The connection between Hegelian thought and the emergence of modern Jewish nationalism – Zionism – appears, at first, to be far–fetched and slightly incongruous. Yet some aspects of Hegelian thought became attractive to many secularised, Jewish intellectuals in the 19th century in their quest for self-identity amidst the turmoil of enormous political and social upheavals. Some facets of this receptivity to Hegelian ideas, and especially their extension to the future dimension of history, bear striking similarity to the popularity of Hegelian notions among the Polish intelligentsia in roughly the same period (cf. Ryszard Panasiuk's ‘Hegel in Poland’, in the Spring-Summer 1982 issue of the Bulletin). The context is also similar: political impotence and the reinterpretation of a political historical tradition with overt religious connotations.

The main issue facing Jewish thinkers in the post–1789 period was two-fold: the claim for integration, on the basis of equality, into a society based on the ideas of the Enlightenment, and the redefinition of Jewish identity in a mostly secularised world. Zionism appeared historically as one of the answers to this doutfle quest: it claimed that integration into the modern world should be on a collective – i.e. national – and not individual base; that this integration had to be based on auto-emancipation and self-determination, not on emancipation by others; and finally – and most fundamentally – that Jewish identity should be defined in terms of nationhood, not merely religious affiliation.

The career of American Hegelianism, as might be expected, reveals almost as much about the distinctive features of the native cultural and intellectual tradition as it does of the theoretical contribution of Hegel to professional philosophy in the English-speaking world during the last century and a half. In this brief essay I have divided the story of American Hegelianism into four periods, on the understanding that these are thematically suggestive rather than chronologically exact. Each marks a changed estimate of Hegel's importance within the United States, and each includes some discussion of an influential or ‘modal’ figure with loyalties to Hegel or to derivative absolute idealist doctrine. The intention is to provide an historical ‘map’ with bibliographical and biographical landmarks, which may prove to be of use or interest to students of Hegelianism at other times and in other places.

For several reasons, independent of his own estimate of America as ‘the land of the future’, the United States should have proved receptive to Hegel's ideas. American philosophy, in a remarkably continuous tradition from dissent within Puritanism to contemporary logicians, has consistently returned to the tenets of idealism and voluntarism; stressing the. essential spirituality of the material and social world and the decisive role of the will in the forming of that world. Hegel and later absolute idealists assisted significantly in maintaining these preoccupations, but theirs was not the most persuasive voice. In several senses American idealism, as measured by the origins and development of the most important indigenous doctrine – the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce and his successors – has remained more consistently Kantian than Hegelian, more epistemological than metaphysical, more concerned with the individual human conscience than the grand formal and historical design.

Hegel's thought reached Poland at the end of the 1830s and by the first half of the 1840s became the chief subject of discussion and controversy in Polish philosophy. It was a sign of an intellectual revival and proof of the importance of philosophical problems in the intellectual culture of the time. The reception of Hegelianism contributed a new element to the Romantic thought which had developed after the defeat of the November 1830 Uprising. Polish writers – and there was almost no philosopher who did not make a reference to Hegel – sought support in his theoretical schemas to resolve the important problems of the epoch. These were, first, the search for the cause of the fall of the nobles' republic in the 18th century and the failure of the 1830 revolutionary upsurge and, secondly, attempts to show ways of liberating the nation from alien rule and to determine its historical place among the nations of Europe. The predominant interest was in the philosophy of history since, with the help of the constructions of the historical process inspired by Hegel, one could justify the claim of the Poles to a place among the nations of Europe. Hence the Polish followers of Hegel, having different aims from the Master, necessarily modified his historlco-philosophical (or ‘historiosophic”) schemes in an essential way: while Hegel had seen the realization of the ideal in the present, his Polish followers emphasized the importance of the future for the fulfilment of mankind's mission.