ABSTRACT
G.W.F. Hegel is the great philosopher of the progressive development of human thought - of the principle that new ideas and cultural forms are built by taking up the old ones, and at once encapsulating and transcending them in new forms. For him, cultural tradition is an active, developing human Mind or Spirit, which realises itself in history in the form of nations, cultures and institutions. Marxist materialists, however, call this the development of ideology, and see it as a reflex of material developments.
Hegel's philosophical system is actually a superb example of a complete ideology. The whole of human history is presented as leading triumphantly up to Hegel's present system of ideas. All human knowledge is woven together in a fashion, which provides a metaphysical justification for the existing order of things — political, religious, social and artistic. A special method of reasoning is provided — the dialectic — which makes it possible to prove that that history, and that order, are necessary properties of the world.
Engels sharply distinguished between Hegel's system, which he thought profoundly reactionary, and his method, which both he and Marx thought potentially revolutionary, because it depended on the incessant overthrowing of established concepts. (Modern deconstructionists take the same view of their procedures.) When Marx inverted the system, and modified the dialectic to cover class conflict rather than conceptual 46opposition, he turned ideology into the historical product, rather than the foundation of society. The foundation of society became an economic one. Hegel's system remained as an inexhaustible quarry from which theories of ideology can be taken.
Neither Hegel's system, nor his method, can sensibly be defended nowadays. But he has lived again in the works of those who have rejected him - Marx, Kierkegaard, Russell ... - and has lived again and again in the Hegelian Marxisms of the twentieth century. It is more surprising to note that the relationship between structuralism and post-structuralism can be mapped directly onto the relationship between Kant and Hegel: Lévi-Straussian structuralism is a Kantian enterprise; and post-structuralism is the Hegelian dialectic with an ironic and destructive twist.
