Carl Ludwig Michelet

Carl Ludwig Michelet (1801–1893) was co-editor of Hegel’s works, in particular of the philosophy of nature, and an active member of the Verein der Freunde des Verewigten. Politically he stood furthest to the left among the centre Hegelians; philosophically he remained the most faithful to Hegelian systematics.

His five-volume System der Philosophie als exacter Wissenschaft (1876–1881) is the most ambitious attempt to bring Hegel’s approach up to date for the second half of the nineteenth century. He retains the structure of logic, nature and spirit, but integrates the advances of the empirical sciences — with electricity and magnetism he succeeds in taking up Oersted and Faraday; Darwin he knows precisely and opposes to his descent an ideal sequence of stages.

Systematically the most consequential point is that with him world history, rather than philosophy, forms the conclusion of the system: philosophy does not only comprehend the past, it orients the future. His book on the post-historical age sketches an areopagus of mankind in Constantinople to which five continental federations of states send delegates — an anticipation of the UN and the EU — predicts the fraternisation of the nations through railway, steamship and telegraph, and advocates women’s suffrage. The vision joins prophetic foresight with a Eurocentrism bound to its time.

In the 1860s he attempted, with August von Cieszkowski, a Hegelian renaissance: the journal Der Gedanke (1861–1884) and a philosophical society in Berlin. The attempt remained without effect, but it shows his unwavering insistence that Hegel’s philosophy still had a future.