Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) may well be the most influential philosopher and political theorist Germany has produced, with the possible exception of Kant. He follows in a European tradition influenced by Rousseau and having important connections with Plato and the Classical Greek philosophers. His influence, though often of a tenuous nature, is undeniable across an enormous range of modern social thought, but especially in Marxism, even though he would not himself have been in any way a Marxist. No one could reduce the subtleties of Hegel’s thought to a dictionary definition. The only approach is to identify a few of his most influential ideas. To start, he argued that human civilization was the story of intellectual and moral progress, and that this was not accidental but the working out of a rational spirit in human perception. This is one of the ways in which he influences Marxists, who also believe in human progress, although they would attach much more importance to material or technological change, while Hegel saw the real source and description of progress as lying in our collective intellectual development. Secondly, his detailed account of change and development, the ‘dialectical argument’, has been taken over by Marxists (see dialectical materialism), but also by many other schools of thought. The dialectic, to Hegel, is the process in which any given social or intellectual state contains an essential contradiction.
This contradiction forces a conflict (of ideas to Hegel, of interests to others). As a result we must see human history as a series of conflicts where a ‘thesis’ (the original state or idea) conflicts with an ‘antithesis’ to produce a result, the ‘synthesis’. But the synthesis itself must contain an internal contradiction, and on we go again. Although such ideas usually seem extremely metaphysical, Hegel’s writing is often down-to-earth and illustrative, and shows how useful a dialectical approach can be. In practical terms his major importance is as a precursor of Marx; but Marx radically changed Hegel’s perspective, by taking material rather than intellectual matters to be crucial. Hegel tended to believe that the state was the most important aspect of politics, and much of his more directly political argument was concerned with the development of the state. For Hegel the state, the way we organize our politics and our systems of social coercion, demonstrated our degree of rationality; so the state was the best measure of human progress. He raises so many issues that most subsequent political theories can be related to his work. Apart from Marxism, the most obvious is the work of another German social thinker, of more vital relevance to mainstream academic thought, Max Weber.
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