailors, and milliners [Modehändler, Schneider und Putzmacherinnen].”⁶² “The risk of living without work on a small fortune,” he wrote in his 1831 notebook, “can only be done in celibacy.”⁶³

In his acid public writings, Schopenhauer generalized his experiences and proclaimed that women should never be granted control over finances. Property must be passed on from men to sons, he maintained, and women must forever be prevented from having access to capital because of the supposed wastefulness of their gender (PP II: 560). Such constraints on the female right to inheritance were necessary even for the sake of women, Schopenhauer claimed, and the solution was to give wives and daughters annual pensions rather than direct financial responsibility. In a bizarre sketch of recent European history, he even claimed that the French Revolution, and with it all the tumult of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, was caused by the corruption of the French court under Louis XIII, which in turn could be traced back to the wasteful spending that took place under the “ever-increasing influence” of courtly women (PP II: 561). In Schopenhauer’s peculiar conception of wastefulness as a major historical force, all the chaotic transformations and political struggles of his lifetime were rooted in female extravagance. In essence, he believed that only men were entitled to full social, financial, and legal participation in society.⁶⁴

By departing from the family tradition, Johanna Schopenhauer was a model for her son, although a flawed one, and one he refused to acknowledge. In addition, her example also pointed to a potential source of income, namely, writing for a growing literary market. Johanna Schopenhauer had started a modest writing career in 1810, a few years after settling in Weimar, and she continued to write stories and publish her travel diaries over the next few years. Yet she published materials for very little compensation and was still primarily a high-bourgeois widow hosting a salon who wrote to enhance her local cultural profile. In 1817, however, she turned to her publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus (1772–1823), asking for a higher honorarium for her future manuscripts. Her writing had improved, she said, and her literary production was no longer merely a means to delight her circle of sociability. Instead, it was an independent, time-consuming activity that warranted some compensation; she would submit a manuscript for two Louis d’or (about 13 talers) per sixteen pages.⁶⁵ With a manuscript of at least 250 pages, she would then earn over 200 talers for the text.

In the following years, Brockhaus published her account of her trip to the Rhine, a brief autobiography in a series on “contemporaries,” and her first major novel, Gabriele.⁶⁶ In the years after her banker’s bankruptcy, Johanna Schopenhauer even entertained a career in journalism with plans to edit a women’s literary journal, a job for which she wanted to receive a steady honorarium. In a letter to the potential financier, she wrote: “You give the money to this enterprise. I give my name, my talent, my diligence, and my time, also partly my freedom.”⁶⁷ Even if this plan never came to fruition, need compelled Johanna Schopenhauer to assume the role of a professional author. In her letters, she discussed titles and manuscript deadlines,⁶⁸ negotiated payments, encouraged critics to highlight her recently published texts,⁶⁹ and eventually experienced the publication of her twenty-four-volume collected works; they came out in 1830–1.⁷⁰ Like a seasoned author, she refused to read reviews and cared only about the publisher’s demand for her work; they were, she said, the more reliable “thermometer.”⁷¹

Embarking on a serious literary career in her late forties and early fifties, Johanna Schopenhauer embodied an increasingly common type of author, one who wrote not to display the qualifications and talents required for courtly or administrative employment but to earn a living from sales in the expanding book market. She chose to produce in popular genres – travel writing and romantic novels – which promised a broad readership;⁷² thanks to the “noble tone” of her novels about women, one commentator writes, she was the “favorite author of the upper ten thousands.”⁷³ In many ways, Johanna Schopenhauer’s life coincided with a dramatic transformation of the book market, enabled by higher levels of literacy, an increasingly fast-paced book production process, and the legal codification of author’s rights. From the year of her birth (1766) to the year of relocation to Weimar (1806), the number of published German-speaking writers registered in a dictionary of authors rose from about 3,000 to 11,000,⁷⁴ and by the time her collected works began to reach the public, in 1830, the number of titles published yearly had nearly doubled since the year 1800, from 4,000 to well over 7,000.⁷⁵ Of course, only a tiny number of the 10,000 writers in German lands lived exclusively on their production, but instead relied on some other employment, such as a position as a professor or an administrator. And Johanna Schopenhauer’s own income from writing did not compensate fully for the 1819 loss of her capital. According to Wilhelm Gwinner, her honoraria supported a decent living, though it was one very far from the more luxurious years as a wife in Hamburg and a widow in her first decade and a half in Weimar.⁷⁶

Schopenhauer was obviously aware of his mother’s writing career. In his 1819 vita, he introduced Johanna Schopenhauer as a figure who was “well known” because of her series of writings.⁷⁷ Unsurprisingly, he did not view her market-oriented authorship as a model for how to support an intellectual life. An anecdote illustrates how mother and son viewed each other’s ambitions and strategies with skepticism bordering on contempt. When Arthur Schopenhauer showed his mother his 1813 dissertation, she wondered whether it might be something for “pharmacists,” like a dull technical treatise for a niche audience.⁷⁸ He then retorted, with typical bluster, that people would read his works when one could barely find copies of her surviving writings even in a “junk room.”⁷⁹ To this, she replied that, at that distant time in the future, his writings would still be available since no copies would ever sell. Rather than the mother and son inspiring each other, Arthur and Johanna Schopenhauer enacted a conventional status conflict between popular and academic authors, with one betting on reaching a large audience in the contemporary moment, the other on values that endure over time.

Despite his dismissive attitude to Johanna Schopenhauer’s role in the market for popular books, however, Schopenhauer ended up following her in an indirect way. Even though he was an avid newspaper reader and a regular visitor to a Frankfurt reading room, and even though anecdotes and incidents reported in the Times and other papers frequently found a place in his philosophical arguments, Schopenhauer himself never ventured to make a living as a commentator or critic writing for the press. He was a consumer of journalism but never wrote for periodicals. His works from 1818 to 1840 mostly conformed to long-established academic or philosophical genres such as the dissertation, the essay submitted to a prize competition announced by an academy, or the ambitious philosophical magnum opus. Yet his works were accessible for a philosopher, and he proudly drew attention to it. Writing in English to a potential English translator of his work on color theory, he assured his interlocutor that he had a “very perspicuous and easy” style.⁸⁰ When Schopenhauer did become more famous, in the 1850s, it was after the publication of his more digestible, even practically oriented writing collected in Parerga and Paralipomena. Its essays, dialogues, and fables recalled the pedagogical genre repertoire of Enlightenment writers such as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99), Christian Garve (1742–98), and Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715–69) and were deliberately aimed at a more general readership.⁸¹ In a letter to the publisher, Schopenhauer himself described his writings as a philosophy “for the world.”⁸²

Schopenhauer also first gained appreciation among laypeople rather than academic specialists. The very early reception history was almost dominated by jurists dabbling in philosophy, such as the Magdeburg court judge Friedrich Dorguth (1776–1854), the Mainz lawyer Johann August Becker (1803–81), and the Munich lawyer Adam von Doß (1820–73). The early twentieth-century Schopenhauer follower Hans Zint’s (1882–1945) list of people who belonged to the first generations of Schopenhauer fans likewise points to his broad, nonacademic appeal. Without mentioning names but instead focusing on professions and places, Zint points to a pastor from Nassau, a bank clerk from Frankfurt, a Bavarian judge, a Russian earl, a Saxon jurist, a Dutch flower grower, an Austrian officer, a Silesian country gentleman, an industrialist from the Rhineland, a Berliner doctor, and others.⁸³ The philosopher Rudolf Haym (1821–1901) made similar observations about Schopenhauer’s appeal as early as 1864. In Haym’s critical appraisal of Schopenhauer’s work, he pointed out that the philosopher’s lucid style and unsparing look at reality attracted people of practical experience and urbane polish in the “sophisticated circles of society,”⁸⁴ such as officers and wealthy landowners.⁸⁵ With his accessible writing, pragmatic counsels, and return to classical philosophical questions about the enigma of existence and value of life,⁸⁶ Schopenhauer gained the attention of educated nonspecialists. All this suggests that a more popular publishing strategy earlier in life would perhaps not have been completely impossible. In his lifetime, however, he made next to no money on his books.

Schopenhauer did not sacrifice his intellectual interests for a safely prosperous material existence, as his father wished. Instead, he followed his mother’s example of using the fortune for the purpose of a life beyond business, with the difference that he was nervously cautious so as not to risk the capital or become dependent on the publishing industry for income. Yet Schopenhauer did also very seriously and for a long time consider another path, untried by his parents, namely, a university career. From the end of the 1810s to the end of the 1820s, he would repeatedly ask about open positions at universities in Berlin, Gießen, Jena, Würzburg, and Heidelberg.⁸⁷ Even though he assured the recipients of his application letters that he did not necessarily need a university position to support himself,⁸⁸ he nonetheless viewed the university as a source of future income. The state-funded research university represented the opportunity to draw a salary from teaching and publishing in philosophy, and hence held out the promise of a dependable material base for an intellectual life.

That Schopenhauer viewed the university as a possible source of financial stability, or at least a means to gain supplementary income, is revealed by the timing of his applications.⁸⁹ It was after the news of the collapse of Muhl’s banking house reached him in the summer of 1819 that he started his campaign to qualify as a university lecturer and explored available opportunities in missives to professors and acquaintances from his student years.⁹⁰ The search for a teaching position was occasioned by what Wilhelm Gwinner calls his struggle for the “endangered patrimony.”⁹¹ Schopenhauer himself admitted as much. In 1819 letters to the Berlin professor of zoology Martin Heinrich Lichtenstein (1780–1857), with whom he had taken several courses on topics such as ornithology in 1811 and 1812,⁹² he asked whether he might be welcomed as a lecturer at the university. Schopenhauer did also mention to Lichtenstein that the Danzig bankruptcy had reduced his capital so that he would have to adjust his way of living; he still had funds for the “absolute necessities” but could perhaps no longer live “most comfortably.”⁹³ Since Lichtenstein’s response about opportunities in Berlin seemed more optimistic than the answers from his old student acquaintance, the theologian Ernst Anton Lewald (1790–1848) in Heidelberg, or his former Göttingen professor, the famous naturalist and zoologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), Schopenhauer then focused on Berlin.

While Schopenhauer felt that he had achieved the principal purpose of his life with the publication of The World as Will and Representation in 1818, a university career was his attempt to gain an official position through which he could contribute to society and earn its respect. As a professor, he could achieve a “bourgeois existence” as a fully recognized member of the educated, professional circles.⁹⁴ As he declared in a letter to Blumenbach, he considered “teaching and lecturing” at an institution of higher learning to be the only way for him to step into a “practical life.”⁹⁵ Yet he clearly wanted to take this step for more than reputational reasons. In fiercely combative letters addressed to the bankrupt banker Muhl, Schopenhauer stated that he fought so insistently to retrieve his capital because his very freedom and most importantly his “scholarly leisure” desperately depended on it.⁹⁶ Muhl’s delayed actions alone, he added, had forced him to return to the university to see if his lectures could find an audience and thus generate funds. Facing the prospect of financial loss, he knew he had to convert his knowledge into a “commodity.”⁹⁷ The university was for him the arena of social prestige but also the only institution in which he could “do business” with his intellectual gifts.⁹⁸

Schopenhauer spent years on the lookout for academic appointment, but with the move to Frankfurt in 1833, the long quest for a university position came to an end. Frankfurt was a bourgeois city of commerce and politics, the home of trade fairs and the seat of the permanent congress of the German Bund, the confederation of thirty-nine sovereign, German-speaking states that was founded in 1815.⁹⁹ It was, in other words, not a university town. Schopenhauer’s relocation to Frankfurt was, then, not a move in a career strategy; he was fleeing Berlin for a less cholera-infested city. Even before that move, however, Schopenhauer had come to see his bleak prospects in academia and almost admitted defeat. In a private note from the early 1820s, he described himself as a lecturer who would not obtain a professorship and as a teacher without any students in the seats.¹⁰⁰ After the inquiries in Würzburg in the late 1820s, he made few other attempts to gain a position – by that time, he was already well in his forties.

Shut out from a career at the university, Schopenhauer’s drawn-out attempt to establish his own professional existence eventually came to an end. In the 1830s, he then began to turn his critical energies against university-based philosophy and the very idea of a society maintaining salaried philosophical professionals. The preface to his 1836 book On Will in Nature, his first publication after seventeen years of silence, featured a public attack on academic philosophy in general and Hegel in particular. Schopenhauer’s diatribes against Hegelian obfuscations are legendary; the anti-Hegelian polemic became a regular element in his prefatory remarks to nearly all his new and revised writings in the second half of his life.¹⁰¹ Behind the attacks on Hegelian gibberish, however, one finds a reckoning with an educational system in which various factors, such as state control over professorial appointments, internal academic gatekeeping, and coteries of sly mediocrities, conspired to turn academia into a conformist institution no longer organized to promote the discovery and dissemination of truth. In Schopenhauer’s analysis, German academic philosophers who tried to secure stable salaries all too eagerly agreed to teach government-friendly philosophy to generations of future professionals and thereby shore up social support for the state. There was nothing inherently wrong with seeking to make a living, and Schopenhauer understood the state’s interest in maintaining control over the social transmission of ideas to younger generations. Yet the economic incentives of aspiring academics combined with the state’s control over permissible doctrines corrupted the exploration of truth. Already in 1831, Schopenhauer noted privately that truth inevitably suffered when philosophers in search of professorships worked for a state committed to the doctrines of the prevailing church.¹⁰² In 1836, Schopenhauer even pathetically claimed that the sacred ground of philosophy must be cleansed of such covert “tradespeople” just as Jesus had chased away the sellers and moneychangers from the holy temple (WN: 328).

Schopenhauer himself had turned to the university in search of supplementary economic support for an “intellectual life,” but, rebuffed many times over for more than a decade, he began to claim that independently wealthy individuals were the most reliable guardians of philosophy’s quest for truth. By the 1830s, his defiant identity as a great philosopher in the tradition of Plato and Kant was fused in his mind with a crucial enabling condition, namely, his existence as the recipient of a robust “paternal inheritance [väterlichen Erbtheils].”¹⁰³ Truth, he suggested in the lightly allegorical final paragraph to his 1836 introduction to On Will in Nature, should not have to ask permission to be true, and, by implication, it was best served by those who did not depend on the endorsements of state ministers, the recommendations of established professors, and the support of groups of peers and publishers. The mature Schopenhauer concluded that independent wealth was a necessary foundation for fearless intellectual exploration. In other words, he turned his own background and trajectory into the precondition of genuine truth-telling.

In line with his view of the importance of financial independence, Schopenhauer also dismissed the talented young men from very modest backgrounds who went into philosophy in his own era, since they had typically first been forced to take positions as private teachers in well-to-do families and then risen in the corrupt university system. This was the path of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), for example, who was the son of a poor ribbon weaver and worked as a household tutor for almost a decade.¹⁰⁴ Schopenhauer snidely remarked that long periods of submissive service for a wealthy family headed by a patriarch evidently provided the very best “training ground” for a life as a professional philosopher in Germany (PP I: 173). By contrast, prudently managed capital supported an independent life, which was a necessity for anyone devoted to genuine philosophical thought. The “objective freedom of the genius,” Schopenhauer noted in a manuscript book already in 1821, “depends on inherited wealth,” combined of course with “moderate wishes.”¹⁰⁵ Later commentators have not infrequently granted that he was right. In an overview of German philosophy from 1760 to 1860, Terry Pinkard claims that Schopenhauer’s economic “independence from academic life” allowed him to preserve his idiosyncratic philosophical direction.¹⁰⁶ (In his own era, however, a critic such as Rudolf Haym argued that an actual university career and duties of teaching in the discipline would have exposed Schopenhauer more methodically and thoroughly to critical objections and improved his philosophy.¹⁰⁷)

Karl Kautsky was right to claim that Schopenhauer became a rentier at a young age, in 1808. Yet Schopenhauer did not necessarily identify his life purpose as a philosopher with this socioeconomic location until a little later in life, when the varieties of a “practical life” that he could seriously consider began to look increasingly remote. His final position, he acknowledged at least implicitly, was a little desolate. He never ran an enterprise, never assumed an official position in government or built a professional identity, never bought a stately home, and never started a family. He never achieved the ideal picture of a bourgeois man that he so easily could portray in his writing, namely, a “reasonable, mentally engaged merchant who … carefully executes well considered plans, establishes a firm, provides for his wife, children and descendants, and also participates actively in the life of the community” (PP II: 534). In his private notes, he defiantly claimed that his life should not be judged by the standards of philistines who only recognized conventional types of societal success and material achievements. Given his grandiose philosophical mission, it mattered little that he lacked the traditional elements of a respectable life, such as an official position, a house, or a family.¹⁰⁸ But even though he defended his intellectual life and considered his personal situation a mere vehicle of his great philosophical contribution to humankind, he had not necessarily planned to end up in an isolated position, living like a monk but one without the institutional and social context of a monastery.¹⁰⁹ Due to the many delays and obstacles that obstructed his journey from the merchant class to the class of the state-educated and state-employed professionals, from the Wirtschaftsbürgertum focused on the accumulation of wealth to the Bildungsbürgertum focused on academic credentials and cultural prestige, Schopenhauer ended up in a lifelong limbo. And, after some time, he began more and more aggressively to advance this peculiar situation as a precondition of truth-telling. Schopenhauer was indeed financially independent, and certainly a blunt, polemical spokesperson for his own philosophical system, but his rentier position also meant that he remained disconnected from the professional world and, as we shall see, distant from its political fashions and ideologies.

Schopenhauer as a Member of the Bourgeoisie

Schopenhauer deemed his father’s world of commerce unengaging, his mother’s world of cultured sociability frivolous, and the world of the university conformist and corrupt. He found himself suspended in between elite groups in society, and in some ways lacking a socially legible identity. The happiness of the “normal human being,” Schopenhauer wrote in his private notes, consists in the familiar rhythm of “work and play,” the work week and the weekend.¹¹⁰ Without a profession or job and committed only to his thought, his own time was never quite organized in that way; it knew no special days of rest. His life, Schopenhauer continued, was necessarily a monodrama, a play for one person only, without the interruptions, surprises, and confusions of a communal setting. Yet Schopenhauer was deeply shaped by his socialization and membership in the German Bürgertum, even though he did not quite live up to its standards of success and respectability. As an inhabitant in the German trade hub Frankfurt, he maintained a regular schedule, dined at decent establishments, frequented musical performances, was a regular in the reading room, and wore slightly old-fashioned clothing in an English style to signal his proud Anglophilia.¹¹¹ He was an eccentric outsider to contemporary observers, but he never assumed an outright bohemian lifestyle or engaged in a kind of performance of a fringe existence. His habitus was clearly that of the bourgeois man of his era, and he made a consistent effort to appear as a cultivated, urbane gentleman,¹¹² even though his clothing may have seemed out of date toward the end of his life.

While Schopenhauer felt that the life of business was unsuitable for him, he nonetheless held its practices and values in high regard. Likely informed by his own experience at home and in merchants’ offices, he claimed that businesspeople adhered to a distinct ethos. The “honour of businessmen,” he explained, had highly commendable features because the members of the class understand that mutual trust and confidence in each other’s adherence to obligations are indispensable pillars of all profitable exchange (BM: 184). Businessmen who breach contracts cannot survive, and good businesspeople are careful to maintain their reputations. Sincere intentions to fulfil all promises and honor all contracts, Schopenhauer noted, provide the very basis for “free intercourse” and good societal order (BM: 184). There is nothing wrong with conducting business with people, and business transactions are, Schopenhauer implied, a more universal mode of communication than philosophizing or socializing. Even people incapable of participating in a dialogue on philosophical matters or sustaining an interesting conversation at all, Schopenhauer remarked, could still be talked to in “matters of business” (PP II: 67).

In no way dismissive of his own social background, Schopenhauer also felt that businesspeople should be respected as members of society’s elite. In his late notes on jurisprudence and politics, Schopenhauer claimed that most people, the great “herd,” are in dire need of counseling and leadership (PP II: 223). This task of guidance falls upon “judges, rulers, military commanders, officials, priests, physicians, scholars,” and of course philosophers (PP II: 223). The list of positions and professions probably conformed to the picture of merit and prestige in the university-educated stratum of German lands. These communities, Schopenhauer continued, enjoy a greater overview of the “labyrinth of life” than most people and are thus equipped to advise and order others what to do (PP II: 223). For this, they should be well-compensated and liberated from cumbersome physical labor. Yet Schopenhauer added to this unabashed justification of elite status the note that businesspeople, specifically “wholesalers,” also belong to this privileged “class of leaders” by virtue of their ability to anticipate and satisfy the material needs of the great mass (PP II: 224). Raised among the commercially oriented, propertied bourgeoisie, the Besitzbürgertum, Schopenhauer included them in his enumeration of society’s highest ranks. He could even speak of an “aristocracy of money” and imagined that it associated well with the traditional “aristocracy of birth and rank” (PP I: 379).

More broadly, the concept “bürgerlich” carried positive connotations for Schopenhauer, and he connected it with a broad range of middle-class virtues crucial for success in the world of businesspeople and educated professionals. In Parerga and Paralipomena, he claimed that Robinson Crusoe was not quite a viable model for actual individuals. Since people are not “capable of much” on their own, they must learn to cooperate (PP I: 317). But to enter networks of exchange and mutual assistance, all human beings must prove themselves to be “useful members” of society and cultivate a credible reputation (PP I: 317). A good name or good standing in the “opinion of others,” in turn, depends on the display of a solid, honorable character, consisting of respect for the rights of others and the rule of law, especially the integrity of property or, more colloquially, “mine and thine” (PP I: 318).¹¹³ Equally important, Schopenhauer believed, were impeccable honesty and sincerity and the punctual and satisfying fulfilment of professional duties. These values – adherence to norms regarding property, honesty, professionality, and so on – were, Schopenhauer concluded, the components of “civic honor,” or bürgerliche Ehre, as well as “official honor,” or Amtsehre (PP I: 318–20). He also noted that the former kind of honor received its name from a class, namely, the “middle class” or Bürgerstande, although its application was universal (PP I: 318). A violation of civic honor such as theft or deception, Schopenhauer warned, could very well have lasting consequences, and a criminal or deceptive individual with a ruined name could easily become a “pariah for civil society his whole long life” (BM: 185). In passages such as these, Schopenhauer seems to spell out the prevailing values and attitudes of his own bourgeois background.

One can round out this portrait of Schopenhauer as a legatee of the bourgeoisie by pointing to his appreciation of thrift and skepticism of luxury, a conventional attitude in a long tradition of bourgeois self-help literature.¹¹⁴ In Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer even suggested rehabilitating the supposed vice of “miserliness” (PP II: 188). Using the format of a dialogue to explore the arguments for and against meanness, he contrasted the supposed vice of excessive thrift with that of “waste,” the sure source of impoverishment and in many cases even the root cause of criminality (PP II: 188). A philosophical dialogue typically does not end in an unambiguous conclusion, but it is safe to say that Schopenhauer’s contempt for wastefulness was a constant in his outlook. Like breaches of contract, pervasive extravagance had a destabilizing effect on society, as he explained in his discussion of women. “Existing assets,” he claimed in Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, should be regarded as a “bulwark” against evils and accidents, not as a permission to “procure the pleasures of the world” (PP I: 305). When he traced the sources of his own philosophy, Schopenhauer listed Kant, Plato, and the Sanskrit Upanishads as the most crucial texts, but when it came to advising people about what children should read, Schopenhauer suggested biographies rather than novels, and mentioned Benjamin Franklin’s (1706–90) Autobiography (PP I: 423), the classic early American statement on the virtues of industry and frugality.¹¹⁵ One of Franklin’s central mottos was “Waste nothing.”¹¹⁶ In his insistence on frugality, reliability, and integrity, Schopenhauer emerges as a figure steeped in the conventional bourgeois values of his own social background.

Schopenhauer’s Bourgeois Philosophy

Schopenhauer was a proud member of the bourgeoisie. A survey of his philosophical views of the social order also reveals a profound attachment to the traditional tenets of the European bourgeoisie as it existed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. One finds in Schopenhauer’s writings the following sequence of assumptions: First, the basic element of society is the self-interested individual. Second, labor on pieces of the world grants those individuals exclusive rights to the resulting objects for the satisfaction of their interests. Third, all individuals stand as legally uniform subjects under a centralized state constructed for the purpose of protecting the integrity of their lives and properties. Fourth, individuals can voluntarily contract for their mutual benefit, and their binding agreements constitute a key socio-moral institution in society. Fifth, the prudent management of one’s assets and especially fiscal restraint represent significant virtues. While Schopenhauer never articulated these ideas in one place, and while commentators have spotted inconsistencies among his beliefs, their presence in his work marks him as an exponent of a bourgeois worldview. Schopenhauer’s commitment to the social and political centrality of the individual, the sanctity of property and contract, and the significance of economic prudence provides a sharp contrast with those who adhere to conservative conceptions of a divinely anchored moral and legal order,¹¹⁷ an organic wholeness of communities, enduring hierarchical ties of obligation between lords and bondsmen, and estate-based privileges. For Schopenhauer, the social, economic, and political world consisted only of discrete, possessive, inherently egoistic individuals who made their property through their own industry, traded with one another, and crafted their legal order by means of contractual agreements.

Let us begin with Schopenhauer’s emphasis on individuals as separable, contoured beings. He is known for a metaphysics that stipulates that the world consists of one unitary will and that human individuals are metaphysically inessential figures appearing only in the domain of representation. For him, individuals are the “anguished products” of their “own epistemological making,”¹¹⁸ since it is perception that organizes the world by time, space, and causality and so fragments the unity of the will into a “multiplicity of individuals” (WWR I: 358). Yet, socially and politically, Schopenhauer was committed to a form of methodological individualism¹¹⁹ and denied that collectives of any kind – clans, estates, classes, nations – were ever more than mere aggregates of the individual subjects: “peoples only exist in abstraction; individuals are what is real” (PP I: 180). For Schopenhauer, the reality of the individual resides in the unity and temporal consistency afforded by a continuous and transparent self-relation. In the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer claimed that only individuals enjoy an “immediate unity of consciousness” and that members of a collective, however intimately unified in some social, cultural, or political sense, will remain opaque to one another, without unmediated access to each other’s cognitions and thoughts (WWR II: 459). Individuals are indivisible, communities are not. For rare moral geniuses such as saints, compassion subtended by philosophical insight into the unity of the will can wipe away the ostensibly solid reality of individual figures. Yet this metaphysical realization does not validate the social or political existence of supposed collective subjects. Schopenhauer thus combined metaphysical monism with a rigorous political individualism. And this individualism, one could add, would have been anathema to traditionalist conservatives who emphasized indissoluble family bonds, organic communities, and sacred hierarchies.

Since the individuals who appear in the realm of representation consist of a metaphysical will that is empirically fragmented but not weakened in its substance, scattered into separate entities but not in the least diluted, each individual desires and wills endlessly. The will exists undimmed in each person. At the same time, each cognizing individual understands itself as the self-evident and absolute “centre of the world” (WWR I: 358) and as the sole medium and bearer of conscious experience, whose annihilation would mean the “end of the world” (WWR I: 359). With its insatiable will and unrivaled focus on its own conscious experience, the individual subject naturally inclines toward egoism; it assumes that nothing could possibly be more important or more legitimate than its own continual satisfaction. The individual, Schopenhauer thought, wants to possess all things, dominate all things, and destroy any resistance in its path. Armed with this philosophical background picture, Schopenhauer then declared that human society is made up of ferociously egoistic individual subjects, hostile to all outside resistance. To him, society consisted of energetic atoms that were frequently on collision course with one another.

In Schopenhauer’s view, individual subjects also have rightful claims to pieces of the visible world, but only insofar as they work on matter outside them and expend their labor on the cultivation of land or fabrication of things. Throughout his writings on political and legal matters, Schopenhauer insisted that individuals enjoy a “natural right” of ownership (BM: 183) or a “morally grounded right to property” (WWR I: 363). This right, he argued, is anchored in the “work and labor” they have invested in some object outside them (BM: 184), or “solely and exclusively” in “the fact of working on something” (WWR I: 362). Following a bourgeois tradition of possessive individualism,¹²⁰ Schopenhauer assumed that individuals are the proprietors of their own bodies and capacities and that the application of “energy and labor” in the process of shaping objects makes those objects their exclusive property (WWR I: 362). To deprive others of things that they have made is to take away what truly belongs to them, namely, the force and energy of their bodies. In this context, Schopenhauer also rejected a rival account of the right to property, namely, the Kantian one based on occupation rather than labor. Mere occupation without expenditure of labor did not, Schopenhauer claimed, ground a right to property; it was rooted in human industry alone.

Committed to labor as the source of property claims, Schopenhauer nevertheless admitted that the rightfulness of claims to property was harder to discern in his own society, in which many people’s assets had been transferred to them by inheritance, marriage, or lottery, or gained “in the business of speculation” (BM: 184). Rather than dispute inheritance and other paths to ownership as relatively weak in a moral sense, he instead argued that a positive legal order was indispensable to the protection of property. This was especially true since the millions of egoistic individuals were prone to disregard rightful claims to property and steal from others in the absence of any deterrence. The fragility of property and individual life in a condition of mutual hostility among millions of egoists, Schopenhauer reasoned, means that self-interested individuals endowed with rational foresight are compelled to establish a state, since they apprehend that the costs of “states of anarchy” exceed the potential benefits (BM: 188). His derivation of property rights is therefore followed by an account of how self-interested individuals coordinate to construct a state with exclusive control over the means of coercion. Invoking a modern conceptualization of political society as something that is based on agreement among individuals, Schopenhauer saw positive law as a collective contrivance for the protection of property through the coercive suppression of natural antagonism. In line with a bourgeois tradition, he thus defined the state not as divinely authorized or as transcendent vis-à-vis the human community, but as a delimited institution with a service function toward an extant society.¹²¹ The state was simply the mechanism through which “egoism, armed with reason, tries to avoid its own negative consequences” (WWR I: 376).

Commentators have identified incoherencies in Schopenhauer’s transition from property rights to statehood. Placing him in intellectual history, one can say that Schopenhauer followed Locke (1632–1704) in claiming that property was fundamentally grounded in individual labor but turned to Hobbes as his most significant authority when he described how individuals construct a sovereign state. As the political theorist Herfried Münkler points out, the resulting combination is not entirely coherent, since Locke saw the state as an external guarantor of already extant property, whereas Hobbes viewed statehood as property’s condition of possibility.¹²² The tension seems not to have struck Schopenhauer, or perhaps not bothered him, and the philosophical inconsistency may still possess an ideological consistency. Schopenhauer preferred to establish property as a pre-social and pre-political right, existing prior to statehood, and yet the Hobbesian picture of a war of all against all, contained only by a centralized state, aligned with his dark vision of a humanity composed of aggressive egoists. He presented owners as entitled to their property, but also as continually menaced by the spectacle of rapacious others held in check only by a strong sovereign.

Leaning on his socialization and years of training in the merchant houses of Danzig and Hamburg, environments reputed to uphold high standards of business ethics,¹²³ Schopenhauer believed that the proper way for egoistic individuals to interact was to exchange promises with one another deliberately and formally, that is, to establish contracts. Even in a condition in which a metaphysical will had been shattered into millions of egoistic particles destined to antagonize each other, self-interested individuals could restore some workable measure of peace by voluntarily binding themselves to deliver services, goods, and payments to each other in a mutually beneficial way. In The World as Will and Representation, he spoke with some urgency and passion about the “moral legitimacy and validity of contracts” (WWR I: 364). Contractual agreements, Schopenhauer indicated, were more than an “arrangement of convenience” between profit-oriented individuals.¹²⁴ They were for him the crucial device with which individuals could control the always latent chaos of universal egoism and build, contract by contract, a more predictable human environment. Given the centrality of contract to civilized order, Schopenhauer denounced the “broken contract” as a particularly pernicious injustice and the most “perfect lie” (WWR I: 364). A lie is always an attempt to steer and dominate the will of another person, but in the case of broken contracts the lie dominates another person more comprehensively and deeply, since that person’s actions are initially shaped by a promise and an expectation set out in the contract. Such perfidy and betrayal provoke an especially “deep disgust,” Schopenhauer added, because treacherous people undermine everyone’s faith in contractual agreements and thereby do damage to the fragile social order (WWR I: 365). Without contracts, society descends into the chaos of desperate mutual aggression.

With this view of freely contracting individuals, Schopenhauer emerges as a legatee of a bourgeois tradition that replaced a feudal ethos of personalized obligation with a “morality of contractual fidelity” among enterprising people able to enter uncoerced agreements.¹²⁵ As an exponent of the ethics of business, he deemed honesty the basis of all commercial activity and adherence to contractual stipulations a fundamental duty.¹²⁶ Explicitly following Hobbes, Schopenhauer also viewed the state itself as a contractually based institution, a voluntary agreement among contracting parties to delegate the monopoly of violence to a sovereign. In passages detailing the validity and necessity of contracts generally, Schopenhauer declared that positive law is enabled by a “political contract” (WWR I: 369). It follows that Schopenhauer viewed failures to comply with the laws of the state as deep moral wrongs, as further instantiations of the most complete lie and egregious betrayal.¹²⁷ For him, punishment at the hands of the state, finally, represented a legitimate application of coercive means to ensure the “fulfilment of the law as a contract” (WWR I: 374).

The coherence and validity of Schopenhauer’s arguments are less important here than the observation of how closely he relied on a bourgeois normative vocabulary for his social and political analysis. Schopenhauer is known as the premier pessimist thinker, a philosopher who merged German Idealism, Platonic philosophy, and Eastern religion to revive metaphysics and confront his readers with a vision of the inescapable pain and suffering of life. He emerges, one could say, as a philosopher who drew on ancient sources and the wisdom of a global ensemble of religions. Schopenhauer’s conception of society, however, seems more connected to a history of bourgeois individualism. In line with this tradition, he posited humans as egoistic beings who render a volatile world more predictable by means of institutionalized promise-making that is backed by a coercive state.¹²⁸ As we saw above, Schopenhauer’s embrace of values such as frugality and professionality make him seem quite like a conventional middle-class character, but his political philosophy was also deeply bourgeois, focusing on independent individuals, their property claims, and their contractual agreements.

Proletarians and Aristocrats

As a son of the German commercial bourgeoisie and a financially independent bachelor, Schopenhauer belonged to a minority in German society. In the middle of the nineteenth century, only about 5 percent of the population were members of the bourgeois class.¹²⁹ Schopenhauer understood that his society was dominated by other groups, both numerically and politically. Not infrequently, he spoke critically of them. He feared the mass of the population because he suspected that destitute people would always want to assault property owners, and he criticized the aristocracy as a privileged but now obsolete group that wrongfully considered itself above the law and did not respect the state’s monopoly on violence. For Schopenhauer, then, the class to which he belonged was the beneficiary of lawfulness and public order, threatened by larger or more traditionally prestigious social strata that did not share its ethos.

Schopenhauer does not seem to have had a very sharply defined conceptual understanding of the classes and groups below the bourgeoisie, and he certainly possessed no fixed terminology. He had a clear notion of the businessman, whom he could describe as a property owner, trader, founder, business leader, domestic patriarch, and community pillar, but no equally detailed sense of someone from the peasantry or working class. A traveler and observer, he did encounter members of what he called “common people,” but without a developed ethnographic or sociological understanding of the majority population, he often simply spoke of them as an undifferentiated clump, calling them the “multitude,” the “masses” (PP II: 59), or “the great heap.”¹³⁰ He was, in other words, not terribly interested in any further distinctions among the lower classes – among rural laborers, small independent farmers, artisans in towns and cities, manufacturing employees, and the desperately destitute, such as rural and urban vagrants. In his later writings, Schopenhauer did use the term “proletariat,” which on the surface might indicate a closer attention to the changing social landscape of the 1840s and 1850s (PP II: 221; PP II: 533). Yet it is clear from his writing that he associated the Latin term with the poor and propertyless class of people as they were defined in the Roman period and described in the works of contemporary German historians such as Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831).¹³¹ In other words, Schopenhauer did not construe the proletariat in the modern socialist sense, as a class of industrial wage earners who live by selling their labor power to capitalists.¹³² He likely never read Marx.¹³³ As the anthropologist Arnold Gehlen (1904–76) pointed out, Schopenhauer seemed curiously uninterested in the problems of industrialism and the concerns of the working-class movement despite being a regular consumer of newspapers from England, the most industrialized country of the nineteenth-century world.¹³⁴

However rudimentary, Schopenhauer’s notes about inequality suggest that he was not dismissive or contemptuous of the poor. Always attentive to suffering, he responded with compassion and reflection to the indigent. His philosophical ally Julius Frauenstädt wrote that, during their walks in Frankfurt, Schopenhauer could stop in his tracks and ruminate when he saw a poor family dressed in rags. Such sights reminded him, he told his younger friend, of all the “wretchedness of life [der ganze Jammer des Lebens].”¹³⁵ As the Schopenhauer scholar Ludger Lütkehaus has documented, Schopenhauer’s writings do contain critical passages on child labor, long work hours, harsh and monotonous labor, the uneven distribution of hard physical effort, and perennial physical need among the poor.¹³⁶ These comments on poverty and exploitation even moved the Social Democratic Party member and sympathetic Schopenhauer reader Hans Zint to claim, in a 1928 newspaper article, that the philosopher of pessimism entertained critical ideas about inequality and exploitation that were central to the history of socialism.¹³⁷

As indicated by Frauenstädt’s story about the philosopher’s pensive reaction to the presence of the poor in the city, however, Schopenhauer did not view pervasive impoverishment as a problem to be dealt with by political means. Perhaps unaware of key terms in the political discourse of the 1830s and 1840s, he did not refer to the so-called social question to address the plight of the destitute.¹³⁸ In other words, he did not frame the presence of poor masses as an issue that must and can be addressed and resolved by political means.¹³⁹ On the contrary, he viewed hard labor as the “natural lot of earthlings” (PP I: 307), declared that the world is one great “labour camp” (PP II: 272), and argued that even the most consistent efforts by people would only ever allow them to survive from day to day. For him, the formulation about the wretchedness of life was a recurring phrase for an inevitable, likely ineliminable aspect of the human condition.¹⁴⁰ Most human beings were destined to live a life of toil in circumstances barely sufficient for their preservation. Consumed with work and the daily struggle to survive, Schopenhauer commented, most working people have no time or leisure to think or even become “aware” of existence itself (PP II: 533). This overwhelming state of suffering and obtuseness that is characteristic of the great mass, he believed, could not be improved by means of regime change, and no government should be falsely blamed for the “burden of misery that clings inseparably to human existence” itself (PP II: 233). To advocate for political transformation, as the “demagogues” of the era did, was therefore “mendacious and impudent” (PP II: 233).

The existential rather than political concern for the suffering of the poor was also not accompanied by any respect for the intellectual or moral quality of the masses. Schopenhauer implied that the people, the masses, could be uncouth, unreliable, wild, and even dangerous to the established order. The multitude must be understood as mere “mob” or “rabble” (WWR II: 155). The vast intellectual and moral distance between the elite and common people was a natural one, to be bridged only in an imaginary and likely perpetually remote “golden age” (WWR II: 155). In fact, Schopenhauer felt it would be better for the all-important maintenance of social stability if the great majority of people remained preoccupied with their daily toil and did not reflect very much on their situation. There would be nothing more horrifying than to “imagine the great, ponderous masses” suddenly set “in rapid motion,” shedding their inert prejudices for new, radical opinions transmitted to them from the educated world (PP II: 59). Once mobilized, these masses would likely “sweep up and overthrow everything” (PP II: 59). In Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer even explicitly stated that the purpose of the state must be the protection of the “few who have been given some property” against the countless people who possess “nothing but their bodily strength” (PP I: 132). For him, the state’s purpose was to protect the propertied class.

In On the Basis of Morals, too, Schopenhauer claimed that the poor will not always acknowledge the “inequality of possession” as a fair result of disparate abilities and efforts and might then resolve to stealing just to escape poverty (BM: 184). In such cases, they are deterred only by the legal order and the fear of social sanctions and lifelong stigmatization; even the “lowly man” wants to avoid becoming a pariah (BM: 185). Without the “compulsions of law” and the supplementary threat of social excommunication, Schopenhauer believed, society would collapse into anarchy (BM: 188).

In contrast to his blurry but fearful image of the common people, Schopenhauer spoke of the aristocracy with a little more focus, and sometimes with more venom. As members of a locally influential merchant class and readers of Enlightenment literature, both of Schopenhauer’s parents were skeptical of the traditionalist aristocracy and kept their distance. During a visit to a spa in 1787, Schopenhauer’s mother declined to make the acquaintance of a countess since she did not want to genuflect before the aristocratic lady, as was expected of a nonnoble woman.¹⁴¹ Schopenhauer himself also questioned the legitimacy of a noble estate, although he could defend its existence on pragmatic grounds. In an angry comment in his youth, he repudiated the inherited privileges of the aristocracy along with serfdom and called them examples of codified illegality.¹⁴² For a member of the early nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, the aristocracy with its privileges appeared as a group without a clear function and hence as useless and outdated.¹⁴³ In a passage from the late work Parerga and Paralipomena, however, he could argue for a more strategic approach to the nobility. The right to property was ethically and rationally superior to the “right of birth,” and yet the aristocracy did embody the transfer of entitlements across generations (PP II: 234). Prudent bourgeois owners committed to the general principle of inheritance should therefore refrain from attacking the nobility, since such a critique might erode the legitimacy of property transmission. His views on the traditionally privileged role of noblemen in the monarchical state followed a similar development from principled reservation to pragmatic acceptance. In 1814, he wrote in his notebooks that “suitability” or competence, rather than high birth, should stand as the only valid criterion of success in state administration.¹⁴⁴ As a son of the bourgeoisie, he preferred meritocracy over noble privileges. Yet several decades later, he acknowledged that the king may prefer to rely on nobles rather than “even the most highly trusted commoner” because ancestry and tradition link the monarch to the aristocracy (PP II: 234).

Schopenhauer also leveled a more legal-political argument against the European nobility: its traditions of honorable self-defense were in his eyes a threat to public order and security. In a long, rant-like segment on obsolete honor codes, he attacked the nobility’s continued practice of challenging foes to duels to restore their reputation. In a modern society with a fully developed “judiciary and police,” Schopenhauer insisted, duels were an absurd atavism, one that regrettably compromised the integrity of regular law enforcement and challenged the authority of the state (PP I: 339). He considered armed noblemen and officers who were obsessed with defending themselves against insults and slights as a lawless element, even as tiny dictators who refused to abide by rules and who exercised a kind of “tyranny” of violence (PP I: 339). From Schopenhauer’s point of view, both the lower classes and the aristocracy could pose a danger to the peace and order guaranteed by the state. In one respect, then, the rabble and the aristocracy were similar: they were both prone to disrespect the laws.

Schopenhauer and the Economy

Despite Schopenhauer’s consistent appreciation for the virtues and social function of businessmen and his evident distance from the working classes as well as the nobility, he was probably not the most effective advocate of his father’s class. Absent from his comments on the aims and methods of traders, merchants, and wholesalers is a fuller account of how markets work. Even loyal disciples and scholars have noted Schopenhauer’s disinterest in economics as an emerging discipline. In an 1899 dissertation on Schopenhauer’s social and political views, Karl Weigt stated that Schopenhauer’s work simply does not deal with the area of Nationalökonomie and that his library did not contain a single book on the subject.¹⁴⁵ Weigt in turn refers to the claim of the philosopher Philipp Mainländer (1841–76) that Schopenhauer was completely uninformed about works in the domain of national economy.¹⁴⁶ In his major work The Philosophy of Redemption [Die Philosophie der Erlösung], Mainländer dismissed Schopenhauer’s contention that even ostensible advances in the history of humanity will inevitably lead to new cataclysms, and, specifically, that a future achievement of world peace informed by millennia of human experience would only result in “over-population of the whole planet” (WWR I: 377) with horrific consequences that only the most fearless imagination could conceive.¹⁴⁷ With such comments on demographic development and the impossibility of sustainable progress, Mainländer asserted, Schopenhauer betrayed his lack of knowledge of key debates in nineteenth-century social science. Mainländer thought specifically about Henry Charles Carey’s (1793–1879) polemic against Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), according to which humanity, once it had emerged from lower stages of civilization, could expand enormously and yet find new and more advanced ways to nourish and sustain itself.¹⁴⁸ Schopenhauer, Mainländer concluded, was simply ignorant of the state of nineteenth-century economics.

Schopenhauer’s lack of interest in an entire discipline or mode of inquiry is not in itself damning; he did keep up to date about developments in the natural sciences but may not have had time to follow debates in other, emerging fields. Yet in the context of his thoughts on property, contract, and exchange, there are still conspicuous gaps. Schopenhauer defended the legitimacy of egoists claiming property and doing business for the sake of their own enrichment, and he argued that behaviors motivated by profit nevertheless yield a meaningful ethos of honorable conduct. He did not, however, supplement this account of egoistically motivated exchange with an argument about the society-wide benefits of trade. In other words, he did not develop an economic justification for a world of egoistic interests¹⁴⁹ and had no vision of market dynamics through which self-interested individuals nonetheless contribute to prosperity for all. Schopenhauer supplied a metaphysical explanation for egoism and the mutual hostility of all as well as a story about how egoism can be held in check by a contractually grounded state, but he did not consider how antagonism can be transmuted into an engine of economic growth.

In terms of intellectual history, Schopenhauer built his account of property and statehood on thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke but showed no comparable interest in later figures such as Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) or Adam Smith (1723–90), both of whom presented the beneficial aggregate outcomes of individually self-interested behavior. To put it very schematically, Schopenhauer absorbed British seventeenth-century conceptions of society but not ones developed in the eighteenth century. It would not have been impossible for him to familiarize himself with Adam Smith’s writings on the economy. In the period that Schopenhauer was an active philosopher, Smith’s key arguments circulated in German academic circles, and university professors were aware of his ideas concerning the blessings of division of labor,¹⁵⁰ unrestricted trade among peoples, and the operation of an invisible hand that ensured the “conversion of individual interests and actions into a totality beneficial to all.”¹⁵¹ The German reception of Smith began some three decades before Schopenhauer commenced his university studies,¹⁵² and Smith’s writings were introduced at the Hanoverian and Prussian institutions where Schopenhauer spent his years as a student.¹⁵³ Yet the most famous integration of Adam Smith as a political economist into German philosophy was carried out not by Schopenhauer but by his nemesis, Hegel. In Philosophy of Right, Hegel wrote very appreciatively of the new science of economy and mentioned Smith under the heading of the “system of needs.”¹⁵⁴ Hegel’s work of political philosophy came out in 1821, and Schopenhauer knew it and rejected it.

By cultural habitus or mentality, Schopenhauer was clearly a son of the German propertied bourgeoisie, but, without the arguments of contemporary political economy, he was not quite one of its modern mouthpieces. He expressed respect for businessmen and classified them as members of a societal elite but did not make broader arguments for a capitalist economic system that could unfetter the productive capacities of society and generate material improvements for all. In the rare moments that he turned his attention to the economy, he seems to have pictured it as a zero-sum game, in which the enrichment of a few necessarily depends on the impoverishment of the many. Since the powers with which individuals are endowed allow them to ensure only their own survival, he reasoned, the fact that a few ended up living in great affluence must mean that they have exploited large numbers of laborers, who are forced to produce commodities such “delicate” and “silken” clothing (PP II: 221). This also implied that these laborers had been forcibly removed from the production of necessities for all, with the consequence that large masses sunk into poverty. The comfort of a few must be bought by the perennial misery of many, even in the horrendous form of the enslavement of Black people on sugar and coffee plantations.¹⁵⁵

Yet Schopenhauer’s condemnation of luxury published in Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851 was out of step with economic thought, which had begun to abandon the idea that basic needs could be regarded as invariable and easily determined¹⁵⁶ and had ceased treating luxury in moralistic terms as a symptom and source of corruption.¹⁵⁷ By Schopenhauer’s era, generations of thinkers had already argued that the desire for luxury serves to stimulate commerce, which in turn reduces the overall level of societal destitution.¹⁵⁸ Schopenhauer himself could not quite sustain his critique of luxury as a dubious enjoyment for the few and a burden for the many. He conceded that the “arts and sciences” require leisure time for a few people in society and that they therefore can be called “children of luxury,” but that these pursuits nevertheless repay the debts to all those who labor under harsh conditions. They do so by inventing and disseminating technological advancements and machinery that greatly increase society’s output, ultimately for the benefit of “everyone” (PP II: 223). In his own age, Schopenhauer admitted, the mechanization of production in factories meant that even a modest “store clerk” could afford “silk stockings” that in earlier centuries had been reserved for royalty (PP II: 223). In his brief but strangely meandering account of the dialectics of luxury, then, Schopenhauer described the emergence of an industrial society in which an increasingly comfortable lifestyle could be enjoyed by large groups of people. Modern mass production in “factories and workshops of every kind” would, he implied, alleviate poverty among the lowest classes without eliminating the elite (PP II: 223). Yet Schopenhauer did not drop his moralistic attitude toward luxury and did not make an explicit argument for the blessings of modern markets. He even broke off his depiction of an industrialized future society with the words that it was absolutely not his intention to “write a Utopia” (PP II: 223).

Despite his background in merchant circles, which was highly unusual for German philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and despite his strong commitment to private property, voluntary contracts, and trade, Schopenhauer never provided a fully articulated economic justification for commercial society. Inspired by the political thought of the early modern period, he remained a German follower of Thomas Hobbes, fearful of the specter of conflict and a collapsed public order, rather than a German follower of Adam Smith, hopeful about the ways in which individual ambition can serve the common good. Schopenhauer was a staunch advocate of a bourgeois ethos but, by the standards of his own time, perhaps an anachronistic one.

Schopenhauer and the Ideologies of the Early Nineteenth Century

Schopenhauer lived like a gentleman, cherished the values and virtues of his social background, and conceptualized society in a way that was informed by a bourgeois tradition of possessive individualism. Yet as most accounts of his person and life indicate, he was at odds with the society of his era and did not quite fit into any camp. Without an academic position, professional identity, or career, the mature Schopenhauer had few loyalties and found himself on the outside of cliques and associations. It is well-known that he spent decades neglected as a minor figure on the periphery of the guild of philosophers, but even when his philosophy and biography started to become a topic of public discussion, he was criticized for retreating from a properly righteous engagement in the debates and conflicts of the day. As we have seen, the image of Schopenhauer as an aloof rentier was established early. In some ways, Schopenhauer’s politics were not even legible in his own time. He was neither a supporter of sweeping, revolutionary changes nor a recognizable traditionalist conservative, neither a defender of the Christian faith nor an atheist radical, and he was far removed from the mass movements of the nineteenth century, such as nationalism or socialism. Looking at Schopenhauer in the context of the nineteenth century, he can seem like a stranger in an age of rival ideologies and clashing causes.

Schopenhauer’s position as an outsider is most clearly brought out through a chronological overview of how he criticized emerging political trends and schools of thought. In nearly every decade of his life, he encountered new bundles of political beliefs, often carried by an aspiring, upward-moving social or professional group. Nearly every time, he responded to these beliefs with disinterest, cynicism, or cantankerous rejection. In his bleak picture of human beings driven by narrow self-interest, he judged idealistic support of various causes such as public welfare, patriotism, or religious purity as a “great masquerade” designed to conceal individual egoism (PP II: 192). Yet his cynicism can in turn be looked at more skeptically, or rather contextually, as a symptom of his isolation from the dominant groups and institutions of his period. Socialized in a particular class at a particular time but not affiliated with any professional network, appointed by any institution, or dependent on any community as an adult, he also did not express solidarity with any collective cause.

Born in 1788, Schopenhauer was, to begin with, too young to experience the political shocks of the era of the transatlantic revolutions. Living in the free port city of Danzig as members of a patrician class with republican leanings, Schopenhauer’s parents were stirred by the news of the French Revolution and felt hope for a new world, but then were alienated by reports about the terror that followed, a typical response of well-to-do, educated Germans.¹⁵⁹ Schopenhauer himself would only ever express fear of convulsive government overthrows and rebellions against elites. To him, radicals and revolutionaries risked throwing society into a state of violent anarchy far worse for all individuals than an undemocratic but stable order. In his late writings, he acknowledged the principle of popular sovereignty, a crucial legacy of the revolutionary era: “Of course the people are sovereign” (PP II: 224). But he quickly added that this sovereign people, immature as it will always be, must nevertheless stand under the “permanent tutelage” of a king (PP II: 224).

Schopenhauer’s antirevolutionary stance is clear, but it is equally important to point out that he was born well after the thinkers who articulated the communitarian and Romanticist responses to the revolutionary era. He was not a German follower of Edmund Burke (1729–97) and showed no consistent preference for the blessings of slow and evolutionary change; for reliance on practice, custom, and tradition; or for the integrity of natural, organic communities. The German philosophers who wrote major statements for or against the French Revolution, such as Schopenhauer’s professor in Berlin, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who provided a defense of the Revolution (1793), or the diplomat Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832), who translated Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) into German, were a generation ahead of Schopenhauer. These thinkers were in their mid-twenties when they witnessed the collapse of the royal regime in France and reacted passionately to it. Schopenhauer, in contrast, never espoused the idea of a legitimate revolution with the enthusiasm of someone like the young Fichte, but also never utilized the tropes and concepts of the communitarian reaction like the German readers of Burke.

Schopenhauer’s resistance to the ideologies of his day became apparent once he entered adulthood and confronted the ideals of his own cohort. In the 1810s, when he was in his twenties, Schopenhauer experienced how the rising German national cause excited students of his generation. Shaken by the Napoleonic invasion and subsequent French occupation of German principalities since 1806, many intellectuals began to embrace a nationalist anti-French creed and called for ethnically and linguistically defined self-government. As several countries went to war against Napoleon in the spring of 1813, students and professors at Schopenhauer’s university in Berlin even prepared to fight French-led armies as soldiers. By contrast, Schopenhauer left the city to avoid the turmoil and danger of war and eventually finished his dissertation in a small Thuringian town, Rudolstadt, where he, appropriately enough, was living in an inn or a Gasthaus – uninterested in a national homeland, he remained a perpetual guest.¹⁶⁰ In letters and statements on this period of his life, he explicitly declared that he felt no love for the fatherland and considered himself a stranger everywhere.¹⁶¹ Schopenhauer was clearly immune to the exuberant national rhetoric of the end phase of the Napoleonic Wars.¹⁶² To some extent, his inherited capital might have insulated him from the ideology. The members of the fraternal nationalist circles envisioned a nation-state that would be welcoming to them and allow them to find steady employment, enjoy long careers, and participate in political affairs.¹⁶³ Conversely, they associated alien rule with more precarious and constrained opportunities for themselves and their kin. With his inheritance providing him with some protection, Schopenhauer also had less fear of a discriminatory foreign government blocking chances for advancement.

The politically more stable 1820s saw the spread of another belief system among the academic youth, and it had a definite source: Hegel. In his political thought, available in book form in the 1820s, Hegel rejected fraternal nationhood as the primary political mode of integration and argued that emotional ties or spontaneous solidarity could never replace the rational architectonic of the modern state.¹⁶⁴ Individuals, Hegel argued, could come to recognize their positive interdependence and collective unity, but then as enfranchised citizens acting within the complex structure of the modern state and not as ethno-cultural brothers. The state, not the nation, was the home of the individual. Again, Schopenhauer remained completely unpersuaded. Like Hegel, he rejected early nationalism, but his own conception of statehood was diametrically opposed to the Hegelian vision. For Schopenhauer, the state was not the great enabler of a satisfying rational life, the source of meaningful social membership, or the medium of genuine reconciliation of all individual wills. It was something more modest, namely, a device to quell unrest and discipline the anarchic tendencies of egoistic individuals. As in the case of nationalism, Schopenhauer’s repudiation of Hegelian statism had a social or biographical dimension. In his polemic against university philosophy, he specified the social bearers of Hegelian political thought. Statism, Schopenhauer argued, was transparently the philosophy of a whole social universe of “junior barristers, lawyers, doctors, candidates, and teachers,” the educated professional class of a modern society, many of whom depended on the state bureaucracy for their livelihood (PP I: 132). But this was the precisely the class to which Schopenhauer was denied entry.

In the 1830s, after Hegel’s death, Hegelianism split into factions famously described with the terms “left” and “right.”¹⁶⁵ The key polarizing arguments concerned the role of religion vis-à-vis philosophy but also public life and the state. Traditionalist Hegelians argued for the consonance and ultimate identity of religion and philosophy, whereas radical, so-called Young Hegelians such as Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) questioned the convergence and presented traditional religion as a form of collective self-alienation, in which human attributes were projected onto an imagined divine being. The aim of critical philosophy, Feuerbach and other radicals thought, should be to overcome this self-separation and help society establish an entirely secular condition. Such a critical vision had consequential political implications. The radical secularist Young Hegelians wished to demystify political authority and democratize politics, whereas traditionalist monarchists became more entrenched in their wish for a pious populace obedient to royal authority.¹⁶⁶ Schopenhauer did not directly participate in these politico-theological debates. Yet he was not unaware of them either, and traces of his reactions can be detected in his writings. A critical philosopher who never shied away from the pursuit of truth, however corrosive, he appreciated the Young Hegelian critique of Christianity’s mythical character. Yet contrary to the group of younger thinkers, these critical insights did not compel him to demand a resolute de-Christianization of the state. Instead, he argued that savvy political regimes could deploy religion as an instrument of control and pacification for the sake of stability and order. Schopenhauer thus ended up in a position outside both camps: his view of the function of religion in political life was too instrumentalist for the regime loyalist, but his dismissal of popular, antihierarchical politics distanced him from the radical secularist. His politics were not aligned with any ideological front line.

The 1840s saw the broad emergence of ideologies such as liberal nationalism and socialism as well as the outline of organized party politics. Ideas about constitutional checks on government and social emancipation that were previously cultivated in intellectual coteries now circulated more widely. Issues such as pervasive penury and national unity, the so-called social question and the national question, became issues of broader public debate.¹⁶⁷ Schopenhauer’s generational peers among the nationalists now appeared as veteran spokespeople for a middle-class movement that was eager to break with the old absolutist regimes and realize a simultaneously unified and constitutionalized Germany. Predictably, Schopenhauer remained unimpressed by the formation of a German parliament in 1848 and mocked the stolidly mediocre figure of the respectably employed “man of the people” and “German patriot” who was “worthy of a seat in the Paulskirche,” the meeting place of the first pan-German parliamentary delegates (PP II: 80).¹⁶⁸ The “German fatherland,” he had written in 1843, failed to inspire any sentiments in him.¹⁶⁹ Yet Schopenhauer showed no great respect for traditional royal regimes either. His dismissal of key liberal ideas was not accompanied by a sycophantic celebration of kings, and he did not single out any actual regent to praise his paternal wisdom and benevolence.

The 1840s was also the decade in which the most radical of the Young Hegelians, excluded from academic careers, entered the public sphere as champions of the exploited and disenfranchised masses. The decade saw a growing stream of socialist poems, editorials, pamphlets, and manifestos, among them the 1848 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx (1818–83) and Friedrich Engels (1820–95), both about three decades younger than Schopenhauer. In his brief comments on left-wing radicalism, Schopenhauer considered its focus on the material needs of the large population as an exclusive preoccupation with primal physicality and therefore labeled socialism a form of “bestiality” (WWR II: 481).¹⁷⁰ Like other skeptical commentators on early socialism, he identified the rising ideology with crude, appetitive materialism.¹⁷¹ Writing in 1844, the various strands of left-wing activism seemed to him to consist of “ruined factory workers,” primarily found in England, strangely converging with “ruined students,” primarily found in Germany (WWR II: 481). Not unlike more initiated commentators on the origins and components of Marxist-inspired socialism, Schopenhauer identified a new political force in the combination of an industrial working class most prominent in Great Britain with a radical new philosophy most prominent in Germany.¹⁷² As fighting on the streets broke out in European and German cities in the revolutionary year of 1848, Schopenhauer became worried, sensing that the entire legal order was under threat, and with it his property.¹⁷³ In the will he drew up a couple of years after the revolution, he dedicated funds to the families of the Prussian soldiers who had been wounded, handicapped, or killed in the tumult of the revolutionary year.¹⁷⁴ Without children or younger family members to inherit him, he put away some of his funds to guardians of a public order that ensured the general integrity of property.¹⁷⁵

The decade-by-decade overview of Schopenhauer’s repudiations of contemporary movements such as German nationalism, Hegelian statism, radical Young Hegelianism, reform-oriented liberalism, and early European socialism leaves us with a picture of a philosopher consistently committed to political stability for possessive egoists and little else. Schopenhauer did not join the politically involved bourgeoisie in calling for political changes in German lands, such as unification and the adoption of a constitution, but also did not entertain any ties to an actual royal regime or organized conservative interests. He panicked at the prospect of a plebeian revolution but felt no special affiliation with the conservative elites, such as courtly administrators, the nobility, and the clergy. When he dedicated funds to the defenders of order, it was to the foot soldiers enforcing the law, not their political or military leadership. In the context of his time, he was not a typical liberal, conservative, or socialist. Instead, he remained a consistent contrarian, a skeptical contemporary who often wanted to identify the social carriers of ideologies; behind Hegelianism, there were striving barristers and junior civil servants, and behind socialism, there were students in precarious circumstances.

Schopenhauer was an observer of his time, a regular newspaper reader, and expressed opinions on movements and trends. He could comment on technological and industrial advances that supplied society with more commodities or report on the accumulating discoveries of the “physical sciences,” whose “unbiased empiricists” delivered confirmations of his philosophy (WN: 323). He was aware that he himself profited from the increasingly global interchange that brought insights into Asian cultures and religions to Europe and Germany. In his mind, the era could be described as a period of invention, science, and interchange, and he even wrote that nineteenth century was a “philosophical century,” an age sufficiently mature and cultured for truly advanced thinking (WWR I: 70).

Yet if Schopenhauer was appreciative of the intellectual and scholarly achievements of the century, he rejected its characteristic sociopolitical developments: the liberalization of absolutist rule, the calls for freedom from censorship, the national consolidation of states, the struggle for women’s rights, the pleas for democratization, the signs of mass mobilization and class politics. To Schopenhauer, any reform of a traditional regime was little else than a fad, and any collective political movement little else than a menace. Politically, he was even deliberately anachronistic, frequently citing Thomas Hobbes rather than later theorists. In an age of tumult but also of noticeable advancement, he held on to a dark image of always-latent anarchy and conflict, and he stubbornly remained inspired by thinkers from the early modern period of grim religious strife rather than hope for the future of an educated, prosperous, and reconciled humanity. Proud of his merchant background, he never broke his commitment to the basic elements of a bourgeois order – to a vision of legally equal, self-interested, propertied individuals honestly adhering to contractual agreements – but as a lifelong outsider to the social, professional, and ideological circles of his era, he remained skeptical of the shared grander causes and dreams of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.