Colonial Appropriation and Its Refutation
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The bitter irony of the reception history lies in the fact that Hegel’s philosophy of history, although explicitly critical of colonialism, was misused by colonial ideologues to justify their rule.[1] Passages about “peoples without history” were torn out of context and used as legitimation for the “civilizing mission.” The division into “natural peoples” and “historical peoples” served to justify oppression and exploitation.
This appropriation rested on several fundamental misunderstandings:
First, Hegel’s descriptive analysis (based on deficient sources) was read as normative justification. When Hegel wrote that Africa was “no historical part of the world,” he was describing the state of the historical documentation available to him, not an essential property of Africa itself.[2] Colonial ideologues read this as justification for excluding Africa from history.
Second, dialectical development was misunderstood as linear hierarchy. The Universal-Particular-Individual structure shows how the universal unfolds itself in various particularities. Every culture is a legitimate particularization of universal reason. Colonial ideologues perverted this into a ladder on which European culture stood “above” and others “below.”[3]
Third, “sublation” was understood as replacement rather than integration. Colonial rulers claimed that “primitive” cultures had to be sublated (= annihilated) within “civilized” European culture. But as we have seen, sublation in Hegel means precisely not annihilation but preservation and elevation to a higher level of complexity.[4]
Von Arnim shows in his analysis that this colonial reading contradicts not only Hegel’s explicit statements but also his method. Dialectic is an instrument of critique, not of legitimating existing power relations. It exposes contradictions and drives toward their resolution. A colonial system founded on the denial of recognition is inherently contradictory and must be dialectically overcome.[5]
On Allende’s economic policy see Stefan de Vylder: Allende’s Chile: The Political Economy of the Rise and Fall of the Unidad Popular (1976). ↩︎
On the critique see Ernesto Laclau: “Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America” in: New Left Review 67 (1971). ↩︎
On the history of liberation theology see Phillip Berryman: Liberation Theology (1987); Christopher Rowland (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology (2007). ↩︎
Gustavo Gutiérrez: Teología de la Liberación: Perspectivas (1971). English: A Theology of Liberation (1973). ↩︎
Lucio Colletti: Marxism and Hegel (1969), London: Verso, 1973; as well as Intervista, pp. 45–78. ↩︎