Most American scholars know and admire the works of Jean Hyppolite, Jean Wahl and Alexandre Kojève. The French Hegel revival, thirty or forty years ago, resulted from a rereading and reevaluation of the Phenomenology and of the early writings published by Nohl as well as of some of the Jena manuscripts. Especially in the case of Hyppolite’s and Kojève’s interpretations, one could find in them clever insights which nevertheless involved Existentialist or Marxist presuppositions. Though very stimulating, these interpretations (...) were not entirely faithful to Hegel’s thought. More and more French Hegel scholars progressively made this point clear and understood that a new approach was needed. In this paper, I will try to assess the current state of French Hegel scholarship, pointing out the most recent outstanding contributions and discussing them. (shrink)

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Among the most influential parts of the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) were his ethics, his theory of the state, and his philosophy of history. The Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) (1821), the last work published in Hegel's lifetime, is a combined system of moral and political philosophy, or a sociology dominated by the idea of the state. Here Hegel repudiates his earlier assessment of the French Revolution as a "a marvelous sunrise" in (...) the realization of liberty. Rejecting the republican form of government, he espouses an idealized form of a constitutional monarchy, whose ultimate power rests with the sovereign. (shrink)

Among the most influential parts of the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) were his ethics, his theory of the state, and his philosophy of history. The Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) (1821), the last work published in Hegel's lifetime, is a combined system of moral and political philosophy, or a sociology dominated by the idea of the state. Here Hegel repudiates his earlier assessment of the French Revolution as a "a marvelous sunrise" in (...) the realization of liberty. Rejecting the republican form of government, he espouses an idealized form of a constitutional monarchy, whose ultimate power rests with the sovereign. (shrink)

This book has as its stated aim to track the course of the Hegelian concept of “the unhappy consciousness” through the twentieth century French mind, in order to understand more fully and clearly the use made of this theme.

Contemporary Perspectives on the History of Philosophy was first published in 1983. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The authors of the 27 appears in Volume 8, Midwest Studies in Philosophy,have established reputations as historians of philosophy, but their vantage point, here, is from "contemporary perspectives" - they use contemporary analytic skills to examine problems and issues considered by past philosophers. The (...) papers, arranged in historical order, fall into six groups: ancient philosophy (the Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle); the seventeenth-century rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza); the empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume); Kant; the nineteenth century (Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Mill); and, in conclusion, an essay on Wittgenstein's Tractatus and two broad, retrospective papers entitled "Old Analyses of the Physical World and new Philosophies of Language" and "Moral Crisis and the History of Ethics.". (shrink)

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) has commonly been seen as Europe’s leading philosopher since Kant. His influence extended across the globe down to the Second World War – not least through his dissident disciple, Karl Marx. Since then, despite intermittent revivals, his importance has tended to be eclipsed by a rising tide of anti-modernist polemic, extending from Heidegger to postmodernism. Central to Hegel’s political thought was his view of the French Revolution. But notwithstanding its pivotal role in (...) the development of his ideas, his reaction to that event has been systematically misconstrued. In presenting a more faithful account of Hegel’s interpretation of his own era, the argument presented here places his response to contemporary developments in the context of a series of World Revolutions which framed the meaning of his age. This approach serves to illustrate the unique combination of historical and philosophical reasoning on which Hegel’s thought depended. In the process, reconstructing his arguments raises challenging questions about the applicability of bygone political ideas to later historical periods. (shrink)

Focusing on the section ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ of the Phenomenology of Spirit, this article argues that the method Hegel employs in this work does not capture the full significance of the French Revolution. I claim that Hegel’s method is reformist rather than revolutionary: Hegel deliberately restricts his analyses to transformations that occur within the element of thought and presents the changes that occur within this element as logically ensuing from one another. This approach, I argue, (...) is at odds with the very concept of a revolution. Seen in this way, efforts to frame Hegel’s philosophy as revolutionary are misguided. (shrink)

This book explores Hegel's response to the French Revolutionary Terror in relation to contemporary theories of trauma.

In this essay I distinguish the Phenomenology’s account of the French Revolution and Terror from the Philosophy of Right’s. Understanding the former’s discussion of the “Furie des Verschwindens” of Absolute Freedom requires an appreciation of the hopes and fears raised by the Enlightenment’s Nützlichkeit, the precise structure of “Absolute Freedom and Terror,” and the fact that Verschwinden for Hegel denotes a mode of non-corporeal negation that allows particulars to reveal a universality that they themselves are not. Read in (...) this light, the Phenomenology’s account better explains actual political experience than does the Philosophy of Right’s critique of “negative freedom.”. (shrink)

The English-speaking philosophical world will greatly benefit if this fine translation of Ritter's essays on Hegel produces an effect similar to that of the reception of the German original. The impact of the title essay alone, first published as a separate volume in 1957, can in part be gauged by its being one of a dozen post-war books on Hegel analyzed in Michael Theunissen's special Beiheft of Philosophische Rundschau on Die Verwirklichung der Vernunft [The Realization of Reason], and (...) one must agree with Manfred Reidel's characterization of it as "fundamental" ["grundsätzlich"]. The consideration of Ritter's work with which most readers will probably be familiar is Jurgen Habermas's essay, "Hegel's Critique of the French Revolution", expressly written to "amplify" Ritter's thesis. (shrink)

Thomas McCarthy, the general editor of the series of “Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought,” and Richard Dien Winfield, the translator and introducer of this volume, deserve signal praise for making Joachim Ritter’s essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right available in a fine and accurate English translation. Despite the book’s narrow title, these essays address in cogent and far-reaching ways major issues in Hegel’s political philosophy and in modernity generally.

Greek tragedy, in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, represents the performative realization of binary political difference, for example, “private versus public,” “man versus woman” or “nation versus state.” On the other hand, Roman comedy and French Revolutionary Terror, in Hegel, can be taken as radical expressions of political in-difference, defined as a state where all mediating structures of association and governance have collapsed into a world of “bread and circuses.” In examining the dialectical interplay between binary, tragic difference (...) and comedic, terrible in-difference, the paper arrives at hypothetical conclusions regarding how these political forms may be observed today. (shrink)

An argument contending that Hegel is not the last and greatest exponent of an outdated onto-theologism, but rather the philosopher of modernity, a thinker who anticipates, diagnoses and replies to the spiritual and social crises of the 19th and 20th centuries, would have two parts. The first would hold that the issue of modern theoretical-philosophical crisis and malaise - an issue raised by many and most recently by Richard Rorty in Philosophy And The Mirror of Nature - is both (...) anticipated and replied to by the Phenomenology and the conception of a systematic philosophy which it introduces and makes possible. Such an argument would work to show how Hegel articulates a systematic philosophy not founded on epistemology or metaphysics. The second part of the argument would hold that the issue of modern ethical and socio-political crisis and malaise - an issue raised by many and most recently by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue - is both anticipated and replied to by the Philosophy of Right with its sweeping conception of morality, ethics, society and the state. Such an argument would work to show how Hegel articulates those social and political structures in and through which individuals can realize their humanness in a way which is not destructive, not disruptively arbitrary and alienating but communal and harmonious. (shrink)

Explanations of the violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia often conflate two events: the far-ranging and self-destructive violence within the revolutionary Party, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of cadres, and the larger genocidal destruction of so-called “counter-revolutionary” classes and ethnic minorities. The exterminationist violence inflicted within the Khmer Rouge organization itself is perplexing, for its shape and sequence cannot be explained by theories of mass violence in the current literatures on (...) genocide or state terror. Our aim in this article is twofold. First, we show how key features of a theory of limitless, exterminationist, and ultimately self-destructive violence are contained within G.W.F. Hegel’s obscure analysis of the Terror of the French Revolution. Second, this Hegelian theory of exterminationist violence with a particular model of modern consciousness at its heart, can account for the transformation of typical forms of r.. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Hegel's Interest in History and the French Revolution Hegel and the Philosophy of History Hegel and the History of Philosophy Hegel's Historical Approach to Knowledge References.

This article discusses the relation between colonialism and the sovereignty of peoples through a dialogue between Hegel and the thought of the French Revolution. These two sides are relevant to each other not only because of their historical proximity, but also because of the connections that can be established when we approach the topic of colonialism through these two manifestations. Hegel is explicit that his philosophy of history and his philosophy of right are supposed to be philosophies (...) of freedom. Yet despite the importance that he lends to freedom, Hegel also explicitly defends, in the very same text, colonial domination when he deals with the relation between peoples. A similar problem had arisen in the course of the French Revolution. Following the declarations of war, France is confronted on various occasions with the question of how to deal with other peoples and countries. With the foundation of the Republic in 1792, the relation with other peoples becomes central in the revolutionary debates. The topic of colonialism is part of the constituting debates, and not only because of the uprisings in then Saint Domingue leading to the Haitian Revolution. This article is a part of a larger research project that attempts to reassess the relations between Hegel and the French Revolution, and deals with the question of how we can re-read Hegel's interpretation of the French Revolution based on the evolving historiography of the Revolution. After an introduction of both sides of this dialogue, the paper discusses how Hegel's political philosophy can be applied to understand the debates about the emancipation of colonies that take place during the French Revolution. The next part further analyses some issues, such as the notion of sovereignty and, in the concluding remarks, I summarize my discussion and point to some avenues for further research. (shrink)

_Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France_ is a two-volume work that documents the French reception of G. W. F. Hegel and F. W. J. Schelling from 1801 to 1848. It shows that the story of the "French Hegel" didn't begin with Wahl and Kojève by giving readers a solid understanding of the various ways in which German Idealism impacted nineteenth-century French philosophy, as well as providing the first ever English-language translations of excerpts from the (...) most important philosophical texts of the era. Inside volume one, readers will find a number of interpretative frameworks to help them get to grips with this neglected field in the history of ideas. In addition to excerpted translations and a narrative of Hegel’s and Schelling’s fate in France during the early nineteenth century, this volume includes an introduction on transnational reception history, as well as an analytical catalogue of the translations of their work produced in French at this time, of the publications which appropriated or interrogated their philosophical legacy, and of the journals, institutional structures and other mechanisms of dissemination that brought Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophy into France. The book thus details the ways in which French philosophers of the period took up the debates and concepts of German Idealism, transformed them or rejected them. In this way, it aims to contribute to a reversal of the serious neglect of early nineteenth-century French thought in English-language scholarship and, in so doing, goes beyond a nation-based narrative of the history of philosophy. (shrink)

This is a critical introduction to modern French philosophy, commissioned from one of the liveliest contemporary practitioners and intended for an English-speaking readership. The dominant 'Anglo-Saxon' reaction to philosophical development in France has for some decades been one of suspicion, occasionally tempered by curiosity but more often hardening into dismissive rejection. But there are signs now of a more sympathetic interest and an increasing readiness to admit and explore shared concerns, even if these are still expressed in a very (...) different idiom and intellectual context. Vincent Descombes offers here a personal guide to the main movements and figures of the last forty-five years. He traces over this period the evolution of thought from a generation preoccupied with the 'three H's' - Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, to a generation influenced since about 1960 by the 'three masters of suspicion' - Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. In this framework he deals in turn with the thought of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, the early structuralists, Foucault, Althusser, Serres, Derrida, and finally Deleuze and Lyotard. The 'internal' intellectual history of the period is related to its institutional setting and the wider cultural and political context which has given French philosophy so much of its distinctive character. (shrink)

In spite of his deep insights, Hegel fails to grasp the specific character of the war waged by the French Revolution and the Empire. His theory of limited warfare turns out to be a peculiar Sollen, but it is precisely this gap between rationality and reality what makes his classical model an appealing antithesis to postmodern violence. Keywords.

Hegel is known for coining the word “phenomenology” as a description of the methodological approach that he pursues in the famous work that bears this title. It has long been an open question the degree to which the later philosophical school of phenomenology in fact follows the actual method developed by Hegel or if it merely co-opted the name and applied the term in a new context. While Husserl was dismissive of Hegel, the French phenomenologists were (...) generally receptive to Hegel’s conception of phenomenology. This chapter argues that there are in fact some important points of continuity and that the French phenomenological school’s understanding of Hegel as a forerunner of their movement is quite legitimate. (shrink)

Gregor Moder’s Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity is a lively entry into current debates concerning Hegel, Spinoza, and their relation. Hegel and Spinoza are two of the most influential philosophers of the modern era, and the traditions of thought they inaugurated have been in continuous dialogue and conflict ever since Hegel first criticized Spinoza. Notably, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German Idealists aimed to overcome the determinism of Spinoza’s system by securing a place for the freedom of (...) the subject within it, and twentieth-century French materialists such as Althusser and Deleuze rallied behind Spinoza as the ultimate champion of anti-Hegelian materialism. This conflict, or mutual rejection, lives on today in recent discussions about materialism. Contemporary thinkers either make a Hegelian case for the productiveness of concepts of the negative, nothingness, and death, or in a way that is inspired by Spinoza they abolish the concepts of the subject and negation and argue for pure affirmation and the vitalistic production of differences. Hegel and Spinoza traces the historical roots of these alternatives and shows how contemporary discussions between Heideggerians and Althusserians, Lacanians and Deleuzians are a variation of the disagreement between Hegel and Spinoza. Throughout, Moder persuasively demonstrates that the best way to read Hegel and Spinoza is not in opposition or contrast but together: as Hegel and Spinoza. (shrink)

This paper considers Hegel’s treatment of the dispute between modern philosophy and faith in his Phenomenology of Spirit. The paper shows that Hegel is concerned with this dispute as part of his systematic program to advance the true philosophical concept of self and world, but, by so doing, he supports ahumanistic reconciliation between Christianity and the secular values of the Enlightenment. The paper contains extensive discussions of Hegel’s views on the French philosophes, and it shows how (...) he used their writings in his criticism of the popular notions within denominational religion. It also shows why Hegel did not fully support the philosophes’ assumptions, but, instead, he was willing to accept Christian notions of the incarnation and redemption. (shrink)

In this article I put forward an interpretation of what is at stake in Frantz Fanon's claim that there is a reciprocity at the basis of G. W. F Hegel's master-servant dialectic. I do this by staging a critique of the ‘shared-humanity’ interpretation of Fanon's claim. Fanon's problem, as this interpretation understands it, is that the master-servant dialectic describes a situation in which two human beings knowingly confront one another as such. Such a situation—because human-to-human confrontation is assumed—does not (...) adequately describe a racially divided situation because of racism's dehumanizing force. Fanon's problem would thus be that Hegel assumed shared humanity. I contest this reading by claiming that Fanon's issue is not reciprocal humanity but reciprocal struggle. To get to this point requires demonstrating that the shared-humanity reading is implausible on a variety of grounds. Thanks to the work of Philippe Van Haute it can already be said that in Hegel's text no shared humanity takes place. But Van Haute nevertheless claims that the shared-humanity problem is present in Kojève. Thus, it first needs to be shown that Kojève's text disallows such a reading. With this result in hand, I move to show the textually unsupportable nature of a subset of the shared-humanity reading—the ‘ontological reading’—whose strategy of reading Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks obscures the Sartrean-Beauvoirian commitments which would in fact allow a more accurate reading of Fanon's claims about reciprocity in Hegel to be made. I then seek to show—with reference to these commitments and a broadly Kojèvean emphasis on the centrality of struggle in human subject-formation—that Fanon's comments about reciprocity take aim at the question of mutual struggle in Hegel and Kojève. ‘The French Negro’, Fanon argues, did not get to experience the cost and value of freedom, unlike Hegel's servant. (shrink)

FRENCH philosophers from Descartes on have been particularly concerned with the philosophical significance of the human body. Perhaps, as Hyppolite declares, Merleau-Ponty most clearly articulates an ontology of the animate body. Such an interest is by no means confined to philosophers in the French tradition. Surprising, as it may seem, the early Hegel also had a strong interest in the theme of embodiment, the significance of which even Merleau-Ponty in his essay ‘Hegel’s Existentialism’ fails to grasp. (...) The French phenomenologist argues that once Hegel embarks on his discussion of Observational Reason the ‘existential’ viewpoint ceases. Thus, the existential problem of death becomes transmuted into a higher form of life through such ‘altitude thinking’. Even Zaner’s The Problem of Embodiment fails to explore the early Hegelian foundations of incarnate-consciousness in the thought of Marcel, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. It seems appropriate therefore to briefly examine Hegel’s conception of embodiment in The Phenomenology of Mind on the 200th anniversary of his birth. (shrink)

_Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France_ is a two-volume work that documents the French reception of G. W. F. Hegel and F. W. J. Schelling from 1801 to 1848. It shows that the story of the "French Hegel" didn't begin with Wahl and Kojève by giving readers a solid understanding of the various ways in which German Idealism impacted nineteenth-century French philosophy, as well as providing the first ever English-language translations of excerpts from the (...) most important philosophical texts of the era. Inside volume two, readers will find a series of scholarly studies to help them get to grips with this neglected field in the history of ideas. The contributors are world-leading and emerging experts from Europe, UK, and North America. They highlight the stakes and trace the pathways of this reception for French and German thought during the period, including the ways in which French philosophers of the period took up the debates and concepts of German Idealism, transformed them or rejected them. In this way, the volume aims to redress the serious neglect of early nineteenth-century French thought in English-language scholarship and, in so doing, goes beyond a nation-based narrative of the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Hegel’s philosophy of revolution has been widely studied and much debated. Some scholars see Hegel as a tiresome defender of existing political orders, while others point to his enthusiastic, if partial, support for the French Revolution, as well as for many modern revolutions or insurrectionary movements, both ancient and modern. Following this last line of argument, my paper attempts a Hegelian interpretation of the Russian Revolution, taking into account important aspects such as the subversive dynamic of Hegelian (...) political concepts, the relationship between class and state in Hegel’s political philosophy, the overwhelmingly anti-feudal character of the Russian Revolution, and, finally, the stabilisation and distortion of the Russian Revolution under the Stalinist regime, which, in Hegelian terms, can be seen as a new form of absolute freedom (terror) aimed at solving the main social dilemma of modernity identified by Hegel in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, namely poverty. (shrink)

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is probably his most famous work. First published in 1807, it has exercised considerable influence on subsequent thinkers from Feuerbach and Marx to Heidegger, Kojève, Adorno and Derrida. The book contains many memorable analyses of, for example, the master / slave dialectic, the unhappy consciousness, Sophocles' Antigone and the French Revolution and is one of the most important works in the Western philosophical tradition. It is, however, a difficult and challenging book and needs to (...) be studied together with a clear and accessible secondary text. Stephen Houlgate's Reader's Guide offers guidance on: Philosophical and historical context Key themes Reading the textReception and influence Further reading. (shrink)