Hegel graffiti in Tubingen (photo courtesy of the author)
It was a balmy August day in Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, a sleepy (but immensely wealthy) Western European metropolis with the skyline of a much smaller city and one of the more incoherent transport networks I had encountered in Germany (which, given the state of Deutsche Bahn, was saying a lot). The town is known as the nerve center of the German automobile industry—hosting the headquarters of Porsche and Mercedes-Benz, as well as their respective car museums. It is also the easiest way to get to Tubingen, an even sleepier Medieval college town nestled in between the Neckar and Ammer rivers, about an hour south of Stuttgart by bus.
That day, there was a regional train outage (Deutsche Bahn again!)—so bus it was. By the time I reached Tubingen, it was getting dark, but the charming Neckar riverfront, and the endearing and distinctive Hölderlinturm (home to its namesake, the German romantic poet Hölderlin, for the last 37 years of his life) were still teeming with tourists. After leaving my travel backpack in the local youth hostel, I made my way back to the center of town. Not for Hölderlin, but for his classmate, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Hegel and Hölderlin studied (and lived) together at the Tübinger Stift, a Lutheran seminary, in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Upon graduating, Hölderlin spurned the ministry and instead pursued a literary career, which was prematurely interrupted by the debilitating mental illness that eventually confined him to the Hölderlinturm. Hegel also rebuffed a career in the church, but philosophy, not poetry, was his ticket out. After undergoing an intensive study of German idealism, he followed his friend Friedrich Schelling to Jena (another college town) and entered the philosophical academy. By the mid-1820s, he was one the most widely read and respected philosophers in the German-speaking world. Today, he still ranks alongside Kant and Nietzsche as a seminal figure in the history of German (and global) thought. His vast corpus, which emphasized the place of history in human practice, and the contextual and cultural determinants of our rational capacities, has had a tremendous impact on the way humanists and social scientists describe the evolution of human civilization, most notably in the work of his intellectual descendent and the most famous of the ‘Young Hegelians’, Karl Marx.
As of the 2025-2026 academic year, Hegel’s influential—and controversial—Lectures on the Philosophy of History no longer has a place on the Contemporary Civilization syllabus, not even as a recommended or supplemental text. While instructors may choose to teach the Lectures as an accessory to the standard CC curriculum—often as a bridge between Late Enlightenment universalism (epitomized in Kant, Wollstonecraft, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man) and the 19th-century proto-sociology of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and the Romantic liberalism of John Stuart Mill—they must do so at their own discretion. There is irony in the fact that a thinker whose work so thoughtfully explored the theoretical foundations of human intellectual history has been removed from the CC syllabus—a condensed survey of that very history.
That’s not to say that there aren’t good reasons to drop the Lectures, a text strewn with reductive and downright offensive analyses of various African and Asian civilizations, which are variously depicted as either statically ahistorical or culturally unrefined. Hegel’s insightful reflections on the development of European religion and philosophy are undercut by his absolute ignorance of the world beyond Western Europe and the Mediterranean Basin. But read with the appropriate context and in critical dialogue with writers and thinkers from beyond the West, the Lectures remains an insightful contribution to the development of Western historical thought—both in spite of its provincialism and because of it.
The real reason for Hegel’s disappearance from the syllabus, however, may not be cultural politics but geopolitics. In the early 1990s, the fall of the Soviet Union provided fuel for a new historicism, with Francis Fukuyama’s notorious The End of History and the Last Man leading the charge. These Whiggish political philosophers argued that the coming decades would inaugurate an era of ideological consensus, liberal peace, and global prosperity, in contrast to the terror, dissension, and chaos of the previous century. Drawing on Hegel, they maintained that this new historical epoch would lie beyond history itself—marking the final form of the human project. Whatever its merits at the time, Fukuyama’s thesis has not withstood the turmoil of the past few years. If anything, our moment is a post-Hegelian one: the force of history has reasserted itself, but narratives of progress—including Hegel’s—no longer hold any currency in our collective consciousness.