The Indictment - Hegel as Culprit for the War
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse: The Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918)
Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (1864-1929) was a liberal sociologist, journalist, and later professor at the London School of Economics. His book The Metaphysical Theory of the State appeared in 1918—in the last year of the war, written in anger over four years of senseless dying. It was not a neutral philosophical treatise, but a wartime pamphlet, an indictment.
The basic thesis was simple and devastating: Hegel’s philosophy of the state is a “wicked doctrine” that legitimized German militarism and thereby made the war possible. The Prussian authoritarian state invoked Hegel, so Hegel was guilty of the catastrophe. This logic was questionable—but effective in the atmosphere of the war.
The specific critique was directed against Hegel’s formula “What is actual is rational, and what is rational is actual.” Hobhouse read this as a justification of the existing order: what is, is good—so the Prussian military state is also good. This reading ignored Hegel’s distinction between mere existence (Existenz) and essential actuality (Wirklichkeit). Hegel did not justify everything that exists, but only what corresponds to its own reason.
Hobhouse analyzed Bosanquet’s concept of the “real will”—and showed its authoritarian implications. If the state represents the “real will,” it can act against the factual will of citizens—and present this as their true will. This critique struck Bosanquet—and in the wartime mood Bosanquet was equated with Hegel.
The impact was devastating for British idealism. Whoever had been a Hegelian before 1914 stood under suspicion after 1918. The philosophy faculties of Oxford and Cambridge turned away from continental speculation. Analytic philosophy—Russell, Moore, later Wittgenstein—offered the alternative: clarity instead of obscurity, analysis instead of system, logic instead of dialectic.
The irony: Hobhouse himself, in his own social theory, was not so far removed from Green and Bosanquet. He too emphasized the social nature of human beings, the constitutive role of community, the necessity of state intervention. But in the context of the war, these affinities became invisible—what counted was the demarcation.
The systematic assessment: Hobhouse’s critique struck real problems in the British reception of Hegel—the danger of glorifying the state, the authoritarian implications of the “real will,” the insufficient emphasis on individual rights. But attributing these problems to Hegel himself was historically inaccurate. Hegel was neither a nationalist nor a militarist—he was a Prussian reforming civil servant who favored constitutional development.
The tragedy: just as the British reception of Hegel had reached its most mature form—systematic, academically established, philosophically productive—it was destroyed by the attribution of war guilt. It would take decades before Hegel was again read in England as a philosopher to be taken seriously.