ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author aims to propose a reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of spirit. He indicates some of the ways in which contemporary social analysis can learn from Hegel’s insights. The author argues that Hegel’s primary motivation to write an all-encompassing system of philosophy was his anguish in the face of the social and political fragmentation around him. This ubiquitous bifurcation was parallelled by a growing estrangement of human beings from the ground of their being in nature. Hegel took J. J. Rousseau to task for the formalism of his social contract theory the concrete reality of the spirit of a people expressing itself in its art, its religion, its political and economic institutions. Hegel’s overriding aim is to examine in thought the being of this spirit, and to grasp the process through which modern society strives to become adequate to it.
