Edgar Bauer

Edgar Bauer (7 October 1820 – 18 August 1886) was a German writer and political philosopher associated with the Young Hegelians. The younger brother of Bruno Bauer, he became known in the 1840s for radical political and anti-religious writings. His 1843 book Critique's Quarrel with Church and State led to a conviction for sedition and four years' imprisonment at Magdeburg.

After his release he took part in the German revolutions of 1848–49 and later lived in exile in Denmark and London. Marx and Engels criticized the Bauer brothers in The Holy Family (1844) and The German Ideology (1846), written during the early phase of their collaboration. In later years Bauer adopted conservative views, worked as a Prussian civil servant in Hanover, and founded the periodical Kirchliche Blätter (Church gazette) in 1870. Some later anarchist writers also presented his early work as an influence on German anarchism.

Edgar Bauer was born on 7 October 1820 in Charlottenburg. He came from a Thuringian family.^[1] His father F. G. Ch. Bauer was a porcelain painter in Eisenberg.^[1][2] In 1815, his father was appointed to Charlottenburg, where he served as director of an expanded painting workshop he had established, remaining in that post until his death in 1853.^[1]

Bauer's mother was Eleonore Karoline Wilhelmine Reichardt, whom Bauer's father married on 7 February 1809 after the early death of her sister Juliane Louise Reichardt (his first wife, married 22 October 1804 in Altenburg). Together they had four sons, of whom Edgar was the youngest.^[1] Around 1841, his mother read journal reviews and author sketches and closely followed David Strauss's life and work, including the reception of his Dogmatik. The Bauer family belonged to the German middle class.^[3]

Bauer studied jurisprudence and philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he joined the Young Hegelian circle around his brother Bruno Bauer. Other members of this circle included Arnold Ruge, Karl Marx, Max Stirner, Friedrich Engels, Georg Herwegh, Karl Grün, Moses Hess and Mikhail Bakunin. He was particularly close to Engels at that time. Bauer became a regular contributor to a range of philosophical and political publications, and he developed a strongly revolutionary political outlook.

After Bruno Bauer was dismissed from his academic position because of his atheism, Edgar Bauer regarded an academic career as closed to him, given his brother's reputation and his own growing profile as a radical publicist. In 1842 he abandoned his studies and became a freelance writer and journalist. He contributed to the liberal Rheinische Zeitung, among other publications.

In 1843 Bauer published Critique's Quarrel with Church and State, a work described as the first sustained theoretical defense of terrorist tactics for political and social ends. The book appeared on 7 August 1843, but the Berlin police confiscated what they believed to be the entire edition that same night. On 23 October 1843 Bauer was indicted for publishing without submitting the book to the royal censor. His trial ran from November 1843 to February 1844.^[4]

In September 1844 he was sentenced to three years of minimum-security confinement. Bauer had meanwhile smuggled a single copy to Switzerland, enabling the radical publisher Friedrich Jenni to issue a second edition. When copies reappeared in Berlin in mid-1844, Bauer was rearrested and retried, and in spring 1845 his sentence was extended to four years. He began serving his term at the fortress of Magdeburg on 9 May 1845.^[4]

While he was in prison, his former associates Marx and Engels published a polemical critique of him and his brother Bruno, The Holy Family (1844). They continued this critique in The German Ideology (1846), which was not published at the time. Despite this, Edgar Bauer appears to have remained on friendly terms with Marx and Engels.

Following Prussia's general amnesty for political prisoners of 18 March 1848, Bauer returned to Berlin in April 1848 and participated in the Revolution of 1848. After 1849 he fled to Schleswig-Holstein, and by 1851 he had aligned himself with the Danish cause in the region.^[4] During the First Schleswig War (1848–51), Bauer supported the Danish side.

In 1851, to avoid arrest, he escaped to Denmark and then to London, where he lived in exile for several years. During this period he often met Karl Marx in London, but their relationship was strained.^[5] According to Eric v.d. Luft, during one argument Bauer struck Marx in the face.^[6]

In 1861, an amnesty enabled Bauer to return to Germany. By now thoroughly conservative, he had renounced anarchism, socialism, democracy, atheism and critical philosophy. He settled in Hanover, became a Prussian civil servant and in 1870 founded the conservative periodical Kirchliche Blätter (Church gazette). He died in Hanover on 18 August 1886. His literary remains are in the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (Archive of social democracy) in Bonn.

Edgar Bauer did not follow the "materialist turn" in Young Hegelian philosophy associated with Ludwig Feuerbach (as Marx, Engels, Grün and others did), but continued to work within the neo-Fichtean idealist "philosophy of action" associated with his brother Bruno Bauer. Like Bruno, Bauer was an anti-theist and treated emancipation from religion as a necessary precondition of social emancipation. Unlike Bruno, who was skeptical of socialism, Bauer described himself as a socialist and was usually associated with the "True Socialists" around Hess and Grün.

According to Lawrence Stepelevich, Bauer was the most anarchistic of the Young Hegelians, and "...it is possible to discern, in the early writings of Edgar Bauer, the theoretical justification of political terrorism."^[7] German anarchists such as Max Nettlau and Gustav Landauer highlighted Bauer's 1843 book Critique's Quarrel with Church and State as an early anarchist text in Germany.^[8][9]

"'No private property, no privilege, no difference in status, no usurpatory regime'. So reads our pronunciamento; it is negative, but history will write its affirmation." — Bauer, E., "The Political Revolution" (1842).^[10]

• Geschichte Europas seit der ersten französischen Revolution (von Archibald Alison). In: Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst, 14./15./16. Dezember 1842
• Der Streit der Kritik mit Kirche und Staat (Charlottenburg, 1843)
• Denkwürdigkeiten zur Geschichte der neuern Zeit (1843–1844, 12 Hefte, with Bruno Bauer)
• Die Geschichte der konstitutionellen Bewegungen im südlichen Deutschland während der Jahre 1831–34 (Charlottenburg, 1845, 3 Bd.)
• Die Kunst der Geschichtsschreibung und Herrn Dahlmanns Geschichte der französischen Revolution (Magdeburg, 1846)
• Geschichte des Luthertums (under the pen name Martin von Geismar, Leipzig, 1846–1847)
• Über die Ehe im Sinn des Luthertums (Leipzig, 1847)
• Der Mensch und die Ehe vor dem Richterstuhle der Sittlichkeit. In: Die Epigonen. Fünfter Band (1848), pp. 317–343
• Das Teutsche Reich in seiner geschichtlichen Gestalt (Altona, 1872)
• Die Wahrheit über die Internationale (Altona, 1873)
• Englische Freiheit (Leipzig, 1857)
• Die Rechte des Herzogtums Holstein (Berlin, 1863)
• Die Deutschen und ihre Nachbarn (Hamburg, 1870)
• Artikel V, der deutsche Gedanke und die dänische Monarchie (Altona, 1873)
• Der Freimaurerbund und das Licht (Hannover, 1877)
• Der Magus des Nordens. Novelle. 1882

• Landauer, Gustav (1 June 1909). "Zur Geschichte des Wortes „Anarchie" (Schluß)" (PDF). Der Sozialist (in German). Vol. 1, no. 8. pp. 62–64. Retrieved 13 December 2025.
• Nettlau, Max (1925). Geschichte der Anarchie I: Der Vorfrühling der Anarchie: Ihre Entwicklung von den Anfängen bis 1864 (PDF) (in German). Retrieved 13 December 2025.
• Barnikol, Ernst; Reimer, Peter; Sass, Hans-Martin (1972). Bruno Bauer: Studien und Materialien (in German). Assen: Van Gorcum. ISBN 9023209176.
• Stepelevich, Lawrence S. (1983). The Young Hegelians, an anthology (PDF). Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-24539-7. Retrieved 13 December 2025.
• v.d. Luft, Eric (2006). "Edgar Bauer and the Origins of the Theory of Terrorism". In Moggach, Douglas (ed.). The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 136–165. ISBN 978-0-521-85497-9.

• Works by or about Edgar Bauer at the Internet Archive
• Publications by Edgar Bauer at the German National Library Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine
• Edgar Bauer, "The Political Revolution" at the Marxists Internet Archive
• Eric v.d. Luft, "Terrorism, philosophical and ideological origins" at Encyclopedia.com