Pantheism, Personalism, and Popular Sovereignty:

Abstract

This article seeks to elucidate the politico-theological significance of Ludwig Feuerbach’s magnum opus, The Essence of Christianity (1841), by considering that work in relation to reviews published by Feuerbach in the 1830s of works written by two figures identified by him as representatives of “the Positive Philosophy.” These are Friedrich Julius Stahl, later called by Friedrich Wilhelm IV to the chair of jurisprudence in Berlin, and Jakob Sengler, a co-founder of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie. Feuerbach’s critique of Christian theism and his own theory of the divine attributes in The Essence of Christianity are interpreted as a direct response to the theoretical claims of the Positive Philosophy and as an indirect repudiation of the theory of the German-Christian state underwritten by those claims, most notably in Stahl’s account of the monarchical principle and in conservative publications such as the Berliner Politisches Wochenblatt .