The reputation of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel has gone through a series of positive and negative reevaluations since his death almost two centuries ago. In his heyday, Hegel was both the chief philosopher of the Prussian state and an inspiration for the nascent German left. Left-Hegelians, as the antiauthoritarian faction inspired by the idealists came to be known, viewed Hegel’s philosophy as an attack on the principles which right-Hegelians believed it celebrated: the market, the state, and God. By the time Karl Marx had begun to develop his Hegel-inspired political economy, he could observe that the great German philosopher had been cast away by posterity and treated like a “dead dog.”

World War II poured cold water on the second wave of Hegel enthusiasm, which began in the late nineteenth century. On both the Left and the Right, critics charged the author of the Phenomenology of Spirit with totalitarianism and bemoaned what they saw as his rosy-eyed belief in progress, a commitment viewed as indefensible after the horrors inflicted by two great wars.

But Hegel continued to exercise an influence on intellectuals who remained committed to diverse visions of progress. On the Left, György Lukács defended a humanist variant of Hegelianism whilst on the Right, Giovanni Gentile, the house philosopher of Italian fascism, professed his own allegiance to idealism, which he rebranded as “actualism” — a creed which sought to remodel Italian society through a volkish “geist” expressed within a palingenetic totalitarian state. The Russian émigré Alexandre Kojève provided perhaps the most ambitious and prescient synthesis, reimagining Hegel as a prophet of liberal pan-European post-national federalism.