 An early and enormously influential reaction to Cohen’s view was his friend Franz Rosenzweig’s. Rosenzweig argued that Cohen’s concern in the Religion with the concrete individual, expressed in the idea of the individual’s “correlation” with God, constituted a decisive break from the Ethics of Pure Will’s concern with universal laws of human action (Rosenzweig 1924). On Rosenzweig’s interpretation, in the Religion Cohen abandons the rationalism that characterizes his earlier conception of humanity working out its relation to God in a historical process of improving the laws by which it governs itself. Instead, Rosenzweig suggests, Cohen commits himself to a conception of the religious individual that is more fundamental than universal, rational ethical considerations. Thus for Rosenzweig, despite Cohen’s claims to the contrary, his views in the Religion are fundamentally discontinuous with his views in his systematic ethics.