Framing: The Simultaneity of Upheaval
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The year 1968 marks a caesura that extends far beyond student protests. In a single year, a concentration of crises, upheavals, and new departures occurs that becomes globally effective and permanently transforms philosophical thought. What at first glance looks like separate events—student protests in Paris and Berlin, the Prague Spring, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the My Lai massacre, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the Olympic protest in Mexico City—turns out to be a multidimensional crisis of the postwar system.
The philosophical significance of 1968 lies not in individual theories that emerged at the time. It lies in an epistemic shift: all three blocs—Western liberalism, Eastern socialism, the Third World liberation movement—fall into crisis simultaneously. And with them, the philosophical justificatory systems fall into crisis. Hegel plays a paradoxical role here: he is reclaimed (by the student movement via Marx and the Frankfurt School), yet at the same time radically criticized (by the emerging postmodernism).
This chapter examines 1968 not as a single event but as a point of condensation for long-term developments that lead, in the following decades, to a reordering of the philosophical landscape.