Framing: France's Paradoxical Situation After the Liberation
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
When Paris was liberated in August 1944, France stood before a philosophical paradox. The country that had suffered under German occupation became the intellectual capital of Europe — precisely because Germany had destroyed its own philosophical tradition through National Socialism. While German universities were compromised, their most significant thinkers dead, emigrated, or entangled in complicity, a philosophical culture flourished in Paris that was unique in its intensity and originality.
The prewar French reception of Hegel — Kojève’s existentialist interpretation, Hyppolite’s philological translation work — had prepared the ground. But it was only after 1945 that its full effect unfolded. The generation that had heard Kojève’s lectures in the 1930s — Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille — now stood at the beginning of its most productive phase. They had lived through the occupation, the Resistance, the liberation. Hegel’s categories — recognition, master and servant, labor, death, freedom — were no longer academic concepts for them, but existential experiences.
At the same time, this reception was selective from the outset. It concentrated almost exclusively on the Phenomenology of Spirit, while the Science of Logic — Hegel’s actual magnum opus — was largely ignored. Hegel became the thinker of negativity, of alienation, of conflict. The question that runs through this chapter is: Was this productive one-sidedness a necessary step — or a narrowing that had to be overcome?