where the great modern opposition between the state and the individual seems subjected to this same logic, and the individual’s true individuality is said to reside in and only in the political universal, the State. Thus, on the one hand, Hegel’s political philosophy is often praised for its early identification and analysis of a fundamental, new aspect of contemporary life – the categorically distinct realm of political life in modernity, or the independence of the ‘State’ from the social world of private individuals engaged in competition and private association (‘civil society’). But, on the other hand, his attempt to argue for a completion of these domains in the State, or that individuals could only be said to be free in allegiance to a State, has been, at least since Marx, one of the most criticized aspects of his philosophy.
Finally, criticisms also frequently target the underlying intention behind such claims: Hegel’s career-long insistence on finding some basic unity among the many fragmented spheres of modern thought and existence, and his demand that this unity be articulated in a discursive account, that it not be merely felt, or gestured at, or celebrated in edifying speculation. Post- Hegelian thinkers have tended to be suspicious of any such intimations of a whole for modern experience, and have argued that, with the destruction of the premodern world, we simply have to content ourselves with the disconnected, autonomous spheres of modern interests.
In his lecture courses these basic themes are treated in wide-ranging accounts of the basic institutions of cultural history. History itself is treated as fundamentally political history, and, in typically Hegelian fashion, the major epochs of political history are claimed to be as they were because of the internal inadequacies of past epochs, all until some final political semiconsciousness is achieved and realized. Art is treated equally developmentally, evolving from symbolic, through ‘classical,’ to the most intensely self-conscious form of aesthetic subjectivity, romantic art. The Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion embody these themes in some of the most controversial ways, since Hegel often treats religion and its development as a kind of picture or accessible ‘representation’ of his own views about the relation of thought to being, the proper understanding of human finitude and ‘infinity,’ and the essentially social or communal nature of religious life. This has inspired a characteristic debate among Hegel scholars, with some arguing that Hegel’s appropriation of religion shows that his own themes are essentially religious (if an odd, pantheistic version of Christianity), while others argue that he has so Hegelianized religious issues that there is little distinctively religious left. Influence. This last debate is typical of that prominent in the post-Hegelian tradition. Although, in the decades following his death, there was a great deal of work by self-described Hegelians on the history of law, on political philosophy, and on aesthetics, most of the prominent academic defenders of Hegel were interested in theology, and many of these were interested in defending an interpretation of Hegel consistent with traditional Christian views of a personal God and personal immortality. This began to change with the work of ‘young Hegelians’ such as D. F. Strauss (1808–74), Feuerbach (1804–72), Bruno Bauer (1809–82), and Arnold Ruge (1803–80), who emphasized the humanistic and historical dimensions of Hegel’s account of religion, rejected the Old Hegelian tendencies toward a reconciliation with contemporary political life, and began to reinterpret and expand Hegel’s account of the productive activity of human spirit (eventually focusing on labor rather than intellectual and cultural life). Strauss himself characterized the fight as between ‘left,’ ‘center,’ and ‘right’ Hegelians, depending on whether one was critical or conservative politically, or had a theistic or a humanistic view of Hegelian Geist. The most famous young or left Hegelian was Marx, especially during his days in Paris as coeditor, with Ruge, of the Deutsch-französischen Jahrbücher (1844).
In Great Britain, with its long skeptical, empiricist, and utilitarian tradition, Hegel’s work had little influence until the latter part of the nineteenth century, when philosophers such as Green and Caird took up some of the holistic themes in Hegel and developed a neo-Hegelian reading of issues in politics and religion that began to have influence in the academy. The most prominent of the British neo-Hegelians of the next generation were Bosanquet, Mc- Taggart, and especially Bradley, all of whom were interested in many of the metaphysical implications of Hegel’s idealism, what they took to be a Hegelian claim for the ‘internally related’ interconnection of all particulars within one single, ideal or mental, substance. Moore and Russell waged a hugely successful counterattack in the name of traditional empiricism and what would be called ‘analytic philosophy’ against such an enterprise and in this tradition largely finished off the influence of Hegel (or what was left of the historical Hegel in these neo-Hegelian versions).
In Germany, Hegel has continued to influence a number of different schools of neo-Marxism, sometimes itself simply called ‘Hegelian Marxism,’ especially the Frankfurt School, or ‘critical theory’ group (especially Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse). And he has been extremely influential in France, particularly thanks to the lectures of a brilliant if idiosyncratic Russian émigré, Alexander Kojève, who taught Hegel in the 1930s at the École Pratique des Hautes Études to the likes of Merleau-Ponty and Lacan. Kojève was as much influenced by Marx and Heidegger as Hegel, but his lectures inspired many thinkers to turn again to Hegel’s account of human selfdefinition in time and to the historicity of all institutions and practices and so forged an unusual link between Hegel and postwar existentialism.
Hegelian themes continue to resurface in contemporary hermeneutics, in ‘communitarianism’ in ethics, and in the increasing attention given to conceptual change and history in the philosophy of science. This has meant for many that Hegel should now be regarded not only as the origin of a distinctive tradition in European philosophy that emphasizes the historical and social nature of human existence, but as a potential contributor to many new and often interdisciplinary approaches to philosophy.
See also FRANKFURT SCHOOL, IDEALISM, KANT , PHILOSOPHY OF HISTOR. R.B.P.