Why is Hegel's vision of history as one unfolding whole so seductive, and why does every self need another's recognition?
32 claims from this lecture, in the order Marci Shore makes them, with the 14 terms it leans on and its 33 links to other lectures.
The truth is the whole.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit. The epigraph Shore gives this lecture.
By number of claims in this lecture.
Shore’s own judgments and connections
The 7 claims the lecture spends most time on.
Hegel makes history part of philosophy's own substance, reversing a tradition since the Greeks that sought timeless, universal truth and treated the changing and contingent as noise to purge.
Put simply Hegel: since the ancient Greeks, philosophers had looked for truths that never change, and treated whatever changes or happens by chance as noise to get rid of. Hegel reverses this and makes history part of philosophy itself.
Small changes of degree can pile up until, at some threshold, they amount to a change of kind. Hegel's model is water: warmed bit by bit, then suddenly boiling.
Shore's preferred way into the Phenomenology: a Bildungsroman of consciousness as such, maturing through stages until, midway, it merges with Geist.
Put simply Shore's preferred way to read Hegel's Phenomenology: as a coming-of-age story whose hero is consciousness itself, anyone's. It grows up in stages until, halfway through, it merges with "Geist," our shared collective life.
Geist is "the I that is a We": for Hegel meaning is relational, so a single act, like hitting a ball, counts for something only within the whole.
Put simply Hegel's "Geist" is "the I that is a We": the shared life we are each part of. Meaning is relational. In Jay Bernstein's baseball image, hitting a ball counts as a home run only within the whole game.
Where to read it Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit §177.
Alienation, in Hegel, is failing to see your own particular life as part of Geist, of the whole; its cure is coming to feel at one with the universe's telos.
Put simply Hegel: alienation means failing to see your own life as part of the whole, which he calls "Geist". The cure is to feel at one with the goal (the "telos") the universe is moving toward.
On one reading, a master is master only through a slave's acknowledgment, yet only subjects can recognize, and he has made the slave a thing; hence his permanent dissatisfaction.
Put simply One reading of Hegel's master and slave: a master is a master only if a slave acknowledges him. But only a person can truly acknowledge anyone, and he has made the slave a thing. So he is never satisfied.
What seduces people in Hegel, Shore judges, is wholeness itself: the promise that unity can finally be achieved and everything be seen as interwoven.
Read down to follow the lecture. The time opens that minute on YouTube.
In Hegel, calling something necessary and calling it good amount to the same judgment. The French Revolution was both: it had to come, so it was right.
Other readings Terry Pinkard (Does History Make Sense?, 2017) defends Hegel's philosophy of history against the common reading of it as a theory of inevitable progress, grounding it in an account of human subjectivity.
Where to read it Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic §6; Philosophy of Right, Preface.
In his memoirs Herzen describes Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as something you live through rather than read: an experience, not a book.
Hegel shares the Enlightenment's ambition to make philosophy scientific but thinks it went about it wrongly: too skeptical, too shallow, better at dismantling faith than at offering depth in return.
Hegel sets out to solve the old bridge problem, how to get from mind to world: he will join subject and object, though with a dash of mysticism.
Put simply Hegel sets out to solve an old puzzle: how a mind shut inside its own head can reach the world outside. His answer joins mind and world together, with a touch of mysticism.
Hegel makes history part of philosophy's own substance, reversing a tradition since the Greeks that sought timeless, universal truth and treated the changing and contingent as noise to purge.
Put simply Hegel: since the ancient Greeks, philosophers had looked for truths that never change, and treated whatever changes or happens by chance as noise to get rid of. Hegel reverses this and makes history part of philosophy itself.
Like the Romantics, Hegel cares less about what is than about what is becoming: nothing holds still, and everything is always on its way to being something else.
Small changes of degree can pile up until, at some threshold, they amount to a change of kind. Hegel's model is water: warmed bit by bit, then suddenly boiling.
Spirit ripens quietly and gradually toward a new form; then, like a child being born, the new world arrives all at once, "in one flash."
Put simply Hegel: "Spirit", the shared life of humanity, matures slowly and quietly toward a new form. Then, like a child being born, the new world arrives all at once, "in one flash."
Shore's preferred way into the Phenomenology: a Bildungsroman of consciousness as such, maturing through stages until, midway, it merges with Geist.
Put simply Shore's preferred way to read Hegel's Phenomenology: as a coming-of-age story whose hero is consciousness itself, anyone's. It grows up in stages until, halfway through, it merges with "Geist," our shared collective life.
Consciousness climbs from one stage to the next by trying, in some highly abstract sense, to overcome alienation; the whole Phenomenology is that struggle.
Put simply Hegel's Phenomenology: the mind climbs from stage to stage by trying to overcome alienation, the feeling of not being at home in the world. The whole book is that struggle, in a very abstract sense.
One useful way to sort the course's thinkers, in Shore's view: those who build big systems and those who take systems apart. Hegel belongs squarely with the builders.
Geist is "the I that is a We": for Hegel meaning is relational, so a single act, like hitting a ball, counts for something only within the whole.
Put simply Hegel's "Geist" is "the I that is a We": the shared life we are each part of. Meaning is relational. In Jay Bernstein's baseball image, hitting a ball counts as a home run only within the whole game.
Where to read it Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit §177.
As Shore tells it, the Phenomenology's world history is a short European list: Greece, a lesser Rome, then nothing significant until the French Revolution and its deeper interpretation by German philosophers.
In the text In the Phenomenology (1807; Miller translation), the chapter on Spirit runs from the ethical order and legal status through culture, faith and the Enlightenment to "Absolute Freedom and Terror" and then morality, without naming any period.
Understanding is retrospective: Hegel's owl of Minerva "spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." What anything meant becomes clear only afterward, never in advance.
Put simply Hegel: we understand things only by looking back. His image: the owl of Minerva "spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." What anything meant becomes clear afterward, never in advance.
Where to read it Hegel, Philosophy of Right, Preface, closing paragraphs.
Hegel rejects Kant's intention-centered morality as inadequate: acts usually have consequences far beyond what anyone meant, so their meaning can be judged only in hindsight.
Put simply Hegel rejects Kant's view that an act is judged by the intention behind it. Acts usually have effects far beyond what anyone meant, so what they mean can be judged only looking back.
Dialectics is Hegel's name for what contradictions do when they meet: a position turns out unstable, its negation displaces it, and such clashes drive history forward in jolts.
Put simply Hegel's "dialectics": when opposing positions clash, one turns out to be unstable and its opposite pushes it aside. Clashes like these drive history forward, in sudden jolts rather than smoothly.
Aufheben, Hegel's untranslatable verb for how one stage gives way to the next, means canceling something while also keeping it and raising it onto a higher plane.
Put simply Hegel's German verb "aufheben" has no English equivalent. It describes how one stage gives way to the next: the old is canceled, but also kept, and lifted to a higher level.
Freedom, for Hegel, means recognizing necessity: since whatever happens had to happen, there is no room for a subjectively good choice, only for grasping why things are so.
Put simply Hegel: being free means understanding that things had to happen as they did. Since everything happens as it must, there is no room for choosing what seems good to you, only for grasping why things are so.
In the text In the Philosophy of Right (§124), Hegel calls the right of subjective freedom "the pivot and center of the difference between antiquity and modern times"; "freedom is the insight into necessity" is Engels's summary of Hegel in Anti-Dühring.
Other readings Robert Pippin (Hegel's Practical Philosophy, 2008) reads Hegel's freedom as a relation: agents take their purposes as their own and act within institutions of mutual recognition, so the individual's own endorsement matters.
Berlin thinks Hegel extremely dangerous: his system, as Shore recalls him saying, is a very dark wood from which few return to report, and once inside you are meant to stop wanting things otherwise.
Alienation, in Hegel, is failing to see your own particular life as part of Geist, of the whole; its cure is coming to feel at one with the universe's telos.
Put simply Hegel: alienation means failing to see your own life as part of the whole, which he calls "Geist". The cure is to feel at one with the goal (the "telos") the universe is moving toward.
History's end, for Hegel, is a mystical point where all oppositions (freedom and necessity, is and ought, subject and object) dissolve into synthesis; nobody has ever witnessed it.
Put simply Hegel: history ends at a mystical point where all opposites (freedom and necessity, what is and what ought to be, the mind and the world) merge into one. Nobody has ever seen this happen.
On one reading, a master is master only through a slave's acknowledgment, yet only subjects can recognize, and he has made the slave a thing; hence his permanent dissatisfaction.
Put simply One reading of Hegel's master and slave: a master is a master only if a slave acknowledges him. But only a person can truly acknowledge anyone, and he has made the slave a thing. So he is never satisfied.
On one reading, through real labor, by reshaping the world with his own work, the slave makes himself into a subject; the one reduced to a thing acquires subjectivity.
Put simply One reading of Hegel's master and slave: by working on the world and reshaping it, the slave makes himself a person with a self of his own. The one treated as a thing becomes a subject.
For Davis the master is never secure: he stands perpetually on the brink of turning into the slave, who holds real and concrete power to flip the relation.
Put simply Angela Davis, reading Hegel's master and slave: the master is always on the verge of becoming the slave, because the slave holds real, concrete power to turn the relationship around.
Davis argues that, looked at philosophically, the master's supposed freedom and independence are a myth: slavery itself supplied his livelihood and wealth, so he depended on the slave.
Put simply Angela Davis, reading Hegel's master and slave: the master's freedom and independence are a myth. Slavery itself supplied his livelihood and wealth, so he depended on the slave all along.
Bernstein reads Hegel's master-slave dialectic as showing identity is never self-contained but always mediated by another's recognition; these dependencies are one of the things we find unbearable.
Put simply Bernstein's reading of Hegel's master and slave: no one's identity is self-contained; it always comes through being acknowledged by someone else. Depending on others like this is one of the things we find unbearable.
Nobody in the Phenomenology gets to be simply identical with themselves: identity is always mediated, handed to you through another's gaze, so no self stands on its own.
Put simply Hegel's Phenomenology: nobody can be who they are all by themselves. Your identity always reaches you through someone else, through how another person sees you, so no self stands on its own.
Hegel's slogan "the true is the whole" means everything is interdependent and intelligible only together; since a totality shows itself only from its end, meaning arrives in retrospect.
Put simply Hegel's slogan "the true is the whole": everything depends on everything else and makes sense only together. A whole can be seen only from its end, so meaning comes only looking back.
Where to read it Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface §20.
Miłosz has a name for what made Hegel's vision of wholeness so peculiarly seductive: "the Hegelian bite."
For Arendt, Hegel's philosophy was Western thought's last attempt to reunite being and thought, subject and object; whether it housed reality or imprisoned it, nobody could say.
Put simply Arendt: Hegel's philosophy was the West's last attempt to bring thought and reality, the mind and the world, back together. Nobody could say whether his system gave reality a home or locked it up.
What seduces people in Hegel, Shore judges, is wholeness itself: the promise that unity can finally be achieved and everything be seen as interwoven.
On Berlin's account of Russia's intellectual history, the fatal foreign import was Hegel rather than Marx: perhaps fine for Germans, but a little Hegel left the Russians drunk.
12 of these 14 first come up in this lecture. Definitions are our paraphrase.
Where a claim here answers an earlier lecture, and where a later lecture answers a claim here. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
KantThe Copernican turn in Kant's epistemology reverses the direction of fit: not the mind conforming to things as they are, but knowable things conforming to the mind's capacities. L2 · 38:03
HegelHegel sets out to solve the old bridge problem, how to get from mind to world: he will join subject and object, though with a dash of mysticism. L4 · 11:43
Takes up the problem of the bridge between subject and object that Descartes and Kant tried to solve
FichteFichte: "to be free is nothing, to become free is heaven." Freedom is not a state you have but a becoming you live, driven by desire. L3 · 37:08
HegelLike the Romantics, Hegel cares less about what is than about what is becoming: nothing holds still, and everything is always on its way to being something else. L4 · 14:38
Shore says Hegel takes the being-versus-becoming distinction central to Romanticism, which she recalls through Fichte's line on becoming free, and makes it central.
RousseauTwo things distinguish humans from other creatures, on Rousseau's account: free agency, and an openness to becoming. We are underdetermined, self-creating beings rather than finished ones. L3 · 17:39
HegelLike the Romantics, Hegel cares less about what is than about what is becoming: nothing holds still, and everything is always on its way to being something else. L4 · 14:38
Humans defined by becoming, not fixed nature, now generalized to all of realityOur inference
KantFor Kant, acting morally means acting from duty, not from whatever one feels like doing; acts are judged by their intentions, never by consequences nobody can control. L3 · 31:51
HegelHegel rejects Kant's intention-centered morality as inadequate: acts usually have consequences far beyond what anyone meant, so their meaning can be judged only in hindsight. L4 · 29:14
Intentions are not enough; actions are judged by consequences that exceed them
HegelGeist is "the I that is a We": for Hegel meaning is relational, so a single act, like hitting a ball, counts for something only within the whole. L4 · 26:43
MarxMarx inverts Hegel, turning dialectics into dialectical materialism: history's driver is not Geist but socioeconomic forces, so philosophy must leave the metaphysical and ideal for the material and concrete. L5 · 33:55
Keeps the dialectic but puts material forces where Geist stood
HegelDialectics is Hegel's name for what contradictions do when they meet: a position turns out unstable, its negation displaces it, and such clashes drive history forward in jolts. L4 · 32:56
MarxMarx inverts Hegel, turning dialectics into dialectical materialism: history's driver is not Geist but socioeconomic forces, so philosophy must leave the metaphysical and ideal for the material and concrete. L5 · 33:55
Retains dialectical motion through antagonism as the engine of history
HegelShore's preferred way into the Phenomenology: a Bildungsroman of consciousness as such, maturing through stages until, midway, it merges with Geist. L4 · 21:10
MarxFor Marx, your place in the socioeconomic structure, the base, determines your thinking; consciousness, culture and art, the superstructure, derive from it. L5 · 46:02
Consciousness is no longer the protagonist of history but derivative of social being
HegelAlienation, in Hegel, is failing to see your own particular life as part of Geist, of the whole; its cure is coming to feel at one with the universe's telos. L4 · 40:49
MarxFactory work estranges workers from labor itself: hired by the hour, tending machines, performing one fragment of a process whose finished product is never theirs. L5 · 29:36
Shore presents alienation as a shared preoccupation: failure to see oneself within Geist for Hegel, concrete estrangement from one's labor for Marx.
HegelAufheben, Hegel's untranslatable verb for how one stage gives way to the next, means canceling something while also keeping it and raising it onto a higher plane. L4 · 35:40
MarxAll history so far is class struggle, and each order carries the seeds of its own destruction: feudalism yielded to capitalism, whose bourgeoisie produces "its own grave diggers." L5 · 38:25
Every order carries the seeds of its own supersession, now as class antagonism
HegelIn Hegel, calling something necessary and calling it good amount to the same judgment. The French Revolution was both: it had to come, so it was right. L4 · 3:13
MarxIn Hegelian fashion, the Manifesto makes no distinction between forecast and prescription: the proletariat's triumph is predicted, predestined, and right, all at once. L5 · 36:39
Inherits the collapse of what will happen into what should happen
HegelHegel makes history part of philosophy's own substance, reversing a tradition since the Greeks that sought timeless, universal truth and treated the changing and contingent as noise to purge. L4 · 12:04
MarxWhat decisively shapes modern social behavior, for Marx, is industrialization: modernization in a technical and empirical sense rather than modernity as a broad condition. L5 · 24:37
Marx's historicism makes a concrete, contingent process, industrialization, decisive for thoughtOur inference
HegelHistory's end, for Hegel, is a mystical point where all oppositions (freedom and necessity, is and ought, subject and object) dissolve into synthesis; nobody has ever witnessed it. L4 · 41:30
NietzscheSooner or later everyone concludes that the harmonious world where contradictions resolve, Hegel's end of history, is never coming. Unity cannot be found: life is nothing but difference. L6 · 45:04
Declares Hegel's reconciling telos gone: the harmonious whole is not coming and life does not come together.
HegelHistory's end, for Hegel, is a mystical point where all oppositions (freedom and necessity, is and ought, subject and object) dissolve into synthesis; nobody has ever witnessed it. L4 · 41:30
NietzscheHegel's philosophy, by crowning the belated present as the goal of all history, deifies history and sets it, as "the sole sovereign power," in place of art and religion. L6 · 29:53
Treats the world-process philosophy as making history a god, justifying the present as its necessary result and paralyzing culture.
HegelDialectics is Hegel's name for what contradictions do when they meet: a position turns out unstable, its negation displaces it, and such clashes drive history forward in jolts. L4 · 32:56
NietzscheThe revered virtues may owe their worth to being "insidiously related, tied to, and involved with" their wicked opposites, perhaps even sharing one essence with them: good and wicked, true and false, come together. L6 · 31:36
Shore finds something very dialectical in Nietzsche despite his anti-Hegelianism: the same coming together of good and wicked that Hegel is always doing.
HegelHistory's end, for Hegel, is a mystical point where all oppositions (freedom and necessity, is and ought, subject and object) dissolve into synthesis; nobody has ever witnessed it. L4 · 41:30
BergsonFinalism (teleology) holds that life moves toward an end planned from the start; Bergson rejects it: more determinism means less contingency and free will, which he wants room for. L7 · 27:08
A goal fixed in advance leaves no room for contingency or freedom
HegelHegel's slogan "the true is the whole" means everything is interdependent and intelligible only together; since a totality shows itself only from its end, meaning arrives in retrospect. L4 · 46:56
LukácsMarxism, for Lukács, stands or falls on totality: revolution comes only from a standpoint that sees the social whole, and trade-unionism plainly fails that test. L8 · 32:46
Makes Hegel's "the true is the whole" the test of revolutionary class consciousnessOur inference
HegelDialectics is Hegel's name for what contradictions do when they meet: a position turns out unstable, its negation displaces it, and such clashes drive history forward in jolts. L4 · 32:56
HorkheimerDialectics survives without its destination: the contradictions inside things still push history forward, but nothing promises that history ends or resolves. L14 · 24:00
History still moves through contradiction
HegelHistory's end, for Hegel, is a mystical point where all oppositions (freedom and necessity, is and ought, subject and object) dissolve into synthesis; nobody has ever witnessed it. L4 · 41:30
HorkheimerDialectics survives without its destination: the contradictions inside things still push history forward, but nothing promises that history ends or resolves. L14 · 24:00
Drops the guaranteed telos and final reconciliation
HegelHistory's end, for Hegel, is a mystical point where all oppositions (freedom and necessity, is and ought, subject and object) dissolve into synthesis; nobody has ever witnessed it. L4 · 41:30
HorkheimerCritical Theory, as Shore sketches the school, opposes theories promising reconciliation of subject and object, closed systems, and claims to absolute truth. L14 · 35:13
Refuses any promised identity of subject and object; no closed systems
HegelAlienation, in Hegel, is failing to see your own particular life as part of Geist, of the whole; its cure is coming to feel at one with the universe's telos. L4 · 40:49
AdornoEnlightenment reason knows nature only as something to manipulate, and the price of the power it gains is alienation from the very nature it dominates. L14 · 45:41
Alienation reappears as reason's estrangement from the nature it dominatesOur inference
HegelAufheben, Hegel's untranslatable verb for how one stage gives way to the next, means canceling something while also keeping it and raising it onto a higher plane. L4 · 35:40
KojèveFor Kojève, being human means negating the given, in Hegel's sense of overcoming: its concrete features still mark us, but we are no longer its captives. L16 · 15:30
Human being as negating the given echoes Aufhebung: overcome yet marked by what it overcomes
HegelOn one reading, a master is master only through a slave's acknowledgment, yet only subjects can recognize, and he has made the slave a thing; hence his permanent dissatisfaction. L4 · 43:04
KojèveKojève, reading Hegel, holds that a person counts as genuinely human, to himself as much as to others, only through recognition by others, ultimately by all of them. L16 · 38:33
A Heidegger-tinged reading of master and slave: becoming human through others' recognition
HegelOn one reading, a master is master only through a slave's acknowledgment, yet only subjects can recognize, and he has made the slave a thing; hence his permanent dissatisfaction. L4 · 43:04
BeauvoirOtherness, for Beauvoir, is built into thought, "as primordial as consciousness itself": no subject simply is who it is; each finds itself only against an Other. L16 · 35:13
Takes the master-slave dialectic of recognition into relations between the sexes
HegelOn one reading, a master is master only through a slave's acknowledgment, yet only subjects can recognize, and he has made the slave a thing; hence his permanent dissatisfaction. L4 · 43:04
BeauvoirConflict between the sexes can be overcome, Beauvoir thinks, if people take hold of their subjectivity: free, autonomous subjects could then recognize one another reciprocally, and with desire. L16 · 48:11
Mutual recognition, each both subject and object, as the way out of the master-slave impasse
HegelOn one reading, a master is master only through a slave's acknowledgment, yet only subjects can recognize, and he has made the slave a thing; hence his permanent dissatisfaction. L4 · 43:04
SartreBeing looked at makes me someone's object, and that very fact brings home that the looker is a subject. In Sartre's words, "I cannot be an object for an object." L17 · 32:07
Only a subject can objectify me; like Hegel's master, the gaze needs the other as subject.Our inference
HegelNobody in the Phenomenology gets to be simply identical with themselves: identity is always mediated, handed to you through another's gaze, so no self stands on its own. L4 · 45:29
SartreSartre holds that genuine self-knowledge depends on being recognized by another subject; absent that acknowledgment, I cannot really know who I am. L17 · 34:17
No self-knowledge without recognition by another subject
HegelHegel's slogan "the true is the whole" means everything is interdependent and intelligible only together; since a totality shows itself only from its end, meaning arrives in retrospect. L4 · 46:56
ShoreStructuralists meet Hegelians on totality: a sign means something only within a whole that holds everything in place, so faint echoes of Hegel persist even on the synchronic plane. L19 · 21:24
Shore hears vague echoes of Hegel's "the true is the whole" in Saussure's holistic system and says structuralists and Hegelians converge on totality.
HegelOn one reading, a master is master only through a slave's acknowledgment, yet only subjects can recognize, and he has made the slave a thing; hence his permanent dissatisfaction. L4 · 43:04
GirardGirard calls it the scandal: the mediator whose desire one copies also blocks access to the object, so the same person is admired and hated at once. L20 · 29:51
Shore draws an analogy between loving and hating Girard's mediator and the bind of Hegel's master, who needs recognition from a slave made an object.
HegelHistory's end, for Hegel, is a mystical point where all oppositions (freedom and necessity, is and ought, subject and object) dissolve into synthesis; nobody has ever witnessed it. L4 · 41:30
DerridaTo Derrida, anything linear, one-directional or Hegelian feels totalitarian, and goes with an illusion: that a transcendental signified, a unifying first principle, exists. L22 · 16:37
Derrida calls Hegel's linear march toward a final synthesis totalitarian.
HegelHegel's slogan "the true is the whole" means everything is interdependent and intelligible only together; since a totality shows itself only from its end, meaning arrives in retrospect. L4 · 46:56
LyotardThe postmodern, in Lyotard's famous 1979 formula, is "incredulity toward meta-narratives": a refusal to believe any single grand story could gather everything up and make it cohere. L22 · 17:41
Incredulity toward any grand story claiming to hold the whole togetherOur inference
HegelHistory's end, for Hegel, is a mystical point where all oppositions (freedom and necessity, is and ought, subject and object) dissolve into synthesis; nobody has ever witnessed it. L4 · 41:30
DerridaDerrida labels the undertaking a hauntology: the many spirits of Marx, and with them Hegel's teleological conception of time, will go on haunting us indefinitely. L25 · 36:24
Hegel's teleological time survives as a haunting rather than a destination
HegelHegel's slogan "the true is the whole" means everything is interdependent and intelligible only together; since a totality shows itself only from its end, meaning arrives in retrospect. L4 · 46:56
PatočkaPatočka and Michalski shared a conviction: in the 1970s communist bloc Heidegger could counteract Hegel, showing meaning need not require wholeness, nor some kind of truth an inevitable destination. L25 · 42:24
Uses Heidegger to show meaning without wholeness and truth without a preordained end
HegelSmall changes of degree can pile up until, at some threshold, they amount to a change of kind. Hegel's model is water: warmed bit by bit, then suddenly boiling. L4 · 16:53
ShoreThe twentieth century matters because its stakes are so high: death tolls so vast that, as Hegel describes, a change of scale becomes a change of kind. L25 · 29:45
Shore likens the twentieth century's death tolls to what Hegel describes as changes in scale becoming changes in kind.
Throughlines that pass through this lecture.
As they come up in the lecture.
French Revolution: the Bastille falls (July 14) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man is proclaimed.
Napoleon rides through Jena; Hegel allegedly calls him "world spirit on horseback". Shore tells this as a story that may not have happened.
Phenomenology of Spirit Phänomenologie des Geistes
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is published (completed in Jena in October 1806).
Philosophy of Right Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts
World War I, set off by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
Munich Conference: Chamberlain (with Daladier and Mussolini) cedes the Sudetenland to Hitler, promising "peace for our time".
Lectures on Liberation