Finland — The Complete Hegelianization of a Nation (1824–1863)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Historical Paradox — Hegel in the Russian Grand Duchy
Of all the early receptions of Hegel outside Germany, the Finnish one is the most remarkable — and the least known.[1] Between 1824 and the early 1860s, Finland was the only country in the world where Hegel’s philosophy was not one school among several, but philosophy as such. Every aspiring civil servant had to study Hegel’s philosophy of right; every doctor of philosophy had to work through parts of the system in detail. The University of Turku/Åbo (later Helsinki) became completely Hegelian — comparable only to Berlin under Hegel himself, and later to Oxford under the British Idealists.
The paradox: this Hegelianization took place in the Grand Duchy of Finland, an autonomous part of the Russian Empire under the Tsar. While in Russia itself Hegel reception began laboriously (see Chapter 17), and while in Germany the Hegelian school was already disintegrating, Finland became the stronghold of a productive, politically effective Hegelianism.
The historical-political constellation: In 1809, Russia had conquered Finland from Sweden. Tsar Alexander I granted the new Grand Duchy extensive autonomy — its own administration, its own laws, its own university (initially Turku, from 1828 Helsinki after a fire), Swedish as the official language. Finland remained culturally Swedish in character, but politically subordinate to the Tsar. This position between Sweden and Russia, between a Western educational tradition and Eastern sovereignty, created unique conditions for the reception of Hegel.[2]
The Beginnings — Gabriel Palander and the First Reading of Hegel (1819–1823)
The first mention: Hegel’s name first appeared in connection with Gabriel Palander, who gave lectures on Kant at the University of Turku from 1816 to 1819. His doctoral student Israel Hwasser reports that already in the summer of 1819 he had discussed Hegel’s logic with Palander — at a time when in Germany itself only a few had read Hegel.[3]
The first Hegelian writings: Johan Matthias Sundwall, a student of Palander, wrote the 1822 dissertation De juridicum analyticorum et syntheticorum discrimine, which begins with a quotation from Hegel. In 1823 Sundwall announced that he would begin a lecture series on Logic following Hegel. The professor of history, J.H. Avellan, also pointed to Hegel in his dissertation series Läran om den absoluta friheten (The Doctrine of Absolute Freedom) and criticized Kant using Hegel.[4]
Confirmation from Berlin: In 1829, Immanuel Ilmoni, professor of medicine at Turku, visited Hegel in Berlin. Hegel, according to Ilmoni’s report, “looked like a porter with his cap and leather dressing gown.” When Ilmoni reported on the state of philosophy in Finland, the astonished philosopher simply commented: “So lectures are being given according to my system in Åbo [i.e., Turku].”[5]
This anecdote shows that Hegel knew of the Finnish reception — and was apparently surprised that his philosophy was being taught in this remote northern Grand Duchy.
Johan Jakob Tengström — The Organizer of Hegelianization (1828–1847)
The key to dominance: The complete Hegelianization of Finland is the work of Johan Jakob Tengström (1787–1858). When the University was moved from Turku to Helsinki in 1828 (following the devastating fire in Turku in 1827), Tengström became professor of theoretical philosophy. From 1830 he was the only professor of philosophy in the entire country — a monopoly position he used for the systematic dissemination of Hegel.[6]
Institutional implementation: From 1832, Tengström began regularly lecturing on various parts of the Hegelian system: Encyclopedia, Philosophy of Right, Logic. Under his influence, almost all dissertations in philosophy were, for decades, more or less Hegelian. The examinations for aspiring civil servants in natural law, morals, and constitutional law were based exclusively on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Tengström thus created a system in which no one could pursue a career in administration, the judiciary, or education without having studied Hegel.[7]
Tengström’s philosophical position: Tengström was not a creative philosopher. His role consisted rather in transmitting and institutionally anchoring Hegel’s system. As a figure of cultural life he remained in the background, but he supported the new tendencies. Decisive was his combination of Hegelianism and nationalism.[8]
Early nationalism: Already in 1817, still in Turku, Tengström had written an essay, Om några Hinder för Finlands Litteratur och Cultur (On Some Obstacles to Finland’s Literature and Culture). The concrete measures he demanded did not differ much from what his predecessor Henrik Gabriel Porthan had already called for. What was new was the philosophical position on science, education, and the state, which clearly differed from both Romantic and Enlightenment thought. This text already announced a characteristic typical both of Tengström and of his student Snellman: the combination of Hegelianism and Finnish nationalism. In this essay the difference between the Finnish and the Swedish people, following Finland’s separation from Sweden, was theoretically discussed for the first time.[9]
The end: When Tengström retired in 1847, his most significant student, Johan Vilhelm Snellman, was passed over for succession on political grounds. G.F. Aminoff received the post instead. Yet Hegelianism could not be marginalized, because in Finland there were only Hegelian philosophers.[10]
Johan Vilhelm Snellman — The Culmination of Finnish Hegelianism (1806–1881)
The student becomes the master: Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806–1881) was Tengström’s most significant student and the only Finnish Hegelian of European stature. By the time Snellman studied, Hegelianism had already become dominant in Finland — basic knowledge was taught in a Hegelian manner.[11]
The interrupted career: Although the young Snellman aimed at a university career, it would be misleading to characterize him as a purely academic philosopher. Due to principled disputes with the civil service and the consistory, his academic career was interrupted for years. Before he was finally appointed professor in 1856, he worked as a school rector and founded the newspaper Saima, which promoted the improvement of the status of the Finnish language — against Swedish dominance in education and administration. Despite the long interruption of his academic career, Snellman’s system concept remained more or less the same.[12]
The philosophical self-description (1841): In the preface to his main German-language philosophical work, Versuch einer speculativen Entwicklung der Idee der Persönlichkeit (Tübingen, 1841), Snellman wrote about the state of philosophy in Finland:
“[I]n this period, Romanticism and Schellingianism flourished in Sweden with the new so-called historical school. The separation of Finland, however, had already weakened the influence of the latter to such an extent that this literary revolution, significant for Sweden, showed little effect in Finland. Thus it happened that while in Sweden philosophy has still not gone beyond Schelling, in Finland Hegelian speculation has, since the years 1824, 1825, become dominant at the university. For this progress the country is particularly indebted to the present professor of philosophy, Johan Jakob Tengström, through whose efforts it has already come to the point that every aspiring civil servant, for the ordinary examination in natural law, morals, and constitutional law, learns exclusively Hegelian philosophy of right, and that all doctors of philosophy study at least some part of the system in detail.”[13]
This description was not exaggerated — it accurately reflects the state of the Finnish university in the 1840s.
Snellman’s Main Philosophical Works — Personality and State (1841–1842)
The “Idea of Personality” (1841) — Left Center in the Post-Hegelian Dispute
Snellman’s principal work, published in Tübingen in 1841, Versuch einer speculativen Entwicklung der Idee der Persönlichkeit, was a somewhat belated intervention in the dispute over the philosophy of religion that had broken out within the Hegelian school after Hegel’s death (see Chapters 2–4). The central problem concerned the role of subjectivity at the final stage of religious consciousness and the interpretation of absolute religion.[14]
The position: Carl Ludwig Michelet, one of the leading centrist Hegelians, characterized Snellman’s position as belonging to the “left center” — between the Hegelian Right (which defended the doctrine of a transcendent God, the immortality of the soul, and the historical Christ) and the Left Hegelians (who disputed these doctrines).[15]
The critique of Göschel (Right Hegelian): According to the Right Hegelian Carl Friedrich Göschel, the human soul attains its highest determination in a conscious unity with absolute spirit — the soul becomes immortal as personality. Snellman’s critique concerned Göschel’s emphasis on continuity or the persistence of the soul: Göschel accepted a common-sense concept of immortality, thereby ignoring the demands of the speculative method, which requires immanent development from a strictly logical principle. Snellman instead emphasized the importance of the sublation of the stages of finite and infinite spirit: only with universal and objective thought is the transcending of finitude, that is, immortality, possible.[16]
The critique of Strauss and Feuerbach (Left Hegelians): The thesis of the identity of divine and human personality brought Snellman close to the pantheistic positions of Ludwig Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauss. But he criticized these too:
- Strauss had identified God with all-personality, humanity in its totality, such that all-personality is present in the consciousness of every individual. For Snellman this was not enough: he demanded an identity between individual personality and all-personality, which are only different aspects of personality.[17]
- Feuerbach fell back into a Kantian understanding of logic by interpreting God as a generic concept of humanity and being unable to develop the relation between God and human personality speculatively.[18]
Snellman’s originality: Snellman’s concept of personality — self-consciousness as absolute knowledge, in which subject and object are identical — formed for him the logical center of Hegelian philosophy.[19] Despite his effort to read Hegel literally, Snellman went beyond Hegel: he emphasized the disposition of the individual and interpreted Hegel’s identity thesis as an ethical demand on individuals to recognize themselves as the presence of world spirit. Absolute knowledge, as an ethical demand, has a strictly present-tense quality: it concerns all rational human beings at all times, and the human being recognizes himself as eternal in the Absolute.[20]
The “Doctrine of the State” (1842) — National Spirit and Finnish Nationalism
Snellman’s second main work, Läran om staten (The Doctrine of the State), appeared in Stockholm in 1842. The book was conceived as a popular presentation of Hegel’s philosophy of society, or of right. Snellman differed from Hegel, however, in several systematically significant respects:[21]
1. The emphasis on disposition: A peculiarity already found in the Idea of Personality was the emphasis on the disposition of the individual. The social subject should act as a person, and its action should be conscious. Ethical life is interpreted as ethical consciousness — not merely as an objective structure (Hegel), but as a subjectively appropriated conviction.[22]
2. National spirit instead of world spirit: What makes Snellman original in a questionable, but politically effective way, is his identification of substantial spirit with the national spirit. Despite speaking of world spirit, Snellman emphatically opposed “empty cosmopolitanism”: world spirit operates only in the histories of the various states. Universal culture always appears in national form.[23]
For Snellman, the concept of the state is closely linked with the concept of national spirit. Both are conceived as processes: the state is an autonomous process of legislation, through which a nation creates its law for itself. National spirit is the (consciously) changing coherence of national culture. For Snellman a nation in its totality was an agent.[24]
3. Education and language: For Snellman there is no such thing as a generally human education. He emphasized the inseparable connection between culture and language, as well as of thought with language. For Snellman a nation is primarily a unity of education. But he also saw the possibility of the dissolution of nationality: if all nations were to reach an equally high level of universal education, national differences would disappear.[25]
4. Democratic demand: The condition for political freedom and equality was, for Snellman, that everyone should have the opportunity to be educated. Education — familiarity with past culture — is the precondition for immediate participation in the politics of the state. Tied to this conviction is also his democratic demand for the improvement of the status of the Finnish language relative to Swedish.[26]
The Political Impact — Hegelianism as Constitutional Theory (1863)
Despite its gradual disappearance from academic life (in 1852–1856 the teaching of philosophy was banned by Tsar Nicholas I as dangerous to society), Hegelianism nonetheless retained importance.[27]
The constitutional function: During the long period when the Estates were not convened, it was above all Hegelian philosophy of right that supported efforts to constitutionally limit the power of rulers. This was also Snellman’s own wish, who in his Doctrine of the State agreed with the Hegelian insight that the monarch’s task is to set the “formal dot on the i” — not to rule arbitrarily, but to sanction rational laws.[28]
The culmination in 1863: When the Diet finally convened in 1863, Snellman had already left his professorship behind and was on his way to taking up the office of Senator. With the strong-willed Tsar of Russia, Alexander II, Snellman drafted the speech from the throne, in which the Tsar promised to govern Finland on the basis of constitutionally limited power.[29]
This episode shows the unique political effectiveness of Finnish Hegelianism: a Hegelian philosopher wrote the speech with which the Tsar constitutionally limited his own power. Hegel’s philosophy of right became an instrument of Finnish autonomy within the Russian Empire.
Systematic Conclusion — What Made the Finnish Hegelianization Possible?
The three complete Hegelianizations: Besides Finland, there were only two other cases of complete institutional Hegelianization:
- Berlin under Hegel (1818–1831) — the source
- Oxford under the British Idealists (1870s–1910s) — the late flowering
- Finland under Tengström/Snellman (1824–1863) — the early flowering
The enabling conditions for the Finnish Hegelianization:
- Institutional monopoly: Tengström, as the sole professor of philosophy (1830–1847), could fully control philosophical training
- Small scale: The Finnish educational elite was small — one university, a few hundred students. Hegel’s system could thus be transmitted comprehensively
- Political function: Hegel’s philosophy of right offered a rational justification for Finnish autonomy vis-à-vis Russian arbitrariness AND for Finnish nation-building vis-à-vis Swedish cultural dominance
- Linguistic mediation: The educational elite was educated in German — Hegel could be read in the original, without translation
- Insulation: The geographical and political position (part of the Russian Empire but culturally distinct) protected against the turmoil of German post-Hegelian fragmentation. When the school disintegrated in Germany (1831–1848), an orthodox Hegelianism could be taught undisturbed in Finland
- German-Finnish affinities: The cultural closeness between Germany and Finland was greater than is often assumed. The Finnish educational elite regularly studied in Germany; German professors taught at Finnish universities. The Protestant university tradition connected the two countries. This affinity allowed for rapid and thorough reception of German philosophy.[30]
The limits: Finnish Hegelianism was productive in application (philosophy of right, nationalism, constitutional theory), but not in developing the method or the logic further. Snellman was not a second Hegel, but an outstanding interpreter and political practitioner. When the new generation after 1856 received new ideas (liberalism, positivism), speculative Hegelianism quickly disappeared from academic life.[31]
The historical significance: Finnish Hegelianism shows that Hegel’s philosophy could be received differently than in Germany — not as a school formation that fractured into Right and Left, but as a politically effective instrument for grounding autonomy, constitutionalism, and national identity. This productive reception succeeded where institutional, political, and cultural conditions coincided.
The account of Finland follows closely the article “Die Blüte des Hegelianismus in Finnland” by Henriikka Tavi, in Hans Jörg Sandkühler (ed.), Handbuch Deutscher Idealismus, Stuttgart 2005, pp. 385–388. ↩︎
On the historical situation of Finland 1809–1917, see Osmo Jussila et al.: From Grand Duchy to Modern State: A Political History of Finland since 1809, London: Hurst, 1999. ↩︎
Juho Manninen: “The Eclipse of Kantianism and the Emergence of Hegelianism in Finland 1800–1840,” in: Ajatus 40 (1983), pp. 132–134. ↩︎
Manninen 1983, pp. 132–134. ↩︎
Ernst Julius Heinricius: Kurkistus kulissien taakse, Helsinki 1912, p. 113. Cited according to Manninen 1983, p. 134. ↩︎
Manninen 1983, pp. 136–138. ↩︎
Snellman: Samlade Arbeten (SA) II, p. 197f. See also Manninen 1983, p. 138. ↩︎
Manninen 1983, p. 146. Tengström was “not a creative” personality, but was of immense importance as an organizer and mediator. ↩︎
Tuomo Pulkkinen: The Postmodern and Political Agency, Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 1989, p. 52. Manninen 1983, pp. 125–130. ↩︎
Manninen 1983, pp. 140–143. ↩︎
Pulkkinen 1989, p. 5. ↩︎
Pulkkinen 1989, p. 51. ↩︎
Snellman: SA II, p. 197f. ↩︎
Juho Manninen: “The Essence of Spirit. J.V. Snellman and the Post-Hegelian Debate,” in: Ajatus 38 (1980), p. 12. ↩︎
Juho Manninen: “Snellman and Europe,” in: Scandinavian Journal of History 6 (1981), p. 5. ↩︎
Vesa Oittinen: “Spinosa atque exilis oratio — J.V. Snellman’s Idea of Personality,” in: Nordeuropaforum 2004, pp. 15–22. ↩︎
Oittinen 2004, p. 25. ↩︎
Oittinen 2004, pp. 25–27. ↩︎
Oittinen 2004, p. 20. ↩︎
Oittinen 2004, p. 26. ↩︎
Manninen 1980, p. 27. ↩︎
Manninen 1980, p. 27. ↩︎
Manninen 1980, pp. 27–30. ↩︎
Pulkkinen 1989, p. 17. ↩︎
Pulkkinen 1989, pp. 20–22. ↩︎
Manninen 1981, p. 7; Pulkkinen 1989, pp. 7–19. ↩︎
Pulkkinen 1989, p. 5. ↩︎
See Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §280 Addition. ↩︎
Manninen 1981, p. 11. ↩︎
On German-Finnish cultural relations in the nineteenth century, see Matti Klinge: Die Universität Helsinki 1640–1990, Helsinki: Otava, 1991, and idem: Kaksi Suomea (Two Finlands), Helsinki: Otava, 1982. ↩︎
Pulkkinen 1989, p. 111. ↩︎