This chapter reconstructs Schopenhauer’s critical engagement with thinkers from his own era. It notes that Schopenhauer often focused his scrutiny of Kant and Hegel on their political arguments. In the former case, Schopenhauer claimed that Kant’s moral theory was in fact a concealed political theory. In the latter case, he claimed that Hegel’s philosophy of the state conflated politics, religion, and morality for the purpose of serving the Prussian state. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s reputation as an apolitical thinker is misleading since his elaborate criticisms of Kant and Hegel are partly generated by his conception of politics. It also argues that Schopenhauer’s demystifying critique of statehood in German Idealism places him in a position similar to the radical Young Hegelians, including the early Marx. Yet while the young Marx attacked the bourgeois vision of state rule over a market society composed of atomized, competitive individuals, Schopenhauer affirmed it.

This chapter analyzes Schopenhauer’s political beliefs in the context of his biography. Schopenhauer was a well-traveled son of a merchant who failed to gain a foothold in academia and never pursued another career in the professions, business, or government. Without traditional prospects, he settled into a rentier existence. He retained much of his background’s bourgeois attitudes toward property, individual industry, and frugality, but since he was confined to a life outside professional circles, he came to occupy an outsider position and opposed both conservatives and progressives, orthodox Christians and secular radicals. Committed to the idea of a natural intellectual elite, he was skeptical of collective political movements, such as the nationalism and socialism of his own time. Yet he was also critical of the traditional aristocracy with its relative independence from the modern state. His preferred political regime was a nondemocratic, monarchical statism that would protect individuals and their property.

Despite ubiquitous references to ‘ethnicity’ in both academic and public discourse, the history and politics of this concept remain largely unexplored. By constructing the first transnational and interlingual conceptual history of ethnicity, this book unearths the pivotal role that this concept played in the making of the international order. After critiquing existing accounts of the ‘expansion’ or ‘globalisation’ of international society, the chapter proposes to rethink the birth of the international order through a scrutiny of its major concepts. Fusing Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history with the philosophical writings of G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida, the chapter theorises the emergence of the international order as a dialectical process that both negated and preserved existing imperial hierarchies. The concept of ethnicity is ejected by this dialectical process as a residual category – an indigestible kernel of difference and particularity – that cannot be internalised by the work of sublation.

Coriolanus manufactures his unbending martial spirit through both a life-and-death struggle for recognition (Hegel) against Aufidius and a life-defining opposition with the masses. Both oppositions seek to annul the other. By alienating our sympathies, first from Coriolanus and then the people, the play calls for our dialectical political thought. It asks us to see a mutuality, and hence a vision of justice (Plato), that those onstage cannot. We see them in failure and deadlock. His family’s love invades Coriolanus as a foreign force and shatters his self-sufficient oneness. He “melt[s]” before his wife’s silent “dove’s eyes”. In such moments, the subject (indeed the sovereign) becomes an other to itself. It observes itself from a point of estrangement and sees a previously obscured truth. Coriolanus breaks from his warrior-god role (and the master-slave deadlock) and is opened to something intersubjective: he is “not / Of stronger earth than others”. In Hegel’s terms, the masterful subject endures an experience of bondage, whereby “everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations”. The chapter argues that Shakespeare turns his alienated audience into the “bondsmen” (or “slaves”) who must “work” on the play and think through its estranging oppositions.

With animal embodiment, the project of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature comes full circle: The opening selection of text on space and time end with twin terms – place and movement – and in animal embodiment we finally get the natural phenomenon that does justice to both. The animal body is the first physical body to have three properly distinguished dimensions, and it is only in virtue of those qualitative, organic dimensions that we can abstract away a three-dimensional Euclidean space in which such bodies are taken to appear and to move. Hegel divides his discussion of the animal into discussions of its formation, assimilation, and species-process, and the chapter adopts that categorization as its structure. As a first pass, it says that form (die Gestalt) gives us the special point 0 for time and the step from the plane to an enclosing surface for space; assimilation gives us the order of time and the step from line to plane for space; and the species process (Gattungsprozeß) gives us the linearity of time and the step from point to line for space. These combinations display the animal body as the spatio-temporal object par excellence, and thus the object by reference to which all spatiality and temporality is understood.

In Hegel’s philosophical system, Nature is the Idea in its external manifestation, in the form of “otherness.” This is widely interpreted as implying that the realm of the Idea extends beyond the boundaries set by the Logic, permeating other parts of the system. On this reading, Nature functions solely as an extension of the Idea, with no intrinsic significance beyond this role. This chapter challenges this interpretation, showing that in Hegel’s system, Nature possesses an independent reality and cannot be reduced to a mere “function” or “mirror” of the Idea. As an autonomous and self-sufficient entity, Nature operates according to its own laws, distinct from the laws of Logic. Thus, what Hegel offers in his Philosophy of Nature is a metaphysical (philosophical) account of the conceptual structure of nature itself, of what it ultimately is. The account of nature that arises from Hegel’s philosophical inquiry into the natural world is not only realistic, it also offers a systematic image of nature in its dynamic development aligned with growing complexity. This underpins Hegel’s emergentist agenda, which differs substantially from the one proposed by traditional Naturphilosophie. Hegel’s version of emergentism aims to demonstrate why a particular set of concepts and principles is sufficient for comprehending natural phenomena at a specific level of complexity and how these concepts and principles logically necessitate the emergence of the succeeding level. This “system of stages” is not propelled by external factors such as divine command or preordination; instead, it operates internally and metalogically, driven by its own inherent logic and principles.

This chapter considers a serious challenge to conceptual realist readings of Hegel which is based on his Philosophy of Nature. According to such readings, one way in which reason is inherent in the world rather than imposed upon it is that individuals are instantiations of substance universals such as “horse” or “human being” which we come to know, and which belong essentially to those individuals in their own right. However, critics of this conceptual realist reading have then countered that in his philosophy of nature, Hegel speaks about the “feebleness of the concept in nature” and seems to allow for a good deal of indeterminacy in the way individuals are classified into kinds, making it hard to see them as essential to individuals and as inherent to the world in the way the conceptual realist claims. This debate and how it relates to Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is then the focus of this chapter. It is argued that nothing in what Hegel says about the problems in classifying nature in fact threatens conceptual realism, thereby showing how the conceptual realist reading can be vindicated in a way that is consistent with this text.

Hegel has commonly been ridiculed for views expressed in his 1801 dissertation, On the Orbits of the Planets, in the final pages of which he had adopted a series of numbers from Plato’s Timaeus – a cosmological text earlier taken seriously by Kepler – to account for the ratios of the distances from the sun of the then known six planets of the solar system. While defenders of Hegel have usually toned down the extent of these claims, this chapter argues that Hegel’s reference to Plato’s Pythagorean cosmology must be taken seriously – not as cosmology, however, but as instantiating the logic appropriate for empirically based science. Hegel’s allusion to Plato’s mythologically expressed “syllogism” is consistent with his idea that logic as Plato conceived it allowed its application to the empirical world but that this applicability had been compromised by Aristotle adaptation of it. With the proper grasp of logic’s utilization of the category of “singularity” in its difference to “particularity” – available to Plato but not Aristotle – we can appreciate how, while Kepler’s Laws were empirically based, Newton’s were not as they relied on abstract entities that could not be justified empirically.

In contrast to what several recent interpreters suggest, Hegel would reject the labels “naturalism,” “essentialist naturalism,” and “naturalist essentialism” for his philosophy. In light of the architecture of his system, the label “essentialist naturalism” would commit him to a variety of physicalism, which he rejects on the grounds of physics’ inability to establish the compatibility of material bodies and physical form. Second, as his critique of nature’s most concrete category “the death of the individual animal” and the sublation of nature into Geist illustrate, Hegel deems nature incapable of reconciling the individuals’ particularity with the genus’ universality, and therefore associates the realm of nature with death and proceeds to sublate nature into the concept of Geist. Finally, pointing out the inability of objectivist essentialist metaphysics to consistently unite the universal with the particular, Hegel also rejects the metaphysics of “naturalist essentialism” and proposes a concept-metaphysical account of the relationship between the logical idea, nature, and Geist. As all of these are variations of the idea, this proves him to be an idealist rather than a naturalist or a spiritualist.

This chapter takes seriously the concerns of Eliot’s early reviewers with a tension in her fiction between the devoted depiction of life later associated with realism, and a didactic impulse to which they increasingly felt she succumbed. Asking why Eliot interrupted representation with theorisation, the chapter takes as a case study her alternating dramatisation and analysis of incongruous versions of history in Chapter 20 of Middlemarch. It traces the lineage of such alternation, via an allusion to her friend John Sibree’s translation of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, into one of the notebooks Eliot used as she developed Middlemarch, which is read less as a source for either the novel’s theories or its facts than as a laboratory for its experiments in moving between them. The chapter suggests that Eliot valued the dissonance her reviewers detected when dogma intruded upon depiction. It thereby elucidates her contribution to the dialectical novel of ideas this book explores.

This chapter discusses the sections of finite and absolute mechanics of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature which are predicated upon his theory of space and time. It starts with the emergent notions of matter and movement before giving the details of the mechanical analysis in a close reading. Giving a foundation for Kepler’s laws is not only a touchstone of Hegel’s theory but is an integral rung in a system of steps building natural science from space and time. The chapter exposes three main strands of argument: dimensional realization of time and space in movement of matter, striving towards inner and outer centers of extended bodies, and the realization of a system of bodies in motion which materializes a complexity paralleling not only of the tripartite system general-particular-individual of his logic but additionally includes two particulars – as necessary in Hegel’s account of nature. Lastly, the chapter comments briefly on the relationship to Kant, Newton, and classical mechanics, as well as on modern aspects. As it demonstrates, Hegel’s treatment of mechanics is not an idiosyncratic way of presenting celestial mechanics but contains radical, quite modern metaphysical concepts which are not only interesting in their own right but furnish a key to the understanding of his system.

Hegel’s “natural philosophy” is an extension of his overall systematic project having to do with a post-Kantian philosophy that did not rely on Kant’s conception of “pure intuitions.” Instead, Hegel proposed a Logic that as an internally self-enclosed system of pure thoughts required to make sense of making sense. Famously, he concluded his Logic with some not entirely clear ideas about the need to move from it to a Naturphilosophie, a move which he somewhat puzzlingly said was not itself a further logical “transition.” Hegel also defends a non-empiricist study of nature, that is, an explanation not merely in terms of empirically determined regularities, for all such regularities, although existent, are not fully “actual” in that they are not what is doing the real work of explanation. What explains the regularities themselves are the various pure objects of the Naturphilosophie which are involved in working out what “external to pure thought” would mean: the mechanical, the physical, the chemical, and the biological fields of nature, each of which manifests a power (Potenz) that explains why the empirically found regularities in nature actually hold. This chapter suggests that the reason for the transition from Logic to Nature is that pure thought on its own is powerless, and that this has implications for how we think of Hegel’s system as a whole.

This chapter investigates how ideological and political motivations prompted Italian Hegelians in the second half of the nineteenth century to posit a contrived identification between the Renaissance and the Risorgimento, recognising in them a common revolutionary character. By focussing on Italian Hegelians’ interpretations of Giordano Bruno’s philosophy and Tommaso Campannella’s work, this chapter deals with ideas of modernity, interpretations of the Renaissance in nineteenth century Europe, and anticlericalism in the Risorgimento.

This chapter focuses on Italian Hegelians’ interpretations of Machiavelli’s political thought and argues that during the nineteenth-century Italian political language underwent a radical transformation: while the term Risorgimento had generally indicated a specific period of modern history (approximately from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries), by the end of the century that term began to be identified with the Italian struggles for national emancipation. At the same time the word Renaissance began to be used to indicate the period of early modern history between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, also identified with the birth of ‘Modernity’. The transformation of the language represents a change of ideas, of the way the intellectual and political leaders of the Risorgimento interpreted the failed religious and moral reformation in early modern Italy and how Machiavelli represents the ‘Italian Luther’.

This introduction engages with the story of a generation of Italian Hegelians, who began to engage with Hegel’s political thought shortly after his death, in 1832, and continued to grapple with it until the end of the century. It discusses the contribution of this book to the most recent scholarly debates on Hegel and Italian Hegelianism, to the broader field of the history of political thought, as well as to the research on nineteenth-century Italian political thought. It outlines a new perspective on a time of radical political and intellectual transformation undergone by one of the most spectacular instances of nation- and state-building of nineteenth-century Europe by presenting one of the main feature of modern Italian political thought. It argues that Italian Hegelianism shows that it is in history that philosophy acquires its political relevance.