Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831) A German idealist philosopher whose major influence on the development of sociological thought has been through Karl Marx and Marxism. He developed a philosophy of history, particularly of the history of thought, which he saw as a determinant of social and political history. History is seen as a dialectical progress towards rational truth. This process involves an initial proposition (thesis), which is inadequate and generates a counter-proposition (antithesis), and the rational content of both are taken up into the synthesis. Truth is seen, not in terms of isolated individual propositions, but as a totality where the meaning of each proposition depends upon its relationship to others. The movement of history is then seen as the estrangement or objectification of the mind from itself and the transcendence of that estrangement. In sociological terms, the bourgeois state of his period was seen as representing the final transcendence of divisions in history, which goes hand in hand with the development of truth as a whole. A good starting-point for those interested in Hegel's philosophy is his volume on The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Peter Singer's Hegel (1983) is an excellent commentary on the man and his work.

Karl Marx, in a famous phrase, ‘stood Hegel on his head’, giving priority to economic, social, and political history over the history of ideas, but maintaining something of the same dialectical method. Hegel's influence and mode of reasoning can also be found in the Marxism of György Lukács and the Frankfurt School (see CRITICAL THEORY).