Bruno Bauer (1809-1882) is neither a well-known nor an easily accessible figure. Despite making a significant contribution both to the evolution of Hegelianism and to nineteenth-century German controversies about the historical Jesus, his work is now little read and only infrequently discussed. His name appears often enough, not least in sketches of Karl Marx's intellectual evolution (on which Bauer had a disputed impact), but serious studies of his work are few and far between (in any language).

Part of the reason for this neglect is undoubtedly the forbidding form and extent of Bauer's work. He was a prolific writer with evolving views, whose corpus remains in a disorganised and indeterminate state. (‘Prolific’ does not overstate the case; a recent bibliography of Bauer's publications between 1838 and 1845 lists some twenty-two books and pamphlets, together with fifty-nine articles and reviews, from this eight-year period alone.) Copies of his writings are often very difficult to locate, there is no scholarly edition of his works, and there is ongoing controversy concerning his authorship of particular texts (attributions are complicated by his collaboration with others as well as by his enthusiasm for pseudonymous and anonymous publication). Nor are his views always easy to identify. His writings exemplify a (now) largely unfamiliar cultural idiom (that of German idealism), and his own views are occasionally expressed rather obliquely (in part, in response to the problems of contemporary censorship). For example, in one of his best-known works—Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts (1841)—Bauer poses as an anonymous Pietist critic as a covert way of advancing an unremittingly progressive interpretation of Hegel.

The (understandable) dearth of critical literature on Bauer's work makes the appearance of Douglas Moggach's scholarly and illuminating monograph especially welcome. Moggach offers not a comprehensive intellectual biography of Bauer, but a study which is (sensibly) constrained by both chronology and subject matter.

Moggach's chronological remit is provided by his distinctive, and deceptively simple, account of Bauer's intellectual evolution. He treats Bauer's writings as organised by a single fundamental divide, an intellectual rupture prompted by the failure of the revolutionary movement of 1848. Bauer is said to have come to see 1848 as confirming the bankruptcy of the philosophical tradition in whose self-proclaimed vanguard he had previously stood. The present volume is concerned with Bauer's Vormärz writings, which Moggach portrays as possessing a thematic and foundational consistency (which others have doubted). Bauer's politically conservative, if scarcely conventional, later writings are treated only summarily in a brief epilogue.

Moggach's substantive remit is provided by his focus on the republican and Hegelian themes in these Vormärz writings. Bauer is presented as the creator of an original (if Hegelian inspired) republicanism, which broke with both liberalism (whose purported possessive individualism he rejected) and nascent socialism (whose embrace of sectional interests he abhorred). Other aspects of Bauer's work are not ignored, but are treated primarily insofar as they bear on these political and philosophical concerns. For example, Moggach's discussion of Bauer's critique of religion is dominated by a concern to demonstrate the affinities between Bauer's emerging republicanism and the theological writings produced during his abbreviated academic career (Bauer had been dismissed from the University of Bonn in 1842, ostensibly for the heterodoxy of his New Testament studies).

In his account of Bauer's republicanism, Moggach has many interesting and intelligent things to say. Not least, he propounds a novel account of the genesis and foundation of Bauer's political thought. In 1829 the student Bauer had produced a prize-winning essay on Kant's aesthetics (entitled De pulchri principiis); Hegel himself had commended its content, though deprecating the author's uncertain grasp of Latin. (An English translation of Bauer's prize essay forms an appendix to the present study.) Whereas others have viewed this text as a precocious academic exercise largely without influence on his subsequent work, Moggach treats its central theme—a Hegelian conception of the self-actualising power of reason—as the key to deciphering Bauer's complex and elusive critical theory. Bauer's republicanism is said to be underwritten by the ethical and aesthetic idealism which first surfaced in the prize essay. For Bauer, the historical actualisation of reason was to culminate in the creation of a new republican state by the partisans of universality (a revolutionary agency whose identity is not always clear and whose practical efficacy might be doubted). In claiming an early and foundational role in Bauer's work for the objective realisation of reason, Moggach breaks with the predominant interpretation of Bauer's work (especially in the early 1840s) as propounding some kind of radical subjectivism.

I am not persuaded by all of the elements in this sympathetic rehabilitation of Bauer's Vormärz political thought. In particular, I would question Moggach's attempt to limit Bauer's ‘virulent anti-Semitism’ to his later writings. Moggach treats the writings of the early 1840s in which Bauer opposed Jewish emancipation as exemplifying a form of republican ‘rigorism’ in which citizenship is open to individuals only insofar as they can demonstrate their rejection of any form of sectional (including religious) identification. However, this reading would seem to neglect the striking asymmetry in Bauer's treatment of Jews and Christians in these texts (in which Judaism is portrayed as a distinctly retrograde and abhorrent kind of belief, and in which Jews are described as a distinctly retrograde and abhorrent kind of humanity). I would maintain that a “virulent anti-Semitism” forms one of the continuities in Bauer's work (albeit that in his later writings Jews are identified by purportedly “racial,” rather than religious, criteria).

There remains, notwithstanding such interpretative disagreements, little doubt about the quality of the volume under consideration. In his own introductory remarks, Moggach pays tribute to the “meticulous scholarship, rigorous analysis, and balanced criticism” of Ernst Barnikol (1892-1968), the doyen of Bauer studies (whose archive at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam provided Moggach with some of his materials). Moggach does not share all of Barnikol's substantive views, but those same methodological qualities are amply evidenced in the present text. Douglas Moggach has produced a very welcome volume, an original and learned study of a neglected and difficult subject.