Simon Gros

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“If we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence, an exact knowledge of Hegel, of both his greatness and his limitation, is absolutely indispensable.“

It is well known that Hegel exerted a major influence on the development of Marx’s thought. This circumstance led Lukács, one of the chief Marxist theoreticians of this century, to embark on his exploration of Hegelian antecedents in the German intellectual tradition, their concrete expression in the work of Hegel himself, and later syntheses of seemingly contradictory modes of though.

Four phases of Hegel’s intellectual development are examined: “Hegel’s early republican phase,” “the crisis in Hegel’s views on society and the earliest beginnings of his dialectical method,” “rationale and defense of objective idealism,” and “the breach with Schelling and The Phenomenology of Mind.” Lukács completed this study in 1938, but because of the imminent outbreak of war, it was not published until the late 1940s. A revised German edition appeared in 1954, and it is this text that is the basis of this first English translation of the work.

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Table of Contents

Preface to the new edition (1954)
Introduction

PART I: HEGEL’S EARLY REPUBLICAN PHASE (BERNE 1793-96)
1 Hegel’s ‘theological’ period: a reactionary legend
2 What is the meaning of ‘positivity’ in Hegel’s early works?
3 Historical perspectives and the present
4 The republics of Greece and Rome
5 Christianity: despotism and the enslavement of man
6 The place of ‘positivity’ in the development of Hegel’s thought

PART II: THE CRISIS IN HEGEL’S VIEWS ON SOCIETY AND THE EARLIEST BEGINNINGS OF HIS DIALECTICAL METHOD (FRANKFURT 1797-1800)
1 General description of the Frankfurt period
2 Old and new in the first years in Frankfurt
3 Fragments of two pamphlets on current German problems
4 Critical engagement with Kant’s ethics
5 The first studies in economics
6 The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate
7 The Frankfurt Fragment of a System
8 Reformulation of the problem of ‘positivity’

PART III: RATIONALE AND DEFENSE OF OBJECTIVE IDEALISM (JENA 1801–03)
1 Hegel’s role in Schelling’s break-away from Fichte
2 The critique of subjective idealism
3 Against abstract idealism in ethics
4 Hegel’s view of history in his first years in Jena
5 Hegel’s economics during the Jena period
6 Labour and the problem of teleology
7 The limitations of Hegel’s economic thought
8 ‘Tragedy in the realm of the ethical’

PART IV: THE BREACH WITH SCHELLING AND ‘THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND’ (JENA 1803-07)
1 The growing estrangement between Schelling and Hegel up to the final breach
2 Hegel’s political opinions and his approach to history in the period of The Phenomenology of Mind
3 A synoptic view of the structure of The Phenomenology of Mind
A Subjective spirit
B Objective spirit
C Absolute spirit
4 ‘Entausserung’ (‘externalization’) as the central philosophical concept of The Phenomenology of Mind
Appendix: the text of the fragment in French attributed to Hegel

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