Who is G.W.F. Hegel from The Ethics of Ambiguity; and what is their importance?

G.W.F. Hegel the idealist philosopher who believed that the entire universe was a single entity evolving into self-consciousness and that all human beings were simply manifestations of this absolute spirit. While Beauvoir learns much from Hegel, she stridently resists his identification of the real with the universal and absolute as against the particular and concrete.