7. The Revival of Hegelianism. In 1860 a new
Hegelian periodical, Der Gedanke (Berlin, 1860-84)
was founded under the editorship of Carl L. Michelet.
Among its German subscribers were Göschel and David
Strauss, Ferdinand Lassalle and Rosenkranz, Moses
Hess, Lasson, and Zeller. When subscriptions were
asked for in 1870 for a bust to commemorate Hegel,
subscriptions came (among others) from J. H. Stirling,
T. H. Green, Caird, Wallace, and Benjamin Jowett, and
Ruge responded from his home in Brighton. There were
members in France, Great Britain, Italy, Holland,
Scandinavia, and the U.S.A. In Germany Michelet and
Rosenkranz continued to be the leading Hegelian
writers. Michelet contributed to Der Gedanke a series
of “world-historical surveys” (in which he castigated
Napoleon III) and defended the “philosophy of the
deed of our friend and member Count von Ciesz-
kowski” (Der Gedanke, 1861). He published Naturrecht
oder Rechts-Philosophie als die praktische Philosophie,
2 vols. (Berlin, 1866). The influence of Hegel's Philo-
sophie des Rechts on this book is considerable, as to
both form and content. But Michelet objected to
Hegel's defence of hereditary monarchy, arguing that
“in our times the Idea has become more stable than
nature,” that “the vote has become more stable than
legitimacy,” and that as mind masters the world “what
is the most rational becomes also the most useful.” (We
may note the Hegelian, nonempiricist distinction be-
tween rationality and the satisfaction of wants, and the
idea that since voting is established it is right.) Michelet
also argued, following Hegel, that freedom of persons
necessitates freedom of contract, and, going beyond
Hegel, that this necessitates universal free trade. He
also held that the incorporation of one people by
another can never be justified, but that what is unjust
from the standpoint of the Law of Nations can be just
from the standpoint of world history. (The idea of a
constantly rationalized and developing world history
is a theme of many Hegelians.) A state can be defeated
by others who become “the bearers of civilization”
(Träger der Bildung), but this should not prevent the
losers from continuing their internal life “so that the
natural limitations of their spirit still give expression
to a side of the universal human spirit” (II, 215).
J. H. Stirling's The Secret of Hegel, 2 vols. (London,
1865) helped to introduce Hegel to the English-speak-
ing world. Although he makes a defense of Hegel
against Haym's political aspersions, Stirling is mainly
concerned with the Hegelian logic and epistemology,
and to some extent with Hegelian religion. He refers
to Strauss and Feuerbach as the “Atheistico-Material-
istic set,” and makes a good attempt to expound the
outlines of Hegel's Christology: “Hegel ascribes to
Christ the revelation that God is man or that man is
God.... Before Christ, God was external to man, and
worship or obedience to him consisted in external
ceremonies. But since Christ, God is inward to man:
he is our conscience. We no longer ask the will of God
from external oracles, but from our own selves: that
is, we are now a law unto ourselves, we are to our
own selves in the place of God, we are ourselves God,
God and man are identified” (I, 149).
Stirling was the first of a number of Scottish Hegel-
ians, of whom Edward Caird and William Wallace are
the best known, and a number of Scottish ministers
contributed to Hegel's bust. T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley,
and Bernard Bosanquet, however, partly because of
their connections with Oxford, exerted a greater influ-
ence. All three thought that Hegel had refuted the
empiricist and atomic (or pluralist) metaphysics they
attributed to J. S. Mill and the utilitarians, and all three
held that individual men are essentially related to the
community to which they belong. Green argued that
the state should, by social legislation, enable individuals
to make the best of themselves, Bosanquet that the state
was necessary to make ultimate decisions—Hegel's
“majesty,” perhaps, in nonmonarchical form. Bosan-
quet lived into the period when socialism was being
publicly discussed in England, and in a lecture given
to the Fabian Society in 1890 he quoted Hegel's justifi-
cation of private property in the
Philosophie des
Rechts, and gave no comfort to his state-socialist lis-
teners (“Individualism and Socialism” in
The Civilisa-
tion of Christendom, London, 1899). Bradley employed
Hegelian concepts (e.g., the concrete universal) to show
that patriotism and retribution are not superseded. At
the end of
Ethical Studies (Oxford, 1876) he writes of
religious faith as the belief “that you too are really
one with the divine,” and quotes Böhme to this effect.
He also discusses the notion of worshipping “Human-
ity,” as advocated by the positivist Frederick Harrison.
Bradley, quoting Trendelenburg in his support, ques-
tions whether all human beings, past and present, make
a single being, and argues that even if they did, it would
not be worthy of worship unless it were more than
human. Green, in an early paper, “An Essay on Chris-
tian Dogma” (
Works, ed. Nettleship, Vol. III, London,
1888), argues on Hegelian-Straussian lines that the
central Christian doctrines represent profound philo-
sophical truths, but in his review in 1880 of a book
in which J. Caird defended Hegel's philosophy of reli-
gion he objects that it is not credible that the individual
could be identified with God. Bosanquet (
What Reli-
gion Is, London, 1920) says that “religion just
is the
weld of finite and infinite,” but although this is Hegel-
ian, Bosanquet does not link it with Christian doctrine
even to the extent that Strauss had done.
The influence of Hegelianism in the United States
can be seen in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy
(St. Louis, 1867-93), edited by William T. Harris. In
the first issue there is a preface by the editor who
announces that there will be discussions of positivism,
articles on Faust and Beethoven, and a defense of
Speculative Philosophy. “The day of simple experi-
ence,” he writes, “is past.” Harris thought that hitherto
“national unity seemed an external mechanism,” but
now people were reaching “a consciousness of the
other essential phase, and each individual recognizes
his substantial side to be the State as such.” This was
Hegelian political philosophy much as Bradley under-
stood it nine years later, but the journal was more
concerned with literature, metaphysics, aesthetics, and
the philosophy of religion than with politics. Harris
contributed a great deal himself, including translations
from Hegel's Logic, sympathetic criticisms of Herbert
Spencer, and a defense of the immortality of the soul:
“But if anything is, then there must exist the Absolute
and its reflection; and its reflection implies immortal
beings” (Journal..., 4, 2 [1870], III). Hegel himself
had not been explicit on this subject, but Göschel had
been, and chapters from his Von den Beweisen für die
Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele im Lichte der
spekulative Philosophie (Berlin, 1835) were published
in English in the Journal in 1877 and 1883-85. Josiah
Royce, influenced though he was by German Idealism
as a whole, can hardly be called a thoroughgoing
Hegelian in his political or moral philosophy. For
although his Philosophy of Loyalty (New York, 1908)
stresses the need for the individual to find his station
in society and identify himself with a community, his
admiration for loyalty to lost causes is contrary to the
main tendency of Hegelianism whether of the Right
or of the Left. For according to Hegelianism, reason
now or in the future must master the world. It is
interesting to note that in The Philosophy of Loyalty
(p. 238) Royce uses Hegel's phrase “the self-estrange-
ment of the spirit” to express the loss of individuality
suffered when people become mere units in some
over-large community.
