Christopher Yeomans's "The Politics of German Idealism"

Christopher Yeomans received his PhD at the University of California, Riverside in 2005. He began his academic career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied primarily linguistics, literature, and literary theory. Eventually literary theory led him to critical theory and then to the classical German philosophy that serves as its foundation. After a dissertation on Hegel's theory of free will, he then became an assistant professor of philosophy at Kenyon College, joining the Purdue faculty in 2009. His broad project is to develop a political theory that integrates the conceptual riches of the Kantian theory of autonomy (free will), the phenomenological riches of an expressivist theory of moral psychology, and the political riches of concrete social and historical description.

Yeomans applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Politics of German Idealism, and reported the following:

Here is the most suggestive paragraph from page 99:

Fichte’s conception of the family is the most contracted of any of the German Idealists, and in that respect represents the civil- social nuclear family in its sharpest contrast with the corporate- social extended household. Fichte’s concep­tion not only eschews any relation to servants or the internal economic structure of the family; it is, in fact, almost exclusively focused on the marriage bond rather than the multigenerational nature of even the nuclear family. In fact, the discussion of relations to children is relegated to the fourth of four sections and proceeds along lines almost entirely distinct from those of the first three sections. In those first three sections, in which the concept of marriage is deduced and elaborated, everything turns on the tension between the purported natural differences between the sex drives of men and women, on the one hand, and their presumed equality in having reason, on the other. Marriage is necessarily heterosexual and monogamous. The marriage relation is deduced as that relation which will allow both sexes to express their natural sex drive in a way compatible with reason and thus with their own moral personality. The basic conflict is between the purported passivity of the female sexual drive with the activity of reason, and the resolution of this conflict is found in the voluntary subjection of the wife to the husband. It is important not to understate the extent of this subjection, nor the extent to which it is (almost) entirely limited to marriage.

I think the Page 99 Test works! It drops the reader straight into a typical analysis of one of the main writers (Fichte) on one of the main institutions (the family) that the book discusses. Among the things the reader will see here is the difference between the civil-social and corporate-social perspectives. One of the claims of the book is that the best way to understand the social context of German political philosophy at the turn of the 19th century is in the split of the new voluntaristic civil society from the older corporate or traditional society (the Ständegesellschaft), and then the attempt at state-building in the middle of that split. I argue that philosophical debates between Kant, Fichte and Hegel can be understood as structured by the way they take up those three different perspectives. On the family, Fichte demands of us the radical change to the nuclear family of civil society, Kant reconstructs the traditional extended economic household (including servants), and Hegel attempts to balance the different functions of the family from the perspective of state regulation. This is not to say, of course, that there are not philosophical conceptual differences between the philosophers—it is rather to say that those differences are representative of the social differences between the perspectives that they take up. The reader on page 99 might then think: so far, so Marxist. But I don’t read any of the three philosophers as a superstructural mouthpiece for any particular group. In fact, in the following chapter I show that when it comes to property the three philosophers take up different perspectives: Fichte the state perspective that treats property ownership as a precondition for political participation, Kant the civil-social perspective which treats property rights as flexible in the way required for economic innovations, and Hegel the corporate-social perspective which treats property as a personal extension of the will to the body and beyond.

Learn more about The Politics of German Idealism at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue