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The Politics of German Idealism
Christopher Yeomans
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The Politics of German Idealism
The Politics of German
Idealism
Law and Social Change at the Turn
of the 19th Century
C H R I S T O P H E R Y E OM A N S
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022060575
ISBN 978–0–19–766730–9
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197667309.001.0001
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For my wife Simone.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
1. Introduction 1
1.1 German Idealism in and of the Sattelzeit 1
1.2 The Shape of the Work to Come 13
PA RT I : L E G A L S TA N D I N G H I S T O R IC I Z E D
2. Kant and the Provisionality of Right 23

2.1 The Problem of Provisionality 24
2.2 Full Dominion vs. Diverse Ownership Interests 28
2.3 State of Nature vs. Civil Condition 37
2.4 Kant on Private Jurisdiction 44
2.5 Kantian Provisionality and Kant’s Philosophy of History 52
3. Hegel and the Plurality of Legal Standing 59
3.1 The ALR Project in the Context of Sattelzeit Reforms 60
3.2 Plurality of Forms of Action as a Plurality of
Forms of Responsibility 63
3.3 Forms of Responsibility and the ALR 80
PA RT I I : P R I VAT E L AW
4. Family 93
4.1 Families and Households 94
4.2 Fichte: The Marriage 98
4.3 Hegel: The Nuclear Family 104
4.4 Kant: The Household 110
4.5 The System of Perspectives 115
5. Property 117
5.1 Constructivism 118
5.2 Kant and the Universal Principle of Right 122
5.3 Fichte and Efficacy 124
5.4 Hegel and Personhood 127
5.5 Historical Constructivism 131
viii Contents
6. Inheritance 138
6.1 Hegel: Private Property and Family Resources 138
6.2 Fichte: Relative and Absolute Property 152
6.3 Kant: Inheritance as a Purely Economic Question 155
PA RT I I I : P U B L IC L AW
7. Fichte’s Three Political Philosophies 161

7.1 Kantian and Social-Historical Background 162
7.2 The Antinomy of Punishment 166
7.3 The Closed Commercial State 172
7.4 The Historical Works 177
7.5 Horizon of Expectation, Space of Experience, and Action 182
8. Hegel’s State 184
8.1 Estates and the State 184
8.2 The Stereoscopic Historical Perspective 204
9. Conclusion 216
9.1 Provisionality 216
9.2 Pluralism 218
9.3 Historicism 220
Bibliography 223
Index 229
Acknowledgments
This work originates in a historical turn in my work on German philosophy that

began with a simple question: what are the estates (die Stände)? I had envisioned
a brief stroll through a garden of historical description but quickly fell down the
rabbit hole of German historiography and philosophy of history. My first attempts
to right myself were supported by the Provost’s Office at Purdue University
through the Faculty Fellowship for Study in a Second Discipline (History). I used
that time to work through background material with help from Whitney Walton
and Charles Ingrao of Purdue’s Department of History. The most intensive pe-
riod of research came during a year’s sabbatical in 2016–2017 from Purdue
University as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at LMU-München where
Günter Zöller kindly agreed to be my host. Finally, Purdue’s College of Liberal
Arts supported a book scrub on the full manuscript and I benefited greatly from
comments and discussions with Terry Pinkard, Lydia Moland, Keven Harrelson,
Clinton Tolley, and Günter Zöller. The Department of Philosophy at Purdue has
been a wonderful place to do this work, and I am grateful to my colleagues and
students for their contributions to its stimulating atmosphere.
I have been presenting material from this work since 2015 at various confer-
ences, talks, and workshops. I am grateful to organizers and audiences at Purdue,
UC San Diego, Northwestern, University of Chicago, LMU-München, Münster,
the New York German Idealism Workshop, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin,
Padova, Valencia, Heidelberg, and TU Dresden. Earlier versions of material
that made it into the book have been published by the Hegel Bulletin, Journal
of the History of Philosophy, and in collections from Routledge and Palgrave
Macmillan. I am grateful to these publishers for their support; specific prior
publications are indicated at the beginning of each of the relevant chapters.
This is now my third book with Oxford University Press, and I am greatly
appreciative of that continuing relationship. I couldn’t hope for a better editor
than Peter Ohlin, and I got tremendously useful and timely feedback from three
anonymous referees. Paloma Escovedo and Imogene Haslam shepherded the
manuscript through the production process and helped with the design.
Finally, my family has now also seen me through three books! This book is
dedicated to my wife Simone, and I thank my children Miranda, Gemma, and
Noelia for keeping me grounded in my own historical present.
Abbreviations
Works of J. G. Fichte
A Addresses to the German Nation. Edited and translated by Gregory Moore.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Citations are first to the English
translations and then to volume 1/10 of GA.
CCS The Closed Commercial State. Edited and translated by Anthony Curtis Adler.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. Citations are first to the English
translation and then to volume III of SW.
FNR Foundations of Natural Right. Edited by F. Neuhouser. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000. Citations are first to the English translation and then to
volume III of SW.
GA Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften. Edited by Reinhard Lauth, Hans Gliwitzky, and Eric Fuchs.
Stuttgart: Frommann-Holboog, 1964–.
SE The System of Ethics. Edited by D. Brezeale and G. Zöller. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005. Citations are first to the English translation and then to
volume IV of SW.
SW Johann Gottlieb Fichtes sämmtliche Werke. Edited by I. H. Fichte. Berlin: Veit und
Co., 1845–1846. Cited by volume and page number.
Works of G. W. F. Hegel
EL Part I of the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse.

Edited by U. Rameil, W. Bonsiepen, and H. C. Lucas. Vol. 20 in GW.
Hamburg: Meriner Verlag, 1992. References are by section number, with ‘R’
indicating the remark following the section, and ‘Z’ the addition from Hegel’s
lectures. English quotations are from The Encyclopedia Logic. Translated by T. F.
Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1991.
GW Gesammelte Werke. Hamburg: Meriner Verlag, 1992.
PR Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Edited by J. Hoffmeister.
Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1995. English quotations are from Elements of the
Philosophy of Right. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991. Citations are by section number. ‘R’ refers to the Remark or
Anmerkung, ‘Z’ to the Addition or Zusatz.
VPR Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie. Edited by K.-H. Ilting. Stuttgart: Fromman
Verlag, 1974. Cited by volume and page number.
xii Abbreviations
Works of Immanuel Kant
All citations to Kant are by volume and page number to Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften.
Berlin: Königlich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1910–. English
quotations are modified versions of those found in Practical Philosophy. Edited by M. J.
Gregor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996; and Political Writings. 2nd ed.
Edited by H. S. Reiss. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
CF Conflict of the Faculties.

IUH Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. Translations from
Kant’s Politics.
MM Metaphysik der Sitten (Metaphysics of Morals).
TP On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in
Practice.
TPP Towards Perpetual Peace.
WIE What Is Enlightenment?
1
Introduction
1.1 German Idealism in and of the Sattelzeit
The simple guiding thought of this study is to understand German Idealist po-
litical philosophy as political, that is, as a set of policy options and institutional
designs aimed at a broadly but distinctively German set of social problems.1
‘Political’ here refers to use of the state’s power to enforce law, and ‘social’ to the
norms and groups that are regulated by that enforcement but which also antedate
or exceed that enforcement.2 Because the power to enforce law is very much still
being actualized by state-building in the period at issue, ‘political’ refers quite
narrowly to a certain kind of practical legal project rather than to a perennial set
of problems from the history of philosophy. By way of method, I claim that to
reveal the political nature of German Idealist political philosophy requires un-
derstanding German Idealism as both taking place in and conceptualizing its own
historical present—this is the sense in which it is not only political, but political
philosophy. Throughout I make use of the tight connection between concepts,
institutions and history noted by Reinhart Koselleck: “Without social formations,
including their concepts, by means of which they determine (whether reflexively
or self-reflexively) their challenges and seek to meet them, there is no history, it
cannot be experienced nor interpreted, not presented nor told.”3
1 I should note at the outset that I won’t be using the term ‘German Idealism’ as anything more
than a shorthand for ‘Kant, Fichte & Hegel,’ and I use ‘classical German philosophy’ interchange-
ably. The former term is controversial, and both my inclusion of Kant and my exclusion of Schelling
could certainly be challenged. More radically, the whole notion of German Idealism as a constrained
episode could be challenged (see Beiser, “Hegel and the History of Idealism”). Again, I don’t take
much to turn on this terminological point, and except for Fichte, the topic of idealism as such won’t
make much of an appearance in this work. I am particularly interested in political philosophy—or
philosophy of law, broadly construed—which is why Schelling doesn’t make an appearance. I do feel
a bit guilty about the exclusion of figures such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Georg Forster, who
were important contributors to this kind of political philosophy. But my aim in this work has been
to induce contemporary philosophers to see with new eyes figures whom they have already taken
to be important political philosophers, rather than to encourage them to see new figures as impor-
tant. For the latter program, Beiser’s work remains central (see Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and
Romanticism).
2 Both of these terms are to be contrasted with ‘inter-subjective.’ I mean by ‘social’ and ‘political’ to
describe historically specific forms of relations among persons, rather than any a priori form of inter-
personal recognition. On the various levels between abstract inter-subjectivity and concrete sociality,
see Yeomans, “Hegel’s Pluralism as a Comedy of Action.”
3 Begriffsgeschichten, 12. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Koselleck in this mono-
graph are my own.
The Politics of German Idealism. Christopher Yeomans, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197667309.003.0001
2 The Politics of German Idealism
The most important general feature of the historical present of the German
Idealists is the way in which the period from 1770 to 1830 was one of transition
between early and late modernity, a so-called saddle period (Sattelzeit) in which
the metaphor is of a Bergsattel or shallow valley between two mountain peaks.
This is a strange sort of historical present, of course, since it is a present that is con-
scious of both its difference from the past and its anticipation of the future. The
notion of such a Sattelzeit comes originally from the German historian Reinhart
Koselleck, and is worked out in great detail in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe
(Foundational Historical Concepts), a collaborative project in mid-20th-century
Germany that produced an eight-volume encyclopedia tracking the changes
in political concepts over the period. The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and
Koselleck’s own landmark study, Prussia between Reform and Revolution, will be
frequent sources throughout the study, but I will explore this historical context
in a way that is not narrowly restricted to Koselleck and his collaborators. The
Sattelzeit theme is still current among German historians who do not share the
details of Koselleck’s approach. For example, Jürgen Osterhammel has recently
made the case for a global Sattelzeit from 1770 to 1830, with the true or truncated
19th century coming between 1830 and 1890, overlapping another transitional
period starting in the 1880s.4
I tell a historical story of the German Idealists that draws on conceptual re-
sources which they developed, yet which differs in fundamental respects from
the historical story told by any of the Idealists themselves, as well as from
some commonly told stories about the origins of modern philosophy gener-
ally.5 The key to the difference between the account offered here and that told
by the German Idealists themselves is my attribution to them of a form of his-
toricism that only came to be explicitly distinguished a century later—namely a
historicism that describes the synchronic experience of historicity at a time (in
the present), whereas their own philosophies of history tended to emphasize a
historicism that described diachronic change over time (indeed, progress over
time). The terms ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’ originate in linguistics, but I do
not here mean to use them in a way that refers exclusively to language. I simply
mean to indicate the difference between looking at a phenomenon primarily as
it as at a given time as opposed to how it has changed over time. Here, the phe-
nomenon is political relations, and the German Idealists have separate works in
4Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 58–63.

5In this way, I try to present a history of the German Idealists that is neither assimilative nor
reception-historical, in Harrelson’s use of those terms. It is not assimilative because it attempts pre-
cisely to understand them in their own context, even when that seems archaic to modern ears (e.g.,
my emphasis on patrimonial courts and corporate society more generally). But it is not reception-
critical, since I have precious little to say about the way in which these figures have been handed
down to us. See Harrelson, “Hegel in the Americas: Interpretive Assimilation and the Anticolonial
Argument.”
Introduction 3
which they try to describe the change in such relations over time. In Hegel’s ver-
sion (his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History), for example, that story
begins in China and ends in 19th-century Europe. But there is also an impor-
tant sense in which the possibility and even necessity of change is embedded in
the German Idealist’s non-developmental accounts of political relations in their
philosophies of right (Recht)—it is this synchronic historicity whose presence
I attempt to make visible here.
This attribution to the German Idealists of a form of what later (in the 20th cen-
tury) became known as Historik in addition to their own Geschichtsphilosophie
is a key hermeneutic device of this study, and I contend that it allows us to see
aspects of contemporary relevance in their work that are obscured by the single-
strand interpretations that see only their progressive, diachronic philosophies of
history. The synchronic historicism (Historik) is to be found in fascinating but
obscure aspects of their political philosophy, such as Kant’s claim that our rights
prior to the final institution of an ideal state are provisional, that is, both valid and
revisable, defensible and yet inconclusive. One set of hermeneutic tasks of this
study, then, is to raise these synchronically historical doctrines to visibility and to
reveal their historicity.
But in another way, the story here begins from a historical development that
was more apparent to the German Idealists than it is to us. In this way, the story
told here is closer to that told by the German Idealists themselves than it is to
most of our own contemporary ways of telling the history of modernity. The spe-
cific question at issue is, What fundamental change induces modernity? Whereas
common contemporary stories—particularly in philosophy—emphasize the rise
of science or the European religious wars, or even the much later explosion of
industrial capitalism, this study starts from a more immediately relevant social
change, namely the separation between state and society. This separation was
thematized by Kant in his distinction between private and public law, by Fichte in
his understanding of the discontinuity between economic and political relations,
and by Hegel in his theorization of a new social sphere, civil society (bürgerliche
Gesellschaft).
Among historians, the separation between state and society is recognized to
be a central development of the modern era. In fact, this separation can serve as
a criterion for the transition into modernity, which then begins in England in the
17th century, in France in the early 18th century, but in Germany first toward the
end of the 18th century.6 An interpretation of modern European history along
these lines then takes the following general shape: originally the state counted as
the highest and most general estate (Stand), and thus was characterized by the
6 See, e.g., Conze, “Das Spannungsfeld von Staat und Gesellschaft im Vormärz,” 207–269; and
Skinner, “The State.”

same form and kind of unity as the other estates, that is, as society (or, better, as
the various overlapping societies clustered together in a geographical region). In
the corporate society or Ständegesellschaft, the state counted as one estate among
others, first among equals (or second to the church).7 Law-making was occa-
sional at best, and most social and political relations were simply determined
by local customs and traditional privileges. But in Germany there is a break in
the late 18th century. Increasingly, traditional practices were supplanted by ab-
stractly rational criteria developed for the planning and evaluation of state ac-
tion, and then different rational criteria were developed within and for society.
As Jerrold Seigel puts it:
The general notion of civil society as an organized form of social life governed
by laws made it seem natural to consider political authority as part of it; but
rulers and administrators in Germany sowed the seeds of their separation by
taking bürgerliche Gesellschaft as an object of state action and policy, focusing
on social relations and private behavior as targets of their efforts to improve and
develop their territories.8
The state built a professional administrative corps and promulgated both general
laws and particular regulations, whereas in civil society new forms of association
and modes of production outside the church, guilds, manorial farms, and other
traditional estates were deployed. And this difference was only magnified by the
way in which that professional administrative corps took that society as an object
of intervention. Out of this break grew a tension: the goals of the state and of the
new civil society partially corresponded to each other but were not entirely con-
gruent. Furthermore, the remaining corporate society did not recognize itself as
goal-oriented at all, and thus found itself in fundamental tension with both state
and civil society.
So on the one hand we have a dualistic phenomenon—a split between state
and society. But the nature of that split introduces a second split within society
itself, which comes to have two different variants—a more traditional corporate
society (Ständegesellschaft) and a more voluntary and contractual civil society
(bürgerliche Gesellschaft). Prior to this split, economic discourse in Germany
consisted of treatises primarily about householding—that is, about the mainte-
nance and proper management of household enterprises such as farms, rather
than descriptions of laws of profit or prices. This is an economics in the classical
7 This had a linguistic representation as well: “Up to the mid-17th century, the Latin status was
generally translated into German not as Stat, but as Stand—denoting thereby not a condition, rela-
tion, or institution associated with a ruler, but the hierarchical estate groupings which controlled and
limited his power” (Tribe, Governing Economy, 28).
8 Seigel, Modernity and Bourgeois Life, 115.
Introduction 5
Aristotelian sense, an economics for corporate society. Only once the state splits
from society and generates the new civil society do we have the economics we
know today, oriented toward ensuring returns on investment and economic
growth.9 The two dualistic splits together thus produce a triangular split between
civil society, state, and corporate society.10
Though using slightly different language, Fernand Braudel has an evocative
presentation of this split between two forms of society:
In drawing up this inventory of the possible, we shall often meet what I have
called . . . ‘material civilization.’ For the possible does not only have an upper
limit; it also has a lower limit set by the mass of that ‘other half ’ of produc-
tion which refuses to enter fully into the movement of exchange. Ever-present,
all-pervasive, repetitive, material life is run according to routine: people go on
sowing wheat as they always have done, planting maize as they always have
done, terracing the paddy-fields as they always have done, sailing in the Red
Sea as they always have done. The obstinate presence of the past greedily and
steadily swallows up the fragile lifetime of men. And this layer of stagnant
history is enormous: all rural life, that is 80 to 90% of the world’s population,
belongs to it for the most part. . . . And material civilization has to be portrayed,
as I intend to portray it, alongside that economic civilization, if I may so call it,
which co-exists with it, disturbs it and explains it a contrario.11
In this work, I try to interpret classical German philosophy within the space of
what Braudel here calls “this inventory of the possible.”
Classical German philosophy from Kant to Hegel is situated in the historical
field of tension defined by that triangle, and the political concepts developed
by those philosophers take up much of their content from it. This history of the
emergence of this field of tension shows that it has three corners: an older corpo-
rate society that was composed of the innumerable particularities of each estate
and region; a new civil society that was stamped by universal conceptions of per-
sonal freedom; and a state that served as the increasingly powerful individual in
9 Tribe, Governing Economy, 24.

10 In some respects my approach is similar to the recent work of Christoph Asmuth. Asmuth is
himself keen to interpret the German Idealists in terms of their reflecting their historical context, and
to emphasize the constellation of different positions with German Idealism rather than arguing for or
against any particular position, much less presenting one figure as the completion of a development.
Furthermore, the German Idealists as he reconstructs their (primarily theoretical) philosophy are
pluralists, or philosophers of difference. But the thoughts pursued in this paragraph indicate some of
the differences as well, and to my mind he tends to emphasize exclusively the progressive elements
to the neglect of more traditional and inertial elements (though he does seem to see the importance
of their connection for contemporary philosophy). In a slogan, if Asmuth sees German Idealism as
Wissen im Aufbruch, I see it as Wissen im Spannungsfeld. See Asmuth, Wissen im Aufbruch.
11 Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, 28.
the social field as a whole. This field of tension is not only to be understood as the
field of contest on which the German Idealists meet each other in disputation,
but also as a subject area that is itself conceptualized by the German Idealists.
Importantly, corporate society, civil society, and the state must themselves be
understood not so much as institutions which are objects of contemporary ob-
servation and philosophical perception, but rather as perspectives from which
different dimensions of such institutional objects as the family, law, and prop-
erty can be observed. In this way, the political philosophies of the German Idealists
should be understood as ways of conceptualizing social reality that are philosoph-
ical expressions of the way society conceptualizes itself (i.e., from these three basic
and different social perspectives).12 Though the way society conceptualizes itself
is often put in an objective register of functions and causes, the philosophical
conceptualization brings out the way these same relations can be put in a sub-
jective register of judgments and values. It thus brings out the way that these
relations are justificatory and normative in addition to being explanatory and
functional.
Furthermore, these social perspectives have a temporal form: the true corpo-
rate society always lies in the past, the true civil society in the (far) future, and the
true state in the (near) future. They are never present in the present, as it were,
and thus cannot be directly perceived.13 In Koselleck’s terms, the present is the
temporal field of tensions of these “futures past,” and the actual social objects
are institutions in that present which are illuminated from these different tem-
poral perspectives simultaneously. Though Koselleck is perhaps best known for
taking up these perspectives, recognition of their importance for understanding
the history of Sattelzeit Germany extends beyond Koselleck and beyond Prussia
to other German states as well. (In fact, in many respects the paradigmatic
examples of these splits are in Baden and Bavaria.14) Let’s look briefly at two phe-
nomena that exemplify this breadth before moving on to some contrasts with
other approaches to the historicity of political philosophy.
The first example is from Isabel Hull, who describes the pattern of sexual be-
havior and the changes in this pattern in relation to the more general changes
of the state and society in the 18th century. Though Hull uses other terms, this
network can be conceived using the triangular field of tension described above.
12 I use ‘society’ and ‘society itself ’ here as placeholders for describing corporate society, civil so-
ciety, and the state collectively. It is actually an entailment of the methodological perspective taken up
in this work that there is no truly neutral conception of all three combined to be had; there are only
three different substantive conceptions, that is, the collection of the three viewed sequentially from
the perspective of each of the three. Though a crucial result for the overall project of which this book
is a part, it introduces expository difficulties that are best left to the side here.
13 For a contrasting view of the meaning of ‘civil society’ in this period, see Dipper,
“Übergangsgesellschaft: Die ländliche Sozialordnung in Mitteleuropa um 1800,” 68.

14 Conze, “Das Spannungsfeld von Staat und Gesellschaft im Vormärz,” 215–17.
Introduction 7
The following passage from Hull contains both a specific example as well as the
general form of this network:
In the course of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, Sittlichkeit
became more and more identified with matters exclusively sexual. . . . The
Grimms’ examples of this shift in usage toward the narrowly sexual are lit-
erary sources from the late eighteenth century (Wieland, Schiller, Goethe). Had
the Grimms included more legal sources, they would have seen that the ‘older
examples’ of the more sexual usage are typical of legal discourse and that this
usage was then, in the late eighteenth century, taken over by the literary shapers
of civil society, who developed the sexual accent even further and, by the nine-
teenth century, had surpassed official usage, which still continued to retain
some of the diffuseness characteristic of earlier times. In the following pages we
will see this pattern again, whereby the state shaped and accentuated a way of
interpreting or using sexual behavior, passed this along to nascent civil society,
which in its turn developed this interpretation or usage independently of the
state. This incomplete dialectic describes the formation of our modern concep-
tion of ‘sexuality.’15
Here the term ‘Sittlichkeit’ and its change in meaning from a general concept
of social uprightness to a narrower conception of sexual mores is the specific
topic. Naturally this thesis has interesting consequences for our understanding
of Hegel’s doctrine of Sittlichkeit (‘ethical life’), but here I want to focus on the
conceptual form of the dialectic Hull describes.
In order to see this form more clearly we must first ask: from what source is
this form of interpretation of sexual behavior taken over by the state and “shaped
and accentuated”? Clearly this way of regarding sexual behavior cannot originate
in the same society—civil society—that later takes this form of interpretation
over from the state and generalizes it. Rather the state took over this form of in-
terpretation from corporate society (Ständegesellschaft), here understood as the
customs and traditions (Sitten und Gebräuche) of the majority of the population.
The process of taking over these meanings ran primarily through the attempted
regulation of sexual behavior, since the attempt to manage and direct the sexual
activity of the population by means of laws required sufficient contact between
the laws and the activity to be regulated by them, and thus the state was forced to
familiarize itself at least with these customs and traditions of the population.16
Thus we have a circuit, which leads from corporate society through the state to
civil society.
15 Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815, 95.

16 Ibid., 92.
Each position is something like an electronic component in an electrical cir-

cuit: it influences the circulating meaning (here, that of ‘Sittlichkeit’) in regular
ways, similar to the way the electronic components influence the circulating cur-
rent. This regular influence of the social stations in our circuit could certainly
be described in a variety of registers, but here I want to remain at the logical
level: the corporate customs normally push toward particularity (“the diffuse-
ness characteristic of earlier times”), the governmental intervention toward
individuality (“shaping and accentuating” through a legal system), and the civil-
social17 opinions toward universality (the same sexual system for all citizens).
But a misunderstanding suggested by the analogy should be avoided, which
would be to think that the cycle runs from one institution to another to another.
When we understand by ‘institution’ a goal-oriented and integrated set of norms,
then Sittlichkeit is the institution in this example, and the societies and the state
are perspectives from which this institution is observed and regulated.
The different authors writing on sexuality had the norms of Sittlichkeit in
common and these norms reflected governmental, corporate, and civil-social
interests, but the perspectives defined by those interests were complicated. For
example, Hull points out that the unique social position of the supporters of the
civil-social interests played a role in their observations, since many if not most of
these writers and advocates were, in fact, government officials of one sort or an-
other. Due to his corporate status as a civil servant, such an official could have a
kind of family that would have been unimaginable for an innkeeper or farmer or
guild master, and it was precisely this very particular and unusual kind of family
that formed the universal image of the nuclear family that he then advocated
for all.18
Partially in order to dispel a second misunderstanding—that the meanings
here are exclusively linguistic—our second example deals with the changes in the
political representation of social interests in Bavaria. In the so-called Vormärz
period (i.e., the period leading up to the March 1848 revolutions), the primary
goal of the Bavarian state was to build a unified individual state out of the many
lands that were first brought together in 1806/1815. This process of state-building
was pursued in the face of resistance by the corporate estates, who wanted to
protect their previous prerogatives and privileges. But it was also simultaneously
subject to the civil-social criticism that the proposed constitution didn’t push fast
enough toward this future unity.
17 I have adopted the somewhat cumbersome neologism ‘civil-social’ to describe this perspective,
rather than the usual ‘bourgeois.’ In my view, ‘bourgeois’ has come to mean so many things that it
is now unsuitable as a term of art to describe a particular social position. For similar reasons, I will
use ‘governmental’ to describe the perspective of the state, though in many respects ‘administrative’
might have served just as well.
18 Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, 183–84.
Introduction 9
In Vormärz Bavaria, the corporate perspective is easiest to recognize in the

nobility and clergy. Both groups opposed the growing power of the state and in
particular the power of the bureaucracy. In addition, a civil-social opposition set
itself against the state, in particular against the estates-system of the new con-
stitution. Following the promise of the Vienna Congress, in 1818 Bavaria had
promulgated a constitution with a bicameral legislature (a chamber of councilors
(Reichsräte) and a chamber of deputies (Abgeordneten)). The members of the
chambers were corporately determined: roughly speaking, members of the high
nobility and clergy belonged to the chamber of councilors, whereas representa-
tives of the universities, towns, markets, and other corporations to the deputies.
Though in principle the second chamber was to represent the interests of civil
society, its membership was constituted in a way that corresponded to no con-
temporary social actuality, since that membership was derived instead from pre-
cisely the traditional prerogatives that were anathema to the new civil society. In
the chamber of councilors, the nobility and clergy remained even more tightly
tied to their traditional, pre-political order, and thus also had no relation to the
newly arising liberal, civil-social opposition. In the estates assembly, then, the
civil-social perspective was primarily represented by deputies who were civil
servants (either as professors at the university or bureaucrats in the towns), and
who were therefore also servants of the state.
In this context, the civil-social critique of the constitution was that it con-
cerned only artificial or state-estates, whereas in reality there were only two es-
tates: those with traditional privileges and prerogatives taken together on the
one side, and the general estate on the other side (which was therefore entirely
without representation in the assembly). Even though this form of privilege was
soon to be abolished, Wolfgang Zorn’s view is that these artificial states nonethe-
less played an important role precisely in that abolition:
These state-estates may be understood as an element of corporate stabilization

in the middle of modern constitutionalism. Their institution built, as it were, a
bridge between the political freedom which was further-advanced in Bavaria
since 1818 in comparison with Prussia and the even stronger social bond as
compared with Prussia.19
This bridge then made it possible for Bavaria in 1848 to move into modernity
with political equality whereas at that time Prussia regressed to the so-called
Dreiklassenwahlrecht (three-class voting franchise), in which voting rights
were apportioned by income (tax status). Here I just want to point out the tem-
poral dimension: the corporate recourse to traditional (i.e., past) particularities
19 Zorn, “Gesellschaft und Staat im Bayern des Vormärz,” 141.

stabilized the near future because it enabled an equilibrium, and in that equilib-
rium the development into the further future could take place.
The circuit described here also does not run from one institution to another: as
noted, the legislative advocates of the civil-social critique of the state-estates were
primarily servants of the state, that is, civil servants (as were roughly half of the
chamber of deputies). In this debate over the proper structure of the legislature,
the institution ‘representation’ is exchanged and shared between these different
temporal perspectives.
Three points ought to be made here before going on, all of which go to distin-
guish my own historiographical approach from some prominent others. First of
all, it is essential to my way of viewing the material that the relevant historical
context is primarily social. This separates my view from prominent historians
of philosophy such as Beiser, Pinkard, Pocock, and Skinner, for whom the rel-
evant historical context is primarily intellectual.20 It draws my work closer to
that of scholars such as Comay, Buck-Morss, Maliks, and even Dickey. But here
it may also be helpful to point out that the relevant context for Comay, Buck-
Morss, and Maliks is political and takes the form of an event (the French and
Haitian Revolutions), whereas I am primarily interested in structural context.21
Even when it comes to structural context, however, I am more interested in
medium-term changes than in the longue durée to which eventual history is usu-
ally contrasted. Dickey’s account is extraordinarily rich, making use of both a
general intellectual context of religious debates and a very specific political and
religious context of Württemberg.22 I make no claim to the inherent superiority
of my method, but I do think that it is both original and that it reveals a depth and
interconnectedness of German Idealist political philosophy that shows it to be
itself an understanding of the Idealists’ own historical experience. It also brings
into relief the significance of certain aspects of their doctrines that might have
seemed hopelessly archaic (such as Hegel’s estates structure and Kant’s “thing-
like right to a person [auf dingliche Art persönliches Recht]”). In the conclu-
sion, I will argue that it is precisely through revealing the historicity of German
Idealist political philosophy in this way that we can see what might be of value to
contemporary debates. Once we get down to the historical specifics—the social-
historical specifics—we find surprising ways in which some of the contexts that
are relevant for the German Idealists have reappeared in different form in our
20 Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism; Pinkard, German Philosophy; Pocock,
Politics, Language, and Time; Skinner, “The State.” Similarly, I have nothing to say about the role
of these figures in the development of the modern canon of philosophy along the lines argued in
Harrelson, “Hegel and the Modern Canon”; and Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy.
21 Comay, Mourning Sickness; Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History; Maliks, Kant’s
Politics in Context.
22 Dickey, Hegel.
Introduction 11
own time. More than anything else, we will see our contemporaries in their at-
tempt to formulate philosophies of legal, political, and social institutions that
were new and yet nonetheless already undergoing fundamental change.
Second, and despite the difference noted above between my approach and the
Cambridge school of Pocock and Skinner, one feature of their work is deeply im-
portant to my own and is shared with Koselleck. That feature is their attention to
the plurality of political languages and their interaction within a historical pe-
riod. As Pocock nicely puts it:
A complex plural society will speak a complex plural language; or rather, a plu-
rality of specialized languages, each carrying its own biases as to the definition
and distribution of authority, will be seen converging to form a highly com-
plex language, in which many paradigmatic structures exist simultaneously, de-
bate goes on as between them, individual terms and concepts migrate from one
structure to another, altering some of their implications and retaining others,
and the process of change within language considered as a social instrument
can be imagined as beginning.23
In this work, I have taken Kant, Fichte, and Hegel to be speaking such different
languages, and I have tried to trace their interconnections as a way of illuminating
the way that conversation reconstructs the political reality of their historical
present. As Pocock notes, we are always tempted to overgeneralize or otherwise
extend the meaning of historical texts beyond the meanings they can bear when
they are considered to be historically significant, in part because the authors
themselves are so rarely in full control of their own vocabulary and see their own
time through a glass darkly. We need a kind of historical key that reveals the lin-
guistic paradigm of the period in question, or as, I would put it, a lens to bring the
complexity of the plural society into focus.24 Burke provides that key for much of
Pocock’s analysis, and Hegel for my own. I thus hold that the lens that brings the
German Idealist debate into focus was provided by a contributor to that debate.
Put another way, I hold that one of the positions in the debate has an advantage in
bringing the others into relief. I thus take on a particular burden of proof to show
that this key is not tendentious and does not make Hegel into the inevitable out-
come of a teleological process of philosophical development. This is not my view,
but a natural suspicion on the part of the reader is certainly justified and can only
be allayed in the course of the work. In advance, I will merely point to the crucial
23 Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, 22.

24 Ibid., 32–33.
importance which I attach to Kant’s doctrine of provisionality as announcing the

theme of synchronic historicism in German Idealism.
Third, the social background that I bring to bear in interpreting these figures is
more narrowly focused on Germany itself than many other current approaches,
for example, that of Buck-Morss. To use a contemporary term, one might be
tempted to say that this background comprises domestic affairs rather than inter-
national ones. For similar reasons one might take my understanding of the polit-
ical philosophies at issue to make them out to be philosophies of law rather than
political philosophies per se. There is something right about both suggestions.
On the former point, I will have almost nothing to say about cosmopolitanism,
race, or colonialism. In trying to interpret the semantics of the terms, claims,
and principles used by the German writers to articulate their views on political
matters, I look to an “inventory of the possible” that is structured by the tec-
tonic shifts in social structure in the ground right under their feet, rather than to
more spatially or temporally distant relations.25 On the latter point, the central
problem that animates these philosophies on my account is a very practical ver-
sion of the ‘What is law?’ question, but in German: ‘Was ist Recht?’ ‘Recht’ is, of
course, a very difficult term to translate into modern philosophical English, and
‘right’ is more a transliteration than a translation. But many earlier translations
rendered it as ‘law,’ and one can read my study as inclining in that direction. In
my view, the focus on law—on norms enforced by sanctions through adjudica-
tion by authoritative processes—reveals the distinctive set of social problems to
which the formulations of Kant, Fichte and Hegel respond. But in another sense
the notion that the subject matter is domestic and legal can easily lead the reader
astray. The latter formulation can do so because ‘law’ easily brings to mind the
sorts of 21st-century legal systems we all inhabit, with perhaps some federalism
but otherwise a clear hierarchy of authority and narrow scope of what counts
as law. This, however, is not at all the situation in late 18th-century Germany,
where many different forms of legal authorities and norms coexisted. The former
formulation can mislead because prior to effective state-building, the clear line
between the domestic and the international was not to be found, particularly in
economic matters. In fact, precisely this problem animates Fichte’s most practical
political work, The Closed Commercial State. But bearing those caveats in mind,
the emphasis on the local and the legal is a distinctive feature that the reader will
see played out in this study.
25 In this respect it is worth noting the different position of the various German states with respect
to colonialism as opposed to England, France, or the Netherlands. Though there are scattered colo-
nial claims prior to German unification in 1871, they are unsuccessful and marginal to economic
and political life in the German states. The situation changes quite dramatically with the Berlin
Conference of 1884.
Introduction 13
1.2 The Shape of the Work to Come
1.2.1 Part I: Legal Standing Historicized
One of the crucial but hidden themes of German Idealist political philosophies
is the way that legal standing—specifically the modern notion of equal standing
before the law—is a work in progress. The legal individual and their rights claims,
combined with their access and subjection to legal proceedings for securing
those claims and adjudicating disputes with others about them, is a social per-
sona that is just as much being created as presupposed by the new forms of gov-
ernmental and civil-social institutions. In Part I, we start with the two most
basic thematizations of this process in German Idealism: Kant’s doctrine of the
provisionality of private law, and Hegel’s theory of the plurality of forms of legal
responsibility.
Chapter 2 concerns a specific feature of Kant’s political philosophy that is of
fundamental significance, namely the notion of provisional right. In this idea,
Kant has formulated an essential aspect of the historicity of German Idealism and
it deserves sustained discussion on its own. I connect this notion with two impor-
tant features of ownership relations in the Sattelzeit. First, the practical problem
of ownership rights is not that of determining the boundaries of exclusive titles,
but rather of disentangling and reweaving a complex set of ownership relations.
Second, the relevant contrast to which the state of nature vs. civil condition dis-
tinction refers is not a contrast between a situation of no political authority and
one with political authority. It is, rather, a contrast between a society that had
many different political authorities and one in which only the state had political
authority. Then, I show how understanding Kant against this background puts
the scholarly debate on the issue in a new light. Kant’s doctrine of provision-
ality is not a theory of a precursor stage to the final civil condition, but rather
a theory of practical judgment under interminable conditions of uncertainty.
It is a response to the historicity of politics that resonates throughout German
Idealism and is one of its signature achievements. Furthermore, this is one of the
cases in which we are not forced to choose between antiquarianism and anachro-
nism, because these two features of the Sattelzeit that are crucial to interpreting
Kant on provisionality are also features of our own world. In our time, political
authority is much more widely distributed than is usually recognized (see, e.g.,
McMahon 2012 and Anderson 2017), and any unified conception of property re-
lations has long since been unraveled by the actual practice of law in the context
of capitalism. With this doctrine, Kant in his own way articulates the co-presence
of the particular investments of the past, the universal demands of the future,
and the individual plans of the present. I end this chapter with a specific example
of Kant’s provisional theory that has gone largely unrecognized, namely Kant’s
notion of a thing-like right to a person (auf dingliche Art persönliches Recht). This
is the kind of right held by spouses and children against each other, and masters
against servants. On my view, Kant’s inclusion of such a right within the domain
of private law, which must be taken up into the civil condition and enforced by
the state, is ipso facto a claim that private legal jurisdiction must coexist with
the jurisdiction of state courts in the just republic. There is, if you like, a kind of
meta-provisionality built into Kant’s conception of law, according to which the
tension between private and public legal jurisdiction is not a relic of the past to be
got beyond but rather a continuing problem to be managed even in republics. If
this is right, then the political and the social cannot be as cleanly split as contem-
porary political philosophy has assumed, since there are forms of enforcement
authority within the social realm as well.
In Chapter 2, we have our first key to the synchronic historicism of the
German Idealists in Kant’s doctrine of the provisionality of private law. In
Chapter 3, we explore a second key, which is found in Hegel’s account of the
coexistence of different forms of legal responsibility in the Sattelzeit. This key
is historicist in two senses. First, the different forms of responsibility and their
characteristic successes and failures are related to epochal shifts in the evalua-
tion of action. And second, this account of the coexistence of different forms of
responsibility is related to the great German legal reforms of the late 18th and
early 19th centuries, including the paradigmatic Prussian Allgemeines Landrecht
(ALR). This chapter takes up Hegel’s theories of legal responsibility against the
background of the ALR and other German legal reforms. The ALR was one
of the great Enlightenment reform efforts, and had as one of its primary goals
the systematization of the different regimes of law extant in the Prussian states.
Philosophical theories of moral responsibility have always traded heavily in legal
analogies, and the German Idealists are no exception. This chapter shows Hegel’s
multiple accounts of agency to be attempts to manage a distinctive tension of the
ALR, which is that it grasped the members of the various estates (Stände) on the
one hand as equal agents before the law, but on the other hand assigned them
to different legal venues with different rules and thus different ways of holding
them responsible. One way to see these different ways is to consider the different
forms of exculpation that attach to them. Most fundamentally, these different
forms of exculpation are grounded in difficulties in figuring out which concep-
tion of the socially objective world is the right framework for determining the
moral valence of the action, or even if the action is subject to moral evaluation
at all. Here we have a feature that is apparently archaic—and is certainly pursued
by Hegel in terms of social conditions that are now quite distant from us—and
yet continues to appear in new guises in our own time. For example, should what
we eat be understood morally in terms of its climate impacts, its source in ethnic
traditions, or simply as a biological process without any great moral import?
Introduction 15
The answer to this question depends on the proper conception of the objective
world in which the agent acts. This chapter first reconstructs the form of such
difficulties for Hegel’s three “rights” of agency: the right of knowledge, the right
of intention, and the right of insight into the good. These three rights correspond
to three different normative competences that the ALR and reform movements
attempted both to demand of and develop in agents: competence in determining
whether a specific action is a proper object of normative evaluation, compe-
tence in evaluating the social impact of an action, and competence in making
all-things-considered judgments about actions. The distinction between these
forms of normative competence is then interpreted as a philosophical reflection
of the historical shift induced by the ALR and continued into the reform period
that first turned noble privileges into negative property rights, and then within
a generation turned those same negative property rights into positive, fungible
economic rights. In this process, the social landscape of those rights transformed
sequentially from something physical into something a priori and universal, and
then again into something social and thus value-laden, but also contingent and
enormously complicated. The transitional, non-ideal nature of Hegel’s political
theory is most revealed in the fact that the normative competences he identifies
are essentially abilities to cope with these shifts in meaning.
1.2.2 Part II: Private Law
With these foundations in hand, we turn to the study of the particular social
institutions that were described and justified by the German Idealists.
Chapter 4 focuses on the institution of the family as it was understood by
the German Idealists. I reconstruct the debate between the Idealists as a de-
bate between representatives of the different social perspectives first laid out
in Section 1.1 and then given more conceptual and action-theoretical struc-
ture in Chapters 2 and 3. I begin with another brief historical introduction of
both intellectual and social context. The intellectual context is primarily the
development of Cameralist thinking in the 18th century in opposition to
Aristotelian understandings, which then interacts in complex ways with the so-
cial changes brought on by war and modernization in the Sattelzeit. This involves
reconstructing the historical context a bit more specifically than already done in
Chapter 1, and in general I try to introduce historical context sequentially (i.e., as
it illuminates particular features of the Idealists’ doctrines and shows them to be
representatives of a particular social perspective). This is a tactic that I use quite
a lot in the book, so it might be worth saying a bit about this methodological
choice. It is a bit like just-in-time lectures in the classroom, where the thought
is that rather than providing all of the background and setup at the beginning,
potentially weeks before the class tackles an issue that makes use of some partic-
ular piece of that background, it is best to provide the background information
right when it is needed. Outside of the general sketch of the Sattelzeit and its field
of tension in Section 1.1, I have adopted a similar strategy for the historical con-
text. In part, that is because the features of historical context to which I appeal are
features of social context and thus likely unknown to the philosophers who are
the primary target audience of the book. But in part this is because the particu-
larity and specificity of that context matters, and so an exhaustive background
treatment would be too long. Then I offer an interpretation according to which
Kant presents the family from the corporate perspective, Fichte from the civil-
social perspective, and Hegel from the governmental perspective.
But in order immediately to distinguish my approach from Marxist histori-
ography of philosophy, I also argue that all of the three social perspectives are
present in each of the philosophers. By doing so, I hope both to push back against
any reductionism that would portray the Idealists as merely mouthpieces for so-
cial interests, and also to show that the Hegelian framework that is employed
here to reconstruct the Idealists is neither tendentious nor anachronistic. To
my mind, the best way to fight the reductionism is to show that the great value
of the Idealists as philosophers lies in the way that they each present all three
perspectives, even though one must be prioritized—and Hegel is no exception
here. The choice between the Idealists is, in an important sense, like the choice
between forms of agency themselves—it must be a matter of Willkür rather
than Wille because we are forced to choose a prioritization that is, contrastively
speaking, arbitrary. In particular, I try to get at the way in which the unity of
the perspectives produced by each prioritization is contrastive—that is, the
way in which there are really three unities involved, one from each of the three
perspectives.
Chapter 5 takes on German Idealist theories of property. In particular, it takes
up the issue of the relation between reason and politics. Of course, the proxi-
mate source of concern about this relation for the German Idealists is the French
Revolution and the Theory-Practice debate that it sparked.26 In Chapter 5, I con-
nect the issue to a contemporary metaethical debate with historical roots in
the German Idealists, namely the debate over the nature of and prospects for
constructivism. All of the German Idealists are constructivists in some sense—
that is, all of them see free self-consciousness as the source of norms—and
comparing the different advantages and disadvantages of each of their forms
of constructivism helps us make a start at seeing what is promising and what is
dangerous about each of their perspectives. More specifically, the dilemma for
constructivists as set out by Arto Laitinen is a nice way to frame the historical
26 See Maliks, Kant’s Politics in Context, chap. 2.

Introduction 17
options philosophically, and to locate the German Idealists in our triangular field
of tension. In addition, Chapter 5 extends the perspectival analysis thus far de-
veloped by characterizing views of property by reference to the function of prop-
erty that comes to the fore in their analyses: the personal, the economic, or the
political. These terms will help us add another connection between the projects
of agency and the social perspectives, as well as profiling the Idealists against the
background of the broader modern debate over property rights. Perhaps most
important, this chapter helps to fill out the way in which each of the philosophers
take up multiple perspectives by showing that each has a different perspective on
property than they had on the family. Whereas Kant took a corporate-social per-
spective on the family, he takes a civil-social perspective on property that focuses
on its economic role. Whereas Fichte took a civil-social perspective on the
family, he has an essentially governmental perspective on property that focuses
on its political role. And whereas Hegel took a predominately governmental per-
spective on the family, he takes a surprisingly corporate-social perspective on
property that focuses on its personal role. Again, I want to distinguish my histo-
riographical approach from any sort of social reductionism—whether Marxist
or of any other sort. These figures are not mere mouthpieces of any one social
class, but construct social reality from multiple perspectives.27 They contrast,
however, because of the different perspectives they take on different institutions
and the predominant perspectives from which the perspectives are unified into a
systematic political philosophy. The debate between them can be reconstructed
as philosophical precisely because they present different ways of unifying these
perspectives.
In Chapter 6, I take up an issue in which both of the institutions we have seen
so far—property and the family—are related to each other: inheritance. The issue
of the legitimacy of inheritance is one of the crucial social questions of the late
18th and 19th centuries.28 In contrast with our own contemporary reflections
on inheritance, which is spurred by the enormous inequality of capital wealth
produced by multi-generational inheritance, the distinctiveness of the issue in
the Sattelzeit comes from its reaction to feudal inheritance structures before
the advent of capitalist industrialization.29 This chapter focuses on Hegel, since
he most explicitly grasped different social forces and values involved. Indeed,
it is partially under the pressure of the tension between those forces that Hegel
distinguishes between two different forms of property, and puts that distinction
to use in striking a balance between those forces. But it should be remembered
27 For a good review of modern historiographical research that has put paid to the notion of the
bourgeoisie as a historical agent, see Seigel, Modernity and Bourgeois Life, chap. 1.
28 See Beckert, Inherited Wealth.
29 On the contemporary context, see Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century; and Halliday,
Inheritance of Wealth.
that the nature of the inheritance right is an important piece of Kant’s doctrine of
private right—and is the subject of an important criticism in Bouterwek’s influ-
ential review of the Doctrine of Right. Furthermore, Fichte’s doctrine of inherit-
ance also relies on his distinction between relative and absolute property, which
we saw already in Chapter 5. In this chapter we see a marked difference between
Fichte and Hegel, on the one hand, and Kant, on the other. Despite Hegel’s rather
cursory and uncharitable engagement with Fichte on this question, their views
are actually quite close, and both are motivated to attempt to balance the prin-
ciple of a modern economy with the principle of the family. The great difference,
of course, is in their conceptions of what the modern economy will look like.
For Fichte, the modern economy is essentially a planned economy, and the eco-
nomic rights to be vindicated are the rights of each to earn their own living and
of the state to maintain a stable and productive population according to its plan
for production and consumption. For Hegel, the modern economy is essentially
a market economy in which industries form according to economic laws rather
than government decrees. The economic right to be validated is thus the right to
the free ownership and use of property.
1.2.3 Part III: Public Law
In Chapter 7, Fichte takes center stage. Fichte’s great contribution to the his-
toricity of political philosophy lies in his simultaneous development of three
different political philosophies that are only tenuously connected to each
other: an ideal theory in his Foundations of Natural Right, a very nonideal theory
in his Closed Commercial State, and an educational theory of progress in his
Characteristics of the Present Age and Addresses to the German Nation. Working
from a rather high altitude, I try to show that these three political philosophies
can be characterized in terms that Koselleck has given us: the Foundations as a
horizon of expectation (the future made present), the Closed Commercial State
as a space of experience (the past made present), and the Characteristics and
Addresses as the relation of agency that connects the horizon and the space, the
future and the past. Though these three political philosophies are, theoretically
speaking, only tenuously connected to each other, this can easily obscure the way
in which they are historically very tightly joined—and they are joined in a dis-
tinctive tension that illuminates the historicity of the period in which they were
written.
In Chapter 8, I reconstruct Hegel’s theory of the state. Of crucial importance
to the structure of Hegel’s state is understanding the way that its pattern is essen-
tially that of the estates—and thus the way Hegel’s institutional design of the state
is a self-conscious attempt to bridge the gap between state and society. Because
Introduction 19
the very notion of the estates sounds as archaic and idiosyncratic to us now as
does Kant’s thing-like right to persons, the first section of this chapter goes into
some detail regarding the context and function of Hegel’s theory of the estates.
I argue that for Hegel, the estates are social preconditions for legal and political
practices, forms of political participation in their own right, and conditions of
possibility of moderate government (three functions also attributed to the es-
tates by Montesquieu). Then, in the second section I connect this feature of the
Hegelian state with the analysis of Fichte’s political philosophy in the previous
chapter. I show that Hegel’s state is the result of the kaleidoscopic task of in-
cluding within a single institution all three of the elements that Fichte distributes
to different texts and projects. The different institutional elements of the Hegelian
state embody the temporal perspectives of the social groups that Hegel envisions
populating its members. In the estates-assembly, for example, the lower house
populated by the agricultural estate is inertial, pulling the state backward toward
the standards of past practices in the space of experience. By contrast, the upper
house populated by the estate of trade and industry is accelerationist, pressing
forward toward the horizon of expectation. But then I go on to show how each
of these Hegelian groups contains the whole package of historical dimensions—
the space of experience, the horizon of expectation, and their relation. The his-
toricity of Hegel’s state takes the form of an interlocking mechanism of social
groups, each with its own historicity.
In the concluding Chapter 9, I briefly summarize the three main features of
German Idealist political philosophy that remain most relevant for us today: pro-
visionality, pluralism, and historicism.
PART I
L E GA L STA NDI NG
HISTOR IC I Z E D
2
Kant and the Provisionality of Right
Here I want to take up one of the key historicist moments in German Idealist
political philosophy: Kant’s conception of the provisionality of private law.1 Kant
is among the first in the German tradition to clearly distinguish between pri-
vate and public law. As that distinction has come to be understood today, pri-
vate law regulates largely voluntary relationships between individuals, whereas
public law regulates largely involuntary relationships between groups, or between
individuals and the state. To say that private law is provisional under certain
conditions is to say that it has a real but incomplete sort of validity. This claim is
an enduring philosophical and interpretive puzzle. In calling our rights to prop-
erty, contract, and family relations provisional (provisorisch), Kant claims both
that those ownership interests are actual rights even in a state of nature and that
such rights are only grounded in the civil condition—then they become con-
clusive. Put in other language, our merely social rights claims are valid prior to
the institution of a state (which guarantees a civil condition), even though that
validity depends on their anticipating that state (which would conclusively de-
termine their scope and content). Here we see a theoretical reflection of precisely
the split between state and society that we discussed in the previous chapter.
Kant’s doctrine of provisionality gives us a snapshot of their initial pulling apart,
a picture in which the further split within society between corporate and civil
society is not yet explicitly registered. It gives us a synchronic presentation of the
historical present in which the diachronic change (the splitting of state and so-
ciety) is taking place, and an attempt to understand the significance of that pro-
gressive splitting for the nature of law at the time.
Provisionality is a general feature of private law, which in Kant consists of
our right to objects (property), choices (contract), and statuses (spouses, chil-
dren, and servants); but we can start to get at the issues by focusing on owner-
ship interests in objects (Sachenrecht). Two features of property in the Sattelzeit
period are crucial to understanding Kant’s account of its provisionality. First,
the practical problem of ownership rights was not that of determining the
boundaries of exclusive titles, but rather of disentangling and reweaving a com-
plex set of varied ownership relations. Second, the relevant contrast to which the
1 An earlier version of some material in this chapter appeared in Yeomans, “Kant and the
Provisionality of Property.”
The Politics of German Idealism. Christopher Yeomans, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197667309.003.0002
Kantian distinction between the state of nature and the civil condition refers is
not a contrast between a situation of no political authority and one with political
authority. It is, rather, a contrast between a corporate society that had many dif-
ferent political authorities and a social order in which only the state had political
authority.
In Section 2.1 I briefly lay out the interpretive problem of provisionality—
the texts at issue and some extant interpretations. In each of the following two
sections I try to bring historical resources to bear on problems that arise for con-
sideration of the theory of property in the context of its provisional status. In the
first subsection of each of these two sections I review some current work and
point to difficulties that open the way to consideration of historical context; in
the second subsection I briefly rehearse some relevant point of that context; and
in the third subsection I draw some conclusions.2 Then, in Section 2.4 I take up a
particularly interesting feature of Kant’s doctrine of law from the perspective of
his provisionality, namely his endorsement of a thing-like right to a person (auf
dingliche Art persönlichen Recht). This is the kind of right held by spouses and
children against each other, and by masters against servants. It is a kind of pri-
vate legal jurisdiction that, on Kant’s account, must not be abolished but rather
enforced by the public law of the state. Finally, in Section 2.5, I relate this syn-
chronic characteristic—provisionality—to the diachronic and progressive story
Kant tells in his works on the philosophy of history.
2.1 The Problem of Provisionality
The Kantian texts here are diffuse and sometimes comparative. Furthermore,
different writers on the issue emphasize different formulations, even though all
of the formulations are somewhat oblique. It is perhaps easiest to see in the con-
trast between the titles to Sections 8 & 9 of Kant’s Doctrine of Right on owning
something external to you:
§8: “It is possible to have something external as one’s own only in a rightful
condition, under an authority giving laws publicly, that is, in a civil condition
[Etwas Äußeres als das Seine zu haben, ist nur in einem rechtlichen Zustande,
unter einer öffentlich=gesetzgebenden Gewalt, d.i. im bürgerlichen Zustande,
möglich].” (MM 6:255)
And:
2 An argument for similar conclusions to my own, but drawn rather more from traditional ra-
tional reconstruction of Kant’s text, can be found in Messina, “Kant’s Provisionality Thesis.”
Kant and the Provisionality of Right 25
§9: “In a state of nature something external can actually be mine or yours
but only provisionally [Im Naturzustande kann doch ein wirkliches, aber nur
provisorisches äußeres Mein und Dein statt haben.]” (MM 6:256)3
The relation between the two is then explained by Kant as follows: “Possession
in anticipation [Erwartung] of and preparation [Vorbereitung] for the civil con-
dition, which can be based only on a law of a common will, possession which
therefore accords with the possibility of such a condition, is provisionally
[provisorisch] rightful possession, whereas possession found in an actual civil
condition would be conclusive [peremtorische] possession” (MM 6:25–67).
There seems to be rightful or just possession within the state of nature, but of a
kind that essentially makes reference to a more complete or more just possession
within the civil condition. There is thus a distinction between two forms of the
rightfulness of possession of external things that is correlated with the distinc-
tion between two forms of human collective life—a form of society prior to or
independent of the state, and a form of society that is produced by the state.
But the concept of provisionality is implicitly invoked also in other contexts,
for example, the conduct of war: “Right during a war would, then, have to be the
waging of war in accordance with principles that always leave open the possi-
bility of leaving the state of nature among states (in external relation to one an-
other) and entering a rightful condition” (MM 6:347). So whereas the problem
of provisionality is particularly pressing with respect to private law, it is of wide
application to Kantian doctrines spelled out in other terms and with respect to
other norms of political philosophy. In essence, the problem is one of the status
of norms that are provisional, and the relation between that provisional status
and their full or completely binding status.
Scholars have taken different approaches to understanding the distinction
here. Rafeeq Hasan puts the problem as follows:
Kant appears to hold the following two theses:
Thesis 1: There is a natural right to property that is not itself generated by public
authority.
Thesis 2: Entry into the civil condition does not simply render natural prop-
erty rights more secure. Rather, there is no way for property rights to be fully
rightful outside of an institutional and legal specification.4
3 See also MM 6:264: “Something can be acquired conclusively [peremtorisch] only in a civil con-
stitution; in a state of nature it can also be acquired, but only provisionally [provisorisch].”
4 Hasan, “The Provisionality of Property Rights in Kant’s Doctrine of Right,” 854.
Hasan then distinguishes between interpretations that hold Thesis 1 but

abandon Thesis 2 as weakly provisional and interpretations that hold Thesis
2 but abandon Thesis 1 as strongly provisional. As Hasan rightly sees it, the
problem is that weakly provisional interpretations turn Kant into Locke and
thus make it hard to see what is provisional about the rights at all, whereas
strongly provisional interpretations turn Kant into Hobbes and thus make it
hard to see why they are rights at all. Put in terms of the validity of norms, weakly
provisional interpretations seem to make the norms fully valid even at the pro-
visional stage (and thus to undermine the distinction between provisional and
conclusive status for norms), and strongly provisional interpretations seem to
deny any validity to the norm at the provisional stage (and thus to undermine
the sense in which it is a norm at all). For example, Arthur Ripstein counts
as a strong provisionality theorist in Hasan’s reckoning, because on Ripstein’s
account in the state of nature we have a right to an object, and rights are inter-
nally connected to the entitlement to enforce them coercively, and yet in the
state of nature we have only the limited right to enforce those rights in only
those cases in which our innate freedom is imperiled.5 As a result, it doesn’t
look as though we have the right at all in the state of nature (i.e., in the society
which is independent of the state).
In contrast, Hasan offers a middle way, anticipatory provisionality:
According to anticipatory provisionality, state of nature property claims do

not wrong other agents, but nor are they full-fledged rights claims that simply
await institutional specification. Rather, they anticipate a condition in which
the authority to make such claims can no longer be unilaterally determined.
The meaning of ‘anticipate’ here is two-fold. State of nature property claims
create the necessary background conditions for public authority. At the same
time, they draw on a public authority they lack. Although they are defective as
instances of right . . ., they are still rights because they are opposed to the clear
wrong of remaining in the state of nature.6
On this line of thought, the concept of provisionality is a thought experiment

meant to show that the validity of ownership claims depends on the commit-
ment of owners to move from the state of nature to a civil or public condition, in
the sense that claiming something as your own ipso facto commits you to bring
about that condition.7
5 Ripstein, Force and Freedom, 165.

6 Hasan, “The Provisionality of Property Rights in Kant’s Doctrine of Right,” 856.
7 Ibid., 876.
Helga Varden also counts as a strong provisionality theorist on Hasan’s ac-

count, and understands the difference between the state of nature and the civil
condition as one in which the former set out the circumstances of justice (though
in a matter quite different from Hume and Locke) but the latter is constitutive for
justice (i.e., rightful relations).8 But Varden goes further in arguing that the civil
condition identified by Kant is not just any political authority but only a state or-
ganized along very specific lines.9
More radically, Elisabeth Ellis appeals primarily to the passage quoted
above concerning international law and the conduct of war, and puts the point
in terms of the normative distance between ideal principles and non-ideal
conditions: “The concept of provisional right applies to institutions that im-
perfectly mirror their own normative principles; since all existing political
institutions do this, pragmatic politics must follow a rule of provisional rather
than conclusive right.”10 On this construal, provisionality is neither a thought
experiment regarding the underlying normative commitments of ownership
claims nor an analysis of the normative consequences of a past transition to
a political state, but rather a description of the situation we are necessarily in
even within the political state. Ellis’s view thus escapes Hasan’s division, which
assumes that at some point we get out of the state of nature and into the civil con-
dition in some sort of conclusive way.
Here I just want to identify two common assumptions behind these otherwise
very different approaches to the problem of provisionality, assumptions that are
shared by the vast majority of the literature on Kant’s theory of ownership. First,
they either explicitly argue for or implicitly assume a comprehensive and unified
conception of ownership as the content of Kant’s doctrine of rightful possession,
which is then assimilated to contemporary understandings of property rights.
Second, they either explicitly argue for or implicitly assume a conception of the
state of nature that is nonpolitical and even nonsocial. In each of the following
sections I try to first diagnose this assumption and its problems in a representa-
tive of the current literature, then provide some historical context to motivate the
thought that Kant might have had something different in mind, and then return
to Kant to offer the outlines of an alternative interpretation. Because the first as-
sumption is perhaps the most significant barrier for understanding property re-
lations today, I devote the most space to its discussion.
8 Varden, “Kant’s Non-Voluntarist Conception.”

9 Varden, “Kant’s Non-Absolutist Conception of Political Legitimacy.”
10 Ellis, Kant’s Politics, 112.
2.2 Full Dominion vs. Diverse Ownership Interests
2.2.1 Ripstein
Here in this section I want to do justice to Ripstein’s reconstruction of Kant’s view

of property, in part because it is the current interpretation that seems to draw
Kant farthest away from his historical context and the problem of provisionality.
Difficulties diagnosed with Ripstein’s view will serve to motivate the more com-
plicated but less definitive reflections that follow.
Ripstein’s Force and Freedom has the tremendous virtue of rendering vis-
ible the systematic interconnections between different features of Kant’s polit-
ical philosophy, and its connection to other aspects of Kant’s thinking (such as
the doctrine of intuition). Much of its power therefore lies beyond the scope of
this short section. Nonetheless, the specific doctrine in which I am interested
seems to me a paradigmatic example of this virtue. That doctrine asserts that the
property right protects the exclusive use and possession of a spatial region by a
single individual, and does so on the basis of an exclusively formal conception
of purposiveness. These features are derived from Kant’s Postulate of Practical
Reason with Regard to Rights, and, because of their specifically spatial dimen-
sion, introduce a distinctive role for intuition in the technical Kantian sense. In
what follows I try to unpack the connection between these features by tracing
Ripstein’s argument for them.
Here is Kant’s Juridical Postulate of Practical Reason (JPPR):
It is possible for me to have any external object of my choice as mine, that is,
a maxim by which, if it were to become a law, an object of choice would in
itself (objectively) have to belong to no one (res nullius) is contrary to rights.
(MM 6:246)
In his reconstruction, Ripstein emphasizes the formality of the postulate, in at

least two dimensions. First, the tie between the object and the possessing sub-
ject is formal. Kant says that “any external object of my choice” can be made
mine, not just those on which I have worked, or for which I have a particular
use. Second, the sense of “choice” is entirely formal. It does not depend on any
particular purpose with respect to which the object is to serve as means, but
only to the formal means-end relation itself. So long as I really can make the
object a means to some end, it is an object of my choice in the relevant sense.
In both cases, formality has the sense of arbitrariness or contingency because
neither the specific content of the purpose nor that of the object secures the
rightful relation to the object. This arbitrariness of the connection between the
object and subject of property relations is, of course, an essential element of
the modern doctrine of property relations, and accounts for its extraordinary
generality.
Here is how Ripstein ties these thoughts together in interpreting Kant’s argu-
ment for the Postulate of Practical Reason with Regard to Rights:
Kant’s argument shows, first, that the only way that a person could have an en-
titlement to an external object of choice is if that person had the entitlement
formally, because having means subject to your choice is prior to using them for
any particular purpose. Second, Kant argues that the exercise of acquired rights
is consistent with the freedom of others, because it never deprives another
person of something that person already has. So anything less than fully private
rights of property, contract and status would create a restriction on freedom
that was illegitimate because based on something other than freedom.11
Key to Ripstein’s reconstruction is the notion of incompatibility, and the formal

level at which it operates. Let me explain.
On Ripstein’s account, the innate right to control over our bodies is different
from the acquired right to property, but they both provide a normative frame-
work required by the incompatibility of my possession of an object with your
possession of an object. In the case of innate right that object is a human body
(whether mine or yours), and in the case of acquired property rights that object
is something external to our bodies. Now, in principle, such incompatibilities
could operate on a variety of levels. My possession of a thing now might be in-
compatible with your possession of the thing now but compatible with your pos-
session of it later. Or, my possession of the thing for the purpose of storing value
in it might be compatible with your possession of the thing for its use but incom-
patible with your possession of the thing for the purpose of exchanging it for an-
other thing. In contrast to these options, it is crucial to Ripstein’s interpretation
of Kant that this incompatibility operates entirely at the formal level of choice
as such. It is crucial because it seems that only that level of incompatibility will
generate the exclusiveness of individual use. That level of analysis is justified by
the need to construct a truly private law, that is, a law without domination or
personal dependence of any kind (cf. Hasan 2018). Anything less than a purely
formal criterion for determining the distribution of personal freedoms would
require that the scope of my freedom be determined, in part, by the specific con-
tent of your ends and would therefore constitute an objectionable dependence
on your choices.12
11 Ripstein, Force and Freedom, 62. See also Ripstein, 88. (Ripstein 2009, 88): “Having things sub-
ject to your choice must be understood in terms of their being subject to your purposiveness, and so
to your exclusive use of them.”
12 Ripstein, Force and Freedom, 91.
Of course, this formal level of analysis immediately generates the problem

of applicability. Kant himself signals this problem in characterizing the three
forms of private law (property, contract, and status) as “objects of my choice in
terms of the categories of substance, causality, and community between myself
and external objects in accordance with laws of freedom” (MM 6:247). To draw
this analogy is immediately to invite the quid juris question for the categories
of private law parallel to that question for the theoretical categories of relation
(substance, causality, and community) from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. But
whereas the answer to the quid juris question in the case of the categories of rela-
tion appeals to time as a form of intuition, the answer to the quid juris question in
the case of the categories of private law appeals to space as a form of intuition (on
Ripstein’s account). Here I just want to note two problems with the argument.
First, the exclusivity of the property right cannot be derived from the purely
formal conception of agency. Nothing in the purely formal conception of agency
makes agency either individual (at any level) or necessarily exclusive of influence
or even interference from the agency of others.13 It is plausible to regard agency
as intrinsically goal-directed in the way that Kant and Ripstein do, but nothing
in the structure of goal-directedness is going to give us the required exclusivity
either, and Ripstein never attempts to show how it would do so.14
Second, nothing in the intuition of space is going to give you that exclusivity
either, especially given the way that Kant distinguishes between self-ownership
and ownership of property. Perhaps if one argued for property as an extension of
the self (as Hegel does), one could combine that with spatial intuition to make
the same claims for exclusiveness (no two things in the same place at the same
time). But, perhaps to his credit, Kant doesn’t conceive of property as such an
extension of the self, and so there is not even potential applicability of an only-
one-thing-in-one-place principle.
I don’t mean these problems just to indicate the trivial point that we are
dealing with the practical extension of a concept for which there can be no theo-
retical license (i.e., the point that there can be no strict equivalence between the
answers to the two quid juris questions). Even granting Kant the legitimacy of
that practical extension, there is nothing in either the concept so extended or the
sphere to which it is extended that contains the exclusivity that justifies property
rights as full dominion. Of course, this leaves the practical purpose for which it
is extended as a potential justification, but that is neither the way Ripstein’s inter-
pretation goes nor itself a promising avenue for development.
13 In fact, it is not clear what resources for individuation there are at the purely formal level, a fact
that Schopenhauer places at the center of his own Kantianism.

14 Here my view is different from that of Katrin Flikschuh, who sees purposiveness itself as the cul-
prit. Flikschuh, “Innate Right and Acquired Right in Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom,” 304. See
also Ripstein’s reply to Flikschuh (Ripstein, “Reply to Flikschuh and Pavlakos”).
Nor do I mean simply to advocate for the view that Kant’s conception of
rightful ownership is only a conception of usufruct (i.e., rights to use rather than
exclusive possession) and not private property.15 Though I have much sympathy
for the usufruct interpretation, the point here is slightly different. Ripstein’s Kant’s
argument might give us a tie between use and the right to exclude others from
using the property in such a way that would undermine the rightful possessor’s
rightful use, without it following that the rightful possessor could exclude others
from any use of the property. And that is true regardless of whether the posses-
sion was considered rightful under the description of usufruct or property. The
right to non-interference that derives from the connection of rightful possession
with formal agency is formal in the sense that its scope is indeterminate. The ex-
clusion need not be exclusive.16 The qualifications on property rights introduced
by public law in Kant’s theory are then not constraints but rather specifications of
the formal right to exclude.
Another way to put this is as follows: in more everyday reflections on ends and
means, the content of the end is essential to determining what can actually count
as a means for that end (i.e., what I can actually make a means to my end and thus
what can actually be an object of choice and not mere wish). But on Ripstein’s in-
terpretation, we must treat the choice purely formally, and thus can make no ref-
erence to the content of ends for determining means. We then replace the specific
contents of ends with a more general postulate of our need for spatio-temporal
means in order to understand the nature of the means-end relation at issue. This
is fine as far as it goes, but there is simply nothing in the bare thought of being a
spatio-temporal means to an end that entails complete and exclusive use. Again,
as far as I can tell, Ripstein never attempts to establish this central point. There
is no reason to think that “having means subject to your choice is prior to using
them for any particular purpose,” since only our particular purposes make them
into means in the first place.
Ripstein foregrounds Kant’s claim that the postulate of external rights is
driven by a priori intuitions, which then allow us to construct (with geomet-
rical precision) exact boundaries between different citizens’ property, contract,
and status rights (see Ripstein 2009 Appendix A and Kant MM 6:232–33). For
Ripstein the spatiality of the intuitions is the crucial factor, introducing kinds of
incompatibilities to which right must respond by drawing the proper boundaries.
But in fact, Kant refers primarily to the dynamical problem of the equality of ac-
tion and reaction and thus to the systematic balancing of forces:
15 For this view, see Westphal 2002.

16 This topic deserves more discussion than I can give it here. For a useful analysis—though one
that comes to opposed conclusions from my own—see Weinrib, “Ownership, Use, and Exclusivity.”
The law of a reciprocal coercion necessarily in accord with the freedom of

everyone under the principle of universal freedom is, as it were, the construc-
tion of that concept, that is, the presentation of it in pure intuition a priori, by
analogy with presenting the possibility of bodies moving freely under the law
of the equality of action and reaction . . . it is not so much the concept of right as
rather a fully reciprocal and equal coercion brought under a universal law and
consistent with it, that makes the presentation of that concept possible. (MM
6:323–3)
Now, it is hard to parse the analogy in any great detail, but the important point is
that there is no reason to think that there is a unique solution to this equation of
the balance of forces. Primarily this is because the forces themselves—that is, the
ownership claims to specific uses of specific objects—are not fixed but are only
provisional. The very definition of what is mine makes reference to the final solu-
tion to the equation: “the object is mine because my will to use it as I please does
not conflict with the law of outer freedom” (MM 6:253). To change the analogy
slightly, the task is not to find the parallelogram of given forces, but to determine
the nature of the forces themselves such that a parallelogram results. But many
parallelograms are possible and thus many specifications of forces are possible.
It isn’t clear what best geometrical shape would be the best analogy for “a fully
reciprocal and equal coercion,” but whatever it is, there is no reason to think
that there is a single version of it that thus picks out a unique specification of the
forces. The better interpretation is to see the postulate pointing not primarily
to intuition but rather to an idea in the distinctively Kantian sense of that term.
More specifically, it points to the idea of a complete society whose members’ in-
dividual wills are distinctively balanced in an omnilateral (allseitig) will. This
shift in interpretation makes visible two crucial features of Kant’s theory of prop-
erty. The first is its historical character. The second is its problematic character,
that is, it presents a problem to be solved rather than a formal doctrine whose
true outlines we have failed to grasp.
It is, of course, tempting to think that one could accomplish such geometrical
constructions in a priori intuition and then simply fill in the outlines with the
relevant features of the world; certainly, Kant himself indulged in this thought at
points in the Rechtslehre, and indeed precisely in the continuation of the passage
just quoted:
A right line (rectum), one that is straight, is opposed to one that is curved on the
one hand and to one that is oblique on the other hand. As opposed to one that
is curved, straightness is that inner property of a line such that there is only one
line between two given points. As opposed to one that is oblique, straightness
is that position of a line toward another intersecting or touching it such that
Another random document with
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SECONDARY OR REMOTE RESULTS OF
LIVER DISEASE.
In gout: Arrest of oxidation of proteids into urea. Deposits of biurate of lime on

joints, and other disorders. Urinary calculi containing urates, cystine, xanthine,
etc., also from imperfect oxidation of albuminoids. Oxalic acid represents a similar
arrest. Kidney degenerations from irritating urates and oxalates. Fatty kidney from
excessive glycogenesis. Digestive disorders from excess or deficiency of bile or
torpid liver. Nervous disorders, dullness, lameness, vertigo, spasms, irritability
from hepatic inactivity and resulting poisons. Sore throat and bronchitis from
hepatic derangement. Skin eruptions in tardy or imperfect action of the liver.
Treatment: Abundant water, succulent vegetables, ensilage, fresh grains, balanced
ration, in carnivora and omnivora oat meal, buttermilk, clear meat juice, avoid
sweets, gravies, spiced animal food. Dangers for pampered horses, dogs, and old
improved meat producing animals. Open air exercise. Laxatives with alkalies,
salines, mercurous and mercuric chloride, pilocarpin, chlorides, iodides, bromides,
nitro-muriatic acid, ipecacuan, euonymus, bitters.
Among the many secondary results of hepatic disorder, and which

are habitually described as affections of other organs a few may be
mentioned as indicating the wide range of influence exercised by the
liver in disease as well as in health.
Gout as it appears in fowls and omnivora is directly due to the
arrest of the transformation of the albuminoids into urea. Circulating
in the system in the form of the less perfectly oxidized and less
soluble uric acid, it determines deposits of biurate of lime around the
joints, with local inflammations, and disorders of circulation and
innervation, and altered spirit, temper, etc.
Urinary calculi in the same animals, are composed largely of urate
of lime, cystine, xanthine and other nitrogenous products
representing various stages of oxidation short of the final transition
into urea and ammonia. Recognizing the active rôle which the
urinary bacteria fill in this respect we must still acknowledge the
great importance, as causative agents, of an excess in the urine of
these comparatively insoluble products.
The oxalic acid found in certain calculi points in the same
direction, as this acid, both in the body and in the laboratory, is
found to result from the oxidation of uric acid (Wohler, Schenck,
Hutchinson).
Degenerations of the Kidneys are to be largely traced to the same
hepatic source. The uric acid diathesis, and the oxalic acid diathesis,
both the result of imperfect liver function, are among the most
frequent causes of irritation of the kidneys, by which channel they
are eliminated from the body. Hence acute and chronic nephritis, as
well as nephritic calculi result from morbid conditions which have
their starting point in the imperfect function of the liver. Again fatty
degeneration of the kidney is very liable to result from derangement
of the glycogenic function of the liver, the tendency to the formation
of fat and the constant irritation caused by the passage of the sugar
contributing to the tissue degradation. In such cases albuminuria is a
not uncommon accompaniment.
Derangements of the Digestive Organs may be said to be a
necessary result of hepatic disorder. Excessive secretion of bile
stimulates peristalsis and may induce diarrhœa, while diminished
secretion tends to constipation, light colored, fœtid stools, intestinal
fermentations and poisoning by the irritant products. A torpid
hepatic circulation means congestion of the whole portal system,
indigestions, colics, chronic muco-enteritis, intestinal hemorrhages,
hemorrhoids, etc.
Derangements of the Nervous System. In this connection may be
named the lameness of the right shoulder which accompanies certain
disorders of the liver, the extreme dullness and depression that
attends on others, the sluggish pulse that appears in certain types,
the unsteadiness of gait (giddiness) in others, the muscular cramps,
and irritability in still others. These appear to be due in some
instances to the nervous sympathy of one part with another, whilst at
other times they as manifestly depend on the circulation in the blood
of partially oxidized and other morbid products of hepatic disorder
which prove direct poisons to the nervous system.
Derangements of the circulation, like extreme rapidity, or slowness
of the pulse, irregularities in rhythm and intermissions, may be
charged more directly on the nervous affection, though primarily
determined by hepatic disorder.
On the part of the Respiratory Organs, affections of a chronic
type, like sore throat and bronchitis may often be traced to hepatic
torpor or disorder.
Skin Diseases are notoriously liable to come from inactive or
disordered liver, the irritant products circulating in the skin or
sweating out through it, giving rise to more or less irritation. The
result may be a simple pruritus, an urticaria, an eruption of papules,
vesicles or even pustules. In any such cases it is proper to look for
other indications of liver disease,—pale color and offensive odor of
the fæces, muco-enteritis, indigestion, icterus or yellow patches on
the mucous membranes, tenderness on percussion over the asternal
ribs, muscular neuralgia, nervous disorder, the passage of bile,
hæmoglobin, albumen, sugar or other abnormal elements in the
urine, etc.
TREATMENT OF SECONDARY AND
FUNCTIONAL DISEASES OF THE LIVER.
Diet. Many hepatic disorders, and especially those that are
exclusively or mainly functional may be corrected by diet alone.
Prominent among dietary influences is the abundant supply of water.
The succulent grasses of spring and early summer constitute the
ideal diet, hastening and increasing elimination, and lessening the
density of the bile, even to the extent of dissolving biliary calculi and
concretions. Upon dry winter feeding such calculi are common
especially in ruminants, whereas after a month or two at pasture they
are extremely rare. In winter the same good may be arrived at by the
use of ensilage, brewer’s grains, roots, fruits, or even scalded hay or
bran. The two extremes of highly albuminous and highly
carbonaceous or saccharine food are to be avoided or used only in
limited amounts. In the one class are clover, alfalfa, sainfoin,
vetches, cowpea, lespedeza, especially in the form of hay, beans,
peas, cotton seed, gluten-meal, rape and linseed cake. In the other
are wheat, buckwheat, Indian corn, sorghum, sweet-corn and
cornstalks. Some agents like beets which are rich in saccharine
matter may be actually beneficial by reason of their laxative and
cholagogue action. In the carnivora the food should be largely of
simple mush of oatmeal, wheat seconds, or barley meal, skimmilk or
buttermilk. If it is needful to tempt the appetite in a fleshfed animal
this should not be done by rich, fat gravies, highly spiced animal
food, or rich saccharine puddings, but rather by the addition of a
little pure juice of lean meat, or some well skimmed beef tea.
It is as important to regulate the quantity as the quality of the food
as the heavy feeder will over-charge the liver as much by an excess of
otherwise wholesome food, as will the ordinary animal by the
indigestible and unwholesome articles. As a rule the improved
breeds of meat producing animals, have acquired such facility in fat
production that much of the surplus is largely and profitably
disposed of in this way, and in their short lives little obvious evil
comes of the overfeeding, but in cases in which this outlet proves
insufficient, as in horses and dogs that are highly fed on stimulating
or saccharine diet, and which are kept for the natural term of their
lives, with little exercise, the evil tends to reach a point of danger.
Nursing mothers and dairy cows find a measure of safety in the free
flow of milk and the yield of butter, but breeding cows that have been
improved till they have no longer a capacity for milking, but must
have their calves raised on the milk of other and milking strains are
correspondingly liable to suffer.
Exercise in the Open Air. As enforced idleness, on a full diet and in
a warm and moist environment is a main cause of hepatic disorder,
so abundant exercise in the open air and especially in a cool season is
beneficial in a marked degree. Beside the bracing effect on the
digestive organs and the improvement of the general tone of the
system, the action of the muscles in hastening the circulation greatly
favors the removal and elimination of waste matters. Still more
advantageous is the increased activity of the respiration and the
aspiratory power of the chest in at once unloading the portal system
and the liver by hastening the progress of the hepatic blood into the
vena cava and right heart, and in furnishing an abundant supply of
oxygen for the disintegration of the albuminoids and amylaceous
products. Such exercise must of course be adapted to the condition of
the animal and its power of sustaining muscular work, but
judiciously employed, it is one of the most effective agencies in
correcting and improving hepatic disorder or hepatic torpor. Idle
horses, the victims of obstinate habits of constipation, muco-enteric
irritation, indigestion, nervous, urinary or cutaneous disorders will
often be greatly benefited or entirely restored by systematic exercise.
This is one of the great advantages of a run at pasture, as the subject
secures at once the laxative cholagogue diet, an abundant supply of
oxygen, a better tone of the muscular and general system, and a more
perfect disintegration of albuminoids. Sea air with its abundance of
ozone is especially advantageous.
In the carnivora while we cannot send them to grass, much can be
done in the way of systematic exercise, and in the case of city dogs a
change to the country, where they can live out of doors and will be
tempted to constant exercise and play, will go far to correct a faulty
liver.
Laxatives. Cholagogues. When a free action of bowels and liver
cannot be secured by succulent food and exercise, we can fall back on
medicinal laxatives. These are advantageous in various ways. Some
laxatives like podophyllin, aloes, colocynth, rhubarb, senna, jalap,
and taraxacum act directly on the liver in increasing the secretion of
bile. These may be used for a length of time in small doses and in
combination with the alkalies. Other aperients act directly on the
bowel carrying away the excess of bile, the albuminoids and
saccharine matter that would otherwise be absorbed, and by a
secretion from the portal veins, abstracting nitrogenous and
saccharine elements which would otherwise overtax the liver to
transform them. Thus indirectly these also act as cholagogues by
withholding the excess of material on which it has to operate, and by
rousing its functions sympathetically with those of the bowels. Thus
sulphates of magnesia and soda, and tartrates and citrates of the
same bases, given in the morning fasting, dissolved in a large
quantity of warm water and conjoined with sodium chloride,
ammonium chloride, sodium carbonate or other alkaline salts, or
with one or more of the vegetable cholagogues above mentioned,
may be continued for a length of time until the normal functions
have been re-established, and will maintain themselves irrespective
of this stimulus.
Calomel (and even mercuric chloride in small doses), though it is
not experimentally proved to be a direct cholagogue, is one of the
very best correctives of impaired hepatic function. It expels the bile
from the duodenum and bowels generally, thereby preventing its
reabsorption; it proves antiseptic to the ingesta; it eliminates much
of the peptone, saccharine and fatty matter from the intestines and
portal system thus relieving the liver materially; and it is supposed
further to modify the other liver functions by a direct action on the
hepatic cells, and by reducing the cohesion of fibrine, and promoting
the disintegration of albumen. Certain it is that calomel gives most
substantial relief in many torpid and other disorders of the liver and
as it is not in itself an active liver stimulant but has rather a soothing
action on that gland it can be safely resorted to in states of hepatic
irritation in which the more direct cholagogues would prove more or
less hurtful.
In some forms of hepatic disorder where a speedy and abundant
secretion is demanded, pilocarpin may be employed, with great
caution so as not to reduce the strength unduly by the attendant
diaphoresis, diuresis, salivation or diarrhœa.
Alkalies have long been recognized as of great clinical value in
hepatic disorders. Though carbonate of soda decreases the secretion
of bile, (Nasse, Röhrig), yet the alkalies generally appear to promote
oxidation, and to hasten the disintegration of albumen and the
albuminoids. They increase the disintegration of sulphur compounds
materially adding to the sulphates and urea in the urine. They
further tend to increase the hippuric acid, carbonate of soda (2 drs.)
even determining the abundant excretion of this acid in man (Nasse).
It may be concluded that the acknowledged value of alkalies in these
diseases, is largely due to their hastening of the metabolic processes
in albuminoids. Small doses of sodium carbonate further stimulate
the gastric secretion and may thus benefit by rendering the process
of digestion more complete and satisfactory.
Chlorine, Iodine, Bromine and their Salts. These halogens are of
great value in many hepatic disorders. The universal craving for
sodium chloride indicates the need of its elements in the animal
body, and whether this is mainly the supply of chlorine for the
hydrochloric acid of the gastric juice, or to fulfill its uses in favoring
the oxidation and disintegration of the nitrogenous matters in the
blood and tissues, or for other more or less obscure uses, it is well to
recognize and act upon the indication. The various mineral waters
which are held in high esteem in liver affections contain a large
proportion of sodium chloride. As a medicinal agent ammonium
chloride maintains an equally high position. Large doses thrice a day,
so as to induce diaphoresis and diuresis greatly relieve hepatic
congestions. This agent determines a great increase in the urea
eliminated so that it is even more effective in the same direction,
than sodium chloride. Free chlorine is also effective in hepatic torpor
and congestion, and to this in part may be attributed the great value
of nitro-muriatic acid.
Bromide and iodide of potassium have been found to be effective
in reducing hepatic enlargement and thus in conducing to a more
healthy activity of the liver.
Ipecacuanha, Euonymus, etc. These agents are more or less
hepatic stimulants and may be found beneficial as combined with the
laxative or alkaline agents in securing a better functional activity in
cases of torpor or deranged function.
Tonics, Bitters. Tonics are often useful when the health has been
undermined by long continued hepatic disorder. The iron tonics are
as a rule contraindicated as tending to check secretion of bile, unless
they can be given with alkalies. Iron sulphate or chloride, combined
with sodium or potassium carbonate so as to establish a mutual
decomposition will obviate this objection. The vegetable bitters
(gentian, cascarilla, calumba, salicin, serpentaria, aloes, nux vomica)
combined with alkalies are often of great value. Quinia, like opium,
checks secretion and is to be avoided or used with judgment and in
combination with cholagogues.
HÆMOGLOBINÆMIA. AZOTÆMIA.
AZOTURIA. HÆMOGLOBINURIA. TOXÆMIA
FROM IMPERFECT HEPATIC FUNCTION.
Definition. Theories, of hysteria, uræmia, spinal myelitis, myelo-renal

congestion, rheumatic lumbago, myosito-myelo-nephritis, rheumatic chill with
destruction of muscle albuminoids. Yet it occurs in our semi-tropical midsummer
with a temperature of 80 or 90, in spring and autumn, and rarely even in the cold,
damp stable in midwinter in the absence of exercise. Constant conditions: One or
more days absolute rest, preceding steady work, a strongly nitrogenous ration,
continued during the rest, sudden active exertion accelerated breathing and
unloading of peptones and proteids from portal vein and liver into the general
circulation. Sanguineous albuminuria from excess of albuminous food, free
ingestion of water, suppressed milk secretion, forced marches. Transfusion of
blood. Excess of albumen dangerous, excess of red globules not dangerous. The
blood concentration of diuresis or diaphoresis is not dangerous. Continuous
muscle decomposition from work bars the disease. Stable miasm untenable. Poison
may be drawn suddenly from the enormous mass of blood in the liver, spleen and
portal system. The absence of icterus antagonizes the bile theory. Benzoic acid,
unaltered peptones, and glycogen are examples of elements destructive to blood.
Normal destruction of red globules in liver, spleen and bone marrow. Sudden
access of resulting hæmoglobin to the blood. Other products of disintegrated
globules. Poisons from food, and antitoxic action of liver in presence of glycogen.
Carbon dioxide favors solution of red globules. Theories of hæmoglobinæmia in
man. Lesions: Blood black, diffluent, iridescent, has no avidity for oxygen, with
excess of urea and extractives, serum of clot red, globules, small, pale, distorted,
not sticky, extravasations, liver, enlarged, congested, blood gorged, spleen
congested, swollen: Lumbar or gluteal muscles pale, infiltrated, with loss of
striation; bone marrow congested, hemorrhagic; kidneys congested infarcted;
urine dark brown or red, with excess of urea and hæmoglobin. End of spinal cord
has congestion or infiltration. Symptoms: History of high condition, constant
work, high feeding, a day’s rest, then exercise and attack. To full life, follows
flagging, droops, moves one or both hind limbs stiffly, knuckles, drags toes,
crouches, trembles, perspires, breathes rapidly, is tender on back, loins, croup or
thigh, muscles firm, paretic, and drops unable to rise. Urine retained, brown, red
or black, sometimes glairy, later may have casts. Appetite may return. In mild
cases, stiffness, lameness, with or without visible muscular lesions or tremors.
Urine glairy, dense, with excess of urea and nitrogenous products. Recover under
careful feeding and exercise, and relapse under original causes. Progress: May
recover under rest. In bad cases accelerated breathing and recumbency forbid rest
and recovery. Recovery in a few hours or after a week. Urinary casts with renal
epithelium, imply nephritis and grave conditions. In persistent paresis, muscles
waste. Modes of death. Mortality 20 per cent. Diagnosis, by history of onset, etc.
Prevention: When highly fed and hard worked, give daily exercise, with
comparative rest, reduce ration, and give laxative or diuretic. Plenty of water.
Treatment: Rest, sling, diffusible stimulants, bleeding, bromides, water ad libitum,
fomentations, unload liver and portal vein, purgative, eserine, barium chloride,
enemata, diuretics, for remaining paresis, derivatives, strychnia, diet, laxative,
non-stimulating, restore to work gradually.
Definition. An acute auto-poisoning occurring in plethoric horse

on being subjected to active exertion after a period of idleness, and
manifested by great nervous excitement and prostration, paresis
commencing with the hind limbs and the passage of hæmoglobin in
the urine.
Nature and Causes. The most varied conclusions as to the nature
of this disease have been put forward by different authors. In
England, Haycock called it hysteria, mistakenly supposing that it was
confined to mares, and Williams attributed it to uræmic poisoning,
conveniently ignoring the fact that the sudden manifestation of the
most extreme symptoms in an animal which just before was in the
highest apparent health and spirits contradicted the conclusion. In
France (Trasbot) and Southern Europe (Csokor) it has been looked
on as a spinal myelitis, a conclusion based on the disturbed
innervation of the posterior extremities in the great majority of
cases, but which is not always sustained by the pathological anatomy
of the cord. In Germany veterinarians have viewed the disease from
widely different standpoints. Haubner calls it myelo-renal-
congestion (Nièren-Rückenmarks): Weinmann, a rheumatic
lumbago; Dieckerhoff defines it as an acute general disease of horses,
manifested by a severe parenchymatous inflammation of the
skeleton muscles, with a bloody infiltration of the bone marrow,
especially of the femur, and with acute nephritis and
hæmoglobinuria. He attributes the attack to exposure to cold. If this
were the real cause the attack would be far more common in very
cold weather when the horse is suddenly exposed to cold drafts
between open doors and windows, than when he is harnessed and
driven so as to generate and diffuse animal heat. Yet attacks in the
stable are virtually unknown, and in almost every instance the onset
occurs during a short drive. Friedberger and Fröhner say that the
epithet rheumatismal may be correctly applied to almost all cases
that we meet in practice. They quote Goring as having produced the
disease experimentally by exposure to cold, and go on to explain that
rest in the stable before the attack causes the extreme sensitiveness
to cold that is generated by a warm environment. The implication of
the lumbar, pelvic and femoral muscles they explain by the
stimulation of the nutritive metamorphosis by the action of cold on
the sensitive nerves of the skin. The effect of this cutaneous irritation
is exaggerated by the heat of the stable to which they have been
previously subjected. The products of the destruction of the
albuminoids of the muscles, pass into the blood as hæmoglobin, and
produce the ulterior phenomena. The muscles of the hind quarters
especially suffer because of their greater exposure and because they
are subjected to the hardest work in propelling the animal machine.
In this connection they quote the experiments of Lassar and
Nassaroff in which sudden exposure to cold determines
parenchymatous degeneration of muscles; also the cases of
paroxysmal or winter hæmoglobinuria in certain susceptible men
whenever they are exposed to an extremely low temperature.
There are serious objections to the acceptance of this as the
essential cause, among which the following may be named:
1st. The disease is not confined to the cold season but occurs also
at midsummer when the outdoor temperature is even higher than it
is in the stable.
2d. In our Northern States it appears to be more common in spring
and autumn or early winter, when the extreme colds have either
already passed, or have not yet set in, but when the abrupt changes
of weather (rain-storms, etc.) are liable to shut up the animal indoors
for a day or more at a time.
3d. The popular names quoted with approval by these authors—
Monday disease, Easter disease, Whitsuntide disease—indicate the
prevalence in Europe also, of the malady in the milder, or more
temperate seasons rather than during the prevalence of extreme
cold.
4th. The fact that the disease rarely or never occurs in the stable,
no matter how cold the season, how open the wooden walls or floor,
nor how strong the draft between doors or windows, shows that the
theory of cold as the sole or main cause must be discarded.
It is not necessary to ignore the action of cold as a concurrent
factor in certain cases, or as a stimulant to reflex vaso-motor paresis,
to muscular metamorphosis and the increase of hæmoglobin in the
blood. It is only necessary that this should be held as subordinate
and non-essential to the final result. Several other factors that are
accorded a subordinate place by these writers, are so constant and so
manifestly essential that they must be allotted a much more
important position in the list of causes.
A period of rest is a constant precursor of an attack. The more
extended the inquiry the more certain we become that a short rest is
a prerequisite to equine hæmoglobinæmia. The horse that is kept at
daily steady work may be said to be practically exempt. Even the
non-professional observer recognizes the fact and names the disease
after the weekly or yearly holiday or rest day which was the occasion
of it. To him it is the Monday morning disease, the disease of the day
following Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, or Fourth of July. It is
the disease of wet weather, of heavy snowfalls, of the blizzard, or of
the owner’s absence from home, of any time that entails one or two
days of absolute inactivity in the stall.
But again the affection does not appear in the horse that is
absolutely idle for a length of time. It is the short period of rest in
an interval of otherwise continuous work that determines it.
In short the subject must be in good muscular condition and with a
hearty, vigorous appetite and good digestion. The short unwonted
rest interrupts the disposal of the rich products of a vigorous
digestion, and tends to overload the portal veins, the liver, the blood
and tissues with an excess of proteids. The condition of the animal is
so far one of plethora.
Another feature that bears this out is that the attack comes only in
the animal that is heavily fed on a strongly nitrogenous
ration. It is not the disease of the horse kept on straw, or hay, or
which receives a limited amount only of grain. It does not occur in
the animal which has its grain suspended or materially reduced
during the one or two days of idleness. It does not select the horse
that has had a laxative either in the form of food or medicine. This
last may increase the sensitiveness to cold, but it certainly lessens the
tendency to hæmoglobinæmia. The most rational explanation
appears to be that it affords this protection by interfering with the
thoroughness of digestion and absorption, by securing elimination
from the portal veins and liver, and by reducing the amount of
albuminoids in the blood.
A blood abnormally rich in albuminoids, as it is in the transient
plethora induced by a short period of rest, in the well-conditioned
working horse, without any restriction of his diet, may therefore be
set down as one of the most important factors in producing
hæmoglobinæmia. Nor is this without approximate examples in
human pathology. Von Bamberger has shown that “hæmatogenous
albuminuria” will occur in healthy individuals when there is an
excess of albumen in the blood-plasma, as after a too free use of
albuminous food, or after suppression of the milk secretion
(Landois). A similar result comes from increase of blood pressure, as
after drinking freely, or when, under emotion or violent exertion, the
heart’s action is increased in force and the blood is thrown with
greater impetus into the large renal arteries. Senator has found
albuminous urine to attend and follow, for several days, upon forced
marches made by young recruits. Here the muscular work is added to
the increased blood tension superinduced by the more active
contractions of the heart.
In this connection it is interesting to trace the changes in the blood
after transfusion. The dilatability of the capillaries enables the
system to accommodate itself to a very great increase in the volume
of blood An increase of 83 per cent. may be borne without serious
results, but above this limit there is increasing risk and an increase of
150 per cent. entails immediate danger to life. In the restoration of
the blood to its normal condition, the secretion of water sets in
promptly leaving an excess of albuminoids and blood globules. The
next change is in the albuminoids which in two days are almost
entirely transformed into urea. This leaves the blood abnormally rich
in globules (Panum, Lesser, Worm-Müller), the red globules break
up much more slowly and may still be in excess after the lapse of a
month (Tscherjew).
In this light, temporary plethora cannot of itself be accepted as the
main or essential cause of the disease. It must be admitted to be a
more constant and important factor than the mere exposure to cold,
but of itself it is inadequate to the production of hæmoglobinæmia.
In the absence of exertion the general plethora fails to produce the
specific disease; again, after transfusion a plethora of albumen lasts
for one or two days, but hæmoglobinæmia sets in only in the first few
minutes after the animal starts out from the stable, (never after an
hour or two at work): once more, excess of globules may last for a
month, but with steady work there is no danger of this disease, after
the first mile or two has been traversed, on the first day of the
resumption of labor.
A similar plethora of albuminoids and globules may be induced in
a plethoric animal by a profuse diarrhœa, diuresis or perspiration,
the blood having been robbed of its watery constituents, and
concentrated especially as regards its globules and albuminoids, but
hæmoglobinæmia never occurs as the result of such an artificial
concentration. On the contrary a free secretion by the bowels or
kidneys is of the greatest value in cutting short its progress after it
has set in.
The doctrine of poisoning by hæmoglobin produced by excessive
work and disintegration of the muscles is equally insufficient to
account for an attack. Excess of muscular work and of muscle-
decomposition-products, would not reach its maximum within the
first few minutes after the animal has started from the stable, but,
other things being equal, would increase with the continuance of
work and the accumulation in the blood of a constantly increasing
amount of these products. The sharp line of restriction by which the
attack is limited to the initial period of work, while it is never seen
after hard work continued for hours in succession, rules out this
from the list of essential causes. It may be that the products of
muscular decomposition aggravate the attack, but to set them down
as the cause of the attack is to beg the whole question and to
contradict the truth that continuous and severe muscular work with
its consequent increase of waste products is a direct bar to the
development of the disease. It should be noted in this connection
that the increase in the waste of nitrogenous bodies, as shown by the
increase of urea, is dependent far more on the amount of nitrogenous
matters ingested than on the muscle work or decomposition. In
eleven hours just before ascending the Faulhorn, Fick passed 21.686
grs. of urea per hour; in eight hours ascending the hill, 12.43 grs. per
hour; and in six hours after the ascent he passed 13.39 grs. per hour.
A general survey of the field shows that it is not the simple
increase of any normal waste product in the blood which determines
hæmoglobinæmia, and on the other hand the suddenness and
severity of the attack bears all the marks of a profound poisoning.
The nature of the poison has not yet been definitely ascertained, yet
one or two hypothesis may be hazarded, as furnishing a working
theory, in anticipation of the actual demonstration which may be
expected in the early future.
The action of a stable miasm as claimed by some writers is
contradicted by the fact that the disease does not develop so long as
the animal is left to inhale that miasm, and on leaving the stable, the
life and vigor are usually remarkable.
The morbific agent must be sought in some source from which it
can be supplied with great rapidity under the stimulus of a short but
active exertion. The chylopoietic viscera furnish such a source. The
healthy liver contains one-fourth of the entire mass of the blood. The
torpid congested liver of the vigorous high conditioned horse, after a
short period of idleness, on full, rich feeding, must hold much more
than this normal ratio. The spleen, the natural store-house or safety
valve of the portal veins, is also gorged with this liquid in the high
fed, idle animal. This organ which is always turgescent after meals, is
especially so in the over-fed horse, which for twenty-four hours has
been denied the opportunity of working off by exercise, the
superfluous products of an active digestion and absorption. Then the
whole of the portal veins and the capillaries in which they originate
are surcharged with rich blood which cannot make its way with the
necessary dispatch through the inactive liver.
In this condition there is incomparably more than a quarter of the
entire mass of blood, enriched to the highest degree in proteids,
ready to be discharged through the liver and hepatic veins into the
general circulation. Under the action of the hurried breathing and
circulation, caused by the sudden and active exertion, this whole
mass of rich blood is speedily unloaded on the right heart, the lungs
and the systemic circulation. One can hardly conceive of a more
effective method of inducing a sudden plethora, with an excess of
both globules and albuminoids.
The presence of actual poisons in such blood is not so easily
certified.
The absorption of bile elements and especially of taurocholic acid,
which is a solvent of the red blood globules, and would set free their
globulin might account for the characteristic condition of the blood.
The powerful aspiratory action of the chest, would speedily empty
the whole of the liver blood vessels, and lessening their tension below
that of the biliary radicals would determine an active absorption of
bile or of the more diffusible of the bile elements. A manifest
objection to this view is the absence of an icteric tint in the mucous
membranes of the affected animals. The visible mucosæ are of a
brownish red hue, such as might come from hæmoglobin dissolved
in the blood serum, rather than the yellow tint which might be
expected from bile pigment. The theory of poisoning by bile acids
therefore, would require an explanation of concurrent suppression or
decomposition of the bile pigments.
Other sources, however, offer solvents for hæmoglobin, benzoic
acid, which is derived from a cellulose in the fodders, and forms the
source of hippuric acid, dissolves red globules (Landois). In the over-
fed horse with active digestion, but inactive body and liver, this must
accumulate in the liver, spleen and portal system, and when
suddenly drawn into the blood without time for oxidation in the liver
it will contribute to the condition of hæmoglobinæmia.
Peptones, being very diffusible, are very rapidly absorbed, but they
are not found, in healthy conditions, in the portal vein (Neumeister).
These are manifestly transformed into albumen in the intestinal
mucosa (Salvioli), or taken up by the very numerous leucocytes and
transformed or carried elsewhere (Hoffmeister). But peptones
injected into the blood of the dog render it incoagulable, and in large
quantity are fatal (Landois). An excess of glycogen dissolves the red
globules, and the conditions of heavy feeding and torpid liver, are
calculated to produce this in great excess and to store it in the liver
cells.
Under the extra vigorous aspiratory force of the chest, these highly
diffusible agents, present in great excess, are likely to be drawn on
through the mucosa, into the portal vein, liver, and cava, without an
opportunity for complete transformation by leucocytes or liver cells.
These would tend to rob the blood globules of their normal
physiological vigor, would unfit them for maintaining the healthy
functions of lungs, kidneys, brain or muscle, and would unfit the
globules for successful resistance to solvents and other inimical
influences.
Again it is an important function of the liver, spleen and red bone
marrow to disintegrate worn out or abnormal red globules. These are
taken up by the white blood corpuscles of the hepatic capillaries, by
the cells of the spleen and the bone marrow and are stored up chiefly
in the capillaries of the liver, in the spleen, and in the marrow of
bone. They are transformed, partly into colored and partly into
colorless proteids, and are either deposited in the granular form, or
are dissolved (Landois). Quincke says: “That the normal red blood
globules and other particles suspended in the blood stream are not
taken up in this way, may be due to their being smooth and polished.
As the corpuscles grow older and become more rigid, they, as it were,
are caught by the amœboid cells. As cells containing blood corpuscles
are very rarely found in the general circulation, one may assume that
the occurrence of these cells within the spleen, liver, and marrow of
bone, is favored by the slowness of the circulation in these organs.”
From this chain of normal processes of blood disintegration, we may
reasonably infer, a greatly exaggerated work of blood destruction
when, in connection with an increased density of the plasma, and the
presence in the portal blood of poisonous products of digestion, the
red globules have been altered in density, in outline and in vitality, so
that they become ready victims of the amœboid cells of blood and
tissues. Then the stagnant condition of this altered blood in the
compulsorily idle animal favors the greatest excess of this
destruction and the storing up of an increased quantity of
hæmoglobin and other products, to be poured suddenly into the
general circulation as soon as the movement of the blood is
quickened by exercise.
This destruction of the red blood globules by disintegration
contributes to the formation of numerous decomposition-products,
like succinic, formic, acetic, butyric and lactic acids, inosite, leucin,
xanthine, hypoxanthin, and uric acid, some of which are strongly
toxic. The tendency will be to lower the vitality of the red globules
and thus to render them the easier victims of the leucocytes and of
the liver, spleen and marrow cells. Even the freed hæmoglobin
appears to exert a solvent action on the red blood globules. These
are, of course, most concentrated and effective in the seat of their
production, yet when drawn suddenly in large amount, into the
general circulation, by the vigorous aspiratory action of the chest,
they may prove seriously detrimental to the blood at large.
Again a variety of toxic matters are introduced into the system in
the food and others are developed from the food in the stomach and
intestine. Brieger found in the gastric peptones a potent alkaloid
having the effect of urari, and which in excess would determine
muscular paralysis. The alkaloidal and other poisons produced by
fermentations in the intestines have to be safely disposed of. The
ptomaines, if not too abundant, are arrested or even decomposed in
the liver which thus stands as a guardian, at the outlet of the portal
system, to protect the body at large. But this antitoxic function of the
liver is only exercised in the presence of glycogen (Rogers, Landois),
and forced muscular movement soon removes all glycogen from the
liver of the dog (Landois). Again glycogenesis in the liver is now
believed to be dependent on a ferment produced by the pancreas. If
therefore, the sudden active exercise and the aspiratory action of the
chest freed the liver of its glycogen, and hurried the alkaloidal and
other poisons through its capillaries too rapidly to allow of the
protective action of the liver cells, or if the pancreas as well as the
liver had become torpid and had failed to produce the requisite
amount of glycogen-ferment for the liver, the poisoning of the blood
and system at large would be imminent.
Not to mention the other toxic products which come from
imperfect metamorphosis in the liver, it may be noted that a venous
condition of the blood or an excess of carbon dioxide contributes
greatly to the solubility of the red blood globules. It also tends greatly
to modify the fibrinogenous elements. Thus the blood of a suffocated
animal fails to coagulate or coagulates loosely, and the blood of the
portal vein of a suffocated horse is strongly toxic (Sauson). Now the
conditions attendant on the onset of equine hæmoglobinæmia are
such as to give free scope to both of these inimical influences. The
great mass of blood in the portal vein, spleen and liver is venous
blood strongly charged with carbon dioxide, and by the sudden,
active exertion this is forced rapidly through the liver and lungs
without time for full æration, so that the whole mass of the
circulating blood is speedily reduced below par, and laid specially
open to the action of blood solvents. By the same action the systemic
blood is charged with poisons, direct from the food, and fermenting
ingesta, and from the overworked spleen and liver whose functions
are profoundly impaired, and later from other important organs, the
healthy functional activity of which can no longer be maintained by
the deteriorated blood supplied to them.
Hæmoglobinæmia in dogs has been produced experimentally by
the injection of water into the veins the mere dilution of the plasma
dissolving out the coloring matter from the red globules (Hayem);
also by the inhalation of arseniureted hydrogen (Naunyn and
Stadelman); by the ingestion of toluylendiamine, or phosphorus
(Afanassiew, Stadelman); by snake venom, septicæmia, influenza,
contagious pneumonia, petechial fever, anthrax, etc. These cannot be
looked on as causes of the acute hæmoglobinæmia in the horse, but
they serve as illustrations of changes in the plasma, and poisons in
the blood determining the escape of hæmoglobin from the cells.
Ralfe recognizes two forms of hæmoglobinæmia in man:
1st. That in which the hæmoglobin is simply dissolved out of the
blood globules, the solution taking place chiefly in parts exposed to
cold.
2d. A more severe form in which the dissolution is general and
probably attended by some destruction of red globules in the liver,
spleen and even in the kidneys. The general opinion appears to be
that the attacks are due to some nervous disturbance, which causes
vaso-motor disorder and it is supposed that there is an exaggerated
sensibility of the reflex nervous system. It has been suggested that
peripheral irritation causes irritation of the vaso-motor centre, and
in turn this causes local asphyxia in the part stimulated, under which
conditions the red globules part with their hæmoglobin (Roberts).
Murri holds that the disease depends on an increased irritability of
the vaso-motor reflex centre, and the formation, owing to the
disorder of the blood forming organs, of corpuscles unable to
withstand exposure to cold or carbon dioxide.
While it is not assumed to point out the actual poisons of
hæmoglobinæmia in the horse the above suggestions may offer
valuable hints as to the lines of inquiry that may be followed with the
best hope of reaching definite results.
Lesions. These are especially found in the blood, liver, spleen,
muscles, bone marrow and kidneys. The spinal cord and nerve
trunks are occasionally affected.
The blood is charged with carbon dioxide and is black, tarry,
comparatively incoagulable remaining in the veins and showing an
iridescent reflection. It does not absorb oxygen readily though
exposed to the air, and thus bears a strong general resemblance to
the blood of anthrax. It contains an abnormal proportion of urea and
allied extractive matters which greatly increase its density, and
interfere with the healthy exercise of the different cell organisms and
functions. These are not due to excessive muscular activity as stated
by Friedberger and Fröhner, but are derived mainly from the
abundant products of digestion. When the shed blood coagulates it
forms a soft clot without buff and the expressed serum is reddish
from the presence of hæmoglobin, and of hæmatoidin crystals. The
uncoagulated blood drawn over a sheet of white paper stains it
deeply by reason of the same coloring matters in solution. The red
corpuscles may be paler than natural, some even entirely colorless,
and they are often notched or broken up in various irregular forms.
They have lost the natural tendency of the shed equine blood to stick
together, to collect in rouleaux and precipitate to the bottom of the
vessel, so that no buffy coat is formed, should the blood coagulate.
The white corpuscles are relatively increased. Finally the coloring
matters contained in the plasma are imbibed by the different tissues
and give a brown or reddish tinge to such as are naturally white.
Limited blood extravasations are not uncommon especially in the
more vascular organs like the muscles, liver, spleen and kidneys.
The liver is more or less congested and enlarged, friable, yellow, or
mottled yellow and red and exudes black blood freely when incised.
The bile is thick, viscid and dark green, as in cases of experimental
intravenous injection of hæmoglobin.
The spleen is also swollen and congested with blood, and the pulp
is very high colored from the excess of hæmoglobin and other
products of blood destruction. The muscles of the croup are usually

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The Politics of German Idealism

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2023

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022060575

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2. Kant and the Provisionality of Right  23

7. Fichte’s Three Political Philosophies  161

This work originates in a historical turn in my work on German philosophy that

A Addresses to the German Nation. Edited and translated by Gregory Moore.

EL Part I of the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse.

Works of Immanuel Kant

CF Conflict of the Faculties.

1.1 German Idealism in and of the Sattelzeit

graph are my own.

4Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 58–​63.

Skinner, “The State.”

9 Tribe, Governing Economy, 24.

“Übergangsgesellschaft: Die ländliche Sozialordnung in Mitteleuropa um 1800,” 68.

15 Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–​1815, 95.

Each position is something like an electronic component in an electrical cir-

In Vormärz Bavaria, the corporate perspective is easiest to recognize in the

These state-​estates may be understood as an element of corporate stabilization

19 Zorn, “Gesellschaft und Staat im Bayern des Vormärz,” 141.

20 Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism; Pinkard, German Philosophy; Pocock,

23 Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, 22.

importance which I attach to Kant’s doctrine of provisionality as announcing the

1.2 The Shape of the Work to Come

1.2.1 Part I: Legal Standing Historicized

1.2.2 Part II: Private Law

26 See Maliks, Kant’s Politics in Context, chap. 2.

1.2.3 Part III: Public Law

2.1 The Problem of Provisionality

Hasan then distinguishes between interpretations that hold Thesis 1 but

According to anticipatory provisionality, state of nature property claims do

On this line of thought, the concept of provisionality is a thought experiment

5 Ripstein, Force and Freedom, 165.

Helga Varden also counts as a strong provisionality theorist on Hasan’s ac-

8 Varden, “Kant’s Non-​Voluntarist Conception.”

2.2 Full Dominion vs. Diverse Ownership Interests

Here in this section I want to do justice to Ripstein’s reconstruction of Kant’s view

In his reconstruction, Ripstein emphasizes the formality of the postulate, in at

Key to Ripstein’s reconstruction is the notion of incompatibility, and the formal

Of course, this formal level of analysis immediately generates the problem

that Schopenhauer places at the center of his own Kantianism.

15 For this view, see Westphal 2002.

The law of a reciprocal coercion necessarily in accord with the freedom of

In gout: Arrest of oxidation of proteids into urea. Deposits of biurate of lime on

Among the many secondary results of hepatic disorder, and which

Definition. Theories, of hysteria, uræmia, spinal myelitis, myelo-renal

Definition. An acute auto-poisoning occurring in plethoric horse

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2. Kant and the Provisionality of Right 23

7. Fichte’s Three Political Philosophies 161

4Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 58–63.

15 Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815, 95.

These state-estates may be understood as an element of corporate stabilization

8 Varden, “Kant’s Non-Voluntarist Conception.”