“Alle Philosophie ist verdächtig. Es lebe die Philosophie!”

Abstract This article examines Karl Friedrich Köppen’s Fichte und die Revolution (1843), published in Ruge’s Anekdota , as a pivotal moment in the Young Hegelian reception of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Köppen reactivates Fichte’s Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution (1793) fifty years later, not as a historical curiosity but as a conceptual arsenal for the political struggles of the Vormärz . By highlighting themes such as the autonomy of the will, the legitimacy of revolution, the duty of insurrection, and even the extinction of the state, Köppen constructs an image of a “Jacobin” or “sans-culotte” Fichte whose radicalism exceeded Hegel’s. The article shows how Köppen strategically weaponized Fichte’s reflections on the French Revolution against contemporary reactionary theorists like Haller and Leo, and how this retrieval provided the Young Hegelians with alternative conceptual resources to overcome the crisis of the 1840s. In doing so, Köppen positioned Fichte as a philosophical ally in the struggle for freedom, critique, and transformation.