I have no interest in arguments ad authoritatem, because the question of whether Hegel should be considered a contributor to the totalitarian tradition is not a question of fact, but of interpretation.

And even if it was a question of fact, what would matter is not the set of opinions held at the present time or the number of people who hold them, but the fact themselves. What on earth could possibly make anyone assume that the 2007 consensus interpretation of Hegel is automatically more valid than the 1957 consensus, or the 1907 consensus? Did the man die in 1976, or something? Or has history suddenly become a science? Can we see the lab notebooks? Talk about the Emperor of China’s nose.

My opinion is not Popper’s. It is my own, and I have expressed it at length on my own blog. You have linked to a number of articles expressing various views on Hegel, without particularly committing to what you personally believe. This strategy makes the task of presenting an argument so much easier that it is not even worth contending with, which is why I didn’t answer it.

I thank you, however, for now having posted your own opinion, which is certainly worthy of consideration and response.

In the previous comment, you didn’t make an argument. You made an innuendo that virtually all of modern Hegel scholarship is simply fraudulent and self-serving. You can’t actually refute that Hegel was a constitutional monarchist, because he was. You can’t refute that, for him to have been a constitutional monarchist at all, he had to be some sort of political liberal, at least by the standards of the 19th century. I disagree with many official interpretations because they are myths that distort and obscure the record rather than clarify it. There are some basic realities that I cannot deny, however, even if it would make my point stronger. It would make a totalitarian reading of Hegel a lot stronger if he did not, in fact, hold the political views that he did hold.

Again, the fact that even a professional historian, outspoken contrarian and unabashed revisionist such as yourself, who disagrees with the official interpretation of almost every significant question of 20th-century history and many from the 19th, feels it is perfectly reasonable to argue ad authoritatem, makes one of the best cases I’ve seen for my belief that the entire Western university system deserves nothing less than the Henry VIII treatment.

Scholarly consensus changes, as old myths and distortions are challenged by more solid interpretations. Interpretations are revised and, ideally, the new ones are more balanced and faithful to the evidence. Obviously overtly ideologically driven interpretations, whether they come from “Right” or “Left” Hegelians, Nazis or Popperians, cannot be as faithful to that evidence because they have special axes to grind.

We are seeing new criticism of trhe mythology of Wilson and FDR coming from Fleming, for example, and the debunking of Lincoln myths is a small industry in itself. No paleoconservative or anyone else should believe in consensus simply because it is a consensus. The point is that the overwhelming bulk of Hegel scholarship today says that your interpretation isn’t right, which means that there wasn’t anything the slightest bit wrong with my objecting to calling Hegel a totalitarian–the debunkers of Hegel myths have been objecting to this for years. The existence of a scholarly consensus requires the person trying to revive an earlier interpretation or introduce a new one to make better arguments than, “Well, any idiot can see that the entire field is wrong.”

I mean, it couldn’t have been that the planet was conquered by the American Progressive movement, a bunch of well-known state-worshippers with a substantial intellectual debt to German idealism in general and Hegel in specific - could it?

I’m really at a loss as to how any paleoconservative can believe in consensus, “virtual” or otherwise. All respectable American historians also agree that FDR saved capitalism, Lincoln preserved the Constitution, and the US lost the war in Vietnam. Next to this, who cares if Hegel said the State was divine? Obviously he didn’t mean it, and in any case he was right.

Even the Straussians, for God’s sake, are Hegelists. The entire American university system was founded by disciples of Hegel. The only person (besides David Stove) who will tell you that Hegel is a nut is Hegel himself, and fortunately the good folks at marxists.org have served him up, fresh and steaming, for “your lying eyes.”

But it might also be worth considering that, on his own terms, Hegel is not a political philosopher. The Philosophy of Right, after all, is a collection of lecture notes (and gained the importance they have in the interpretation of Hegel largely thanks to Marx), while his major works are works of speculative philosophy - the Science of Logic clearly so; it’s less obvious in the case of the Phenomenology of Spirit, but that is in no small part due to the baleful influence of Kojeve’s overemphasis of the “Lord and Bondsman” chapter.

Heaven forbid, I suppose, that philosophy should not be engagé.