The Western Answer – and Its Indictment of Hegel
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Western answer to Auschwitz has a name: the critique of totalitarianism. Between 1944 and 1951, four thinkers – independently of one another, in different disciplines, but with remarkable convergence – develop a theory of totalitarian rule. Friedrich August von Hayek (economist), Karl Popper (philosopher of science), Hannah Arendt (political theorist), and Karl Jaspers (existentialist philosopher) all argue: National Socialism and Stalinism are structurally related. Both are forms of “total rule” that crush the individual.
Their shared thesis runs: totalitarianism arises when collective goals – nation, race, class, historical necessity – are placed above individual rights. When the state becomes all-encompassing. When an ideology claims a monopoly on truth. When dissent is not tolerated but eradicated.
And Hegel is indicted. His claim that “the state is the actuality of the ethical Idea” (Philosophy of Right §257) sounds to them like an apotheosis of the state. His philosophy of history seems to propagate historical necessity – and thereby to legitimize crimes: “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational” (Philosophy of Right, Preface). His dialectic seems capable of justifying anything: thesis, antithesis, synthesis – and suddenly the bad becomes “necessary” for the good.
Their shared solution is: the open society. Individual freedoms must be protected absolutely. Pluralism, diversity of opinion, decentralized decision-making, separation of powers, the rule of law. The state must be limited – for power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely (Lord Acton).
This indictment raises a question we must answer systematically: Do these critiques actually hit Hegel – or do they hit a caricature?