Leibniz is the genuine initiator of German Idealism. This claim has an illustrious heritage.Footnote ¹ Wilhelm WindelbandFootnote ² (1848–1915) and nineteenth-century historians of philosophyFootnote ³ had long recognised the decisive importance of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), ‘the immortal Leibniz’ as Fichte designates him,Footnote ⁴ for the development of German idealist thought. In his seminal work of 1917, Freiheit und Form,Footnote ⁵ Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) offered the most energetic and sustained defence of this position. Writing at the height of the Great War, in sharp opposition to the prevailing climate of German chauvinism, exceptionalism, and cultural closure,Footnote ⁶ Cassirer affirmed the idealists’ deep engagement with the broader European Enlightenment, but it was particularly Leibniz, he contended, who forged the critical instruments with which the idealists were able to diagnose the modern world. Cassirer argued that in acknowledging the rights of free, rational beings as inalienable and repudiating irrational dependencies and subordinations, Leibniz provided the fundamental ethical impulse articulated and systematised in Kant and Kant-inspired idealisms.Footnote ⁷ Leibniz formed generations of philosophers throughout the German lands, but for Cassirer the fruitfulness of his ethical and political conceptions becomes fully apparent only through the work of Kant and not in Leibniz’s immediate successors like Christian Wolff. Kant conducted a successful theoretical revolution against the Wolffian system and its advocacy of Enlightened absolutism, but the result is a new vindication, a ‘true apology’Footnote ⁸ for Leibniz, reviving and rethinking his basic concepts, and mobilising them in defence of rational freedom. The Leibnizian foundation and the Kantian refoundation and its consequences are the subjects of this enquiry.

Cassirer’s detailed arguments, as current research has shown, demand revision in significant respects,Footnote ⁹ but his work provides a connective thread for the present study. Despite the centrality of political thought to his argument, Cassirer proceeded indirectly in Freiheit und Form, primarily through metaphysics and aesthetics. Here, instead, we shift the focus explicitly to German idealist political thought and its conceptual roots in the Leibnizian system. The innovation proposed here consists in the concept of post-Kantian perfectionism, its origins in Kant’s critiques of his precursors, and its multiple elaborations among his successors. The contention is that a specific idea of freedom, as self-initiated and self-directed activity, underlies this new ethical-political perfectionist current, and that this idea, modified and recast, is the Leibnizian heritage which the idealists retrieve.

The Kantian Revolution

The revolution in ethical and social thought that Kant achieves introduces new concepts of freedom and personhoodFootnote ¹⁰ and reconfigures political debate, but this revolution has deep historical roots. In the German territories, political theories of Kantian derivation emerge in the eighteenth century through a long process of engagement with the heritage of Leibniz, as represented especially by Christian Wolff and his school. These debates are framed by the opposition between the contending political aims of perfection and freedom. The decisive question is whether the state ought authoritatively to prescribe, and to impose, a substantive vision of the good life for its subjects. Wolff’s theory of political perfection, broadly inspired by Leibniz, is reminiscent of Aristotle’s doctrine of eudaimonia,Footnote ¹¹ or happiness as fulfilment of natural capabilities, and continues a long tradition of perfectionist thought whose object is the thriving of a fixed human nature. The state must actively promote the felicity of its members, including their material needs and their higher intellectual and spiritual aspirations. The Kantian criticism of Wolff rejects the paternalistic state and its theoretical basis in the ethics of perfection in favour of spontaneous, self-determining activity, and derives the idea of a juridical order which upholds the principle of free, rightful interaction. Kant’s strictures constitute a decisive repudiation of the Wolffian tradition. The effect of this shift in orientation is to disempower political perfectionism of the older kind.

The nature of Kant’s criticisms and the resulting shifts in political and ethical debate can be lightly sketched here, for subsequent elaboration. Perfectionism is the doctrine that the development of certain capabilities is of intrinsic and not merely instrumental value.Footnote ¹² The end or value promoted is a good in itself and not merely as conducive to other purposes. It is, moreover, of supervening value, not merely one good among others, but the highest attainable good, providing the appropriate and predominant end for ethical orientation. Theories of this kind also tend to be consequentialist: the moral worth of an action is measured by its contribution to furthering this end. How the end is specified varies amongst thinkers, from Aristotelian eudaimonia to Stoic virtue to Wolffian felicitas, and these will be indicated in their place, but characteristically it consists in some idea of the proper life in reference to a given conception of human nature.Footnote ¹³

For Kant, the failing of the old perfectionism as an ethical programme is that it sets up external standards of the good life and requires the moral will to comply with them.Footnote ¹⁴ This position is inadmissible for Kant because even though it favours intelligible over merely sensible goods, it considers these goods as prior to, and foundational for, duty. The moral will would thus be determined, teleologically, by an appeal to a value outside itself, and this is inconsistent with Kant’s sense of autonomy. Moreover, these older theories misconstrue the ends of moral action. They place happiness rather than autonomy at the heart of moral theory. This marks them as versions of what Kant calls heteronomy, or the determination of the will be something outside of itself. A true ethic is autonomous, where the will legislates to itself and enacts that legislation in concrete deeds. For Kant, most ethical systems before his own were guilty of some form of heteronomy; he distinguishes empirical versions, or the blandishments of pleasure or desire in contravention of moral duty, from rational heteronomy or perfection, which seeks an intelligible rather than a sensuous good, but which is equally consequentialist in measuring the goodness of an act by its effects, not its animating principle. Kant insists on validating actions through the maxim that the act is to carry out, and not through the contingent results of the action. The good will is the criterion of the good deed. Such an approach is termed ‘deontological’, from the Greek participle deon, meaning what is required. One implication of Kant’s position, of great importance for ensuing debates on the state, is that considerations of intrinsic rightness place limits on what actions count as acceptable, even if they might yield beneficial results.

A further defect of perfectionisms before Kant is that they typically invoke state authority to enforce the good life, as its proponents define it.Footnote ¹⁵ This paternalistic imposition violates another Kantian principle – the imperative to treat other rational beings as ends in themselves and as agents capable of maturely fixing their own ends. Prescribing to individuals politically how to seek their own well-being infringes their fundamental right of self-determination. On this basis Kant repudiates the Wolffian tutelary state, and among his followers this principle yielded a new orientation in political thinking. In his final systematic work of political theory, the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, Kant demarcates the field of activity or practical reason into three spheres – happiness, right, and morality. Happiness involves the exercise of what Kant calls empirical practical reason, while right and morality are distinct usages of pure practical reason, the differentiation of which will be explored in greater detail subsequently.Footnote ¹⁶ He extracts from the old idea of eudaimonia one of its components, material satisfaction or need fulfilment, and leaves the pursuit of this end open to personal initiatives. Such activities are restricted by institutions of right that assure the coexistence of these many quests but, unlike absolutist or tutelary interventions, do not seek to determine the contents of what counts as happiness for individual agents. To this extent happiness is depoliticised but is subject to the constraints of enforceable rightful interaction, so that the possibility of free activity remains available to all. Kant likewise extracts from eudaimonia another set of ideas, of virtue and moral development, which he situates in the separate, depoliticised sphere of the moral life. Here no coercion is permitted, and here Kant envisages the practice of autonomy as rational self-legislation. This architectonic of practical reason structures later systems of ethical-political thought that constitute our present subject.

Kant, Leibniz, and the New Perfectionism

But Kant’s critique, as devastating and immediately effective as it is,Footnote ¹⁷ does not rule out all possible perfectionisms. Freedom and perfection are not simply opposing ends but can be combined in new ways, responsive to Kant’s objections to the prevailing forms. In the process of distancing from the older perfectionism, a renewal and transformation of perfectionist ethics occurs, and it occurs among Kantians themselves. Kant’s followers – originating with Humboldt, Schiller, and Fichte – formulated a new perfectionist approach, responsive to his strictures on the unacceptability of the older doctrines of perfection, and able to withstand Kantian criticisms. Arising immediately in the wake of Kant’s 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals and extending to the work of Karl Marx and beyond, these new systems focus not on the substantive goods towards which human nature putatively tends or on predefined ideas of happiness, but rather on the exercise of freedom itself and the conditions that sustain it. The starting point of these new systems is the concept of rational self-legislation which Kant’s account of practical reason had espoused, together with interrogations of its possible field of application. The enhancement of the capacity for free, rational self-determination, and not any given substantial end, defines the objective of this perfectionism after Kant. The end to be pursued is no longer an authoritatively promoted conception of human nature and its thriving. Instead, in abstracting from specific purposes and considering only the structure and compossibility of actions, the new approaches after Kant are formal rather than material. As the capacity for free self-defining and self-initiating activity, a capacity that we will designate ‘spontaneity’,Footnote ¹⁸ the proposed end is internal to and constitutive of rational action itself and thus circumvents Kant’s heteronomy critique. Accompanying this change are close explorations of the objective, institutional, and intersubjective conditions for the practice of freedom, and demands for the reform, extension, and consolidation of these conditions. Kant’s own usage of autonomy as moral self-legislation is broadened to include rational agency in the political and social sphere and the critical revision of prevailing relations and institutions in the name of freedom.Footnote ¹⁹

Yet this radical shift of orientation is no mere repudiation of Leibniz. In rejecting Wolff’s application of Leibniz’s political thought, Kant retrieved elements of the Leibnizian system that had remained dormant in Wolff and other Enlightenment figures, redefined these elements, and set them in a new framework, which his own successors in turn elaborated and extended in their new perfectionist systems. Leibniz provided fundamental ethical concepts and conceptual schemes through which the philosophical revolution occurs, elaborating new comprehensions of reason’s legislative authority in morality and politics. The essence of this revolution, as effected by Leibniz’s philosophical heirs, is an engagement with modern society: an extended reflection on individuality, autonomy, and freedom.

This intimate connection between Leibniz, Kant, and subsequent idealisms is the point which Ernst Cassirer persuasively argues, especially in metaphysics and aesthetics. Political theory and ethics remain fertile fields for new historical and systematic investigation into prevailing Leibnizian influences.Footnote ²⁰ Paul ReddingFootnote ²¹ has recently demonstrated Leibnizian derivations of German idealist logic and metaphysics and has established important continuities among many of the authors whom the present study addresses. Here, the emphasis on practical reason and politics will revise and amplify earlier accounts and afford further insights into Kant’s relation to Leibniz and its ethical-political consequences.

Latterly, the convergence of Leibnizian and Kantian approaches has been examined from two independent perspectives, but without explicit reference to Cassirer’s insightful studies. On the one hand, Christopher Johns has underlined the previously under-acknowledged deontological aspects in Leibniz’s thought and has directed attention to his early studies in natural law theory as establishing the rights of free activity, and the corresponding duties of subjects to refrain from hindering one another’s exercise of their rational expressive and formative capacities. Leibniz is generally taken to espouse a version of consequentialist or teleological ethics, measuring the good of an action by its results, not its underlying maxim or rule. Leibniz and Kant are typically considered to be antipodes, but Johns offers a more nuanced reading. He establishes that deontological considerations of inalienable right, especially rights to self-defined spontaneous action, remain operative as limiting conditions within Leibniz’s overall teleological and consequentialist ethic,Footnote ²² and thus align him more closely with Kant. Johns implicitly endorses Cassirer’s interpretation of inalienable rights and applies it directly to political discourse. This step is fundamental to the present narrative.

The second line of convergence is represented by authors such as Paul Guyer and Luca Fonnesu, who stress the decisive importance of perfectionist elements in Kant’s own thought, narrowing the gap which standard readings establish between teleological and deontological theories.Footnote ²³ Guyer pursues two strategies in this regard. First, he identifies a specific strain of what he calls Emersonian perfectionism, recently exemplified in the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, in which reason is instrumental to freedom, the supervening value; and he shows the affinities of Kant, particularly in the Doctrine of Virtue of the Metaphysics of Morals, with this approach.Footnote ²⁴ Second, in his more recent work he defends the idea of a Kantian perfectionism differing from that of Christian Wolff. On this reading, the object of Kant’s perfectionism is not the promotion of any substantive idea of happiness or eudaimonia, as in Wolff, but the perfection of the quality of the moral will, or of choice, as Guyer puts it.Footnote ²⁵

The position which Guyer attributes to Kant himself is significantly different from one defined in the present account as post-Kantian perfectionism,Footnote ²⁶ a distinct development of Kant’s own views, anticipated but not fully articulated in his work. The ethical perfectionism that Guyer identifies in Kant (and whose interpretative status is not in question here) seeks to strengthen the will and virtuous attitudes, that is, it deals with the acquisition of the capacity for moral autonomy; and its domain is the Kantian sphere of virtue, not of right. It maintains the Kantian restriction of autonomy to moral action. Post-Kantian perfectionism, on the other hand, aims at the enhancement of freedom or rational agency in general. Primarily a juridical perfectionism, it occupies the sphere of right, not of morality. It seeks to consolidate the practices and institutions of right and to expand the scope of rightful action in the sense-world. It also aims to secure the objective conditions for effective action in pursuit of self-given ends, such that each individual may pursue particular conceptions of happiness without authoritative imposition. The quest for happiness is subject to the constraints of rightful interaction, but not of direct political imposition.

The fundamental shift, then, is from happiness to freedom as the supervening end. The quest for happiness is not discounted but is set in a new context where right prevails and delimits. Further changes occur in the idea of happiness itself, and in the problem of coordination of actions. The new post-Kantian theories not only displace happiness from its central role in teleological ethics, but also reconceptualise it as a facet of spontaneity: it is neither a singular or substantive end to be obligatorily enacted by the state, nor are its forms and contents fixed by ahistorical species attributes. Involving the individual use of empirical practical reason rather than deriving directly from political edict or natural necessity, happiness becomes multiple and diverse, with important consequences for ethics. Processes of self-formation and Bildung acquire their saliency in this context, since persons must shape their own purposes and actions in mutual adjustment with others, as right requires. Corresponding to the shift from happiness as a singular predefined species attribute to its multiple subjective forms, there occurs a parallel transition from ideas of social homogeneity or identity of ends to problems of coexistence among multiple, diverse, and possibly contending interests. The political problem becomes that of synthesising the multiple in freedom, securing not uniformity but compossibility of actions. The coordination problem among such quests for happiness thus demands a solution. The Leibnizian hypothesis of a pre-established harmony of interests is inadmissible; instead, social accord is a (problematic) result to be won through the exertions of practical reason, but without metaphysical guarantees. Nor must a tutelary state, as in Wolff’s account, be authorised to dictate the features of the good life and to steer its members towards this goal. What defines the perfectionist character of this post-Kantian approach as fundamentally new is the effort to stabilise the accord among subjectivities in ways maximally compatible with the freedom of each, and further the commitment to ‘social creation’,Footnote ²⁷ or processes of social change which enhance the institutional and interpersonal context for free activity and progressively eliminate obstacles to its exercise, reconceiving the logic and limits of state intervention, and developing distinctive accounts of rightful interaction and citizenship.

In all these endeavours the concept of freedom as spontaneity is paramount. This usage must be carefully distinguished from the word in common parlance, where it tends to mean unreflective or hasty, unplanned action. Here the meaning is technical: an action is spontaneous if it originates from an inner motive, and not merely as a response to external stimuli. In contrast to ordinary usage, spontaneity in this sense implies that such actions contain reflection, or rational evaluation and judgement, as a constitutive element. Three distinct but related concepts of spontaneity will feature prominently in this account. In Leibniz, spontaneity means processes of internally generated, self-caused change, such that activity is never engendered from an external source, but always from the subject’s own inner resources; Leibniz’s account is directed primarily against emergent theories of mechanistic materialism such as Hobbes, where all movement is induced from without, through the attraction and repulsion which external objects exert upon subjects.Footnote ²⁸ This usage in Leibniz implies an internal ‘conatus’ or striving, or an individual law of development, governing the attainment of perfection in the two dimensions he identified: the unity of unity and multiplicity (the harmonious display of a many-sided development);Footnote ²⁹ and (as in Aristotle) a teleological process of fulfilment, by which an implicit content is made explicit, or a potential property or set of properties is realised.Footnote ³⁰

In the second meaning of the concept, in Kant, spontaneity in its practical dimension refers to the capacity of subjects to abstract from the workings of external causes, and to admit them selectively into their action plans in accordance with a self-given rule. This capacity is what Kant defines as negative freedom, and it is reason as constituting the very basis of our freedom, rather than serving as a means to exercise it. It is intrinsically connected to our capacity for positive freedom, or autonomy, moral self-legislation in accord with universal principles.Footnote ³¹ In a critical appropriation and development of the Leibnizian notion of spontaneity, the emphasis has shifted from the metaphysics of (monadic) causality and intrinsic laws of motion, to the practical use of reason as a gauge and standard for the kinds of external causes that we may allow to influence our actions. Spontaneity operates across the three spheres of Kantian practical reason: in individual definitions of happiness, in the interplay of right where boundaries for individual activities are set and upheld, and in the uncoerced cultivation of virtue and the moral life.

The third meaning of spontaneity is a further development of the Kantian account, and fully compatible with it, though it is not explicitly laid out in Kant’s own work. Here, as in Fichte, spontaneity refers to the capacity of subjects to exert causality outside of themselves in the phenomenal order, in the sense-world,Footnote ³² and to transform objectivity in accord with the evolving understanding of reason and subjective freedom, an evolution conditioned by the play of internal self-consciousness and external realisations. In Fichte, spontaneity is identified with labour, the transformation of external nature in accord with a concept, a rule, or an end, which is self-given. It is this third meaning of spontaneity which is most characteristic of post-Kantian perfectionism, whose aim is the development of the conditions of free agency. Its site within Kantian reason is the domain of right, of compatible free actions in their external aspect, and not primarily of virtue, or the internal adjudication of ends. Rather, it consists in the promotion of freedom, the capacity to be self-fashioning, to shape one’s own ends, and to determine the political conditions most conducive to this freedom: it aims to secure not primarily the happiness of subjects, nor their moral goodness, but the necessary conditions (objective, epistemic, and interpersonal) for the exercise of subjective causality in the sense-world. Such activity is spontaneous too in pursuit of self-determined ends, whose mutual compatibility is an always problematic and provisional achievement, a practical result and never a metaphysical presupposition. It is, however, essential to grasp the Leibnizian basis of this approach, even where its normative provisions deviate sharply from Leibniz’s own. The central importance of self-defining and self-initiating action is the defining feature of the new perfectionism, and this idea derives from Leibniz.

Ancient Beginnings: Aristotle and the Stoics

It is Aristotle who, if he is not the initiator of political perfectionism of the old kind, at least shapes its particular developmental course. The principal defect of the Platonic system, affirms Aristotle, is that it aims at too much unity.Footnote ³³ In expounding this criticism in The Politics, Aristotle is far from his most lucid; but this criticism has validity in two senses.Footnote ³⁴ At the institutional level, Aristotle repudiates the Platonic communism of The Republic and Socrates’ attempted circumscription of private interest for the ruling groups through the abolition of private property and the family among guardians and auxiliaries. Aristotle’s position can be fruitfully compared with the argument which Thucydides attributes to Pericles in the renowned Funeral Oration over the Athenian dead, pronounced at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War.Footnote ³⁵ There, through Pericles, Thucydides contrasts two senses of unity, the Spartan and the Athenian model. The defects of the former are that unity is imposed from above, and that such unity consists in a brittle and static homogeneity, inimical to initiative and creative adaptation. Friedrich Schiller will make these criticisms his own in addressing contemporary issues of authoritarian and revolutionary impositions.Footnote ³⁶ For Thucydides, and implicitly for Aristotle, the Athenian model is to be preferred because in it unity emerges from below, from consensus and dialogue (dialegesthai), from the composition and not the suppression of differences. The conditions of this dialogue are that many perspectives be developed, articulated, and weighed: a situation which is conducive, as Aristotle will also contend in the Politics, to the discovery and putting into effect of the common good, as a dynamic process of attaining the best practicable end within a healthy state form or polity.

It is the best practicable end that is the telos of political deliberation and action, and not the best end absolutely. Here Aristotle formulates his second criticism of the excessive unity of the Platonic system, the failure to differentiate theoretical from practical reasoning. It is not necessary that citizens and rulers know the Good absolutely, as Plato’s guardians ought to do, but rather that they aim at the relative good, the best end attainable in the circumstances. Political reasoning is not theoria, the knowledge of changeless things, but phronesis, the knowledge of the changeable, and the practical effort to bring about the best achievable end: not to adapt oneself to circumstance or fortune (as the successful Machiavellian Prince will much later aspire to),Footnote ³⁷ but to adapt circumstance to the best possible end. Phronesis is the determination of what that end is, and the instrumental determination of how to achieve it efficiently. The shaping of circumstance to purpose, to an idea of the highest attainable good, is indicative of the ability of thinking to realise itself, and is expressive of Aristotle’s idealism. The movement of actualisation is not a flurry of negation like the flux of Platonic phenomena, which in their very changes display their lesser reality; for Plato, because they change phenomena both are and are not, and are thus self-contradictory, while Ideas are pure, stable, and self-identical. In Aristotle, instead, change is movement directed by and toward an end, a gradual approximation whereby higher degrees of reality are attained. The accomplishment of the end is the perfection of the movement and of the mover, the process of rendering the implicit explicit or turning potentiality into actuality. This is the first meaning of perfection, as completeness, taken up again by Leibniz and his heirs.

Aristotle’s idealism is also a naturalism, since the defining characteristics of species are embedded in nature as a teleological system of determinate ends. Each type of being develops toward its telos, unfolding its inherent possibilities, but also liable to failure or distortion in approaching its goal.Footnote ³⁸ The fundamental attributes of human beings (of whom for Aristotle Greek males are the most representative)Footnote ³⁹ are reason and speech. Reason identifies the good and the means to enact it. Speech deliberates and defines a common task. The exercise of rational faculties in collaboration with one’s peers develops through forms of association, all founded in nature and linked hierarchically, from the oikos or household, to the village, to the polis. The household is the site of production and reproduction, securing subsistence and, in the best instances, a small surplus, and preparing children for their differentiated adult roles. It is characterised by hierarchically organised but complementary functions (because directed to same end) and overseen by the despotic power of the head of the household (despotes). Such control is not synonymous with tyrannical abuse, but is the power of a master over subordinates, some of whom are slaves, defined as organa empsycha or tools with a mind. Natural slaves, according to Aristotle, are endowed with a lesser rational capacity, which will come in modern times to be labelled instrumental reason. They can carry out a prescribed task with more or less efficiency but cannot reliably set rational goals for themselves, being constitutionally incapable of phronesis in the full sense. The master’s control is thus mutually beneficial, permitting slaves to acquire their best possible qualities of discipline and skill.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the next level of association, the village, heads of households meet with their fellows to practise friendship and elementary justice, recognising common interests and acquiring the attitudes and skills conducive to citizenship. Finally, in the polis, if well constituted, citizens deliberate together, defining and executing the best practicable projects for the entire community. It is here in the assemblies of the Greek city-states that properly political power is exercised, as the power of equal over equal, and the species-attributes of speech and reason reach their highest peak. Though they may vary in institutional description, the good forms of the polis are those that promote this optimal development of natural ends in political association. They are conducive to collective and personal happiness or eudaimonia, which Aristotle defines as an intellectual activity or energeia in pursuit of excellence.Footnote ⁴¹ Happiness is not mere passive enjoyment or pleasure, but activity propelled by a rational goal. Here Aristotle anticipates the restless endeavour of modern idealists. But he also establishes the equation between happiness and perfection that Kant and post-Kantians will disprove.

Intimately linked with happiness is the acquisition of arete or virtue. Arete is excellence, the fitness of something for the end for which it is designed. Any kind of being can possess arete to the extent that it contributes to its specific goal. For human beings, according to Aristotle, virtues are modes of habituation and integration into the social structures, practices, and values of a determinate community; they are not absolutes in a Kantian sense, but conditional and relative.Footnote ⁴² They cannot be practised meaningfully in abstraction from their communal setting. Further, the Aristotelian account is also concerned with the ‘equipment’ or relationships that are conducive to the acquisition and exercise of virtuous judgement. Such Aristotelian questions about the equipment of virtue, or about types of relations or interactions (i.e. economic relations and distribution of property, etc,) that might contribute most reliably to the practice of virtue, will recur in new forms, in Leibniz’s inquiry into the connections between freedom and distributive justice,Footnote ⁴³ and in Fichte’s setting of the closed commercial state,Footnote ⁴⁴ though here the stress has moved from virtue to rightful interaction.

Aristotle is thus insistent that, except for rare superlative instances, virtue and happiness require certain social and material conditions in order to thrive. Failure to meet these conditions signifies likelihood of failure to reach the proper natural end. Early modern perfectionisms such as Christian Wolff’s will find this idea fruitful in elaborating their own projects for a rational state and its economic basis, even if they can no longer recognise the specificity of Aristotelian (relatively egalitarian) political power or accommodate it in their tutelary regime. For Aristotle, bad forms of state are those that fail to promote the goal of perfection. By applying his moral theory to politics, it is possible to distinguish two forms: the akolastic or perverse, which substitute a bad end for a good, and the akratic or disordered, which are deficient in the means to achieve the good.Footnote ⁴⁵ Aristotle’s argument against oligarchies can be reconstructed to show that they are akolastic. They replace thriving and virtue with material accumulation or chrematistic, perverting the end of the state to a debasing purpose. Democracies, though diverse in kind, are typically akratic, not necessarily pursuing the wrong end, but lacking the means and equipment to achieve the good. Thus most democracies rank relatively higher than most oligarchies in Aristotle’s typology of regimes. The best practicable form of state in the promotion of human excellence is the republic or polity, whose households are sufficiently rich that citizens are largely exempt from manual labour (the domain of slaves and the disenfranchised) and can devote themselves to the common good, but not so rich or unequal as to breed avarice and envy. In the polity, the middle sort prevails. The Aristotelian doctrine of virtue as a mean between deficiency and excess is further exemplified in his perfectionist theory of state forms. His arguments will resonate into the modern era.Footnote ⁴⁶

These arguments are not uncontested, though, even in antiquity. In the Hellenistic age, and importantly among the Romans, Epicurean thought promoted simplicity of desires and political abstinence as a remedy for the oppressions and complexities of imperial life. The goodness of an act was measured by the pleasure that accompanied it, but unlike Thomas Hobbes who in other ways replicates their thought, the objective was not to maximise pleasure but to minimise pain. Epicurean thought remains within the horizon of the ancient view of nature as a system of circumscribed places. In contrast to post-Renaissance views of expansive and transformative human activities, Epicureans see the material and social world as resistant to human efforts. It is thus more reasonable to limit one’s desires than to risk frustration and defeat by overreach. A transgression of boundaries, which modern hedonism will come to recommend, is repudiated by the Epicureans as an act of hubris and an invitation to nemesis. But within the ancient world conception, the contrast with Aristotle is marked. Whereas for him active citizenship in a properly constituted state represented the highest achievement, for Epicureans political involvement was to be eschewed as inessential or adverse to private happiness.

In contesting Epicurean passivity, the Stoics also develop an alternative to Aristotle that depicts virtues as modes of the practice of personal autonomy, independent of political and social relationships. Stoic apoliticism is more nuanced than the Epicurean; it does not condone abstinence from political activities but advocates discipline and duty, regardless of one’s station, as means of self-cultivation and personal perfection. While the Stoic movement encompasses divergent ideas across six centuries of history, from approximately 300 BC to 300 AD,Footnote ⁴⁷ with effects extending far beyond these years, its abiding characteristics are its opposition to Epicurean ethics, and its distinctive account of perfection and virtue. To the Epicurean definition of happiness as avoidance of pain, the Stoics reply that pleasure and pain are not primitive or merely given sensations, but as motives for action they are the outcome of a practical judgement. Stimuli are neither pleasurable not painful in themselves, but depend on how subjects relate to them, how they integrate them into a prior self-conception or self-consciousness and so endow them with meaning. While the stimulus, the image or phantasia that the object emits, and that cognition intellectually reconstructs, is not voluntary, how the subject experiences the object is not determined by the external cause, but by an act of will or synkatathesis, literally a setting-down-together. or in the language of German idealism a ‘positing’. This act of assent imparts determinacy to the object, fixing it as worthy of desire or not, whence ensues a movement toward the object (horme) or an aversion (aphorme). Desire follows the will rather than preceding it. (In Leviathan, the neo-Epicurean Hobbes will perhaps ironically describe his purely mechanical movements of attraction and repulsion as horme and aphorme.)Footnote ⁴⁸ Highly significant for later idealism are ideas of self-causation and of positing that originate among the ancient Stoics.

The Stoic position is also distinct from Aristotle, though not so diametrically opposed as to their Epicurean adversaries. By the time that the Stoics articulate their ethical thought, the world of the polis was on the brink of dissolution into the new cosmopolis or world empire, first of Alexander and his successors, and then of the Romans. It was no longer plausible to hold that virtues are local modes of habituation into a circumscribed and active community, as these communities were losing their political weight. The Stoic alternative considers virtues as disciplines of the personal will, achieving autonomy or self-sufficiency disconnected from political life. What remains of politics is the injunction conscientiously to carry out the demands of one’s social position, and both slaves and emperors can attain excellence in doing so. Hence the Stoics can also dispense with the Aristotelian concerns about the equipment of virtue; external factors become mere ‘indifferents’, some preferred and some not, but otherwise morally irrelevant. The will retains its freedom even in the most adverse conditions, provided that subjects do not relinquish control of the will to external forces.Footnote ⁴⁹ In that inner freedom lies ethical perfection. Internal freedom and the common interests shared by all rational beings unite persons in a new universal spiritual community, transcending mundane differences. Interests that appear to divide persons and groups are compatible once they are properly understood. Cicero powerfully advances this argument in De Officiis,Footnote ⁵⁰ which clearly displays its Stoic origins even if its author viewed himself as a philosophical eclectic. In early modernity, Machiavelli’s PrinceFootnote ⁵¹ will offer a decisive riposte to Cicero and to this conception of the fundamental compatibility of interests, and in another register the theme of incompatibility will figure prominently among post-Kantian perfectionists. But a Stoic idea of harmony retains its hold in Leibniz, Wolff, and beyond as a component of pre-Kantian perfectionisms, and as an objective in post-Kantian.

Two other characteristically Stoic concepts also play important roles in subsequent idealist thought. Oikeiosis, cognate with oikos or household, means an attitude of acceptance or being at home in the world.Footnote ⁵² In displaying oikeiosis, subjects experience the world as affirming their rationality. For the Stoics this experience results from having the right kinds of volitional attitudes, positioning oneself toward external objects in an affirmative way and acknowledging the universal harmony of interests that is a hallmark of Stoic thought. The proper orientation of the will towards objects and other subjects is the Stoic version of thriving and happiness, and, unlike Aristotle’s account of citizenship, does not require specific institutional forms. Happiness is not the goal, however, but the result of virtue.

The contrasting term to oikeiosis is allotriosis or otherness, which designates not acceptance of the world but estrangement from it. It is an early formulation of the idea of alienation that will frame later accounts as a historical fate, but here it arises from acts of will which wrongly posit the world as inimical to the self. For the Stoics alienation is a volitional act, equally solvable by a countervailing determination of will that restores integrity and belonging. This is the fundamental moral decision, but in it the will remains free to construct its world either as its fulfilment or as its vitiation.

The problem of alienation is a central issue confronted by post-Kantian perfectionists. Stoic allotriosis as the discordance between self and world appears profoundly different when the world from which subjects are alienated is conceived as the product of their own deed, and not as an immutable cosmic order. Such a world demands redress and not merely adaptation. Modernity affords unprecedented possibilities of freedom, the post-Kantians contend, but also undermines these prospects by fragmentation and structural opposition of interests. These are systemic problems that cannot be solved by Epicurean retreat or Stoic self-discipline, and the harmony of interests can no longer be presupposed. Yet something of inestimable value can be retrieved from Stoic conceptions of freedom as self-causation or spontaneity, and as the inhabiting of a world that reflects our rationality back to us, a world of oikeiosis where, now, institutions endorse and support autonomy. These Stoic influences persist among modern idealists.

German Idealism, Freedom, and Modernity

With its focus on freedom, German idealism from Kant to Hegel differs from previous idealist philosophy. It is distinct from Platonic idealism because it rejects the view of a transcendent intellectual order of formal perfection, of which the material world is an inexact replica; it is closer to Aristotle’s sense of energeia, the shaping presence of form in matter, but is more insistent than Aristotle on the activity of subjects as the sources of form. It is not an idealism which reduces being to thought (Hegel’s unity of thought and being is to be understood differently, as a processual synthesis), nor one which is sceptical about the existence of the external world.Footnote ⁵³ Against such ‘dogmatic’ or ‘empirical’ idealism, the Kantian tradition mounts a decisive assault.Footnote ⁵⁴ The fundamental issue of German idealism is not to impugn the objective world, but to ask how we can rationally and freely relate to it, and act in it. This practical idealism is fundamentally critical of objective historical and social conditions which hinder free self-determination. It is profoundly political and offers challenging insights into the prospects of modern social life. It develops ideas of practical reason as the capacity to be self-legislating and autonomous, and it stresses the self-causing, spontaneous quality of human action. The world as it appears to the senses is not illusory, but is derivative of subjective effort; following Leibniz, German idealism directs attention to the formative activity which underlies both the objects of outer experience and the practices of subjective self-shaping. It invites a critical assessment of these processes of objectification, inquiring to what extent they embody, convey, enhance, or distort the self-understanding of their originators.

For German Idealism, the excessive unity which Aristotle had recognised in the Platonic system is a general characteristic of Greek ethical thought, differentiating it from the modern. For Hegel, the ancient ideal of personhood and community (encompassing Aristotelian arete and eudaimonia) is that of ‘beautiful individuality’, in which the person is conceived as a microcosm of the political whole, exemplifying a determinate set of virtues or excellences, and harmoniously integrated into a relatively undifferentiated community.Footnote ⁵⁵ On this reading, it is the Spartan model described in Thucydides that better exemplifies the Greek ideal; the Athenian model offers only an apparent alternative, sharing the same normative basis. The polis community (in both Spartan and Athenian forms) is a whole, which, as Aristotle affirms, is prior to its parts,Footnote ⁵⁶ prescribing roles and values to its members. Thus Greek unity is always unity from above; the Athenian model merely dynamises the processes of adaptation and integration. Significantly, the characteristically modern idea of reflective, subjective evaluation of institutions and standards had not yet dawned.

When the principle of self-consciousness emerges with the Stoics,Footnote ⁵⁷ it points beyond the Greek horizon of polis life, but it lacks concreteness. Its inward self-determination is not mirrored in objective relations and institutions that confirm it. Stoic self-consciousness stands in contrast with the given ethical and political order which cannot accommodate it, and while Stoicism advocates being at home in the world, it forecloses transformative action in favour of private, inward compliance. German idealism will effect the synthesis and transformation of both poles, of the rigid institutional order and the abstract subjectivity, seeking to integrate critical self-consciousness into the historical process, and rethinking oikeiosis as a new perfectionist mission, making the objective world a fitter home.

According to Hegel, the great discovery of the Enlightenment is that everything exists for the subject, whether in the form of utility, or as matter for the expression of freedom.Footnote ⁵⁸ In working out these ideas, Hegel and other German Idealists such as Schiller draw upon Kantian sources. Kant describes the Enlightenment as an epochal turning point for humanity: the shaking off of self-imposed tutelage, marking the historical maturation of the species.Footnote ⁵⁹ Traditional and transcendent sources of authority, whether political or religious, are deprived of their unreflective influence, and yield to critical adjudication and self-legislation by rational subjects. In the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant maintains:

Enlightenment subjects no longer derive their ethical and political standards from the supposition of a fixed natural order, nor from the given traditions and practices of the community, but from an idea of the self and its purposes. The primacy of freedom does not entail a denial of all law, but places law on a new basis, requiring an interrogation into what the self may rightfully claim and do. The task is to reconcile the freedom of each individual with the freedom of all, within a political order which is not merely given, but constructed; harmony is not pre-established, but achieved. This problem of the compossibility of freedoms is at the heart of German political thought from Kant onwards. In giving political substance to Kant’s moral idea of autonomy, post-Kantians are particularly responsive to the problems of cohesiveness and division in modern society: the unity of unity and multiplicity.

But it is Leibniz who indicates the way ahead. From his student days at Leipzig he engaged closely with the most advanced modern thought, and already glimpsed a resolution to its problems. The mechanical universe of Thomas Hobbes absorbed human activity into a system of universal attraction and repulsion, and replaced rational agency with conditioned reactions to external stimuli. While conceding that mechanistic explanation had a role to play in natural science and in processes of execution of ends, Leibniz denied that it could adequately account for rational processes whereby the ends of activity were determined. Hobbes’ world-view is not incorrect as a description of the objective order, the interplay of forces in the physical world. Hobbes’ error is to overgeneralise this model, extending it beyond its legitimate boundaries and subsuming intentional action under its determinate laws. Linked to this error is another: the claim to be able to dispense completely with the ancients (except for a qualified Epicureanism), to have repudiated utterly their metaphysical concerns. For Leibniz, instead, nothing essential is to be lost, and what is essential in the classics is a view of rational agency and teleological action that is to be revived and revised to make it compatible with modern physics. Recalling Stoic criticisms of the Epicureans, Leibniz contends that physical attraction and repulsion are insufficient to explain action. Instead, we require something akin to Aristotelian teleology or phronesis, an idea of rational ends to be carried out in objectivity, self-initiated rather than merely being shaped by the impress of objective laws. The pursuit of such ends is a response to inner motives, not merely to external stimuli. In adumbrating these ideas in his student correspondence with his professor Jacob Thomasius,Footnote ⁶¹ Leibniz sketches out the programme that will constitute his life’s work. Here originates the idea of spontaneity that will enrich subsequent idealist thought and its political and ethical applications. This is the subject of our story.

Structure of the Argument

Leibniz. Leibniz makes the relation of freedom and justice central to his reflections on political philosophy, in ways which remain paradigmatic for German Idealism. From his earliest work, he derives juridical obligations from the three principles of Roman law, re-interpreted in light of his emerging philosophy: neminem laedere, suum cuique tribuere, honeste (pie) vivere [to harm no one, to give to each what is due, to live honestly/piously] (1667). The first principle is the obligation to exercise one’s own freedom while refraining from hindering the freedom of others. Subsequently, Leibniz will define this freedom as spontaneity, the capacity of subjects for constant, self-initiated activity, expressing a unique perspective on the world and an individual law of development. The second natural law principle, to contribute to the happiness and perfection of all, is a requirement of distributive justice. Various systems of distribution of honours and property are empirically permissible, subject to twofold constraints: that of the first principle, of respecting the right of spontaneity of their members; and that of the requirement of perfection, the contribution of these systems to overall welfare. The third principle, to progress in the love and knowledge of God, enjoins individuals to realise the best possible world, not as fatuous optimism but as a moral mission, striving for higher levels of perfection, or the manifestation of all implicit properties in a harmonious whole. These ideas of perfection, together with the three Leibnizian juridical principles and the concepts of spontaneity and its cognates, provide the basic framework for this study

Wolff and Herder. The political thought of Christian Wolff and its complex relation to Leibniz is next examined through Wolff’s Latin and German works in natural law and his reconfiguration of Leibniz’s juridical principles. Wolff develops a perfectionist ethic based on an idea of a fixed human nature and the requisites of its material and intellectual thriving. The fulfilment of these conditions is the grounds for an interventionist enlightened absolutism, promoting happiness (here equivalent to perfection). Active state intervention is intended to guarantee decent living conditions, education, housing, and preservation of the natural environment, besides intellectual and skills cultivation and the spiritual welfare of the population. Perfection means developing local resources and commercial links, and involves cooperation, which is not to be left to spontaneous initiatives, ineffective or self-defeating without proper direction, but to be coordinated by the state. Wolff’s theory expressly combines Leibnizian spontaneity with Newtonian inertia: subjective spontaneity exists, but is latent and unfocused, and requires exogenous force to activate and direct it to its goal. Wolff admits a pre-political state of nature, but the imperative to leave the natural condition and to enter civil society derives from the natural-law requirement of perfection of self and others, an imperative which is unrealisable in conditions of original anarchy and lethargy. In properly organised civil society, there exists a complementarity of interests in that each person and household has a necessary, mutually beneficial, functionally and hierarchically differentiated role to play in the common quest for perfection. This optimal development provides the overriding ethical end. While Wolff recognises certain residual rights in civil society, he views them as titles renounceable in favour of progress, rather than circumscribing its legitimate forms. The exercise of rights is conditional on their ability to promote happiness, and no appeal is allowed from happiness to rights. The first Leibnizian juridical principle of freedom becomes conditional on the second, of distributive justice, the institutional network through which spontaneity can be motivated to its goal, the third-principle idea of progress. Kant will denounce this Wolffian paternalistic state as despotic, since it aims to make its people happy rather than free, and thus violates spontaneity.

Further elaboration of Leibnizian spontaneity occurs in aesthetics, in conjunction with new ideas of formative action. The reflective, evaluative relation of the active self to its products (i.e., relations of correspondence or non-correspondence between intent and execution) gives rise to various schools of German Romanticism: Herder’s expressivism posits correspondence of subject and object from the unique and irreducible perspective of individual or collective/national agents. Alternatively, in the ironic freedom celebrated by Fr. Schlegel, the infinite creative self constantly disavows its fragmentary deed; the accord of subject and object is precluded on ontological grounds. While defending cultural multiplicity and repudiating mechanistic materialism, Herder’s perfectionism represents a conceptually pre-Kantian approach through his stress on thriving rather than rational freedom, and his naturalistic, organic account of subjective force. In contrast to Romanticist forms of reflection, German Idealism from Kant and Schiller onwards takes the divergence of reason and objectivity to set a practical, ethical task, and not to mark a metaphysical impossibility: the imperative progressively to bring forms of objectivity under the command of reason.

Kant. Kant’s critiques of perfectionism as rational heteronomy and paternalism are analysed in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Practical Reason, and related texts. His reformulation of the Leibnizian concept of spontaneity in the Critique of Practical Reason constitutes his ‘true apology for Leibniz’, salvaging what is most vital in his thought. Kant grasps the normative implications of the first natural law principle of spontaneous freedom, not because it externalises a unique content, as in Leibniz, but because the will is not bound to any foreign cause. Kant refers to this capacity as negative liberty, the will’s ability to abstract from external causes or to admit them selectively according to rational criteria. Spontaneity is the capacity for free goal-setting, and is the condition for an order of right, as the sphere of compatible external actions, established through mutual limitation among juridical subjects. Here Kant effects a second modification of Leibniz, in the idea of mutual causality or reciprocity, an intermonadic causality which opens onto a doctrine of juridical interaction among Kant’s followers. The Metaphysics of Morals of 1797 elaborates the distinction between pure and empirical practical reason, freedom and happiness, and delineates the sphere of rightful interaction, where post-Kantian perfectionism is distinctively operative. This is the arena where the free goal-setting of each individual in its external aspect is acknowledged and harmonised, without political prescription of the particular ends of happiness. The Kantian account of rightful interaction restores the first Leibnizian juridical principle, as grounding and circumscribing the permissible range of second principle distributive justice provisions in a society; and the third principle, as the kingdom of ends or individual and collective self-cultivation, is now effectively depoliticised, removed from the solicitation of the Wolffian state. Thus the triplicity of Kantian practical reason emerges: happiness, right, and virtue. Political constraint is limited by first-principle considerations of freedom. Constrained virtue is no virtue. Nor may the state rightfully determine happiness, as long as the pursuit of private satisfactions does not impede the freedom of others; yet this position does not rule out all interventions beyond the strictest minimum, as Kant’s follower Wilhelm von Humboldt concluded. For Kant and for Fichte, the bounds of legitimate intervention are broader, because the state, as an order of right, has a duty to make the quest for possible happiness available to all. Justice is the condition of universal right or freedom. Kant depoliticises perfection (as happiness and virtue, respectively) but retains the primacy of a reinterpreted Leibnizian freedom as directive of political life.

Early Kantian Debates. The immediate effect of Kant’s criticisms, especially in the crucial interval between the Groundwork (1785) and the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), is not to eradicate perfectionism but to transpose it to a new register, the perfection of freedom itself and the conditions of its exercise. Kant’s complete system of juridical relations emerges belatedly, in 1797. His evocative but incomplete statements of his political position after 1785 gave rise to numerous debates among Kantians on the appropriate basis and limits of state action. Early Kantians take up the third Leibnizian principle of progress and describe it as the outcropping of spontaneous freedom, not as administered and imposed. These debates, involving Hufeland, Reinhold, and Humboldt, originate from Kant’s critiques of Leibniz and Wolff, but also initiate a new type of perfectionist thinking immune to Kant’s strictures against rational heteronomy. These texts of the late 1780s and 1790s offer various combinations of Leibnizian and Kantian ideas. In response to Kant’s Groundwork interrogation of the permissibility of coercion of a rational being, Hufeland justifies legitimate political constraint through its contribution to systemic perfection. His position draws criticism from other Kantians such as Reinhold and from Kant himself. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s early formulation of the limits of state action derives from Kantian anti-paternalism, the Groundwork injunction of the inviolability of rational beings, combined with a modified Leibnizian monadology admitting interaction. His defence of a minimalist state is a possible but not a necessary consequence of Kantian premises.

Schiller. Schiller develops a specifically Leibnizian sense of perfection as the unity of unity and multiplicity. His contribution to the tradition of post-Kantian perfectionism lies in his political application of this dialectic. He defends an order of spontaneous beauty (with expressly republican implications), emergent in freedom, against imposed perfection. In addressing the problems of the incipient modern division of labour and the prospects for political community, he defends variety against uniformity, while distinguishing historically progressive from regressive types of diversity. Schiller further insists on processes of aesthetic self-formation and determinability, which make possible a mutual adjustment of interests as an achievable practical outcome, rather than as a metaphysical presupposition. Interests in modern civil society are diverse and troublingly fragmentary, but potentially reconcilable.

Fichte. Fichte takes the promotion of freedom rather than happiness as the legitimate end of political action. He revises the concept of spontaneity, especially in his System der Sittlenlehre, equating it with labour as the transformation of the sense-world under the command of an idea. The political system proposed in his Geschlossener Handelsstaat is a further application of this idea, together with attention to the conditions (epistemic, material, and intersubjective) necessary for the effective transposition of subjective intentions into objective results. Fichte’s political interventionism is fundamentally distinct from Wolff’s because of its commitment to the primacy of freedom, even when his own concrete prescriptions appear to undermine this objective. The political programmes of Fichte and Humboldt are alternative Kantianisms, but both exemplify post-Kantian perfectionist commitments to enhance the capacity for free activity.

Hegel. History for German idealism is the expression of practical reason, as the process of gradually bringing about the accord of subject and object. Hegel’s conception of history is the realisation of the third Leibnizian principle as the history of freedom, and as the unfolding of the first principle of spontaneity. Historical configurations of ethical life embody changing assessments of the self and the world, and contain essential contradictions whose resolution is the key to progress toward new and more complex forms. The dialectic of the will in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is an exposition of the idea of spontaneity, endowing itself with concrete content as it moves through its dimensions of universality, particularity, and singularity. Hegel’s thought has been recently described as a theodicy, demonstrating that modern institutions are not mere limitations, but legitimate conditions for the exercise of freedom. The rationality of the real in Hegel, however, does not preclude a critical engagement. While utopian projection of future states is precluded on methodological grounds, the close examination of current relations and institutions as exemplifying ideas of freedom reveals nodal points or critical junctures where practical interventions are likely to be fruitful in effecting change. An implicit, historicised ‘ought’ in Hegel, arising from his reworking of the logical categories, marks his place within post-Kantian perfectionism.

The Hegelian School. The concept of post-Kantian perfectionism clarifies the mutual polemics among figures in the School, contrasting Feuerbach’s naturalism, which combines pre- and post-Kantian motifs, with the more exigent Kantianism of Bruno Bauer; and it elucidates sharp disagreements with anti-perfectionists like Max Stirner. Beyond the confines of the School the concrete historical situation comes under the scrutiny of post-Kantian perfectionist thinking. French Revolutionary factions and the contending parties in the German Vormärz express distinct views of freedom and follow different developmental trajectories. Civil society, too, reveals its inner dynamics. Rejecting Leibniz’s pre-established harmony and Wolffian mutuality, but also markedly different from Kant and Schiller, the discovery of the non-compossibility of interests in civil society is the theoretical innovation here. The irreconcilable opposition of interests will be central to Marx, but this view is not original with him. In Bauer, at least, emancipation or autonomy means divesting oneself of particular interests to the extent that they inhibit institutional transformation.

Marx. Marx’s early theory of labour and alienation originates from idealist concepts of spontaneity and formativity. His ideas of socialism and emancipation in the 1840s reprise aspects of Kantian autonomy and heteronomy and follow Fichte in linking labour with spontaneity. Marx formulates the dialectic of the will in a way favourable to the moment of particularity as membership in a social class, and sees one particular class as simultaneously a vehicle of universal interest and revolutionary transformation. Quantitative change is insufficient though necessary: a merely distributive socialism might enhance the living conditions of the workers, but would leave intact structures of exploitation which deprive workers of their agency as well as their happiness. His theory of history and emancipation, recently described as a self-actualisation account, can be more precisely identified as a variant of post-Kantian perfectionism, which, like Feuerbach’s, contains a strong admixture of pre-Kantian elements. This blending of heterogeneous elements has profound theoretical and practical consequences, notably in the absence of a developed concept of right.

This study thus attempts to identify, document, and systematise a tradition of post-Kantian perfectionism in political thought whose significance and originality have until recently not been clearly recognised. The research offers new perspectives on the history of German idealism, highlighting conceptual continuities and shifts from Leibniz onwards, and analysing specific innovations in ethical and juridical thought to reveal both the emancipatory possibilities and the intrinsic tensions in modern freedom.