Framing: The Paradoxical Starting Point
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
When the Second World War ended, Hegel’s philosophy seemed finished in the Anglo-American world. Bertrand Russell had denounced it as “mystical,” the logical positivists dismissed it as “meaningless,” Karl Popper condemned it as “totalitarian.” Analytic philosophy, which had dominated the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and later the United States since the 1930s, defined itself almost by its rejection of continental speculation—and Hegel counted as its most extreme representative.
But this apparent clarity is deceptive. For it was precisely in the phase of the most radical rejection (1945-1960) that the foundations were laid for a rehabilitation that would lead, in the 1970s and 1980s, to the “analytic Hegel renaissance” (Volume III). Three developments prepared the ground:
First: the pragmatist tradition (Dewey, Peirce) had never stopped reading Hegel productively—albeit naturalized, anti-metaphysical, and practice-oriented.
Second: in British philosophy there existed an undercurrent (Collingwood, Oakeshott) that preserved Hegel’s historicity and contextuality without adopting his claim to system.
Third: from the late 1950s onward, individual analytic philosophers (Sellars, Findlay) began to discover implicit Hegelian structures—self-relation, mediation, conceptual necessity—without initially recognizing these as “Hegelian.”
The chapter shows: the Anglo-American rejection of Hegel was never as total as it appeared. Beneath the surface of the polemics, central Hegelian insights were being transformed, naturalized, and pragmatized—preparing a return in new form.