‘Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom’
By Klaus Vieweg
Stanford University Press, 488 pages

‘Hegel’s World Revolutions’
By Richard Bourke
Princeton University Press, 344 pages

The differences between these two books are evident in their Contents pages. Klaus Vieweg’s chapter titles emphasize places and dates: “The Beloved Hometown Growing up in Stuttgart, 1770-1788,” “A Student at the Protestant Seminary Tübingen, 1788-1793,” and “A Private Tutor of a Patrician Family Switzerland 1793-1796,” with later chapters on Frankfort, Jena, Bamberg, Nuremberg, and Heidelberg covering the years 1797 to 1831.

Richard Bourke’s book is divided into three parts: “The Kantian Revolution,” “Hegel and the French Revolution,” and “The History of Political Thought,” with subsections on topics such as “Kant, Religion and Revolution”; “The Christian Revolution and Its Fate”; “The Holy Roman Empire and the French Revolution”; “Revolution and the Modern Constitutional State”; and “Hegel’s Plato.” This intellectual biography is, naturally, mostly a matter of head over heart, featuring none of the dates Mr. Vieweg assigns to each phase of the philosopher’s life.

Intellectual biographies suit philosophers, but that will not do for Mr. Vieweg, even though he calls his book an intellectual biography. He has something more in mind, connecting the “trajectory of a life with the development of a philosophy.” He quotes a student of Hegel’s: “People should not say that the life of such a man is already apparent in his work, while his private life is unimportant; rather it is certain that the totality of men is found only in the combination of both.”

To deal with the whole man, Mr. Vieweg argues, is to show that Hegel was hardly the arch-conservative and proto-fascist that liberal thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper denounce. In his introduction, the biographer provides quite a tease: “Many episodes and anecdotes have recently come to light and they are surprising, exciting, spicy, funny, weird, gritty, and more.”

If Mr. Bourke provides a less juicy biography, he nonetheless joins Mr. Vieweg in deploring the depredations Berlin and Popper have perpetrated. Messrs. Vieweg and Bourke turn Hegel’s detractors on their heads by contending that Hegel is the progenitor of a philosophy of freedom, not tyranny. In effect, they dismiss Berlin and Popper as vulgarians, determined to distort Hegel’s philosophy in their quest to find the roots of fascism in a post-World War II climate of opinion bent on establishing a liberal orthodoxy.  

Messrs. Vieweg and Bourke, in other words, both suggest Berlin and Popper abandoned philosophy for polemics — in Berlin’s case, Mr. Vieweg argues, casting Hegel as a “theorist of the ‘absolute’ and of a ‘world spirit,’” taking away in his murky metaphysics “human liberty.”

Mr. Bourke accuses Popper of philosophical malpractice, so that it became “standard to … categorize” schools of thought as either “malevolent or sound” — in other words, a treatment of philosophy devoid of nuance and qualification.

Mr. Bourke is part of what Mr. Vieweg describes as “an extraordinary Hegel renaissance” in seeing in “Hegel’s concept of freedom the groundwork for his original theory of the capacities of humankind, for his skill in taking on other people’s perspectives, and for understanding freedom as finding oneself in the other.”

Both members of the Hegel renaissance present themselves as without an agenda, as seeking only to understand the sophistication of Hegel’s thought and (in Mr. Vieweg’s case) Hegel’s life, that thinkers of the 1940s and afterwards have ignored.

In spite of the biographers’ opposition to Berlin and Popper, not much effort, other than questioning their motives, is put into understanding these highly influential thinkers. Is there nothing else to be said for Berlin and Popper other than they got Hegel wrong?  

Another question to ask might be: What is it in Hegel’s thought that lends itself to such attacks? Nothing at all? What about his notion of the dialectic: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis? Marx, the materialist, turned the Idealist Hegel upside down, so that the Hegelian dialectic can seem to operate in contradistinction to free will. How exactly did Hegel get himself out of this dilemma that seems to make the dialectical nature of history deterministic?

In short, perhaps more of an engagement with Hegel’s opponents might have made for a stronger argument from two writers who are so bent on vindication that they do not have much patience for their opposition.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Essays in Biography.”