Bruno Bauer

Bruno Bauer (Template:IPAc-en; ; 6 September 1809Template:Snd13 April 1882) was a German philosopher, theologian, historian, and biblical critic. A prominent member of the Young Hegelians, he was a radical rationalist critic of the Bible and Christianity. Initially a student of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Bauer became a central figure in the intellectual circles of the Vormärz, the period preceding the Revolutions of 1848. His philosophical work was a major influence on, and target of critique for, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, with whom he had a close but tumultuous relationship.

Starting as a right-wing Hegelian, Bauer shifted to the left in 1839, developing a radical critique of religion and the state. He argued that the Christian gospels were not historical records but literary works of the human self-consciousness. His most significant work of this period, The Trumpet of the Last Judgement over Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist (1841), presented Hegel's philosophy as a revolutionary atheism that called for the overthrow of all existing religious and political institutions. Bauer's political thought was a form of republicanism based on the concept of "infinite self-consciousness," an ethical idealism that advocated for the constant transformation of society in pursuit of rational freedom.

During the 1840s, Bauer engaged with the emerging social question, developing a critique of both liberalism, for its basis in private interest, and the nascent socialist movements. His controversial writings on Jewish emancipation, in which he argued that both Jews and Christians must renounce their particular religious identities to achieve universal freedom, led to his isolation from many of his former allies. Though he participated in the 1848 Revolutions, their failure led him to abandon his revolutionary republicanism and turn to conservative causes.

In his later life, Bauer developed a virulent anti-Semitism. His post-1848 work focused on historical studies, particularly the origins of Christianity, and on the political development of Russia and the rise of global imperialism. Despite the profound change in his political orientation, his work continued to influence thinkers on both the left and the right, including Karl Kautsky and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Life and career

Early life and Hegelian studies

Bruno Bauer was born on 6 September 1809 in Eisenberg, Thuringia.Template:Sfn His father was a porcelain painter, and the family moved to Berlin in 1815.Template:Sfn In 1828, Bauer enrolled as a theology student at the University of Berlin, where he studied under Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel himself for three years, as well as Hegel's associates Philipp Marheineke and Henrik Steffens.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn Bauer was particularly disappointed with the teachings of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose attempts to find a compromise between various conflicting schools of thought seemed to Bauer to engender only ambiguity and uncertainty.Template:Sfn

In 1829, while still a student, Bauer won the annual Royal Prize in Philosophy on Hegel's recommendation for an essay on Immanuel Kant's aesthetics.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Hegel lavished praise on the work, stating: "The lecture [...] develops most convincingly [...] there is consistent development of the thought and the author has also succeeded in exploiting the contradictions of the Kantian principles, which are incompatible."Template:Sfn After graduating in 1832, Bauer began an academic career in theology.Template:Sfn He became a close associate of the Hegelian school, and was entrusted with editing the second edition of Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1840).Template:Sfn He taught at Berlin from 1834 to 1839, delivering lectures on theology, the Bible, and church history, and serving as the main editor for the Zeitschrift für spekulative Theologie (Journal for Speculative Theology).Template:Sfn During this period, his work was imbued with a spirit of conservative orthodoxy. This led him to be chosen to write the official critique of David Strauss's sensational 1835 book The Life of Jesus, in which he initially defended the historicity of the Gospels.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Left Hegelianism and biblical criticism

By 1839, Bauer had made a decisive shift to a Left Hegelian position, marked by a public break with conservative orthodoxy in his polemical work Herr Dr. Hengstenberg.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn In this work and others, he defended the progressive character of Hegel's system and separated the "spirit of Christianity" from its dogmatic form, undermining the religious ideology of the Prussian Restoration.Template:Sfn This turn was influenced by his involvement with the Berlin Doktorklub (Doctors' Club), an intellectual circle of Young Hegelians that included Karl Marx, Friedrich Köppen, and others. Bauer was considered the moving spirit of this group.Template:Sfn His increasingly radical views led the Prussian Minister of Culture, Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein, to move him to the University of Bonn in an effort to shield him from attacks in Berlin.Template:Sfn

Bauer's radicalization intensified with his critiques of the Gospels, which he developed over a series of works from 1840 to 1842. The project began with his Critique of the Gospel of John (1840), followed by the three-volume Critique of the Synoptic Gospels (1841–42).Template:Sfn In these works, Bauer argued that the Gospel narratives were not historical reports of the life of Jesus, but literary products of the religious consciousness of the early Christian community.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn He saw the evangelists not as historians but as artists who had transformed earlier religious traditions into a new, dogmatic form.Template:Sfn He concluded that the figure of Jesus was a literary invention, a transplantation of the community's own struggles and experiences onto a single representative figure.Template:Sfn This critique was aimed directly at the ideological foundations of the Prussian state, which used dogmatic Christianity for its legitimation.Template:Sfn

Bauer's publications caused a major controversy. In March 1842, he was dismissed from his teaching position at the University of Bonn on the initiative of the conservative minister of education, Johann Albrecht Friedrich von Eichhorn.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Republicanism and The Trumpet of the Last Judgement

In October 1841, Bauer anonymously published his most significant philosophical work of the Vormärz, Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel, den Atheisten und Antichristen (The Trumpet of the Last Judgement over Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist).Template:Sfn Described as the "locus classicus for the Young Hegelian view of Hegel,"Template:Sfn the book adopted the ironic guise of a pious pietist to denounce Hegel as a revolutionary atheist whose philosophy would inevitably lead to the destruction of religion, the state, and all social order.Template:Sfn The book's true purpose was to reclaim Hegel for the revolutionary cause by distinguishing between an "exoteric" Hegel who accommodated existing powers and an "esoteric," atheistic Hegel whose true meaning was accessible only to his radical disciples.Template:Sfn The book was praised by fellow Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge as a work of "world-historical importance."Template:Sfn

In the Posaune, Bauer interpreted Hegel's philosophy as a theory of "infinite self-consciousness," a power that creates and transforms the historical world.Template:Sfn This self-consciousness, he argued, was engaged in a constant revolutionary struggle against all "positivity"—that is, against all fixed, given, or reified institutions, whether religious or political.Template:Sfn The book outlined a political program based on the ruthless critique of all existing relations and a refusal to compromise, culminating in the revolutionary overthrow of the old order.Template:Sfn It advocated for a form of ethical perfectionism, a commitment to constantly transform political and social institutions in the name of freedom.Template:Sfn

Social question and polemics

File:Friedrich Engels - Die Freien (1842)-1.1 V01-1.2 raw RGASPI.jpg

Sketch depicting the Freien by Friedrich Engels, 1842. Bauer is the fourth from the left.

After his dismissal from academia, Bauer became a leading figure among the Berlin Freien (The Free), a circle of Young Hegelians, and founded the journal Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung to promote his ideas of "pure critique."Template:Sfn In this period, he increasingly turned his attention to the social question and the political currents of the day.Template:Sfn He developed a critique of both liberalism and the emerging socialist and communist movements. He saw liberalism as a defense of egoistic private interest that was incapable of genuine opposition to the authoritarian state.Template:Sfn He critiqued socialism for what he viewed as its own form of heteronomy, arguing that communism was a dogmatic ideology that elevated the masses and their material needs over the critical spirit of the intellectual elite.Template:Sfn

Bauer's most controversial interventions came in his 1843 writings on Jewish emancipation, Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question) and "The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free".Template:Sfn Arguing from his principle of universal self-consciousness, Bauer asserted that genuine freedom required the renunciation of all particularistic religious ties. He concluded that Jews, like Christians, could not be emancipated as a religious group but only as human beings, which required them to give up their religion.Template:Sfn This position was widely seen as an attack on one of the central demands of the progressive movement. It led to his break with many former allies, including Marx, who responded with his own famous essay, "On the Jewish Question".Template:Sfn According to Douglas Moggach, Bauer's stance on this issue was a "costly error in judgement" that stemmed from a sectarian "republican rigorism" and a "conflation of right and morality".Template:Sfn

1848 Revolutions and later life

Bauer was an active participant in the Revolutions of 1848. He ran for election to the Prussian National Assembly as a candidate for Charlottenburg, defending the principle of popular sovereignty and calling for the creation of a "league of equal right" that would carry the revolution into all spheres of social life.Template:Sfn He defended the March barricade fighters in Berlin and attacked the liberal bourgeoisie for its willingness to compromise with the monarchy.Template:Sfn

File:Brunobauer (cropped).jpg

Bauer c. 1870

The failure of the revolutions led to a "profound change" in Bauer's thought.Template:Sfn He abandoned his revolutionary republicanism and his ethics of perfectionism, becoming what was known as the "hermit of Rixdorf".Template:Sfn His abiding anti-liberalism now led him to support conservative and, later, anti-Semitic causes, and he collaborated for many years with the reactionary editor Hermann Wagener, one of Otto von Bismarck's closest advisers.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn He developed a new political vision centered on the rise of global imperialism and the clash between Russia and the West. He saw Russia, with its all-encompassing unity of church and state, as a force that would shatter the particularism of Europe and create the conditions for a new, post-metaphysical era.Template:Sfn In his later years, he developed a virulent anti-Semitism, describing the "Jewish question" as the new form of the social question and contributing to the rhetoric of racial anti-Semitism in Germany.Template:Sfn Bauer died in Rixdorf (now part of Neukölln) on 13 April 1882.Template:Sfn

Philosophy

Self-consciousness and critique

The central concept in Bauer's philosophy during his Vormärz period was "infinite self-consciousness" (unendliches Selbstbewußtsein).Template:Sfn For Bauer, this was not an abstract subjective state but the motive force of history itself—the dynamic, creative, and critical activity of human subjects.Template:Sfn It is "infinite" because it constantly negates and transcends any given, finite reality or "positivity".Template:Sfn This self-consciousness achieves its ends through critique, which for Bauer is the theoretical and practical activity of exposing the contradictions in existing institutions and ideologies.Template:Sfn Drawing inspiration from the Aufklärung and the French Revolution, Bauer argued that critique was a form of "praxis"; it is the "terrorism of true criticism" that prepares the ground for the actualization of philosophy in the world.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn For Bauer, "theory is the strongest form of practice."Template:Sfn His version of the dialectic differed from Hegel's in that it was a purely negative process of destruction, lacking Hegel's concept of aufheben (sublation), which involves preservation as well as negation.Template:Sfn

Bauer's theory is a form of ethical and historical idealism.Template:Sfn It is historical because the content of self-consciousness is derived from the rational comprehension of the historical process as the struggle for freedom.Template:Sfn It is ethical because it demands a commitment to "perfectionism"—an uncompromising will to transform the world in accordance with the universal principles of reason and freedom.Template:Sfn Bauer distinguished between the "individual self-consciousness" of particular persons and the "universal self-consciousness," which he identified with liberty and humanity.Template:Sfn The egoistic, religious person is trapped in the former, while the goal of history is the realization of the latter.Template:Sfn

Critique of religion

Bauer's critique of religion was a cornerstone of his philosophical and political project. He originated the term "self-alienation" (Selbstentfremdung) to describe religion as the primary form of alienated self-consciousness.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn In religion, he argued, humanity projects its own essential powers onto an external, transcendent being, and then worships this alienated essence as God.Template:Sfn This process is a "division in consciousness" that stems from objective deficiencies in social and political life; religion is a "distorted consciousness of a distorted reality".Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The God that humanity creates is a "subhuman God," a distorted reflection of humanity's own alienated condition.Template:Sfn

He argued that Christianity, particularly in its Protestant form, represented the "perfection of the religious consciousness" because it had universalized this alienation to encompass all aspects of life.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn In a famous passage, he described the alienated self of the Christian world as a "vampire of spiritual abstraction" that, having been drained of its own content, projects its powers onto a Messiah.Template:Sfn For Bauer, this total alienation was a necessary step, a Vorbereitungsgeschichte (preparatory history), for total liberation.Template:Sfn The critique of religion was therefore the necessary first step toward political revolution, as it aimed to dissolve the ideological foundations of the old order and restore to humanity its own creative powers.Template:Sfn

Republicanism and the social question

Bauer's political thought was a form of republicanism that stood in opposition to both Restoration absolutism and possessive individualist liberalism.Template:Sfn He envisioned a "republic of self-consciousness," a self-determining community founded on a genuine common interest rather than the aggregation of private, egoistic interests that characterized modern civil society.Template:Sfn This republicanism required a radical transformation of individuals themselves, who must overcome their own particularity and elevate themselves to universality through ethical and political action.Template:Sfn He held a Hegelian view of the state as the "manifestation of freedom" but critiqued the existing "Christian state" for being tied to the atomized, egoistic world of civil society.Template:Sfn He drew inspiration from the French Revolution and the federal model of the United States.Template:Sfn

He distinguished between the Volk (the people), a revolutionary subject capable of acting on universal principles, and the Masse (the masses), an atomized, inert aggregate of private individuals characteristic of modern market society.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn For Bauer, liberalism was the ideology of the Masse, as it defined freedom as the pursuit of private property and thereby dissolved the bonds of ethical life.Template:Sfn After 1843, disappointed by the passivity of the masses in the face of political reaction, he turned to a theory of "pure critique," arguing that the intellectual elite must stand apart from the masses and their dogmatic ideologies.Template:Sfn The task of the revolution was to create a true Volk by overcoming the egoism of mass society. This involved not only political change but also social emancipation, including the humanization of labor and the elimination of pauperism.Template:Sfn

Relationship with Karl Marx

File:Marx1.jpg

Depiction of the young Karl Marx

Bauer's relationship with Karl Marx was central to the development of both thinkers. Marx was Bauer's student at the University of Berlin, attending his lectures assiduously in 1839, and became a junior member of the Doktorklub which Bauer led.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn They developed a close friendship and intellectual collaboration; Bauer encouraged Marx to write his doctoral dissertation and planned to secure him a teaching position at Bonn.Template:Sfn They planned several joint publishing ventures, including a journal of atheistic critique to be called the Archiv des Atheismus (Archive of Atheism).Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn During this period, Marx was widely seen as Bauer's most dedicated disciple.Template:Sfn

The intellectual affinity was deep. Marx's doctoral dissertation is saturated with Bauerian themes: the conception of the post-Aristotelian schools of philosophy as a struggle for the freedom of self-consciousness, the idea of critique as a form of world-changing praxis, and the apocalyptic view of history as a series of catastrophic transformations.Template:Sfn The dissertation's preface declares, in a thoroughly Bauerian spirit, that philosophy opposes "all gods in heaven and earth that do not recognise human self-consciousness as the highest godhead."Template:Sfn Marx's early views on religion, alienation, and ideology were profoundly shaped by Bauer. Marx's celebrated critique of religion in his 1843 introduction to his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right borrows heavily from Bauer's language and imagery, including the ideas of religion as an "opium-like influence," the "imaginary flowers" on the chains of oppression, and the "illusory sun" around which man revolves before revolving around himself.Template:Sfn More fundamentally, Marx adopted Bauer's critical method, applying the critique of religion as a model for the critique of politics and economics.Template:Sfn

The friendship broke down in late 1842 over political and tactical differences, particularly concerning the radicalism of the Berlin Freien and the direction of the Rheinische Zeitung, which Marx was editing.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Even then, Marx continued to praise Bauer's work, and the final break came later.Template:Sfn The split culminated in a series of polemical works. In The Holy Family (1845) and The German Ideology (1846), Marx and Friedrich Engels launched a comprehensive critique of Bauer and his philosophy.Template:Sfn They accused Bauer of being an abstract idealist who had turned "Critique" itself into a transcendent power, separate from the real struggles of the masses and material interests.Template:Sfn Bauer responded by accusing Marx of dogmatism and a shallow understanding of his work.Template:Sfn Despite the bitterness of the polemic, the two men re-established personal contact in London in the mid-1850s and discussed politics and philosophy.Template:Sfn

Legacy

Bruno Bauer was a pivotal, if controversial, figure in 19th-century German thought. His scholarly reputation was largely destroyed by Marx's polemics, which depicted him as a speculative idealist completely detached from reality.Template:Sfn This caricature influenced generations of scholars, including Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch, who tended to dismiss Bauer as a minor figure who "lived off the crumbs of Hegelian philosophy".Template:Sfn As a leading Young Hegelian, he played a crucial role in the development of radical biblical criticism. His argument that Jesus was a literary myth rather than a historical figure was famously praised by Albert Schweitzer as "the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found."Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Fellow Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz described him as "undoubtedly the most important" of the Berlin Freien "in character as in culture and talent."Template:Sfn

After 1848, Bauer's influence waned in progressive circles, but his later work anticipated themes that would be taken up by others. His prediction of an age of global imperialism and his critique of modern mass society as a form of cultural decay were influential on Friedrich Nietzsche.Template:Sfn His late, virulent anti-Semitism, in which he recast the "Jewish question" as the central social problem of a declining Europe, contributed to the intellectual arsenal of modern anti-Semitism.Template:Sfn Despite this, his earlier work on the Roman origins of Christianity was later praised and developed by socialists like Karl Kautsky and Engels, who, in his later years, acknowledged Bauer's great contribution to solving the "Evangelical mystery" and paved the way for a selective use of his atheistic ideas in anti-religious propaganda, notably in the Soviet Union.Template:Sfn

Major works

• De pulchri principiis, Prussian royal prize manuscript, first published as Prinzipien des Schönen. De pulchri principiis. Eine Preisschrift (1829), new ed. Douglas Moggach und Winfried Schultze (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996).
• "Rezension (review): Das Leben Jesu, David Friedrich Strauss," Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, Dec. 1835; May 1836.
• Kritik der Geschichte der Offenbarung. Die Religion des alten Testaments in der geschichtlichen Entwicklung ihrer Prinzipien dargestellt 2 vol. (Berlin, 1838).
• Herr Dr. Hengstenberg (Berlin, 1839).
• Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes (Bremen, 1840)
• "Der christliche Staat und unsere Zeit," Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst, June 1841.
• Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1841)
• Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel, den Atheisten und Antichristen (Leipzig, 1841); trans. L. Stepelevich, The Trumpet of the Last Judgement against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist. An Ultimatum (Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1989)
• (anon.) Hegels Lehre von der Religion und Kunst von dem Standpuncte des Glaubens aus beurteilt (Leipzig, 1842); new ed. Aalen (Scientia Verlag, 1967)
• Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit (1842)
• Die Judenfrage (1843) ("The Jewish Question")
• Das Entdeckte Christentum (Zürich, 1843, banned and destroyed, into oblivion until 1927: ed. Barnikol); transl. Esther Ziegler, Christianity Exposed (MellenPress, 2002)
• "Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden," in Georg Herwegh (ed.), Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Zürich und Winterthur, 1843)
• Geschichte der Politik, Kultur und Aufklärung des 18. Jahrhunderts, 4 vol. (1843–45)
• "Die Gattung und die Masse", Allg. Lit.-Ztg. X, September 1844
• Geschichte Deutschlands und der französischen Revolution unter der Herrschaft Napoleons, 2 vols. (1846)
• Der Ursprung des Galaterbriefs (Hempel, 1850)
• Kritik der paulinischen Briefe ("Critique of Paul's epistles") (Berlin, 1850-1851)
• Der Ursprung des ersten Korintherbriefes (Hempel, 1851)
• Kritik der Evangelien und Geschichte ihres Ursprungs, 3 vols. (1850–51); 4th vol. Die theologische Erklärung der Evangelien (Berlin, 1852).
• Russland und das Germanentum 2 vol. (1853)
• Das Judenthum in der Fremde. (Berlin, 1863).
• Philo, Renan und das Urchristentum (Berlin, 1874)
• Einfluss des englischen Quäkerthums auf die deutsche Cultur und auf das englisch-russische Project einer Weltkirche (Berlin, 1878)
• Christus und die Cäsaren...Transl. German to English by Helmut Brunar and Byron Marchant, Christ and the Caesars... available (Bloomington IN: Xlibris Publishing, 2015).
• Disraelis romantischer und Bismarcks sozialistischer Imperialismus (1882)

Translations

The great bulk of Bauer's writings have still not been translated into English. Only a few works by Bauer have been formally translated:

• The Trumpet of the Last Judgment Against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist (1841, trans. Lawrence Stepelevich, 1989).
• The Jewish Problem (1843, trans. Helen Lederer, Hebrew Union College Union-Jewish Institute of Religion, 1958).
• Christianity Exposed: A Recollection of the 18th Century and a Contribution to the Crisis of the 19th Century (tr. Esther Ziegler and Jutta Hamm, ed. Paul Trejo, 2002).
• Bauer's Christ and the Caesars: The Origin of Christianity from the Mythology of Rome and Greece (1879) was ably translated into English by scholars Helmut Brunar and Byron Marchant (2015, Xlibris Publishing).

Further reading

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: 
• Barnikol, Ernst, 1972, Bruno Bauer, Studien und Materialien
• Brazill, W.J., 1970, The Young Hegelians (New Haven: Yale University Press).
• Eberlein, Hermann-Peter, Bruno Bauer. Vom Marx-Freund zum Antisemiten (Berlin: Karl Dietz-Verlag, 2009).
• Engels, Friedrich, 1882, "Bruno Bauer und das Urchristentum," Sozialdemokrat, May 4 and 11.
• Eßbach, Wolfgang, 1988, Die Junghegelianer. Soziologie einer Intellektuellengruppe (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag).
• Kautsky, Karl, 1908, Der Ursprung des Christentums (Stuttgart: Dietz).
• Kautsky, Karl, 1915, Nationalstaat, imperialistischer Staat und Staatenbund (Nürnberg)
• Kegel, Martin, 1908, Bruno Bauer Und Seine Theorien Über Die Entstehung Des Christentums
• Leopold, David, 1999, "The Hegelian Antisemitism of Bruno Bauer," History of European Ideas 25 (1999)
• Leopold, David, 2007, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (Cambridge Un. Press)
• Löwith, Karl, 1967, From Hegel to Nietzsche (Garden City: Doubleday).
• Mah, Harold, 1987, The End of Philosophy and the Origin of Ideology. Karl Marx and the Crisis of the Young Hegelians (Berkeley: Un. of California Press).
• Marx, Karl, 1975, On the Jewish Question, Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: Int'l Publishers)
• Marx, Karl, Frederick Engels, 1975, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, Collected Works, vol. 4 (New York: Int'l Publishers); The German Ideology, Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: Int'l Publishers, 1976)
• Mehlhausen, Joachim, Dialektik, Selbstbewusstsein und Offenbarung. Die Grundlagen der spekulativen Orthodoxie Bruno Bauers in ihrem Zusammenhang mit der Geschichte der theologischen Hegelschule dargestellt (Bonn 1965)
• Moggach, Douglas, ed., 2006, The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School (Cambridge Un. Press).
• Sass, Hans-Martin, 1967, "Bruno Bauers Idee der Rheinischen Zeitung", Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 19, 221–276.
• Schweitzer, Albert, 1906/1913, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (Johns Hopkins Un. Press, 1998)
• Stepelevich, L.S., ed., 1983, The Young Hegelians, An Anthology (Cambridge Un. Press).
• Toews, J.E., 1980, Hegelianism. The Path toward Dialectical Humanism (Cambridge Un. Press).
• Tomba, Massimiliano, 2002, Crisi e critica in Bruno Bauer. Il principio di esclusione come fondamento del politico (Naples: Bibliopolis); transl. Krise und Kritik bei Bruno Bauer. Kategorien des Politischen im nachhegelschen Denken (Frankfurt, 2005)
• van den Bergh van Eysinga, G.A., 1963, "Aus einer unveröffentlichten Biographie von Bruno Bauer. Bruno Bauer in Bonn 1839–1842," Annali Feltrinelli
• Waser, Ruedi, 1994, Autonomie des Selbstbewußtseins. Eine Untersuchung zum Verhältnis von Bruno Bauer und Karl Marx (1835–1843) (Tübingen: Francke Verlag).

External links

• Works by or about Bruno Bauer at Internet Archive
• Stan M. Landry, "From Orthodoxy to Atheism: The Apostasy of Bruno Bauer, 1835-1843 Template:Webarchive", Journal of Religion & Society 13 (Un. of Arizona, 2011)
• The Hegel Society of America
• Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, ch. XI, Bruno Bauer (1906)
• David McLocklan, "Bauer, Marx and religion", in libcom.org
• David McLocklan, "Stirner, Feurbach, Marx and the Young Hegelians", libcom.org
• Frederick Engels,"Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity" (1882)
• Robert M. Price, review, "Bruno Bauer, Christ and the Caesars"