Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The simple guiding thought of this study 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 that 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, I claim 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.