1 - Introduction

Summary

Postwar Hegel scholarship in the twentieth century developed along quite different paths in Anglophone commentary on the one hand, and in Continental interpretation on the other. In England and America, the most important questions were often as much about historical fate as about Hegel's philosophy. Understandably, the great, pressing question after the war was the mysterious, baffling German question: Why had it happened? How could a country that is home to so much of such importance in European civilization have been the source of such unprecedented barbarity and insanity? Commentators looked for some dark underside to modern German culture and philosophy, stubbornly resistant to the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment and finally to social and political modernization itself. They thought they found what they were looking for in an irrationalist, anti-individualist nineteenth-century German romanticism, and they identified its chief spokesman as G. W. F. Hegel. To such commentators as Sidney Hook, Karl Popper, E. F. Carritt, and many others, Hegel's philosophy epitomized many aspects of this deadly virus: a kind of deification of the state (especially the Prussian state that employed him in Berlin), along with a purportedly traditional “German” willingness to play an assigned social role with blind, completely submissive obedience (Bertrand Russell said that Hegel's notion of freedom was “the freedom to obey the police”), a mistrust of democratic politics or “the open society” in general, a politics that seemed to reject any role for the individual in favor of the individual's fixed role in an “estate,” class, or state, a nationalist self-glorification based on a faith in a providential history that had bequeathed to the Germanic peoples the leading world-historical role, a “might makes right” assumption about how such a history progressed, and therewith a justification of war and power politics.