ABSTRACT
In reading the passionate replies of Drs. Avineri and Pelczynski to my review-article of Hegel's Political Writings, I had somewhat the same feeling—making allowance for the difference in subject-matter—one normally experiences in reading a disquisition by circle-squarers. After all, I made no startling claim in maintaining that Hegel was a conservative, national thinker, not a racist, not a totalitarian. What I was mostly concerned to show was that to the extent extra-philosophical motives influenced Hegel's thought, and there is considerably more to his thought than his political philosophy, his early commitments throw light on the origin and development of his doctrine of the concrete universal and some of the inconsistencies of its application. To be charged with perverse misrepresentation of Hegel when I could more plausibly be taxed with accepting the conventional designation of him seems 88to me to be positively bizarre. Most expositors of Hegel, and not only his critics, have regarded Hegel as a conservative thinker as far as his own doctrines and allegiance go. They may all be wrong. Nonetheless until that is clearly established, it is somewhat startling to read that Hegel was not a conservative but a liberal, and indeed, a liberal like Tom Paine! And almost as startling is to read the heated denial that Hegel was a nationalist.
