The Preparation of Volume III — International Networking
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
This German work — the institutionalization, the philology, the systematic reconstruction — did not remain confined to Germany. It became the foundation for the international Hegel renaissance that would begin in the 1990s.
Robert Brandom and John McDowell in Pittsburgh could build on Henrich, Fulda, and Hösle. They no longer had to open up Hegel from scratch — the German groundwork had paved the way. Their own achievement lay in integrating Hegel into analytic philosophy — but without the German systematic work this would not have been possible.
Axel Honneth in Frankfurt, who became internationally known in the 1990s with his Kampf um Anerkennung (1992), had studied under Henrich. His theory of recognition was philosophically independent, but it built on the solid foundation of German Hegel research.
Slavoj Žižek in Ljubljana, who in the 2010s would present his monumental Hegel book Less Than Nothing (2012), reacted to Hösle. He read Hösle in order to set himself apart — but even in that act of differentiation, Hösle’s systematics was the point of reference.
German Hegel research of the 1970s and 1980s, then, was not an end in itself. It was preparation. It created the infrastructure, the texts, the understanding on which the international reception of the 1990s and 2000s could build.