Hegel as a Pioneer of Empirical Cultural Research
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
One of the greatest ironies of Hegel criticism is that he, of all people, is accused of lacking knowledge of non-European cultures. In fact, Hegel was one of the first philosophers ever to engage systematically and empirically with non-European cultures.[1] Before him, this had occurred mainly within theological studies, philology, and history - and there mostly confined to the cultures of the Bible and antiquity.
Hegel evaluated every report on other religions and cultures available to him. He read travel accounts, missionary writings, early ethnographic studies.[2] In his lectures on the philosophy of history, on the philosophy of religion, and on aesthetics, we find detailed engagements with China, India, Persia, Egypt, Africa, and America. His approach here was just as empirical as in his philosophy of nature: he was interested in the phenomena, wanted to understand them, order them, grasp them in their particularity.
Peter-Anton von Arnim, in his pioneering article “Hegel contre le racisme,” worked out Hegel’s explicitly anti-racist positions.[3] Against the racial theory of his time, which sought to derive spiritual hierarchies from physical characteristics, Hegel stated unambiguously: “Nature is not so powerless that it would bring the differences among rational kinds only to these superficial determinations [physical characteristics].”[4] The question of whether all human beings descend from one pair or several - a central debate between monogenists and polygenists - he dismissed as philosophically irrelevant: “This is of no concern to us in philosophy at all.”[5]
Instead, Hegel emphasized the universal rationality of all human beings: “Human beings are therefore rational in themselves; herein lies the possibility of the equality of right for all human beings.”[6] This position led him to an explicit critique of slavery and colonialism. He characterized European expansion as unreasonable and criticized the treatment of colonized peoples.[7]
The problem was not Hegel’s method or a lack of interest in other cultures. The problem was the quality of his sources. Hegel did not recognize - perhaps could not recognize - how deeply the material was filtered through colonial prejudice.[8] The reports he read were written by missionaries, colonial officials, and traders who brought their own interests and prejudices into their accounts. When missionaries reported that Africans had “no religion,” they meant: no Christian religion. When colonial officials spoke of “having no history,” they meant: no written tradition after the European model.
Salazar Bondy, op. cit., p. 89. ↩︎
Enrique Dussel: Philosophy of Liberation (1977); Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion (1998). As an introduction: Linda Martín Alcoff & Eduardo Mendieta (eds.): Thinking from the Underside of History: Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation (2000). ↩︎
Dussel: Philosophy of Liberation (1985), Ch. 2. He develops this against Hegel’s “totality.” ↩︎
On the “analectical method” see Dussel: Método para una filosofía de la liberación (1974). ↩︎
On dependency theory see Cristóbal Kay: Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment (1989); Fernando Henrique Cardoso & Enzo Faletto: Dependency and Development in Latin America (1979). ↩︎
Raúl Prebisch: The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems (1950). On the CEPAL school see Joseph L. Love: “Raúl Prebisch and the Origins of the Doctrine of Unequal Exchange” in: Latin American Research Review 15:3 (1980). ↩︎
André Gunder Frank: Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967). Frank was German but taught in Chile and became a voice of the Latin American left. ↩︎
Ruy Mauro Marini: Dialéctica de la dependencia (1973). On the debate see Jaime Osorio: Teoría marxista de la dependencia (2016). ↩︎