This was Herbert Marcuse's first book on Hegel, written in the early 1930s when he was under the strong influence of Martin Heidegger. It provides a still unequaled Heideggerian reading of Hegel's thought that seeks the defining characteristics of "historicity" - what it means to say that a historical event happens. These ideas were foundational for Marcuse; they express a tradition known as "phenomenological Marxism," subsequently represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and by some members of the Praxis group in Yugoslavia. The book is in two parts. The first analyzes Hegel's Logic in order to identify its ontological problematic or theory of being; by focusing on Hegel's Early Theological Writings and the Phenomenology of Spirit, the second part argues that the concept of Life in its historicity was in fact the original foundation of Hegelian ontology. Clearly this is a "purer" form of philosophizing than Marcuse was to pursue after he joined the Institut fur Sozialforschung, discovered Freud, and distanced himself from Heidegger's philosophy. But there is a definite connection between his analysis of historicity in this important early work and his later attempts to understand the underlying dynamic of contemporary history and society in such books as One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization. Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicityis included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy,

Recent attempts to revitalize Hegel's social and political philosophy have tended to be doubly constrained: firstly, by their focus on Hegel's Philosophy of Right; and secondly, by their broadly liberal interpretive framework. Challenging that trend, Arash Abazari shows that the locus of Hegel's genuine critical social theory is to be sought in his ontology – specifically in the 'logic of essence' of the Science of Logic. Mobilizing ideas from Marx and Adorno, Abazari unveils the hidden critical import of Hegel's logic. He argues that social domination in capitalism obtains by virtue of the illusion of equality and freedom; shows how relations of opposition underlie the seeming pluralism in capitalism; and elaborates on the deepest ground of domination, i.e. the totality of capitalist social relations. Overall, his book demonstrates that Hegel's logic can and should be read politically.

wide criticism both from Western and Eastern scholars.

This classic book is Marcuse's masterful interpretation of Hegel's philosophy and the influence it has had on European political thought from the French Revolution to the present day. Marcuse brilliantly illuminates the implications of Hegel's ideas with later developments in European thought, particularily with Marxist theory.

This book shows how an understanding of the nature and role of insanity in Hegel's writing provides intriguing new points of access to many of the central themes of his larger philosophic project. Berthold-Bond situates Hegel's theory of madness within the history of psychiatric practice during the great reform period at the turn of the eighteenth century, and shows how Hegel developed a middle path between the stridently opposed camps of "empirical" and "romantic" medicine, and of "somatic" and "psychical" practitioners. A key point of the book is to show that Hegel does not conceive of madness and health as strictly opposing states, but as kindred phenomena sharing many of the same underlying mental structures and strategies, so that the ontologies of insanity and rationality involve a mutually illuminating, mirroring relation. Hegel's theory is tested against the critiques of the institution of psychiatry and the very concept of madness by such influential twentieth-century authors as Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, and defended as offering a genuinely reconciling position in the contemporary debate between the "social labeling" and "medical" models of mental illness.

Hegel is making a comeback. After the decline of the Marxist Hegelianism that dominated the twentieth century, leading thinkers are rediscovering Hegel’s thought as a resource for contemporary politics. What does a notoriously difficult nineteenth-century German philosopher have to offer the present? How should we understand Hegel, and what does understanding Hegel teach us about confronting our most urgent challenges? In this book, Todd McGowan offers us a Hegel for the twenty-first century. Simultaneously an introduction to Hegel and a fundamental reimagining of Hegel’s project, Emancipation After Hegel presents a radical Hegel who speaks to a world overwhelmed by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and economic inequalities. McGowan argues that the revolutionary core of Hegel’s thought is contradiction. He reveals that contradiction is inexorable and that we must attempt to sustain it rather than overcoming it or dismissing it as a logical failure. McGowan contends that Hegel’s notion of contradiction, when applied to contemporary problems, challenges any assertion of unitary identity as every identity is in tension with itself and dependent on others. An accessible and compelling reinterpretation of an often-misunderstood thinker, this book shows us a way forward to a new politics of emancipation as we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of contradiction and find solidarity in not belonging.