G. W. F. Hegel
German idealist philosopher (1770–1831)
Also known as: Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), German idealist philosopher, is Quigley's principal modern reference for the dialectical-historicist tradition against which both Marx and Quigley's own seven-stages model are situated. Quigley's engagement is largely critical: he reviews Hegel scholarship in Book Reviews and treats him in Evolution of Civilizations as a figure outside the methodological Western tradition.
Hegel and Marx as historicist twins
In The Evolution of Civilizations Quigley brackets Hegel with Marx as theorists of an inevitable end-state. "He saw Hegel and Marx as presumptuous, in error, and outside the Western tradition in their analysis of history as an ideologic dialectic culminating in the present or immediate future in a homeostatic condition" (EoC 10). The structural worry is the same in both cases: "That triumph would end the Western experiment and return us to the experience of the rest of the world — namely, that history is a sequence of stages in the rise and fall of absolutist ideologies" (EoC 11). Quigley reviewed Walter Kaufmann's Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts, and Commentary in the Washington Evening Star of 29 July 1965, recalling that "thirty years ago, when I was reading" Hegel and the German idealist tradition, the experience formed his own resistance to closed historical systems (Book Reviews 112).
Russian Slavophilism and the German connection
Quigley locates Hegel's substantive nineteenth-century political influence chiefly in Russia. The Slavophiles "had been inspired by German thinkers like Schelling and Hegel, so that the shift from Westernizers to Slavophiles marked a shift from French to Germanic teachers" (T&H 102). The doctrinal content — "supported orthodoxy and monarchy, although they were very critical of the existing Orthodox Church and of the existing autocracy" (T&H 102) — sets Hegel's German idealism as one of the tributaries of the Russian intellectual culture that, decades later, would absorb Marx into a Slavophile-Bolshevik synthesis. The other historicist line Quigley engages, the philosophers-of-history sequence "including Condorcet, Hegel, Comte, Marx, Spengler, and Toynbee" (Book Reviews 46), positions Hegel as one node in the larger nineteenth-century project that Quigley's seven-stages model is intended to displace.
Cited in
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 10 Quigley
He saw Hegel and Marx as presumptuous, in error, and outside the Western tradition in their analysis of history as an ideologic dialectic culminating in the present or immediate future in a homeostatic condition.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 11 Quigley
An ideologic one consistent with the views of Hegel and Marx — a homeostatic condition. That triumph would end the Western experiment.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 102 Quigley
Slavophiles had been inspired by German thinkers like Schelling and Hegel, so that the shift from Westernizers to Slavophiles marked a shift from French to Germanic teachers.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 231 Quigley
Returned to London convinced that the Germany of Goethe and Hegel which he had learned to love in his student days was being swallowed up by the German militarists.
- book-reviews · p. 46 Quigley
Philosophers of history, including Condorcet, Hegel, Comte, Marx, Spengler, and Toynbee. Unlike most books of its kind, which are often disjointed collections of essays on the thinkers examined.
- book-reviews · p. 112 Quigley
HEGEL: Reinterpretation, Texts, and Commentary, by Walter Kaufman. Doubleday & Co.: New York, 1965. 'A Hard Look at a Philosopher.'