The American Transformations (1850-1920) - From Idealism to Pragmatism
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The American reception of Hegel took a different path than the British. Where the British adopted Hegel’s metaphysics and neglected his method, the Americans took an interest in Hegel’s concept of development and transformed it in a pragmatist direction. This transformation took place in two centers - St. Louis and Cincinnati - and ultimately led to a complete reinterpretation of dialectic.
The St. Louis Hegelians - Philosophy on the Frontier
One of the most remarkable episodes in the international reception of Hegel took place in St. Louis, Missouri - a city that European philosophers would have regarded more as the “Wild West” than as an academic center. Henry Conrad Brokmeyer, William Torrey Harris, and Denton Snider formed the core of a movement that unfolded a remarkable intellectual vitality between 1860 and 1890.
The historical context was telling: St. Louis was a border city - geographically between East and West, culturally between old European learning and new American civilization, politically between slavery and freedom. Missouri was a border state in the Civil War, its future uncertain. In this situation, Hegel appeared as the philosopher of mediation - between opposites, between tradition and progress, between individual and community.
The political dimension must not be overlooked. The St. Louis Hegelians were not merely academic philosophers but politically engaged intellectuals. The German immigrant community in St. Louis played a decisive role in the fight against slavery. On May 10, 1861, 6,000 volunteers, mostly German workers under General Lyon, marched on the arsenal at Camp Jackson, which was controlled by officers sympathetic to the South. This march secured Missouri for the Union.
Denton Snider, the historian of the St. Louis Philosophical Society, described the effect of these events with characteristic exaggeration: the founders of the society were “animated by the spirit of the Camp Jackson deed, which marked a new turning point, even if very local and minute, in the World’s History.” For them, Hegel was not merely abstract theory but a philosophy of freedom - the rational grounding of the struggle against slavery.
Another remarkable connection: Joseph Weydemeyer, Karl Marx’s closest collaborator in the United States, became commander of the military government of St. Louis until the end of the war. He had been recruited from New York by General Frémont, who took the initiative to turn the Civil War into a war of liberation by issuing and enforcing his own emancipation proclamation in Missouri in 1861. Weydemeyer fought for most of the war against Confederate guerrillas in rural Missouri.
The institutional achievement of the St. Louis Hegelians was considerable. William Torrey Harris founded the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1867 - the first philosophical journal in America. It appeared regularly from 1867 to 1887 and devoted considerable space to the exposition and interpretation of Hegel and German idealism generally. It also served as a springboard for a new generation of American philosophers, including Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.
Harris’s merit lay less in original philosophical contributions than in the work of mediation. He translated, edited, and popularized Hegel for an American audience. His journal published the first English translations of important Hegel texts. It provided a forum for philosophical debates that had scarcely taken place in America before.
Henry Conrad Brokmeyer (1826-1906) was the intellectual inspiration of the movement. A German immigrant who worked as a mechanic, he translated Hegel’s Logic and the Phenomenology into English - monumental work that was never published and today lies in the Missouri Historical Society Archive. His influence remained largely confined to personal contact. He embodied a form of Hegelianism that was not academically detached but existentially engaged.
The distinctive feature of this movement lay precisely in its non-academic character. The St. Louis Hegelians were not university professors (Harris later became superintendent of the St. Louis schools and eventually US Commissioner of Education), but educated citizens who took up philosophy on their own initiative. They organized lectures, discussion evenings, study groups - a form of public philosophy rare in Europe.
The systematic limit lay in the lack of methodological penetration. The St. Louis Hegelians revered Hegel but did not further develop his method. They adopted his system - often in simplified form - but not his dialectical self-reflection. Hegel became a teacher of wisdom, not a methodological model.
The movement disintegrated in the 1880s. Its members went their separate ways - Harris into educational policy, others turned to different philosophies. But it had fulfilled a function: Hegel had arrived in America. The next generation - Royce, Dewey - could build on this foundation.
The Cincinnati Group - Left Hegelianism in America
Parallel to St. Louis, a second Hegel group with a markedly different orientation emerged in Cincinnati. August Willich (1810-1878), John Bernard Stallo (1823-1900), and Moncure D. Conway (1832-1907) represented left Hegelianism on the American continent.
August Willich was a remarkable figure: a Prussian officer who left the military because of his socialist convictions, a participant in the Revolution of 1848, a friend and comrade-in-arms of Marx and Engels (though later estranged from them), an émigré to America, where he fought as a general for the Union in the Civil War. His socialist political stance combined with a Hegelian philosophy of history: history develops dialectically toward freedom, and this development requires active revolutionary engagement.
John Bernard Stallo developed a materialist interpretation of Hegel closely related to that of Marx. His main work, The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (1881), criticized mechanistic physics from the standpoint of a dialectical philosophy of nature. Stallo argued that the basic concepts of physics - atom, force, motion - are not simple givens but conceptual constructions that contain contradictions and must be developed further dialectically.
Moncure D. Conway held unorthodox religious convictions. He was ordained as a Methodist preacher but turned to Unitarianism and finally to a secular humanism. His reception of Hegel emphasized the critique of positive religion: religion must develop into philosophical insight, or it remains caught in the stage of representation.
The significance of these left American Hegelians lay in demonstrating that Hegel could not be mobilized only for conservative positions. While the St. Louis group and, later, the British idealists made Hegel a support for the existing order, Willich, Stallo, and Conway showed that Hegel’s dialectic also permitted revolutionary, secular, materialist interpretations.
The systematic limit lay - as with their St. Louis colleagues - in insufficient methodological penetration. They adopted Hegel’s critical impulses but not his systematic method. Dialectic became a rhetorical instrument rather than conceptual self-reflection.
Josiah Royce (1855-1916) - Absolute Pragmatics and the Community of Interpretation
Josiah Royce attempted a synthesis that appears in the title of his main work: The World and the Individual (1899/1900). He wanted to reconcile Hegel’s absolute idealism with American individualism - a philosophical squaring of the circle.
Royce’s basic problem was that of individuation. How can the individual be at once part of the Absolute and an independent reality? Hegel’s solution - the individual as a moment of the universal - seemed to dissolve the individual. Royce’s alternative: the Absolute is not a substance encompassing the individuals but the infinite idea that manifests itself in the individuals.
The solution was not convincing. The problem merely shifted: how can the infinite idea be fully present in finite individuals? Royce’s answer pointed to “internal meaning” - the self-interpretation of the individual. Every individual is what it understands itself to be. This self-interpretation is at the same time part of the infinite interpretation that constitutes the Absolute.
”The Philosophy of Loyalty” (1908) developed an ethics of loyalty. Loyalty is not blind allegiance but conscious identification with a cause greater than the individual. The truest loyalty is “loyalty to loyalty” - fidelity to loyalty itself, transcending all particular loyalties.
This conception was meant democratically: recognition of others’ loyalty, even when they are faithful to different causes. But it remained abstract. Which cause deserves loyalty? Royce’s answer - “a cause that transcends and enriches the individual” - was too indeterminate to be practically orienting.
”The Problem of Christianity” (1913) attempted to reconcile Christian theology with idealist philosophy. The church as “community of interpretation” was Royce’s central metaphor. The community of believers continually interprets the message of Christ - and in this interpretation the holy spirit realizes itself.
The systematic significance: Royce recognized the intersubjective dimension of the constitution of truth. Truth arises not in the isolated consciousness but in the community of interpreters. This insight was fruitful and anticipated later developments (Peirce’s community of inquirers, Habermas’s communicative rationality).
The limit lay in the inadequate mediation of individual and community. Royce oscillated between emphasizing individual freedom and emphasizing communal bonds - without finding a convincing synthesis. The dialectic remained an external balancing act, not an internal mediation.
John Dewey (1859-1952) - The Pragmatist Transformation of Dialectic
John Dewey began as a Hegelian and developed into the leading pragmatist. His path shows exemplarily how American philosophy transformed Hegel - and what was lost in the process.
The early phase (1880-1894) was strongly marked by Hegel. Psychology (1887) interpreted Hegel psychologically. Dialectic became a description of the individual’s mental development. Consciousness passes through stages in which it recognizes and transforms its own presuppositions - entirely in the spirit of the Phenomenology of Spirit.
This psychological reading was not new - it had also occurred in Germany. But it prepared the pragmatist turn: if dialectic is the structure of mental development, then it is essentially processual, temporal, historical. Logic is not the structure of reality but a method for coping with problems.
”Studies in Logical Theory” (1903) marked the break. Dewey transformed Hegelian logic into “instrumentalism.” Logical forms are not structures of reality but tools of problem-solving. A concept is good if it helps to master a problematic situation. Truth is not correspondence with reality but successful orientation for action.
This position had its merits: it united theory and practice, showed the functional role of thought, made philosophy practically relevant. But it came at a price: the loss of systematicity. If concepts are only tools, then there are no necessary connections between them. The development of categories - the core of Hegel’s Logic - becomes superfluous.
Dewey himself later remarked on his own Hegelianism: “Hegel’s idea of cultural institutions as an ‘objective mind’ upon which individuals were dependent in the formation of their mental life fell in with the influence of Comte and of Condorcet and Bacon. The metaphysical idea that an absolute mind is manifested in social institutions dropped out; the idea, upon an empirical basis, of the power exercised by cultural environment in shaping the ideas, beliefs, and intellectual attitudes of individuals remained.”
This passage precisely shows the transformation: the metaphysical shell was stripped away, but the insight into the constitutive role of social institutions remained. Dewey secularized and empiricized Hegel - made him practically applicable, but lost the systematic depth.
”Democracy and Education” (1916) showed Dewey’s practical orientation. Education is not the appropriation of ready-made truths but continuous reconstruction of experience. The learner solves problems, develops hypotheses, tests them practically. Democracy and education belong together: both are processes of collective problem-solving.
This conception was democratic, practical, anti-authoritarian - and lost the dimension of truth as the self-knowledge of reason. Hegel had shown how thought becomes transparent to itself. Dewey was interested in successful action, not in conceptual self-knowledge.
The systematic assessment: Dewey’s pragmatist transformation captured the practical dimension of thought that remained underdeveloped in Hegel. The emphasis on problem-solving, experimentation, and democratic participation were important contributions. But the reduction of reason to instrumental problem-solving was a curtailment. The systematic perspective - how different problems are connected, how solutions generate new problems, how the whole develops - was lost.
The American reception thus shows the danger of a practice-oriented appropriation of Hegel. The emphasis on practical application led to the neglect of theoretical foundations. Dialectic went from being a method of reason’s self-knowledge to a technique of problem-solving. What was gained in practice was lost systematically.