Reorientation - Between Restoration and Revolution
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Despite the shock, the reception of Hegel did not entirely break off. On the contrary—the interwar period saw an international intensification, though under changed circumstances. The reaction to the catastrophe took place on several levels:
The Philological Turn in Editing - Back to the Texts
Paradoxically, the shock of the war led to greater philological sobriety. Instead of speculative grand interpretations, the central question became: what had Hegel actually said? Hermann Nohl had already edited the Theological Writings of Hegel’s Youth in 1907, thereby opening up a new image of Hegel. Georg Lasson began systematic new editions of the major works. Theodor Haering was preparing a monumental comprehensive study.
This work was not merely technical, but philosophically significant. For which texts count as “authentically Hegelian” determines which Hegel is read. The distinction between Hegel’s own words and the additions of the student-editors became a precondition for serious interpretation. (Treated in detail in Chapter 23.1)
Institutional Consolidation - The International Hegel Society
In 1930, the International Hegel Society was founded, based in The Hague—a symbol of internationalization. Significantly, it was founded not in Germany, but in the neutral Netherlands. The society organized congresses, brought together various national traditions. This plurality was productive—but it also led to fragmentation, since the various images of Hegel often existed side by side without really being mediated with one another. (Treated in detail in Chapter 23.6)
The Marxist Renewal - György Lukács
György Lukács (1885-1971) was the most significant Marxist interpreter of Hegel in the twentieth century. His History and Class Consciousness (1923) accomplished the theoretically most significant reappropriation of Hegelian logic.
Lukács’s basic thesis: historical materialism is not a philosophy of nature (as in Engels), but a method of social analysis. Dialectical logic is universally valid—but it realizes itself historically in social practice, not in nature.
The category of totality stood at the center. Truth arises only through the grasping of the whole—not as a static system, but as processual mediation. Bourgeois science splinters reality into isolated facts. The dialectical method grasps the connections, the mediations, totality as process.
Reification was Lukács’s central concept for the critique of bourgeois society. The commodity form shapes not only the economy, but all areas of life. Human relations appear as relations between things. This critique was originally Marxist—but Lukács showed its Hegelian root in the critique of alienation.
The immediate impact was limited. The book was condemned by the Communist Party in 1924. It was regarded as “idealist,” as a deviation from orthodox Marxism. Lukács himself later distanced himself from his early positions. But the book continued to have an effect underground.
The limit: Lukács reduced Hegel’s universal logic to the logic of social history. The logic of being, the philosophy of nature, remained outside consideration. This reduction was politically motivated—only society can be changed, not nature. But systematically it was a truncation.
On Lukács’s later works—The Young Hegel (1948) and The Destruction of Reason (1954)—as well as on the Lukács school, see Volume II, Ch. 17, Hungarian Marxism.
Anticipation: Dialectical Theology (Karl Barth)
A further reorientation came from theology. Karl Barth (1886-1968) began with his Epistle to the Romans (1919, radically revised 1922) a theological revolution that explicitly turned against every mediation of God and world, revelation and reason, faith and culture.
Barth reacted to the collapse of liberal theology. The German theologians—including his own teachers—had shared the war enthusiasm of 1914. They had confused culture with the Gospel, the German spirit with the Holy Spirit. Against this confusion, Barth set the “wholly other” God, who is not exhausted in any culture, does not realize himself in any history, is not mediated by any dialectic.
The critique of Hegel was central. Hegel’s reconciliation of God and world appeared as the subtlest form of humanity’s self-deification. The dialectic, which sublates all opposites, also sublates the opposition between Creator and creature—and thereby misses the essence of faith.
The paradox of the name: Barth’s theology was called “dialectical theology”—although it turned against Hegel’s dialectic. “Dialectic” here means not mediation, but holding fast to contradiction: God is God, and man is man—and no synthesis abolishes this difference.
(Dialectical theology is treated in detail in Volume II, Ch. 2—here only as an anticipation, since Barth’s beginnings fall in the immediate postwar period.)
Anticipation: The Frankfurt School
The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923—initially as a center of Marxist research, then under Max Horkheimer (director from 1930) as a site of a “critical theory” that sought to combine Marx, Freud, and sociology.
The reception of Hegel was central to the project. Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse—all were shaped by Hegel, all engaged critically with him. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) was at once the fulfillment and the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of history: reason, which realizes itself in history, turns into its opposite.
(The Frankfurt School is treated in detail in Volume II—here only as an anticipation, since the founding of the Institute falls in the interwar period.)