Die Freien
Encyclopedia
Political philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...
in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, gathering for informal discussion over a period of a few years.
Formation
Die Freien was the name given to the BerlinBerlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
wing of the Young Hegelians
Young Hegelians
The Young Hegelians, or Left Hegelians, were a group of Prussian intellectuals who in the decade or so after the death of Hegel in 1831, wrote and responded to his ambiguous legacy...
, headed by Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer was a German philosopher and historian. As a student of GWF Hegel, Bauer was a radical Rationalist in philosophy, politics and Biblical criticism...
.
The group was formed at the University of Berlin. Its leader, Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer was a German philosopher and historian. As a student of GWF Hegel, Bauer was a radical Rationalist in philosophy, politics and Biblical criticism...
was a student who had attended Hegel’s lectures and was then asked to defend the position of the Old Hegelians against the claims of Strauss’s Life of Jesus. After reviewing the book however, Bauer was converted and became even more radical than Strauss, becoming an atheist and arguing that Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
was not only historically baseless, but was also irrational and a barrier to progress.
Later in his life he would disassociate himself from the group.
Meetings
Attendees included Max StirnerMax Stirner
Johann Kaspar Schmidt , better known as Max Stirner , was a German philosopher, who ranks as one of the literary fathers of nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism...
, Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer was a German philosopher and historian. As a student of GWF Hegel, Bauer was a radical Rationalist in philosophy, politics and Biblical criticism...
, Arnold Ruge
Arnold Ruge
Arnold Ruge was a German philosopher and political writer.-Studies in university and prison:Born in Bergen auf Rügen, he studied in Halle, Jena and Heidelberg. As an advocate of a free and united Germany he was jailed for five years in 1825 in the fortress of Kolberg, where he studied Plato and...
, Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
, and Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
, among others. Although not much is known about the group, with John Henry Mackay
John Henry Mackay
John Henry Mackay was an individualist anarchist, thinker and writer. Born in Scotland and raised in Germany, Mackay was the author of Die Anarchisten and Der Freiheitsucher . Mackay was published in the United States in his friend Benjamin Tucker's magazine, Liberty...
's biography of Max Stirner appearing to be the most authoritative source, involvement appears to have been a formative period for Marx and Engels (who wrote The Manifesto Of The Communist Party, Wage-Labour and Capital and The German Ideology
The German Ideology
The German Ideology is a book written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1846. Marx and Engels did not find a publisher. However, the work was later retrieved and published for the first time in 1932 by David Riazanov through the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow...
shortly after involvement) and Stirner (who wrote The Ego And Its Own
The Ego and Its Own
The Ego and Its Own is a philosophical work by German philosopher Max Stirner . This work was first published in 1845, although with a stated publication date of "1844" to confuse the Prussian censors.-Content:...
around the same time). Consequently, the overall influence of the group to modern political thought can be considered monumental. As a cartoon by Engels shows, their small meetings were also attended by a "secret policeman", reporting on their activities to the authorities. The members of Die Freien held widely diverging views, and met for the purpose of debate; they did not represent a unified political or ideological outlook, though most of them have subsequently been seen as Young Hegelians
Young Hegelians
The Young Hegelians, or Left Hegelians, were a group of Prussian intellectuals who in the decade or so after the death of Hegel in 1831, wrote and responded to his ambiguous legacy...
.
They usually met at Hippel's Wine Bar in central Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
. According to John Henry Mackay
John Henry Mackay
John Henry Mackay was an individualist anarchist, thinker and writer. Born in Scotland and raised in Germany, Mackay was the author of Die Anarchisten and Der Freiheitsucher . Mackay was published in the United States in his friend Benjamin Tucker's magazine, Liberty...
's biography of Max Stirner, they were well known for using foul language, at one point resulting in Arnold Ruge chastising them before storming out. Reportedly there were many women involved with the group, although information only survives for Stirner's second wife, Marie Dähnhardt
Marie Dähnhardt
Marie Dähnhardt, born 1818 in Gadebusch, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Germany, the daughter of an apothecary, was a German suffragette avant la lettre, for some time associated with the Berlin debating club Die Freien. She was married to the philosopher Max Stirner from 1843 to 1846. After...
. Moreover, after the owner stopped lending them money to drink, they resorted to jokingly begging on the street. However, Mackay claims that they drank little and drunkenness was uncommon.
Philosophy
The Young Hegelians, or the Left Hegelians, were a group of followers of Hegelian philosophy. They differed from the Old Hegelians, or the Right Hegelians, in that the latter were orthodox followers who strived to keep Hegel’s philosophy intact. The Young Hegelians, in contrast, while adopting the main elements of the philosophy, such as the dialectic approach, were highly critical of others. Marx for instance would not accept that the state was the seat of universalityUniversality
Universality may refer to:* Universality in physical science * Universality * Universality , meaning present in all places and all times* Universality...
and rationality
Rationality
In philosophy, rationality is the exercise of reason. It is the manner in which people derive conclusions when considering things deliberately. It also refers to the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons for belief, or with one's actions with one's reasons for action...
, i.e. that it was inherently rational, and made it his goal to prove that the difference between civil society
Civil society
Civil society is composed of the totality of many voluntary social relationships, civic and social organizations, and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society, as distinct from the force-backed structures of a state , the commercial institutions of the market, and private criminal...
, which Hegel held to be the sphere where individual interest is pursued in conflict with the interests of others, and the state
Sovereign state
A sovereign state, or simply, state, is a state with a defined territory on which it exercises internal and external sovereignty, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states. It is also normally understood to be a state which is neither...
, where such conflicts are transcended, was in fact misplaced, the goal of the proletariat
Proletariat
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...
being in fact to abolish such differences.
Other Young Hegelians had other qualms about Hegel’s Philosophy: David Strauss did not accept Hegel’s claims of Christian historicity renouncing any historical basis to Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
in favour of its demythization, claiming that the stories found in the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
should be understood as myths "constructed not by individuals but by the earliest Christian communities in response to the teaching of Christ
Christ
Christ is the English term for the Greek meaning "the anointed one". It is a translation of the Hebrew , usually transliterated into English as Messiah or Mashiach...
and the Messianic tradition which they had inherited from the Old Testament
Old Testament
The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...
.".