Transition to Chapter 7: From Paris to Frankfurt
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
At the same time that Kojève, Sartre, and Lacan were reading Hegel existentially-anthropologically in Paris, another form of critique of Hegel developed in Frankfurt (and in American exile): the Frankfurt School.
It too was critical of Hegel — but for different reasons:
- Not the constitution of the subject stood at the center, but the critique of society
- Not the Phenomenology, but logic and the philosophy of right were received
- Not the struggle for recognition, but the dialectic of enlightenment and barbarism
The question that arises: did the Frankfurt School avoid the blind spot of the French reception? Or did it fall into the same aporia — only by a different path?
We will see: the Frankfurt thinkers read more of Hegel (also the logic, also the philosophy of right). But they drew different consequences: not anthropologization, but negativization. Dialectic became “negative dialectic” — critique without construction, negation without sublation.
The question will be: is that a progress compared to the French reception — or another form of the same one-sidedness? And what would a reading of Hegel have to achieve that overcomes both?