Hegel Year 2025

15 May, 2025

This year some friends and I have been doing a "Hegel Year" reading group.

My interest in Hegel was spurred by reading and discussing the "value-form" readings of Marx's Capital. Several writers in that tendency, such as Tony Smith and Chris Arthur, see Marx as having owed a tremendous debt to Hegel and as being, in some sense, imperfectly understood by those who do not understand Hegel.

Political philosophy aside, I found secondary literature on Hegel's philosophy of mind, language, and technology appealing, if somewhat vague in the retelling. Specifically, his notion of the radical dependence of the subject's cognitive faculties on socialization in a historically constituted community struck me as having anticipated important elements of the Later Wittgenstein's thinking (e.g. in Philosophical Investigations).

It was reading Tony Smith's Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism (2018) with a group in D.C. that really convinced me that reading Hegel would be worth the time and effort. Tony Smith's characterization, in asides like this, of Hegel as having anticipated the major antinomies of the normative political theory of liberal democracies intrigued me:

This is not the place to develop a grand synthesis of liberalism and communitarianism... In my view, that task was essentially accomplished long ago in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

Back in 2019 or so, I half-jokingly suggested to some friends that we should organize a year-long Hegel reading group. Late last year, some asked: if not 2025, when?

I considered a few different approaches selecting readings. Should we dive into the Phenomenology unaided? Should we read some secondary literature first? Should we read some texts that were major influences on Hegel?

I was particularly interested in Kant's three critiques. If Hegel year can include Kant, why not Hume? Why not Berkeley? This line of thinking threatens a regress all the way back to Thales.

My friend Joseph Trullinger, a philosophy professor and Kant scholar, suggested focusing on "the twenty five years of philosophy" from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1871) to Hegel's declaration in the 1806 Phenomenology that philosophy had been completed (in a very precise sense). I pushed beyond that chronological limitation only slightly to include three key influences on Kant: Leibniz and Spinoza to give us a clear idea of "pre-critical" philosophy's wild ambitions and Rousseau as the inspiration for his idea of freedom as self-legislation.

Here is the syllabus I eventually landed on. All its merits can be attributed to Joseph, any faults are my responsibility.

So far, our group has made it to Kant's Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Purpose. We're spacing the sessions two weeks apart, with a few exceptions, and hope to finish the Phenomenology before the year is out. I'd love to hear from others who have organized Hegel reading groups, how you approached it, and what you would do differently!