Joachim Ritter - Hegel and the French Revolution (1957)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Intellectual-Historical Constellation
Joachim Ritter (1903-1974) faced a double challenge. As a professor in Münster in the 1950s, he had to grapple both with the Nazi past of German philosophy and with the massive critique of Hegel coming out of the Anglo-American world. Popper had declared Hegel, in 1945, an “enemy of the open society.” In Germany itself, existentialist currents (Jaspers, Heidegger) initially dominated, rejecting Hegel as a systematic thinker.
Ritter’s project was a defense of Hegel through political reinterpretation. But what exactly was he responding to? Three interconnected accusations.
First: that Hegel had glorified the Prussian authoritarian state and thereby philosophically legitimized the German spirit of subservience.
Second: that Hegel’s philosophy of history, with its talk of the “end of history,” was proto-totalitarian—that it legitimized the status quo as rational and excluded radical critique.
Third: that the Hegelians had failed during the Revolution of 1848 and thereby paved the way toward the German catastrophe.
Against all three accusations, Ritter developed a counter-narrative grounded in thorough historical research, one that at the same time contained a systematic thesis about Hegel’s philosophy of modernity.
The Central Thesis: Hegel as Philosopher of the French Revolution
Ritter’s core argument can be summarized in one sentence: Hegel was not the philosopher of Prussian reaction, but the philosophical defender of the French Revolution—including, and especially, after its Terror and after Napoleon.[1]
This thesis was surprising in 1957. Hegel was known as the Berlin state philosopher who had written in the Philosophy of Right (1821): “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.”[2] This formula seemed to justify the status quo.
Ritter now showed that this reading fundamentally misunderstands Hegel’s intention. What Hegel meant was not: “everything that exists is rational and therefore to be accepted.” Rather: “only what is rational is actual—what merely exists without being rational is unreal, illusory, destined to perish.”[3]
To substantiate this, Ritter marshaled a wealth of historical evidence.
The Hegelians as a revolutionary force: Eduard Gans, the most brilliant of Hegel’s students, was Jewish and fought for Jewish emancipation.[4] Heinrich Heine, the poet and political journalist, professed his allegiance to Hegel throughout his life.[5] Ferdinand Lassalle, co-founder of the German labor movement, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Heraclitus in the Hegelian spirit.[6] Karl Marx—the most radical critic of capitalism—developed his method out of Hegel’s dialectic.
The Hegelians as defenders of the Jews: during the Hep-Hep riots of 1819, when antisemitic pogroms swept through German cities, it was Hegelians who stood protectively before their Jewish fellow citizens. Gans fought, legally and in print, for the equal rights of Jews.[7] This was no marginal phenomenon but followed from Hegel’s principle of mutual recognition: if freedom is real only as recognized freedom, this entails the legal equality of all.
The Hegelians against reactionary German nationalism: while Fichte, Arndt, and Jahn preached a völkisch German nationalism—later taken up by Wagner and ultimately instrumentalized by National Socialism—the Hegelians upheld an Enlightenment universalism.[8] For them, the French Revolution—despite the Terror and Napoleonic dictatorship—was the world-historical breakthrough of reason: the declaration that all human beings possess equal rights, not through divine grace or birth into an estate, but through their humanity.
The Compensation Theory: Hegel’s Answer to the Division of Modernity
But Ritter went beyond this historical rehabilitation. He developed a systematic interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of modernity that became known as the “compensation theory.”[9]
His starting observation: modern society is marked by a fundamental division. It separates private life from the public sphere, subjectivity from objectivity, inwardness from external order. Modern individuals live in different spheres that fall apart from one another: at work they function according to the laws of the division of labor and efficiency, in private life they seek personal fulfillment, as citizens they submit to general laws.
This division cannot be overcome—at least not by a return to pre-modern unity. The ancient polis, in which the individual was wholly absorbed into the community, is irretrievably lost. Modern freedom—the freedom of the individual to shape his own life—has its price: alienation.
Hegel’s solution, according to Ritter, lies not in overcoming this division but in compensating for it. Art, religion, and philosophy allow modern human beings to regain the lost unity, at least temporarily—not in reality, but in the medium of spirit. In contemplating a work of art, in religious experience, in philosophical thought, human beings reconcile themselves with reality—without changing that reality itself.
This means: Hegel is not a revolutionary thinker who wants to overthrow modern society. He is a conservative thinker who affirms it—though not uncritically. Modern society is, for Hegel, the most rational historically achieved form because it makes individual freedom possible. But it is not perfect. Alienation remains. Philosophy cannot abolish it, only make it conscious and thereby make it bearable.
What Is True in This? Ritter’s Lasting Insights
Ritter’s interpretation contains several insights that have proven fruitful.
The rehabilitation of historical Hegelianism: Ritter demonstrated irrefutably that the Hegelians of the nineteenth century were a progressive, often revolutionary force. They were not the reactionaries that they were reviled as by conservatives and despised as by the radical left. This historical correction was overdue and necessary.
The defense of modernity: Ritter’s Hegel defends modern society not despite but because of its contradictions. The separation of state and society, of public and private, is not a deficiency but the condition of individual freedom. Totalitarian systems are characterized precisely by their attempt to abolish this separation—they want to capture the “whole person” and leave no private space of retreat.
The recognition of irreconcilability: Ritter defends Hegel against utopian readings. Hegel promised no classless society, no abolition of all contradictions in an earthly paradise. The division of modernity is real and remains. Philosophy cannot overcome it through revolutionary practice, only render it transparent through reflection.
These insights mattered for postwar German society. They made it possible to defend Hegel against his National Socialist appropriators while also distancing him from his Marxist radicalizers. Hegel became the thinker of an enlightened, liberal, but non-revolutionary modernity.
The Internal Contradictions: Where Ritter Reaches His Limits
But precisely the strength of Ritter’s interpretation—its political unambiguity—reveals itself, on closer inspection, as a weakness. For Ritter achieves the rehabilitation of Hegel at the price of a one-sided reading that must blank out central dimensions of Hegel’s thought.
First contradiction: the neutralization of critique. Ritter’s Hegel is a thinker who affirms modern society. The compensation theory implies: the contradictions of modernity cannot be abolished, only endured. Art, religion, and philosophy serve to make alienation bearable—they do not change the conditions themselves.
But is this really Hegel’s position? Reading the Phenomenology of Spirit, one finds there no gentle reconciliation but a radical critique: the unhappy consciousness, the divided consciousness, the master-slave dialectic—all these are shapes that drive their own contradictions forward and thereby lead to new forms of freedom. The dialectic is not a justification of the existing order but a critique that presses toward change.
Here it becomes apparent: Ritter immunizes Hegel against revolutionary readings by making him a conservative thinker. But in doing so, he misses the tension within Hegel’s thought itself—the tension between affirmation and critique, between recognition of modernity and its transcendence.
Second contradiction: the suppression of practice. Ritter’s compensation theory presupposes that modern society is unchangeable in its basic structures. The separation of state and society, of labor and life, is a given. Philosophy cannot abolish it, only reconcile it in the medium of spirit.
But this generates a performative tension: if philosophy only compensates, if it merely makes contradictions bearable without changing them—is it not itself part of the alienation? Does it not become ideology, an “opiate” that eases the pain while leaving the causes untouched?
Marx’s critique of Hegel targeted exactly this point: Hegel’s philosophy reconciles in thought what remains unreconciled in reality. “Sublation” happens only in the mind, not in social reality. Ritter’s interpretation of Hegel confirms exactly this critique—but no longer raises it as a problem, instead celebrating it as a solution.
What is missing here, then, is what Hegel himself regarded as constitutive of philosophy: its practical dimension. The Philosophy of Right is not only about compensation but about the actual shaping of institutions that make freedom possible. State, law, civil society are not given and unchangeable but structures to be shaped.
Third contradiction: the narrowing to Europe. Ritter’s thesis that Hegel was the philosopher of the French Revolution has an unspoken premise: that the French Revolution is the culmination point of world history, that modern European society represents the highest form of human freedom.
But here the question shifts: what about the colonies? What about the people who were subjugated, enslaved, exploited in the name of this very “reason” that supposedly proclaimed universal freedom? The French Revolution proclaimed the rights of man—while simultaneously maintaining slavery. Hegel himself uncritically adopted the colonial perspective of his time when he dismissed Africa as a continent “without history.”
Ritter does not thematize these contradictions. His interpretation of Hegel is Eurocentric—it takes European modernity as the standard and blanks out how this modernity rested on the exploitation of other regions of the world. This is not an accusation from today’s political correctness but follows from Hegel’s own principles: if freedom is mutual recognition, then it cannot be won at the expense of others. The European “freedom” that rested on colonialism and slavery was no real freedom but—to speak with Hegel—unreal, because contradictory.
Fourth contradiction: the defanging of the dialectic. Ritter’s interpretation of Hegel makes Hegel acceptable to postwar German society by de-radicalizing him. The dialectic is no longer understood as a method of immanent critique but as a reconciliation of opposites in spirit.
But this causes the dialectic to lose its critical force. Hegel’s method consisted in thinking through each position until it reveals its own limits, until it contradicts itself and thereby presses toward a higher position. This is no harmonious reconciliation but a painful movement that leaves nothing as it was.
Ritter’s compensation theory, by contrast, implies: the oppositions remain, but we can live with them. This is no longer sublation in the Hegelian sense but resignation—disguised as philosophical wisdom.
Systematic Placement: Ritter’s Location in the History of Reception
Ritter stands at an intersection. He rehabilitates Hegel against totalitarian-theory accusations—and thereby prepares the ground for the later Hegel renaissance. Without Ritter, the Anglo-Saxon analytic reception of Hegel (Taylor, Pippin, Brandom) would hardly have been received in Germany. Without Ritter, the Frankfurt School (Habermas, Honneth) could not have connected with Hegel.
But at the same time, Ritter narrows Hegel. He turns him into a conservative thinker of modernity who wants only to make its contradictions bearable, no longer to criticize them. The revolutionary potential of the dialectic is tamed, the practical dimension of philosophy neutralized, universalist critique restricted to Europe.
What remains of Ritter? The historical correction: the Hegelians were progressive, not reactionary. The systematic insight: modernity has contradictions that cannot simply be abolished. But also the warning: a philosophy that only compensates has lost its critical force.
The task of a contemporary reception of Hegel would be to preserve Ritter’s insights while overcoming his narrowings: to recognize modernity without affirming it. To take its contradictions seriously without stopping there. To recover practice without lapsing into revolutionary utopias. To overcome Eurocentrism without sinking into cultural-relativist arbitrariness.
Joachim Ritter, “Hegel and the French Revolution” (1957), in: Metaphysik und Politik. Studien zu Aristoteles und Hegel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1969, pp. 183–255. The central thesis is found on pp. 183–187. ↩︎
G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Preface, in: Werke in 20 Bänden, Vol. 7, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970, p. 24. ↩︎
Ritter, “Hegel und die Französische Revolution,” pp. 188–192. On the distinction between actuality and mere existence see also: Otto Pöggeler, “Hegels Bestimmung der Philosophie,” in: Hegel-Studien 3 (1965), pp. 168–180. ↩︎
On Eduard Gans see: Norbert Waszek, Eduard Gans (1797-1839). Hegelianer - Jude - Europäer. Texte und Dokumente, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 1991. On the role of Jewish Hegelians: Michael Theunissen, “Die verdrängte Intersubjektivität in Hegels Philosophie des Rechts,” in: Dieter Henrich/Rolf-Peter Horstmann (eds.), Hegels Philosophie des Rechts. Die Theorie der Rechtsformen und ihre Logik, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1982, pp. 317–381. ↩︎
Heinrich Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1835), in: Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb, Vol. 5, Munich: Hanser 1976, pp. 505–641. Heine there calls Hegel a “great Jacobin” and defends him against conservative appropriation. ↩︎
Ferdinand Lassalle, Die Philosophie Herakleitos des Dunklen von Ephesos (1858), 2 vols., Berlin: Franz Duncker 1858. On its significance for the labor movement: Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1968, pp. 196–220. ↩︎
On the historical role of the Hegelians in defending Jewish rights see: Ritter, “Hegel und die Französische Revolution,” pp. 212–218; more comprehensively: Jacob Katz, Aus dem Ghetto in die bürgerliche Gesellschaft. Jüdische Emanzipation 1770-1870, Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum 1986, pp. 142–168. ↩︎
On the German-nationalist reaction and its later effects see: George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin/Vienna: Ullstein 1976, pp. 53–87; on the explicit line of continuity see Fascism as a Philosophical Challenge - A Systematic Analysis. ↩︎
The compensation theory is developed in detail in: Joachim Ritter, “Hegel und die französische Revolution,” pp. 225–242. See also: Hermann Lübbe, “Säkularisierung als geschichtsphilosophische Kategorie,” in: Hans Blumenberg et al., Die Philosophie und die Frage nach dem Fortschritt, Munich: Pustet 1964, pp. 221–239; Odo Marquard, “Kompensation. Überlegungen zu einer Verlaufsfigur geschichtlicher Prozesse,” in: Aesthetica und Anaesthetica. Philosophische Überlegungen, Paderborn: Schöningh 1989, pp. 64–81. ↩︎