Schiller develops a Leibnizian sense of perfection as the unity of unity and multiplicity, and draws out its political implications. He defends a republican order of spontaneous beauty, emergent in freedom, against imposed perfection. In addressing the problems of the incipient modern division of labour and the prospects for political community, he defends variety against uniformity, while distinguishing historically progressive from regressive types of diversity. Schiller insists on processes of aesthetic self-formation and determinability, which make possible a mutual adjustment of interests as an achievable practical outcome, rather than as a metaphysical presupposition. Interests in modern civil society are diverse and troublingly fragmentary, but potentially reconcilable.

Leibniz defends teleology or purposive activity against the overly mechanical worldview of Thomas Hobbes, and develops an idea of spontaneity as self-originating action irreducible to mere mechanistic reaction. He links free activity with justice as the enabling conditions for the exercise of freedom, and with the progressive deployment of individual and collective powers. He thus sets the agenda for subsequent idealism, which reconfigures the idea of spontaneity and reflects on the harmonisation of diverse individual efforts as a problem of ongoing juridical reform

Marx’s early theory of labour and alienation originates from idealist concepts of spontaneity and formativity. His ideas of socialism and emancipation in the 1840s reprise aspects of Kantian autonomy and heteronomy and follow Fichte in linking labour with spontaneity. Marx formulates the dialectic of the will in a way favourable to the moment of particularity as membership in a social class, and sees one particular class as simultaneously a vehicle of universal interest and revolutionary transformation. Quantitative change is insufficient though necessary: a merely distributive socialism might enhance the living conditions of the workers, but would leave intact structures of exploitation which deprive workers of their agency as well as their happiness. His theory of history and emancipation, recently described as a self-actualisation account, can be more precisely identified as a variant of post-Kantian perfectionism, which, like Feuerbach’s, contains a strong admixture of pre-Kantian elements. This blending of heterogeneous elements has profound theoretical and practical consequences, notably in the absence of a developed concept of right.

The concept of post-Kantian perfectionism clarifies the mutual polemics in the Hegelain School, contrasting Feuerbach’s naturalism, which combines pre- and post-Kantian motifs, with the more exigent Kantianism of Bruno Bauer; and it elucidates sharp disagreements with anti-perfectionists like Max Stirner. The concrete historical situation comes under scrutiny of post-Kantian perfectionist thinking. French Revolutionary factions and the contending parties in the German Vormärz express distinct views of freedom and follow different developmental trajectories. Civil society too reveals its inner dynamics. Rejecting Leibniz’s pre-established harmony and Wolffian mutuality, but also markedly differing from Kant and Schiller, the non-compossibility of interests in civil society is the theoretical innovation here. The irreconcilable opposition of interests, central to Marx, is not a view original with him. In Bauer, autonomy means divesting oneself of particular interests to the extent that they inhibit institutional transformation.

Kant’s critique of perfectionism in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals launches lively debate on the limits of coercion and the requisites for free action, foundational for post-Kantian perfectionism. The Critique of Practical Reason reformulates the Leibnizian concept of spontaneity as a ‘true apology for Leibniz’, salvaging what is most vital in his thought. Spontaneous freedom does not externalise a unique content, as in Leibniz, but now conceived as negative liberty, signifies the will’s ability to abstract from external causes or to admit them selectively according to rational criteria. Spontaneity is the condition for an order of right, as the sphere of compatible external actions among juridical subjects. Here Kant effects a second modification of Leibniz, in the idea of mutual causality or reciprocity. The Metaphysics of Morals of 1797 elaborates the distinction between pure and empirical practical reason, freedom and happiness, and delineates the sphere of rightful interaction. Neither happiness nor virtue are subject to constraint, but in the sphere of right coercion or mutual limitation is the condition that assures and generalises freedom.

Kant’s criticisms between the Groundwork (1785) and the Metaphysics of Morals (1797) do not eradicate perfectionism but transpose it to a new register, the perfection of freedom itself and the conditions of its exercise. Kant’s evocative but incomplete statements of his political position after 1785 elicit numerous debates among Kantians on the basis and limits of state action. Early Kantians view progress as the outcropping of spontaneous freedom, not as administered and imposed. These debates, involving Hufeland, Reinhold, and Humboldt, offer various combinations of Leibnizian and Kantian ideas. In response to Kant’s Groundwork, Hufeland justifies legitimate political constraint through its contribution to systemic perfection. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s early formulation of the limits of state action derives from Kantian anti-paternalism, the Groundwork assertion of the inviolability of rational beings, combined with a modified Leibnizian monadology admitting interaction. His defence of a minimalist state is a possible but not a necessary consequence of Kantian premises. It draws criticism from Karl von Dalberg, who defends Wolffian reformist interventionism.

Summary of the argument, implications, directions for further research.

Christian Wolff develops a theory of Enlightened absolutism and a paternalistic interventionist state on broadly Leibnizian promises, assigning to the state the role of promoting happiness amongst its subjects as material, intellectual, and spiritual thriving. He posits a state of nature characterised not by conflict but by stagnation. The duty of self-perfection impels individuals to leave the state of nature and to surrender their natural rights, and the state assumes the duty of co-ordination and steering of individual efforts, consistently with cameralist political economy. Herder reads Leibnizian monads as collective or national subjects, each contributing to the progressive realisation of species-capacities, and in principle harmoniously integrated with all others. He gives rise to expressive Romanticism, where self and world correspond, in contrast to ironic Romanticism, where such accord is in principle impossible, and to idealism, where the accord is a practical task.

Leibniz is the genuine initiator of German Idealism, developing ideas of freedom as spontaneity or self-originating action, and linking freedom with justice and progress in ways that are decisive for Kant and later idealists. Rethinking spontaneity as negative freedom, Kant criticises the paternalistic perfectionism and Enlightened absolutism of Christian Wolff, a distinct development from Leibniz, but opens the way for a new perfectionism of freedom. The origins of perfectionism in Aristotle and the Stoics are surveyed, and the various formulations of post-Kantian perfectionism from Humboldt to Marx are outlined.

History for German idealism is the expression of practical reason, the process of gradually bringing about the accord of subject and object. In Hegel’s conception of the history of freedom, different configurations of ethical life embody changing assessments of the self and the world, and contain essential contradictions whose resolution is the key to progress towards new and more complex forms. The dialectic of the will in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is an exposition of the idea of spontaneity, endowing itself with concrete content as it moves through its dimensions of universality, particularity, and singularity. Hegel demonstrates that modern institutions are not mere limitations, but legitimate conditions for the exercise of freedom. The rationality of the real, however, does not preclude a critical engagement. Close examination of current relations and institutions as exemplifying ideas of freedom reveals nodal points where practical interventions are likely to be fruitful in effecting change. An implicit, historicised ‘ought’ in Hegel, arising from his reworking of the logical categories, marks his place within post-Kantian perfectionism.

Fichte takes the promotion of freedom rather than happiness as the legitimate end of political action. He revises the concept of spontaneity, especially in his System der Sittlenlehre, equating it with labour as the transformation of the sense-world under the command of an idea. The political system proposed in his Geschlossener Handelsstaat is a further application of this idea, together with attention to the conditions (epistemic, material, and intersubjective) necessary for the effective transposition of subjective intentions into objective results. Fichte’s political interventionism is fundamentally distinct from Wolff’s because of its commitment to the primacy of freedom, even when his own concrete prescriptions appear to undermine this objective. The political programmes of Fichte and Humboldt are alternative Kantianisms, but both exemplify post-Kantian perfectionist commitments to enhance the capacity for free activity.

The debate in 1792-94 between Wilhelm von Humboldt and Karl von Dalberg focuses on the legitimacy and limits of the state’s promotion of welfare for its subjects. It represents a clash between the Kantian school and advocates of the Leibniz-Wolff philosophy. Dalberg advocates a strongly interventionist state, while Humboldt circumscribes narrowly the scope of rightful political action. Humboldt’s post-Kantian perfectionism aims to maximise freedom and its conditions, rather than to promote happiness, as older perfectionisms had done. Dalberg, in contrast, appeals to Wolff’s defence of enlightened absolutism, viewing the state as the agency for eliminating obstacles to individual and social thriving, or the good life. While illustrating the reception of Kant’s critiques of previous ethical systems, and the persistence of Wolffian themes, the debate is also indicative of the diversity of political positions advocated by Kantians in the aftermath of The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). In conceiving the individual as a spontaneous monad with a unique developmental trajectory, Humboldt shares with Dalberg a revised version of Leibniz. The blending of Leibnizian and Kantian concepts constitutes the central theoretical interest of the political thought of this period.