Major Works

• Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes)

  - Recommended translation: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. First published in 1807.
  Excerpt from the Preface: Besides, it is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the… More

• Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts)

  - Recommended translation: Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. In addition, the translation by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942) is widely used in existing Hegel scholarship. The Nisbet translation is recommended because it is more literal, and includes the canonical "additions" of Hegel's student Eduard Gans in the body of the text where they are relevant. First published in 1820.
  Excerpt from the Preface: This treatise, therefore, in so far as it deals with political science, shall be nothing other than an attempt to comprehend and portray the state as an inherently rational entity. As a philosophical composition, it must distance… More

• Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences Part 3: Philosophy of Spirit (Wissenschaft des Geistes)

  Excerpt: The knowledge of Mind is the highest and hardest, just because it is the most ‘concrete’ of sciences. The significance of that ‘absolute’ commandment, Know thyself – whether we look at it in itself or under the… More

• Lectures on the Philosophy of World History

  - Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
  From the publisher: An English translation of Hegel’s introduction to his lectures on the philosophy of history, based directly on the standard German edition by Johannes Hoffmeister, first published in 1955. The previous English translation, by J.… More

• Lectures on the History of Philosophy

  - Recommended edition: Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Humanity Books, 1989.
  From the publisher: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was not only a great philosopher but a great historian of philosophy. He invented the idea of the philosophical tradition as a discussion among philosophers extending over centuries centering on a few main… More

Commentary

• Reason and Revolution

  - Marcuse, Herbert. Reason and Revolution, new edition. Boston, 1960.
  Excerpt: Any recognition of individual freedom consequently seemed to involve tearing down the ancient democracy. ‘That very subjective freedom which constitutes the principle and determines the peculiar form of freedom in our world – which forms… More

• From Hegel to Nietzsche

  - Lowith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche, tr. David E. Green. New York, 1964.
  Excerpt: … For Hegel, the spirit as substance and subject of history was the absolute and basic concept of his theory of being. Thus natural philosophy is just as much a spiritual discipline as are the philosophies of the state, art, religion, and… More

• The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought

  - Fackenheim, Emil L. The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought. Bloomington and London, 1967
  Excerpt: Hegelian “science” is marked by an unprecedented presumptuousness. The Encyclopedia [of Philosophic Sciences] is no mere conceptual philosophical system inclusive of other conceptual philosophical systems and related to Reality as its… More

• Idealism, Politics and History

  - Kelly, George Armstrong. Idealism, Politics and History. Cambridge, 1969.
  Excerpt: [Hegel] aspired to be the Aristotle of modern thought and the Proclus of Christian speculation. His deep involvement in the structure of knowledge and the rationale of all historical life – whose qualitative opposition he mediated with his… More

• An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel

  - Alexandre Kojeve, An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols, Basic Books, 1969.
  Man’s humanity “comes to light” only in risking his life to satisfy his human Desire – that is, his Desire directed toward another Desire. Now, to desire a Desire is to want to substitute oneself for the value desired by this Desire.… More

• Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives

  - Pelczynski, Z. Ed. Hegel’s Political Philosophy. Cambridge, 1971.
  The following excerpt is from the editor’s own essay, “The Hegelian conception of the state.” It is noteworthy that the concept of the state as Hegel first elaborated it has all the clarity and simplicity of Hobbes’… More

• Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom

  - Rosen, Stanley. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom. New Haven, 1974.
  Excerpt: Stoic and Skeptic We have now arrived at the threshold of history in the proper sense: the war and work of self-consciousness. This is the history of the unhappiness or homelessness of the human spirit. The unhappiness, of course, is not unmitigated.… More

• Hegel’s Philosophy of History

  - Wilkins, Burleigh T. Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Ithaca, 1974.
  Excerpt: How Contingency is “Sublated” in Necessity It has frequently been argued that Hegel’s fear of contingency was so great that he sought either to explain it away as mere appearance or to explain it in terms of its contribution to some… More

• Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State

  - Shlomo Avineri, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State, Cambridge University Press, 1974.
  […] Hegel has to be seen as the first major modern political philosopher who attempted to confront the realities of the modern age. While many among eighteenth-century philosophers undoubtedly helped to shape the emergent modern world, their basically… More

• The Young Hegel

  - Lukacs, Georg. The Young Hegel, tr. Rodney Livingston. London, 1975.
  Excerpt: The present analysis of Hegel’s economic views will confirm the accuracy of Marx’s observations, both in their positive and in their negative aspects. Hegel did not produce a system of economics within his general philosophy, his ideas were… More

• Hegel (Charles Taylor)

  - Charles Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge University Press, 1975.
  […] In fact, our difficulties just begin when we accept the central role of reason; and it was these difficulties which motivated [the Romantics] in turning away from it to fantasy, invention, and art. For if we abandon the view of spirit as endless… More

• Hegel’s Retreat from Eleusis

  - Kelly, George Armstrong. Hegel’s Retreat from Eleusis. Princeton, 1978.
  Excerpt: We do not know whether Hegel read Fichte’s incendiary tract against the German Burkeans, but it seems likely that he did, since it was, to say the least, hot copy among young intellectuals. In any case, the contemporary associations of lordship… More

• Hegel and Modern Society

  -

  Taylor, Charles. Hegel and Modern Society. Cambridge, 1979.

  Excerpt: Against [expressivism], Herder and others developed an alternative notion of man whose dominant image was rather tha of an expressive object. Human life was seen as having a unity rather analogous to that of a work of art, where every part or aspect… More

• Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History

  - Gillespie, Michael Allen. Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History, Chicago, 1984.
  Excerpt: From Antinomy to Dialectic Hegelian philosophy is fundamentally dialectical. The meaning and character of this dialectical essence, however, arises out of Hegel’s reception and transformation of Kant’s antinomy doctrine. While his… More

• Georg W. F. Hegel

  - Pierre Hassner, "Georg W. F. Hegel," History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, University of Chicago Press, 1987 (3rd. edition).
  Excerpt: Against the attitude of a moral, religious, or intellectual consciousness which attempts to take refuge in the inner life and to reject the “sound and fury” of political realities, Hegel justifies political life as such. It is only in and by the… More

• Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism

  - Smith, Steven B. Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism. Chicago and London, 1989.
  Excerpt: My purpose here is… to examine the genesis of the critique of rights-based liberalism in the philosophy of Hegel. One advantage of this approach is that as a critic of liberalism in at least its early modern or classic form, Hegel provides us… More

• The Cambridge Companion to Hegel

  - The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C. Beiser, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
  From the publisher: Few thinkers are more controversial in the history of philosophy than Hegel. He has been dismissed as a charlatan and obscurantist, but also praised as one of the greatest thinkers in modern philosophy. No one interested in philosophy can… More

• Hegel (Frederick Beiser)

  - Beiser, Frederick. Hegel, 2005.
  Excerpt: These religious and political controversies within the Hegelian school were not so easily resolvable because they involved an apparently intractable problem in the interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics. Namely, what is the nature of… More

• Less Than Nothing by Slavoj Zizek

  - Slavoj Zizek. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London, 2012.
  Excerpt: The same holds for the unreliability of the verbal reports given by Holocaust survivors: a witness who was able to offer a clear narrative of his camp experience would thereby disqualify himself. In a Hegelian way, the problem here is part of the… More

Multimedia

• Hegel: The Philosophy of History

  - Leo Strauss, "Seminar in Political Philosophy: Hegel’s The Philosophy of History," 1965,  The Leo Strauss Project.

• Slavoj Zizek: Return to Hegel

  - Slavoj Zizek, Return to Hegel, Lecture at European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, 2009.  
  Slavoj Žižek speaking about Hegel and Hegelian concepts of history and historicity, drawing not only on the works of Marxs Grundrisse and Jacques Lacan, but also on opera, Schoenberg’s atonal revolution, the experience of impossibility, Freud’s… More

• Introductory Lecture to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

  - Video. Joe Rouse. An introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Wesleyan University, 27 March 2013.

• From Hegel to Marx: What Went Wrong?

  - Terry Pinkard, From Hegel to Marx: What Went Wrong?