History, for Hegel, is the history of the ‘spirit’. It is the history which the spirit itself creates and in which the spirit takes on an ‘objective’ shape in the world. The objectivity of what Hegel calls ‘objective spirit’ is realized in the form of world history. The term ‘world history’ refers less to the history of the whole world, and more to the historical sequence of ‘worlds’, or epochs. World and history thus have an asymmetrical relationship in the Hegelian understanding of ‘world history’: it is one history, which divides everything on earth into many worlds, into local and temporally limited world cultures. What makes it one history—what makes it unified—is the unitary concept of the spirit. The contributions brought together in this special issue discuss Hegel’s theory of world history, taking different approaches to the question of the relationship between the incomplete and the completed, between ‘actuality’ as a rational state and ‘existence’ as a reality that lacks rationality. In all texts, Hegel’s method of developing a philosophy of history represents a central problem.

Hegel’s ‘science of right’ is a philosophical account of spirit’s ‘world’. Accordingly, in this essay, I propose to take it as the model of what I call a ‘political cosmology’. In Hegel’s dialectic-speculative philosophy, cosmology becomes a practical, worldly science. It becomes the account of the ways in which spirit immanently constructs, produces and comes to know its own world and itself as the actuality of the world.

This paper answers the question of how, according to Hegel, we can do philosophy of right. The first part of the paper deals with a critical dimension of Hegel’s understanding of the method of the philosophy of right. In the second part, it is shown that in the philosophy of right we consciously look at the present as forming a comprehensive context, as something that is resistant to mere thought and as something that is temporal. According to Hegel, what we consider in this way is concrete.

The final pages of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia announce a particularly fraught transition. Hegel is describing a move from the concrete world of social and political institutions to the sublimated spheres of art, religion and philosophy—the transition from ‘objective’ to ‘absolute’ spirit. This transition is intricate, partly because, like all transitions, it works in both directions—in this case, from politics to culture and back again. Transition is always difficult to grasp in Hegel, not least because it takes such a variety of appearances: as an inexorable process, as an unexpected leap, or as an invisible movement that seems to take place behind our backs at moments of greatest stalemate. But this particular transition is especially challenging—not simply because it is so unprepared but also because it complicates the idea of the absolute as consummation of the encyclopaedic system. Hegel clearly explains why absolute spirit requires objective spirit. Art, religion and philosophy all depend on a world of pre-existing social practices from which they must nonetheless wrest a special kind of independence. But why the reverse? Why does objective spirit need to surpass itself in forms of spirit that overreach and may even, as we will argue, undermine it? What is the insufficiency in politics that requires the supplement of cultural practices that will destabilise it? Conversely, what is the specific autonomy that absolute spirit requires for its absolution, and what are the political stakes and risks of this autonomy?

Based on Hegel’s thesis of the ‘end of art’, this paper aims to explore how to study Hegel’s philosophy of literature by carrying out a dialogue with Francesco Campana. In his recent book, The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary Novel (2019), Campana demonstrates how literature resists its end by continuous self-transformation and provides a framework of ‘philosophization’–‘poetry’–‘ordinariness’ in understanding the contemporary novel. While, to some extent, I agree with him on the understanding of the ‘end of art’ thesis, I object to his idea that ‘philosophization’ and ‘ordinariness’ are two poles between which poetry moves. I defend the view that, from the perspective of Hegel’s absolute and taking Hegel’s philosophy as a totality, ‘philosophization’ and ‘ordinariness’ are inseparable. Furthermore, I emphasize the significance of Hegel’s thesis of the ‘end of art’, which I argue lies in revealing the problem of modern subjectivity. Literature, as a unique form of art, also reveals this problem and helps to solve it. Therefore, in the study of Hegel’s philosophy of literature, I insist on adopting the perspective of Hegel’s absolute and taking Hegel’s philosophy as a whole so that we can build connections among different disciplines and among different art-forms and art-types. With this perspective, I make some proposals, which include several paradigms for the study of Hegel’s philosophy of literature. Finally, in terms of the thesis of the ‘end of art’, I maintain that the study of Hegel’s philosophy of literature is to address the problem of modern subjectivity.

So fears the fictional spectator within the third act of Ludwig Tieck’s Die verkehrte Welt (Tieck 1978: 87). By the time it nears its conclusion, the 1797 play has become a quadruple play-within-a-play-within-a-play-within-a-play, with the character audience unable to tell what is fiction and what is reality, with Tieck undermining conventional narration as a parable of poetic fantasy and Romantic irony, part of that comic heritage extending from Aristophanes and Cervantes, up to Ludvig Holberg and Laurence Sterne. A verkehrte Welt was a recurrent cultural motif, with a similarly titled play appearing in 1683 by Christian Weise, as well as another by Johann Ulrich von König in 1725, each of which also partook from the Italian tradition of commedia dell’ arte. Heinrich Heine would later, in 1844, give the title Die verkehrte Welt to his satirical poem from the verse cycle Zeitgedichte. Yet the formulation of an ‘inverted world’ after Tieck would go on to acquire a meaning and seriousness through the German tradition altogether independent of his literary whimsy.

Christopher Arthur’s 2022 book The Spectre of Capital presents a systematic-dialectical exposition of the capitalist economy, focussing on the forms of capital. The book is a specific synthesis of much of Arthur’s earlier writings (the relevant works are listed in Arthur 2022: 441–42). Inherently the book goes beyond those earlier writings, because ‘synthesis’ and the associated interconnectedness of ‘moments’ is the true art of the book.

I thank my interlocutors for the care and attention that they have given to my work, The Spectre of Capital; Idea and Reality.1 I also thank the journal for organizing this symposium. The book rigorously develops a systematic dialectical presentation (SDP) of capital as an Idea. The very first, perhaps, to explore the method of systematic dialectic were Tony Smith and Geert Reuten. This problematic always involves a nuanced reception of Hegel’s logic. My differences with Smith and Reuten on this particular issue are partially addressed below.