In Print: The Politics of German Idealism
Publication Title
The Politics of German Idealism: Law and Social Change at the Turn of the 19th Century
Author
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Publication Date
June 9, 2023
About the Book (from the publisher)
The Politics of German Idealism reconstructs the political philosophies of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel against the background of their social-historical context. Christopher Yeomans’ guiding thought is to understand German Idealist political 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. ‘Political’ here refers to use of the state’s power to enforce law, and ‘social’ to the norms and groups which are regulated by that enforcement, but which also antedate or exceed that enforcement. 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, Yeomans claims that to reveal the political nature of German Idealist political philosophy requires understanding 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.
Yeomans’ interpretation begins from a different account of which fundamental change induces modernity. Whereas common contemporary accounts emphasize the rise of science or the European religious wars, or even the much later explosion of industrial capitalism, Yeomans’ 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 potential discontinuity between economic and political relations, and by Hegel in his theorization of a new social sphere, civil society.
About the Author
Dr. Christopher Yeomans, professor and head of philosophy department at Purdue's College of Liberal Arts, 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, where he now heads the philosophy department. 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.