 Another aspect of recent Bauer research is a more thorough elaboration of his 1840’s perfectionist ethic, through the application to his thought of the concept of ‘post-Kantian perfectionism’ (Moggach 2011; Sorensen and Moggach 2020). In Leibniz or Christian Wolff, pre-Kantian perfectionist doctrines, of Aristotelian inspiration, stressed the ethical objective of happiness (broadly understood as material, intellectual, and spiritual wellbeing) and the complementarity of properly understood individual interests. Post-Kantian perfectionism acknowledges Kant’s critique of these earlier eudaemonist forms (described by him as ‘rational heteronomy’), with their implications of political tutelage and paternalistic ‘enlightened despotism’. Unwilling to relinquish the terrain of self-fashioning and self-realisation, however, which Kant depoliticises but retains in his doctrine of virtue, post-Kantian perfectionists like Schiller, Fichte, or Bauer seek a reformulation rather than a complete repudiation of perfectionist ethics, one that would be compatible with modern republican forms of life. Instead of happiness, these new versions stress the central value of freedom as a process or a conquest. The end in light of which actions, relations, and legal forms and institutions can be assessed is rational self-determination and the promotion of the necessary political and social conditions of its exercise. Whereas the older perfectionism had in general envisaged the thriving of a relatively fixed human nature, the post-Kantian versions stress the historical variability of cultural experiences and the determinability rather than the fixity of the self, its openness to critique and self-conscious fashioning. In contrast to older views, the harmony and complementarity of interests is a problematic task, an aspect of rational self-shaping, rather than a preconceived given. The diversity and conflictual character of modern life, the culture of diremption as Schiller and Hegel had described it, must be taken into account as the material element of a post-Kantian perfectionist ethic. Bruno Bauer’s conceptions of history and emancipation in the 1840s, it has been argued, are consistent with this approach.