This book is intended to introduce one of the richest movements in modern philosophy. Hegelianism presents one possible path into modern European or “Continental” philosophy, which we can understand as a series of complex responses to Hegel. In what follows, I show how Hegelian and anti-Hegelian currents of thought shaped some of the most significant movements in twentieth-century European philosophy, from existentialism, Marxism and phenomenology to critical theory and poststructuralism. I foreground the Hegelian themes of the unhappy consciousness, the master/slave dialectic and the struggle for recognition, which have proven very fertile for German critical theory as well as for postwar French philosophy. I also consider the problem of modernity, theories of recognition, and the deconstruction of dialectic, important themes that are all profoundly indebted to Hegelian thought. On the other hand, Hegel has had a largely negative impact on the development of analytic philosophy; fortunately, this has recently begun to change with the emergence of “analytic neo-Hegelianism” (see Rockmore 2005). While I deal primarily with what I loosely call “German” and “French” appropriations of Hegelian thought, I also make some brief remarks on analytic neo-Hegelianism in my concluding discussion.

The book is structured into three parts. It begins with a brief introduction to key elements of Hegel's philosophy, and an overview of some of the main figures in the competing “Right” and “Left” Hegelian schools.