 The political application of the doctrine of self-consciousness can be traced through two texts on the state, also dating from 1840–41. In The Evangelical State Church of Prussia and Science, Bauer described the essence of the state as free development. The state was the dialectical agency of historical progress and of the universality of the will, manifesting the capacity to abstract from any given content and express itself in ever new forms. While signalling empirical tendencies which might limit the state’s progressive function (the prominence of religious interests, and hesitancy before the social question, the emergence of new forms of urban poverty and exclusion), Bauer contended that the genuine state, as the expression of freedom, was in constant transformation. His surface claim was that the Prussian state is such an institution, though his contemporary correspondence belied this view. He defended the 1817 union of the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia as the political overcoming of religious oppositions, whose basis had been eroded by the Enlightenment. Through its (still abstract) grasp of the universal concept of man, against religious particularity, the Enlightenment had transformed religious consciousness into self-consciousness. (This process formed one of the major themes of Bauer’s Christianity Revealed, along with a critique of French materialism for its inadequate grasp of freedom). The churches were now impotent to perpetuate their own existence without the support of the state. Countering conservative historians like F.J. Stahl, who championed the independence of the churches, Bauer’s “The Christian State and Our Times,” of 1841, again identified the state as the focus of ethical life. Stahl’s position implied a derogation of the spirituality of the state, presenting it as an agency of external constraint, to uphold the orthodox ecclesiastical and political order against the flow of history, and to defend a social order governed by irrational privileges and immunities. Bauer denounced not only the Christian state of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, but also the formal Rechtsstaat, or liberal constitutionalism. For Bauer, both these positions defined freedom as private interest, religious or economic; but as particularity, these attitudes had to be purged away in the name of a new political order. Bauer maintained that Hegel’s view of freedom as universality was far in advance of liberal views, even if the Philosophy of Right was inconsistent or incomplete. This was Bauer’s provocative claim at the Welcker banquet of 1841, which occasioned his dismissal from the university. The elimination of egoistic atomism by moral self-consciousness was the pre-requisite for the republic, or the free state. Bauer contended that the existing social order could not be deemed to be thoroughly rational, nor the state to be the institution of freedom that it ought to be, as long as the social question of urban destitution remained unresolved. 