Award of a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdocs to Dr. Thimo Heisenberg

The Political Economy of German Idealism. Fichte, Hegel and Marx on Markets and their Limits.
This research project reconstructs the Political Economy of German Idealism and asks what it can teach us about economic justice today. Focusing on texts such as Fichte’s The Closed Commercial State, Hegel’s theory of ‘Civil Society’ and Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, it analyzes their respective approaches to Political Economy, reconstructs the dialogue between them – and evaluates their contemporary philosophical significance. The guiding intuition of the project is that the Political Economy of German Idealism is uniquely positioned to contribute to our contemporary understanding of economic justice: engaging with the modern market economy at its very inception, German Idealism considers the market economy at a time when the standards and characteristics of this economic form were less set in stone, when genuine alternatives to a market economy appeared more possible, and when its ethical justifiability was more up for debate. As a result, many of the authors considered here produce approaches to Political Economy that lay outside contemporary categories (viz. beyond liberalism, libertarianism or socialism) and are therefore poised to enrich our understanding of economic justice with genuinely new perspectives.
Indeed, there exists a more substantial literature on the relationship of the Political Economy of Fichte and Hegel to the Scottish Enlightenment than on the relationship of their economic views to one another (e.g. Waszek 1985, Henderson and Davis 1991, Herzog 2013).
In particular, I will be making the case that a revival of the Hegelian position in Political Economy is philosophically called for, as it offers the conceptual resources to reconcile the values of economic competition and social community.
My project, then, proposes to take on this historical and philosophical challenge during a Humboldt Fellowship at HU Berlin in 2024, hosted by Tobias Rosefeldt. My aim during this stay will be to work on a book manuscript on the topic. Building on my own previous publications on the subject (on Hegel and Fichte), I intend to use the eight months in Berlin to situate Hegel’s and Fichte’s Political Economy vis-à-vis the German Romantics (esp. Adam Müller) and vis-à-vis the early Marx.