2 - The Transcendent Sovereign and the Political Theology of Restoration

Summary

In 1843, Marx remarked to Feuerbach that “Schelling's philosophy is Prussian policy sub specie philosophiae.” Marx was referring directly to Schelling's complicity with the reactionary regime of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who had summoned him from retirement in 1841 to take Hegel's chair in philosophy at Berlin with the express command to “slay the dragon-seed of Hegelian pantheism.” In a deeper sense, however, Marx was pointing to the profound philosophical affinities between Schelling's Positive Philosophy and Prussian political theology. As both Marx and Feuerbach knew, Schelling's assertion of the theistic idea of personality was directly linked to homologous themes in Restoration political thought. At the core of both the theological and political discourses of personality was an intense concern with the nature and conditions of indivisible unitary will – in short, with the nature of sovereignty. Schelling's philosophy of revelation, for all its metaphysical pathos, arrived at the orthodox conclusion that history reveals the absolute sovereignty of God. Similarly, the divinely ordained legitimacy of personal authority was the leading theme of conservative political thinkers in the era of Restoration after Napoleon's defeat. The Restoration's preoccupation with the transcendent source of personal sovereignty made a clash between conservative political thinkers and Hegel inevitable.

Secularization and Political Discourse

The ideological association of the personal God with the personal sovereign was anything but new at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The analogy between God and monarch had been central to the sacral idea of kingship in medieval political thought, and early modern theories of sovereignty carried this association forward.