Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

Warren Ward looks at the history of a man who looked at the history of the world.

- Warren Ward

G.W.F. Hegel was the leading figure in the nineteenth-century movement known as ‘German Idealism’. These idealists had responded to Immanuel Kant’s work in a manner that Kant would never have approved. Kant believed that although the external world existed beyond our experience of it, we could never know it as it is ‘in itself’ – we could only ever know the world as shaped by our minds to give us our experiences of it. Hegel built on this conclusion to argue that the only thing we can therefore be sure of existing is the consciousness with which we experience the world. So he rephrased the world in terms of consciousness – which is what ‘idealism’ means.

Paradoxically, the most significant legacy of Hegel’s work has been his influence on Marx, a dyed-in-the-wool materialist. That was because Marx was captivated by Hegel’s use of Heraclitus’s idea of ‘dialectic’ to explain how society has unfolded throughout history – of which more later.

Hegel’s Early Stages

Hegel was born at a highly significant time in history, just as the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire was coming to an end. And, within twenty years of Hegel’s birth, the barricades and muskets of French revolutionaries would sweep aside a millennium of medieval feudalism to usher in new foundations of democratic republicanism that endure to this day. These dramatic events would leave a lasting impression on the young Hegel, and greatly influence his ideas.