Afterward, a solution to restore public order is proposed. The theory goes like so: dark forces contrive a crisis, which causes outrage or instills fear in the public. Internet conspiracy theorists have interpreted Hegel’s philosophy as an instrument of social control used by a shadowy cabal bent on implementing a New World Order. Bertrand Russell remarked in The History of Western Philosophy that Hegel illustrated “an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences.”įrom dogmatic arch-rationalist to bloodthirsty warmonger, the charges against Hegel are diverse and far-reaching, much to the frustration of contemporary Hegel scholars, who have long sought to dispel some of the myths associated with their field of study.īut on paranoid subreddits and in dark corners of Twitter, Hegel is being discussed in an entirely different way one even stranger than billionaire weirdo Elon Musk’s contention that Hegel was the inspiration behind the video game Fallout: New Vegas. Over 100 years later, Karl Popper wrote in The Open Society and its Enemies that Hegel was a proto-fascist apologist for the totalitarian Prussian state.

Influential fellow 19th-century philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling disparaged Hegel and, some say, grossly misrepresented his philosophy. Hegel has been subject to countless smears and distortions since his death. It isn’t entirely Hegel’s fault that his ideas are not widely understood though it doesn’t help that German Idealism, the philosophical movement to which he belonged, used highly obtuse language that’s even more difficult to understand in translation. In 2021, Hegel’s vast body of work remains mostly inaccessible to non-specialists. Legend has it that when the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was nearing his final moments in November of 1831, he purportedly uttered the following words: “Only one man ever understood me, and even he didn’t understand me.” This assessment, like many of those offered by the notoriously obtuse and complicated German philosopher, can be applied today.

Hegel dialectic pdf