Interim Assessment: French Hegel Reception at the End of the War (1945)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
At the end of the Second World War, the French reception of Hegel stood at a turning point. What had been achieved? What remained open?
Achievements up to 1945
First: the existential discovery. Through Wahl and Kojève, Hegel had turned from a German system-philosopher into a thinker of fundamental existential experiences. The Phenomenology was no longer read as a metaphysical system but as an account of human self-becoming.
Second: the anthropological turn. Kojève’s lectures had shown that the Phenomenology could be read as anthropology. The master-slave dialectic, labor, recognition — all of these were categories that could be applied to concrete human existence.
Third: the textual foundation. Hyppolite’s translation had created the French text. Hegel was no longer accessible only through German intermediaries or inadequate partial translations but could be studied in the original.
Fourth: productive distance. The French reception was not burdened by the German nationalist appropriation of Hegel. It could read Hegel anew — existentially, phenomenologically, politically — without the weight of the German tradition. This distance proved productive.
The Open Questions
But much remained open and unresolved in 1945:
First: the relation to the Logic. The French reception had concentrated almost exclusively on the Phenomenology. The Science of Logic — Hegel’s actual chief work — remained largely disregarded. Could Hegel’s philosophy be reduced to the Phenomenology? Or did this mean losing what was essential?
Second: systematic integration. Kojève’s anthropological reading and Hyppolite’s philological work stood side by side, unintegrated. How were they related to each other? Was a synthesis possible?
Third: the political dimension. The war years had shown the political relevance of Hegel. But what would this look like after 1945? Was Hegel’s philosophy of the state still tenable after the experience of totalitarianism?
Fourth: the impact on the next generation. The participants in Kojève’s seminar — Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille — stood in 1945 at the beginning of their most productive phase. How would they develop, transform, or overcome Hegel?
The French Exception
The French reception of Hegel in the 1930s and early 1940s was an exception in the history of Hegel interpretation. While in Germany Hegel scholarship was compromised under National Socialism, while in the Soviet Union the dialectic had hardened into state ideology, while in England and America Hegel was denounced as a totalitarian thinker — in France a creative, productive, if one-sided, rediscovery took place.
This exception had its reasons: distance from the German tradition, openness to existential questions, the philosophical quality of the protagonists (Wahl, Kojève, Hyppolite). But it also had a price: the reduction to anthropology, the neglect of the Logic, the fixation on the Phenomenology.
The postwar period would show whether this productive one-sidedness could be overcome — or whether it would lead to a lasting narrowing of the French reception of Hegel. (-> continued in Volume 2)