Introduction: Hegel’s Thought in Europe

Abstract

Rankings of all kinds are one of the joys of the internet age: a vote entitled ‘So who is the most important philosopher of the past 200 years’, cast in 2009 among 600 readers of an US-based philosophy blog,¹ revealed G. W. F. Hegel to be sixth, after Wittgenstein, Frege, Russell, Mill and Quinte, then followed by Kripke, Nietzsche, Marx and Kierkegaard. Hegel is the first thinker on the list who would be labelled ‘continental’ rather than ‘analytic’, and he is also the oldest of the top six. One wonders, however, whether those who gave Hegel a high score in this tournament did so for the same reasons. Did they vote for the metaphysician who developed a system of pure speculative thought that claimed to describe the movement of pure thinking? Or did they remember the achievements of the philosopher of art who wrote extensively about the history of artistic representation from ancient times to the nineteenth century? Was their judgment one about the political philosopher who celebrated the ‘reasonable state’ in which subjective and objective freedom are united? Or did Hegel receive their votes because he scored in so many fields, as a decathlete of philosophy, as it were, and maybe one of the last ones in the history of Western philosophy?