Johann Adolph Dori

Johann Adolph Dori (* around 1765 ; † 1807 in Sorno ) was a German philosopher and the first German to speak of democratic socialism as early as the end of the 18th century . As a philosopher he occupies an intermediate position between Kant and Fichte , as a political theorist he stands between the utopian early German socialism of Franz Heinrich Ziegenhagen , Carl Werner Frölich , Franz Hebenstreit or Andreas Riedel and the revolutionary German democrats of the late 18th century, for a long time German Jacobins were mostly considered under the drawer .

Life

Dori was born in the 1860s as the son of the forester Gottlob Christian Dori in Deutsch-Sorno ; the church registers there have been lost. Dori must have received a good education and later studied economics and philosophy. In the years 1798 and 1799, he published his two main works in Leipzig: the volume on the highest good and its connection with the state and the concrete economic application of this philosophy, which consisted of a democratic socialism, which was developed following Kant's own idealistic system of philosophy : Materials for the establishment of a rational theory of the state economy .

In contrast to Fichte's approach, which was written a little later ( About the Closed Trade State , 1800), Dori's “exaggeration of the state idea” was criticized - for example in the short biographical note in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. In 1805 Dori tried to make his theses better known in the popular science letters on philosophical law and economics .

However, these faded away without much resonance - in contrast to those of the epoch-making philosopher Fichte. In 1804 Dori was at least second professor for morals, history and language at the "Noble Companie Cadetts", later called the Saxon Cadet Corps.

Dori's colleague was Karl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz (1772–1838), who had been professor of morality and history since 1794. Pölitz went to Halle in 1803 and was probably also a Democrat in the 1790s. He later brought out, now a moderate liberal, a work on the European state constitutions since 1789, which had several editions up until the 1830s.

In 1807 Dori gave up his position at the academy more or less voluntarily and died in Freudenstein that same year.

Fonts

• About the highest good and its connection with the state. An attempt by Johann Adolph Dori. Leipzig 1798.
• Materials for the establishment of a rational theory of the state economy. Leipzig 1799.
• Letters on philosophical law and economics. Goerlitz 1805.

literature

• Theodor Inama von Sternegg:  Dori, Johann Adolf . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 5, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1877, p. 347.
• Jörn Garber: “Freedom without property?” German solidarity law theories in the field of influence of the French Revolution. In: Jörn Garber, H. Schmitt: The civil society between democracy and dictatorship. Festschrift W. Grab. Marburg 1985, p. 31 ff.
• Jürgen Riethmüller: The beginnings of democratic thinking in Germany. Democratic state philosophy, foundation of a democratic constitutional tradition and impact on the lower classes in the late 18th century. Neuried 2001, p. 356 ff.
• Jürgen Riethmüller: In the beginning there is justice. In: The time. No. 46, 2004, p. 94.
• Axel Rüdiger: The utopia of the unconditional basic income as a requirement of practical reason. The philosophical justification of communist republicanism in Johann Adolf Dori around 1800. In: Alexander Amberger, Thomas Möbius (ed.): On Utopia's traces. Utopia and Utopia Research. Festschrift for Richard Saage on his 75th birthday. Springer, Wiesbaden 2017, ISBN 978-3-658-14044-1 , pp. 145–160.