Systematic Assessment
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
What remains of this phase? Above all, three things:
First: a solid, textually critical understanding of Hegel. The era in which one knew Hegel at second hand, from compilations and ideologically tinted presentations, was over. One could now read Hegel himself — in critical editions, with an apparatus of variants, with commentaries. This was not exciting, but it was fundamental.
Second: a non-ideological image of Hegel. Henrich, Horstmann, Fulda, Hösle — none of them read Hegel through a political lens. This was a deliberate method. They wanted to understand Hegel before they made use of him. That did not mean they were unpolitical — but politics came after understanding, not before.
Third: an international infrastructure. The conferences, yearbooks, editions, translations — all of them made Hegel into a global philosopher. What in the nineteenth century had still been a German-French phenomenon now became philosophy on a world scale.
What was still missing? Application to present-day questions. German research was necessarily retrospective — it wanted to understand what Hegel thought. But the question “What can we do with Hegel today?” often remained unanswered. This was to change in the 1990s, when a new generation — in Pittsburgh, in Frankfurt, in Ljubljana — made Hegel productive for the present. But this productive appropriation could only succeed because the German groundwork had been done.
The German Hegel renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s was the quiet, laborious, philologically-systematic work that first made possible the spectacular international developments of the 1990s and 2000s. It was the foundation — invisible, but indispensable.