Abstract

Jacques D'Hondt, coming from the French Left, has spent a career uncovering the essential, secret Hegel underlying the surface expressions of the philosopher. He is already known in English through Hegel in His Time: Berlin 1818-1831. He writes the present biography as one would write a detective novel. Suspicious of appearances, a keen and politically astute sixth sense finds that remarkably little in Hegel's life is what it first seems. He seeks the truth in what Hegel does not say or do, or through the missing context of what he does say. And yet, despite the hypocrisy and compromise forced on Hegel as the price of professional success at the best German university of the era, D'Hondt finds in Hegel, if not a martyr, at least a hero in the cause of freedom with whom he can identify. But as daring as Hegel's works were in their esoteric content, just as cautious was Hegel the man in the exoteric form given those works.