The Paradoxical Situation of Postwar Philosophy in Germany
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
While Hegel was accused in the Anglo-American world of being the intellectual forerunner of totalitarianism, a remarkable countermovement was taking place in Germany itself. This is paradoxical at first sight: precisely in the country that had produced National Socialism, a rehabilitation of Hegel began in the 1950s—one that emphasized his liberal, Enlightenment legacy.
This movement was no naive restoration. It was carried by philosophers who had experienced fascism—some in exile, some in “inner emigration,” but all confronted with the question: how could this have happened? And their answer was: not because of Hegel, but despite Hegel. Not because Germany was too Hegelian, but because it was not Hegelian enough.
The central figure of this renaissance was Joachim Ritter. His essay “Hegel and the French Revolution” (1957) became the founding document of a new interpretation of Hegel, one that deliberately argued against the totalitarian-theory appropriation of his work. But this rehabilitation came at a price: it turned Hegel into a conservative thinker of bourgeois modernity, one who did not wish to overcome its contradictions but only to “compensate” for them.