 In his studies of the French Revolution and its impact on Germany, Bauer traced the emergence of mass society, based on conformity and inchoate particularism. The dissolution of the feudal estates by the Revolution produced a purely atomistic society, characterized by the assertion of individual property right. The attachment to private economic interest made impossible a concerted opposition to privilege and to the existing order, and had caused the ultimate defeat of the revolutions that had spawned it. The Jacobinism of the French Revolution, which Bauer in many ways endorsed, had been directed against this attitude, but had failed to overcome it; and this proprietary particularism now threatened the republican movement of the Vormärz. The masses, encompassing both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, represented inertia and stagnation, and formed the bulwark of the existing order. Their opposition to this order was merely apparent. Liberalism unconsciously expressed this development of mass society, defining freedom as acquisition. Bauer criticized liberal constitutionalism as a vacillating, compromising attitude toward the feudal regime. Even in its most advanced form, that endorsed by Hegel, constitutionalism juxtaposed two diametrically opposed principles of sovereignty, popular and princely, and was unable to resolve the contention between them. Incipient socialism shared the same terrain as liberalism, the defence of private interest, but proposed inconsequent and unacceptable solutions to the conditions which liberalism simply affirmed. For Bauer, socialism was irredeemably heteronomous. The socialist movement, he claimed, sought to organize the workers in their immediate, particular existence, and not to transform them. He saw in the proletariat pure particularity, and, unlike Marx, denied that this particularity could transform itself into a genuine universal unless it first renounced its own sectional interests. Bauer also anticipated the negative effects of a socialist organization of labour. While criticizing capitalism for its irrational competitive forms, he defended the principle of competition itself as a necessary condition for progress, the independence of persons, and the possibility of conscious, free self-determination. Bauer’s pre-1848 work revived the classical republican themes of the opposition of commerce and virtue, but gave them a new shape, consistent with his Hegelianism. In 1842–43, Bauer confidently predicted the triumph of republican principles and institutions, though this confidence waned as the political crisis deepened. In his two electoral addresses of 1848–49, he defended popular sovereignty and the right of revolution, demanding that the new constitution be promulgated as an act of revolutionary will, and not received as a concession from the king. He also intensified his critique of socialism for promoting heteronomy and dependency rather than personal initiative and self-determination, and for appealing to the existing, discredited absolutist state for the redress of social grievances, rather than opposing this state with unbending resolution. 