ABSTRACT
Hegel dreamt the seductive dream of Western history as a Bildungsroman. But his attempt to show that the dream corresponds to reality, I argued in the last chapter, is a fairly complete failure. Nonetheless, the dream did not die with him. Under the title ‘Hegelianism’, on the contrary, it became the dominant idea of German philosophy for the rest of the nineteenth century. The only major philosopher to resist being seduced by it was Schopenhauer. The Hegelians, however, split into two factions. The ‘Right’ or ‘Old’ and the ‘Left’ or ‘New’ Hegelians. The disagreement between them concerned the ending of the Bildungsroman, the ‘end of history’.
