Klaus Vieweg’s eight-hundred-page biography of Hegel made something of a sensation when the German original appeared in 2019. More lies have been told about Hegel than about any other philosopher, Vieweg averred, and the biggest lie of all painted Hegel as an apologist for the Prussian Restoration. That remains a common assessment of Hegel on this side of the Atlantic: As Leo Strauss remarked in 1958, Hegel is often seen as “both a reactionary and a metaphysician: a metaphysician, i.e., unscientific, and a reactionary because he sold his soul to the Prussian sham-constitutional monarchy of the early nineteenth century.”
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