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.

The concept of labour provides a key to understanding Marx's complex relations to his German Idealist precursors. Through it, he appropriates and transforms the Idealist concept of spontaneity, develops his critique of heteronomy and alienation under capitalism, and envisages the attainment of genuine autonomy in socialism. We can thus connect Marx with Hegel, but also more broadly to German thought since Kant, indeed since Leibniz.

The Left Hegelian programme

In the works of Kant, Fichte, Schiller and Hegel, the effects of the European Enlightenment and indigenous theoretical traditions stemming from Leibniz were distilled into a philosophical revolution, elaborating new conceptions of theoretical and practical reason and of reason's legislative authority in morality and politics. The essence of this revolution was an engagement with modern society: an extended reflection on individuality, autonomy and freedom. The fundamental issue of German Idealism is not to impugn the external world, but to ask how we can rationally and freely relate to it, and act in it. A resolute yet critical modernism imbues German Idealism with its particular characteristics: for all its inner divergences, it is a practical idealistic approach, a brilliant vindication of freedom. It develops ideas of practical reason as the capacity to be self-legislating and autonomous, and it stresses the self-causing, spontaneous quality of human action. The world as it appears to the senses is not metaphysically unreal or illusory, but derivative; German Idealism directs our attention to the formative activity which underlies the objects of experience, and to processes of subjective self-shaping.

According to Hegel, the central discovery of the Enlightenment is that everything exists for the subject (Hegel 1971, pp. 332–3). This theoretical shift, from ideas of a fixed natural or social order towards subjective utility and freedom, occurs in conjunction with political challenges to the old regime in Europe, and the emergence of modern civil society. While the underlying social changes can be treated only allusively here, the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment is that values and institutions must be critically authenticated as corresponding to subjects’ own insights (C. Taylor 1991, pp. 81–91), and that traditional forms of life must cede to relations sanctioned by reason, whereby subjects attain a growing ascendancy over natural and social processes which inhibit their autonomous self-determination.