Hegel wrote at an ambiguous point in time. The promise of the Enlightenment had faded; in its place had come the terror of revolutionary France, and the nature-oriented reaction of romanticism in Germany. The Enlightenment had seeded both, but which was to be the true successor? Germany was racked with war, and Hegel was soon to live under hated French occupation. These facts seem somehow alive in the pages of the Phenomenology—for instance, in Hegel’s observations about the curious interrelationship between creation and destruction. An old world is destroyed as a new one rises, he noted—citing the arc that bridges the seed and the fruit, and arc which we call the plant. And noting the curious Vedic legend of the dance of Lord Shiva, who created with one foot and destroyed with the other.

In the last decade, the world has witnessed genuine and false applications of the Hegelian evolutionary concept—which provides a basis to say that Hegel and his thinking have both helped and harmed the progress of mankind. The collapse of Communism (itself a construct on Hegelian foundations) fifteen years ago shattered the old bipolar world marked by the struggle between socialist and market systems. The market perspective triumphed. However, the political adjunct of the market system, liberal democracy, has had a less clear time of it. Francis Fukuyama demonstrated the vitality of the Hegelian model with his essay on the “End of History,” published in the National Interest in 1989, with its strong note of liberal democratic triumphalism. Fukuyama also marked the Neoconservative perversion of Hegel—an adaptation of Hegelian notions to suit the Neoconservative political agenda, with its special focus on the political and social transformation of the Middle East.

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