Hegel and Western Civilization.

In lectures on The Philosophy of History, Georg F.W. Hegel asserted that the search for a Spirit or ideology of Freedom was a historical product of a distinctive Western European formation.  This essay examines the reception of Hegel’s Eurocentric historical theory.  

The rise of history as a profession followed the rise of philosophy and history in the German academies and universities from the late 18th and into the 19th century. Studies and attempts at a survey of known world history may be seen in the Ancient 5th century BC Greek historian, Herodotus, and in the late 14th to early 15th century writings of the Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun.

The first modern philosopher of World History in Europe was Georg Hegel.  Hegel had an enormous impact on subsequent approaches to history and in this blog page I examine the problem of Hegel's assumptions about the underdevelopment of the non-West and his reification of Greek and subsequent European or Western Civilization.  This page will focus on Hegel's upholding of Greek and European Western Civilization as what he assumed were superior models for development.  In other pages on this blog I examine Hegel's Orientalism and his assumptions of African racial inferiority and lack of history and development.

In another page I provide a review of Susan Buck-Morss' Hegel, Haiti and Universal History (2009) an important study of Hegel's serious misjudgment about Haiti.