Abstract

In celebration of the two-hundredth birthday of Hegel, there have been and will be, hundreds of meetings, conferences, and symposia to pay tribute — in one way or another — to the man who is perhaps the greatest philosopher who ever lived. The dialectic, non-specialized philosophy of history, concrete non-dualistic aesthetics, and the rebuttal of the Historical School of Law all derive from Hegel's great system. Marx, Lenin, and Mao are all indebted to him. Marcuse, Adorno, and Habermas; Labriola, Banfi, and Gramsci; Kojeve, Hyppolite, and Sartre — all would be considerably weaker were it not for Hegel's genius. What is most important in Hegel's thought is the effect he has had on those who followed, for the ground he cleared provided the way to treat man and society in a manner that was not fraught with irreconcilable dualisms, such as freedom/determinism, mind/body, man/society, institution/person.