Eduard Gans — The Organizer and Mediator (1797–1839)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Eduard Gans occupies a special position in the Hegelian school: he was not only a significant philosopher of law, but above all the decisive organizer without whom the institutional structure of the school would not have existed.
The Organizer of the School
Gans was substantially involved in founding the Sozietät für wissenschaftliche Kritik [Society for Scientific Criticism] in 1826/27 and became its “secretary-general.” The Society and its Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik (see Chapter 2.3) functioned as a kind of Hegelian counter-academy to the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, to which Hegel had not been admitted—without, however, being merely a narrow party organ of the Hegelian school, since non-Hegelian and loosely affiliated contributors also participated in the journal.[1] After Hegel’s death, Gans belonged to the core of the Association of Friends of the Deceased, which produced the collected works (1832–1845); he himself edited the second edition of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1833), in whose preface he expounded Hegel’s methodological position against the Historical School of Law.
Savigny’s Opponent
At the University of Berlin, Gans was the successful opponent of Friedrich Carl von Savigny in one of the most consequential intellectual conflicts of the nineteenth century. Savigny represented the “Historical School of Law,” which understood law as an organically grown product of the “spirit of the people”—opposed to all rational codification and reform. Gans, by contrast, represented the Hegelian position: law is the realization of reason and must be measured against rational principles.
This conflict was not merely academic. Savigny’s position became a justification of the status quo, while Gans’s position provided the philosophical grounding for legal emancipation (including that of Jews). Hegel’s philosophy of right supplied Gans with the systematic basis for this front against Savigny’s Historical School of Law, and the relationship between Hegel and Gans was close enough that the dispute with Savigny can be regarded as one of the central legal-philosophical front lines of the Berlin Hegelian school—not as a private controversy between individual professors.
The Line Thibaut–Hegel–Gans and the Personal Relationship
Gans’s philosophical and political position can only be understood from a longer prehistory that begins in Heidelberg. His teacher of law there was Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut (1772–1840), author of the tract Über die Nothwendigkeit eines allgemeinen bürgerlichen Rechts für Deutschland [On the Necessity of a General Civil Code for Germany] (1814)—the famous counter-position to Savigny’s Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft [On the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence] (1814), which opened the codification dispute and fundamentally shaped the front against the Historical School of Law. Thibaut was at the same time Hegel’s Heidelberg colleague (1816–1818) and connected to him philosophically and in legal-political terms; their relationship remained friendly even after Hegel’s move to Berlin, as Thibaut’s letter to Hegel of September 1, 1828, with its request to convey warm greetings to Gans, shows. Gans thus arrives in Berlin via Thibaut already equipped with a well-developed anti-Savignian position; what he finds in Hegel is not a foreign method, but the systematic grounding of what he had already come to know at Thibaut’s as a basic legal-political stance.
This substantive closeness carries an unusually close personal relationship. Hegel’s own letters leave no doubt about this: to his wife and children he writes on August 17, 1826, that he sees “almost only Gans, my faithful friend and companion”; to Gans himself, after the latter’s departure: “whose company I miss so often”; to Niethammer he sends Gans and Hotho as “very dear and esteemed friends” who are to be “substitutes” for his own visit to Munich—a greater vote of confidence he could hardly have expressed to an oldest friend.[2] Hegel’s son Karl recalls how Gans “sometimes interrupted us stormily at lunch to bring the latest news from France about the Martignac or Polignac ministry.” Within the family circle, Gans was, according to the testimony of a contemporary Berlin woman, “a great favorite” of Hegel’s, whom Hegel, while playing whist, would call to order with the friendly scolding: “There he chatters and chatters and doesn’t pay attention!”[3]
This mediation was systematically organized. When the July Revolution broke out in Paris on July 27, 1830, Gans sent Hegel a first bulletin on August 5 with the core news—provisional government, Lafayette at the head of the National Guard, Polignac nowhere to be found—and announced further bulletins to come. Gans was Hegel’s most important connection to France, organizing contacts with Victor Cousin, with the Saint-Simonians, with the circle around the journal Le Globe. This mediation fell on prepared ground: Hegel himself read Le Globe and Bentham’s journal, was directly interested in the French and English debates, and stood considerably further from the later image of the conservative “Prussian state philosopher” than the orthodox reception wanted to admit. Cousin himself characterized Gans in a letter to Hegel in 1826 as “homme de génie, plein de bonté, avec des faiblesses inévitables”—a man of genius, full of kindness, with inevitable weaknesses—and at the same time urged Hegel to leave the joint journal project (the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik) to the younger energy of Gans: “Laissez faire Gans. Il est jeune, ardent, infatigable.”
This mixture—fiery, tireless, with “inevitable weaknesses”—probably captures the tone in which Hegel occasionally worried about his student. In Hegel’s last years of life, a real political difference with Gans emerged, one that can be pinned to the July Revolution of 1830. Hegel had moved on from the revolutionary enthusiasm of his youth and did not approve of the July Revolution; Carl Ludwig Michelet recalls that Hegel, when Michelet defended the progress of world history through the July Revolution, retorted: “That is exactly how Gans talks.” Gans had personally witnessed the revolution in Paris, had returned with impressions from the Saint-Simonians, and publicly maintained the position that the “democratic revolution” was “not yet finished.” Hegel’s remark marks a real difference, but a political difference within the same philosophical school—not a substantive distancing from Gans’s Hegelianism. If Hegel sighed about “that Gans,” it was more in the manner of an older teacher worrying about the impetuous, pointed public conduct of a hot-blooded student who lacked caution toward the government and its opponents—a concern that in retrospect was not unfounded: the “Lex Gans” of 1822, the conflicts with the Prussian bureaucracy, and finally antisemitic persecution made Gans’s position as a Jewish Hegelian permanently precarious in the Vormärz period.
In November 1831 a final, embarrassing incident occurred: Hegel had announced, for the winter semester of 1831/32—after a six-year pause—that he himself would again lecture on natural law; Gans had announced a parallel course. Four or five students registered with Hegel, several hundred with Gans. Gans then withdrew his lecture with a notice on the bulletin board that explicitly referred students, in case of doubt, to Hegel—well-intentioned, but “clumsy,” as Hegel himself wrote in his last surviving letter, dated November 12, 1831: the notice put him “in a foolish light,” as if he depended on such a recommendation. Hegel nevertheless ends the letter “Your most devoted Hegel”; two days later he fell ill, and on November 14 he died of cholera. Gans was deeply shaken by his death—Varnhagen von Ense reports that Gans met him the following day “with tear-stained eyes” and shed “hot tears.”
The conservative Hegelian right later turned this incident into a narrative that retroactively poisoned the entire relationship: Heinrich Leo wrote that Hegel had died “of the vexation” caused by Gans and his following, “even if cholera was the form of his dissolution”; Karl Lachmann, after Gans had sent a letter of condolence to the widow following Hegel’s death, called Gans an “impudent Jew” over whom Hegel had died. These voices reveal less a judgment of the matter than the harshness with which the political and antisemitic front against the Jewish Hegelian was conducted in the Prussian university milieu—and they are methodologically suspect sources, because they posthumously position Hegel against his most important living student. The positive testimonies from Hegel’s family and closest circle—Karl Hegel, the cited Berlin woman, Varnhagen, Cousin, Hegel himself in his letters—together with Michelet’s balanced position, yield by contrast a consistent picture: daily friendship, a shared international orientation, a growing political difference from 1830 onward, an embarrassing final incident—but no break.
The line Thibaut–Hegel–Gans reveals two things. First, Gans stands not in a break with his teachers but continues a coherent legal-philosophical position that begins with Thibaut, finds its systematic grounding in Hegel, and is developed by Gans himself into liberal-republican and social consequences—consequences that the late Hegel did not follow in every point, but within the same school. Second, Hegel’s philosophy of right, within this constellation, must precisely not be read as a static doctrinal edifice, but as an open framework for discussion and research, in which Hegel himself followed the international debates, in which Gans, as a younger and more energetic collaborator, organized the connection to France, and in which Gans’s own position emerged from this shared intellectual practice.
Gans as Philosopher of Law: Universal Legal History and the Question of the Rabble
Gans’s principal philosophical work, Das Erbrecht in weltgeschichtlicher Entwickelung [The Law of Inheritance in Its World-Historical Development] (4 volumes, 1824–1835), was the first systematic attempt to apply Hegel’s philosophy of right to universal legal history. Using inheritance law as a guiding thread, Gans examined how legal forms—property, contract, inheritance—develop in various forms of society and in what relation they stand to the respective economic and ethical constitution. In doing so, he gave concrete substance to Hegel’s claim that law is “subject to historical development,” against Savigny’s reduction of law to what is historically given.
In his tract Über die Grundlage des Besitzes [On the Foundation of Possession] (1839), Gans carried this methodological confrontation with Savigny’s influential work Das Recht des Besitzes [The Law of Possession] (1803) to its conclusion: whereas Savigny reconstructed possession from factual control over a thing and its legal protection, Gans insisted that possession could not be understood as a mere factum, but had to be conceived from the relation of the free will to the thing. The dispute was thus not merely about a special question of civil law, but about the fundamental question of whether legal forms are to be understood philosophically from freedom or historically-dogmatically from transmitted facts. This controversy was part of the direct lecture-hall experience of the young Karl Marx—in the winter semester of 1836/37 he attended, simultaneously, the lectures on the Pandects with Savigny and on criminal law with Gans, and in the summer semester of 1838 also Gans’s lectures on Prussian civil law.[4]
In the natural law lectures of 1832/33, Gans went, at a decisive point, beyond Hegel’s philosophy of right—methodically proceeding from Hegel, but substantively further than Hegel himself had gone. Where Hegel had treated the existence of the rabble [Pöbel] as a byproduct of civil society, with a “curiously ambivalent” (Riedel) determination as a residual problem that could only be alleviated through private charity, public relief, and ultimately world trade and colonization, Gans formulated, word for word: “Must the rabble remain? Is it a necessary existence? Here I side with the opinion of the Saint-Simonians, who alone are right on this point. […] It is a fact, but not a right. One must be able to get at the grounds of the fact and sublate them.”[5] Three years later, in the Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände [Retrospects on Persons and Conditions] (1836), Gans drew, from his 1830 stay in Paris—where he had encountered the Saint-Simonians and the circle around Le Globe—a line to an early class analysis, naming the “class relation, unchanged through all the vicissitudes of history so far, between master and slave, patrician and plebeian, feudal lord and vassal, factory owner and worker”—a sequence that reappears, in striking parallel, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. A direct borrowing is not thereby proven; what is certain, however, is that Marx attended Gans’s Berlin lectures and that Gans’s Retrospects belonged to the contemporary intellectual milieu in which Marx moved.
Gans’s proposed solution was the “free corporation” or “association”: labor, freed within industry, must not fall from the “despotism” of the medieval guild into the “despotism” of the factory owner, but must find its own ethical form as a horizontal association of wage laborers—an anticipation of the idea of the trade union out of the Hegelian concept of the corporation. In doing so, Gans held fast to the Hegelian concept of property: he explicitly criticized the Saint-Simonian demand for the abolition of inheritance law, because inheritance law seemed to him the “only moralizing element of property” against the egoism of the market. On this point, Marx later goes decisively beyond Gans.
On the question of the constitution, Gans likewise carried out a “tacit correction” of Hegel (Riedel): whereas Hegel had developed constitutional monarchy as the conceptually adequate constitution of the modern state, Gans, taking the United States of North America as his example, treated the republican-representative constitution as the properly conceptually adequate form. He supplemented this by adding to Hegel’s theory of the state a doctrine of opposition as a necessary moment of the state: “If the state does not have to deal with oppositions, it falls into indolence.” These corrections were not deviations from Hegel, but the consistent application of the Hegelian principle—criticizing Hegel with Hegelian means. This very movement is radicalized, shortly afterward, by the Left Hegelians into the method of the “destruction of the philosophy of right”; Gans is its quiet precursor.
Gans is thus the important mediating figure between Hegelian philosophy of right and the later materialist analysis of law—a role that has been largely buried both in the orthodox reception of Marx and in the reception of Hegel. How this mediation entered into Marx’s own movement of thought—and why Marx scarcely mentions it in his published writings—is the subject of Chapter 4.
The Brilliant Orator
Gans was an exceptionally gifted speaker. His university lectures were overcrowded—the young Karl Marx was among his enthusiastic listeners. Gans knew how to convey Hegelian philosophy in a lively and politically relevant way. His lectures on the history of the last fifty years amounted, de facto, to political education in a progressive sense.
The Jewish Hegelian
As a Jew, Gans was active in Berlin’s Jewish community, especially in the “Association for the Culture and Science of the Jews” (1819–1824), which he directed together with Leopold Zunz and Moses Moser and which represented liberal Judaism in the tradition of Moses Mendelssohn. His contribution to the early “Science of Judaism”—such as the essay Gesetzgebung über Juden in Rom [Legislation on Jews in Rome] in Zunz’s Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (1822/23)—already applied the Hegelian method to Jewish legal history: not treating Jewish tradition as an isolated national spirit (as the Historical School of Law did with every national legal history), but as a moment of universal legal history. This methodological operation is the precursor of what Gans later carried out for all legal cultures in Das Erbrecht in weltgeschichtlicher Entwickelung.
Gans converted to Protestantism in 1825—the same year as his childhood friend Heinrich Heine, who called the baptismal certificate the “entrance ticket to European culture.” For both, conversion was a precondition for professional employment; the “Lex Gans” of 1822, a cabinet decree issued specifically against Gans by Friedrich Wilhelm III, which permanently closed off Jewish access to university posts, had reduced the choice to a binary alternative.
Gans’s position reveals the tension in which Jewish intellectuals stood during the Vormärz period: Hegelian philosophy promised rational emancipation—but actual society denied it. This experience also shaped the later radicalization of many Left Hegelians of Jewish origin.
The Connection to France
What appeared, in the personal relationship between Hegel and Gans, as a system of bulletins from Paris had an institutional counterpart: Gans’s friendship with Victor Cousin (1792–1867) was also the channel through which Hegelian philosophy gained a foothold in France in the first place. Cousin, who during his stays in Berlin was repeatedly a guest in Hegel’s house, brought Hegel to the attention of the French public; Gans, conversely, brought the French debates—not only the Saint-Simonians and Le Globe, but also the liberal school around Guizot and Thiers—to Berlin. This mutual mediation was decisive for the early international reception of Hegel and was never comparably revived after the death of both central figures (Hegel in 1831, Gans in 1839).
The Early End
Gans died in 1839 at only 42 years of age—a heavy loss for the school. With him, the school lost not only a brilliant mind but also its most important organizer. His death coincided with the change of monarch in Prussia (1840), which dramatically worsened the political framework conditions (see Chapter 2.3 on the Yearbooks).
On the role of the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik as a Hegelian-shaped but not narrowly party-organized “counter-academy,” see Christoph Jamme (ed.), Die “Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik” — Hegels Berliner Gegenakademie, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1994; Norbert Waszek, “Philosophie: Hegel’sche Schule, Links- und Rechtshegelianer, Jung- und Althegelianer,” in: Vormärz-Handbuch, Bielefeld 2020. ↩︎
This and the following letters of Hegel (to his wife and children, August 17, 1826; to Gans, October 3, 1826; to Niethammer, September 11, 1826; to Cousin, April 5, 1826; as well as Hegel’s last letter to Gans of November 12, 1831) are quoted from: Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. by Johannes Hoffmeister, vol. III, Hamburg 1954. ↩︎
This and the following reports of contemporary observers (Karl Hegel, an unidentified Berlin lady, Carl Ludwig Michelet, Arnold Ruge, Heinrich Leo, Karl Lachmann, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense) are quoted from: Hegel in Berichten seiner Zeitgenossen, ed. by Günther Nicolin, Hamburg 1970. On the biographical constellation of Hegel and Gans as a whole, see also Hanns Günther Reissner, Eduard Gans. Ein Leben im Vormärz, Tübingen 1965; Warren Breckman, “Eduard Gans and the Crisis of Hegelianism,” in: Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001), pp. 543–564; and Manfred Riedel, “Eduard Gans als Schüler Hegels,” in: idem (ed.), Materialien zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie, vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main 1975, pp. 234–253. ↩︎
Marx attended Gans’s lectures on criminal law in the winter semester of 1836/37 and on Prussian civil law in the summer semester of 1838. A direct borrowing of Gans’s formulations into the Communist Manifesto is thus not proven; the closeness shows, however, that Gans belongs to the immediate Berlin background of Marx’s later problematic. See August Cornu, Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Leben und Werk, vol. 1, Berlin 1954, p. 81; Hanns Günther Reissner, Eduard Gans. Ein Leben im Vormärz, Tübingen 1965, p. 157f.; Donald R. Kelley, “The Metaphysics of Law: An Essay on the Very Young Marx,” in: American Historical Review 83 (1978), pp. 350–367; Warren Breckman, “Eduard Gans and the Crisis of Hegelianism,” in: Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001), pp. 543–564. ↩︎
Gans’s famous formulation “It is a fact, but not a right” comes from the natural law lectures of 1832/33; see Eduard Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte, ed. by Manfred Riedel, Stuttgart 1981, pp. 92, 112f.; as well as Manfred Riedel, “Eduard Gans als Schüler Hegels,” in: idem (ed.), Materialien zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie, vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main 1975, pp. 234–253; Norbert Waszek, “Eduard Gans und die Armut: Von Hegel und Saint-Simon zu frühgewerkschaftlichen Forderungen,” in: Hegel-Jahrbuch 1988, Bochum 1988, pp. 355–363. ↩︎