 Bauer used his central concept of infinite self-consciousness, a term taken from Hegel’s theory of subjective spirit, to reconfigure the Hegelian absolute, bringing art and philosophy into close proximity, and excluding religion as a form of alienated reason, while recognising its past historical necessity. Bauer insisted on the immanence of the universal in history, as the record of struggles for liberation, and of alienation, which was necessary to discover the meaning of rational autonomy. Bauer’s ethical idealism resembles a doctrine that Kant calls perfectionism, or Vollkommenheit, a form of rational heteronomy, one of whose meanings is that action is validated by its contribution to historical progress. Bauer equated perfectionism and autonomy, as an uncompromising commitment to remodel political and social relations and institutions. Subjects acquired autonomy by freeing themselves from particular interests, and by repudiating transcendent universals, religious and political institutions which claimed to be underivable from self-consciousness, and exempt from history. Bauer denounced the ancien régime and its Restoration surrogates as a feudal system of tutelage and irrational privileges. Arrogating universality to itself, the authoritarian state which arose over these exclusive particulars thwarted the self-activity of its people, and concealed the source of its authority behind a veil of religious sanctification. Bauer maintained that the state, and not religion, was the principal adversary. Against this order of alienated spirit, he insisted that the decisive political question was the source of the state’s authority, whether in tradition and religious sanction, or in the popular will. This question was to be resolved without compromise. Bauer asserted that his objective was not merely political, but social emancipation. The social question, the polarizations and crises of civil society to which Hegel had been alert, could be resolved not by direct appeals to the particular interests of one class, but by a common republican struggle against multiform privilege. The result of this combat would be the attainment of justice in all spheres of social life.