History of Hegel's Reception, Volume I

The history of Hegel’s reception is not a story of decline, but it is not a success story either – it is the story of a systematically productive fragmentation that led through the darkest night of European intellectual history.

As in the parable of the elephant and the blind men, each of the great post-Hegelian currents grasped a real aspect of dialectical truth – but none grasped the systematic unity of all the aspects.

Volume 1: 1831–1945

Part I: Hegel – The three basic movements within the framework of recognition, as a methodological compass for everything that follows.

Part II: The first generation (1831–1860) – The break-up of the Hegelian school into Right, Centre and Left; contemporary opponents and border-crossers; Marx as materialist transformation.

Part III: Six fundamental challenges – The objections on which nineteenth-century philosophy works itself out: the irrational (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, philosophy of life), Darwin and chance, Freud and the unconscious, existence (Kierkegaard), historicity and historicism, science, the logical-analytic turn (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein), and practice. A separate chapter traces how Hegel’s objective spirit turned into the individual sciences – folk psychology, sociology, philosophy of culture from Simmel via Cassirer to Freyer.

Part IV: International spread (1860–1914) – The British Idealists and American pragmatism (Peirce, James, Mead); the Russian reception in two generations, from the Lyubomudry to Plekhanov; W. E. B. Du Bois and double consciousness; the marginal receptions in France, Italy, Poland, Finland and Scandinavia; and Japan as the most productive appropriation outside Europe.

Part V: The First World War – The indictment of Hegel as “guilty of the war”.

Part VI: The interwar period (1920–1945) – The collapse of the old order and cultural modernism; the Soviet reception as state ideology and Vygotsky’s dialectical psychology; German academic consolidation, including Weimar constitutional theory (Kelsen, Smend, Heller); the phenomenological challenge from Husserl and Heidegger; the early French discovery through Wahl, Kojève and Hyppolite; the Italian culmination in Croce and Gentile.

Part VII: Catastrophe and reckoning (1933–1951) – Fascism as a philosophical challenge: a chapter the size of a book in its own right, which systematically develops the history of ideas and the ideology of fascism – from the transnational precursors through the inner logic of National Socialist ideology and the fascist theory of the state to Losurdo’s thesis of “internal colonialism”, the sociological amplifiers and the question of how a recurring pattern could be recognised. In addition, the critique of totalitarianism in Popper and Arendt.

What is special

Not another neutral history of reception, but a philosophically judging account: each position is first presented in its strongest form, then examined for what it hits and what it misses. Particular care is given to Jewish philosophy after Auschwitz and to postcolonial critique.

Relation to the other books

• Systematic foundation: Hegel’s Logic – Logic of Thinking
• On Hegel’s philosophy of right: Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – How Freedom Becomes Real
• On the early Marx: Hegel and Marx – To Comprehend and to Change

Can be read after Hegel’s Logic – Logic of Thinking – or independently of it.

Bibliography

Year

2026

Edition

Hegel Interpretations Edition · Reception and Influence

Series

Eine systematische Geschichte der Hegel-Rezeption (Volume 1)

Licence

Copyright

Where to buy

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Price: 29.90 EUR/USD

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