 The anonymous Trumpet of the Last Judgement, or Posaune (November, 1841), and its sequel, Hegel’s Doctrine of Religion and Art (1842), interpreted Hegel as sounding a call for revolution, to bring this state into being. Bauer claimed that the consequences of Hegel’s system were the overthrow of church and state; and that Hegel’s conservative critics were right to see him as the most dangerous adversary of the Restoration. Written ironically as pietistic denunciations, Bauer’s two texts attributed to Hegel a theory of infinite self-consciousness, in which the concept of substance and a transcendent absolute were necessary but self-annulling illusions. Recapitulating the issue in his own voice in 1845, Bauer identified a tension in Hegel’s thought between Spinoza and Fichte, between inert, undifferentiated substance and creative form. The Posaune, however, argued that the Spinozist moment, though necessary to Hegel’s dialectic, was fully assimilated to infinite self-consciousness. In absolute spirit, properly understood, all religious pretensions dissipated, while the absolute itself dissolved into the critical activities of conscious individual subjects. Nothing transcendent remained. Yet, the Posaune recognized, Hegel also stressed the concept of substance. Its role had to be accounted for. In its apparent transcendence, substance disciplined the immediate, particular self. This was necessary because, as Hegel argued, particularity cannot be the criterion of theoretical or practical reason; rather, individuals must first internalize substance, as a principle of universality, as a stage in reaching infinite self-consciousness. The undifferentiated, pure universal of substance subsumed all particularity, including the self. This initial, Spinozist moment created an appearance of pantheism in Hegel, which misled interpreters like D. F. Strauss. In Bauer’s depiction, however, Hegel proceeded to dissolve substantiality as a power independent of consciousness. This dialectical resolution was not equivalent to renouncing objectivity, but meant that substance, once it had demonstrated to the particular consciousness the need to transcend itself, might not claim an immediate validity either. Disciplining their own immediate interests, individuals could then become the organs through which the universal attained conscious form. The dialectical illusion of substance was a necessary stage, because in it the unity of concept and objectivity could first be glimpsed; but this illusion had to be overcome in further historical and theoretical development. The subject must appear as potentially universal, and the objective must show itself as a purposive order, responding to the subject’s striving for rational freedom. This development entailed transforming substance into the record of the acts of conscious spirit, an inner relation of self-consciousness to itself. Subjectivity thus assimilated the principle of universality, which it now contained as its own character, not as something alien to it. But this relation was not confined to an inward experience, since, as Hegel maintained, reason must realize itself in the world. The externalization of reason produced a historical sequence, including the forms of alienated life. The stages in this sequence could be grasped as moments in the unfolding unity of thought and being. Bauer described self-consciousness, conceived as an immanent and subjective universality, as the motive force of history, generating historical content by taking up and transforming the given. As Bauer’s 1829 manuscript had also declared, at stake was not only the subjective realisation of the concept, but the fate of the idea, the unity of thought and being; and this required that the objectivity of the historical process be equally emphasized. This historical and critical idealism, which the Posaune attributes to Hegel, was politically revolutionary: it affirmed the rights of free self-consciousness against any positive institution which could not justify its existence before rational thinking, against state, religion, and social hierarchy.