The question of whether Hegel “was” a totalitarian is meaningless. Translate this into Hegel’s vocabulary: does it mean an oriental despot, or one who favors oriental despotism? The answer is no, on both counts, for Hegel. It is also no, on both counts, for Marx. Marx, unlike Hegel, promoted dictatorship as an intermediary state on the road to his utopia, but the end state of Marxian communism is anarchic, not despotic.

The question of what Hegel meant by “state” is also unanswerable. Hegel was a mystic, and it is never profitable to engage mysticism with reason. The word “state” meant “governmental apparatus” at the time, as it still does, and Hegel’s attempt to conflate this word with various undefinable universals - which, contrary to popular belief, do not exist independently - is best regarded as not clarification, but camouflage.

I used the word “divine” because Hegel used it, but it is probably the wrong choice on a website frequented by traditionalist Christians. Hegel sacralized the State. The phenomenon of worship is part of human nature, and it certainly does not depend on a personalized god.

To worship an institution is to consider it essentially and unquestionably benign, to assume that abolishing it is a step backward by definition. Catholics, for example, have this attitude toward the Church, or academics toward the university system. Competing against Hegel’s vision of the sacred State was the Whig perspective, as expressed by Locke, that the State is a mundane and pedestrian institution that keeps us from killing each other.

There is no such thing as a mundane and pedestrian oriental despotism. And this is how Hegel contributed, as did many 19th-century thinkers, quite unwittingly to the century of destruction that followed.

Think of Hegel as an engineer who built a bad bridge. The engineer did not intend his bridge to fall down. He did not have a strange definition of civil engineering in which the bridge that fails in a high wind is actually the best bridge, and it is right and beautiful for it to fall into the river when the high wind comes, because this is as Nature intends. Such perversions would come later. But nonetheless, the bridge fell down. Hegel’s sacred state was an essential tool in the hands of oriental despots and they used it to its full potential. Should we praise him for this?

Whereas Ricardo, for example, was certainly the source of some of the muddled and ridiculous theories in Das Kapital. But it is very easy to imagine Stalinism without Ricardo. It is almost impossible to imagine Stalinism without a theory of the state as - Hegel’s word - “supreme.” Since this invention is not independent, I find it reasonable to describe Hegel as a precursor of Stalinism.

The Estates are a guarantee of the general welfare and public freedom. A little reflection will show that this guarantee does not lie in their particular power of insight, because the highest civil servants necessarily have a deeper and more comprehensive insight into the nature of the state’s organisation and requirements. They are also more habituated to the business of government and have greater skill in it, so that even without the Estates they are able to do what is best, just as they also continually have to do while the Estates are in session. No, the guarantee lies on the contrary [a] in the additional insight of the deputies, insight in the first place into the activity of such officials as are not immediately under the eye of the higher functionaries of state, and in particular into the more pressing and more specialised needs and deficiencies which are directly in their view; [b] in the fact that the anticipation of criticism from the Many, particularly of public criticism, has the effect of inducing officials to devote their best attention beforehand to their duties and the schemes under consideration, and to deal with these only in accordance with the purest motives.

I don’t see any real evidence that Hegel called for a fully responsible ministry.

1. First of all, you seem now to be conceeding that Hegel was not himself a totalitarian, but influenced totalitarians. There is no doubt that Hegel influenced Marx, although I think you’ll find tracing influence to twentieth-century fascism is more difficult (and Hegel undoubtedly influenced plenty of liberals). I already cited Kaufmann who looked at the main Nazi “theorist” Rosenberg’s writings on Hegel. They were critical, and Rosenberg endorsed Schopenhauer (which only a philistine would think means Schopenhauer is wrong or without value).

Along with Hegel, David Ricardo was the most significant intellectual influence on Marx. Does that make Ricardo a proto-totalitarian?

2. “Divinizing” the state seems like neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for totalitarianism. Romans 13:1 says the powers that be are ordained by God, which is perfectly consistent with saying that there are limits on their appropriate authority. Communists surely don’t claim that the state is divine. Hobbes and Rousseau think the state is human, but that doesn’t stop them from coming to illiberal conclusions regarding its claims.

3. Hegel thinks his methodological collectivism is consistent with a limited, constitutional state. He might be wrong, but the onus is on you to show that.

Everyone who spins a myth claims to be debunking one. Would you do otherwise?

In fact, what these modern Hegelists are debunking is not a myth but a strawman. Of course Hegel did not endorse what he called “oriental despotism.” He specifically condemned it: “This often desired unity of church and state is found under oriental despotisms, but an oriental despotism is not a state, or at any rate not the self-conscious form of state which is alone worthy of mind, the form which is organically developed and where there are rights and a free ethical life.”

“Oriental despotism” was the 1830s’ term for what we now call “totalitarianism.” There is no ambiguity at all in this phrase. Therefore, the idea that a century plus of Hegel scholars had somehow failed to read Hegel, which is the proposition that this so-called “debunking” asks us to accept, is so ahistorical on its own that it instantly should arouse the suspicion of even the most gullible liberal, a category which certainly includes neither you nor your readers.

As I explained but will cheerfully repeat, the treatment of Hegelianism as a precursor of totalitarianism is not ascribing some moral complicity to the man. It is simply saying that, since all systems of totalitarianism, or “oriental despotism,” or whatever in God’s name you want to call it, divinize the state, and since Hegel divinized the state, Hegel supplied an essential ingredient in the ideological mix that, in the 20th century, brought oriental despotism to Europe. This is an entirely Wertfrei statement.

One way to dispute this claim would be to show that the line of Hegelian influence died out, and the totalitarian movements of the 20th century had independently originated the idea of a divine state, rather as the octopi independently evolved the retina. Given that everyone knows that both Marx and Bismarck were influenced by Hegelianism, this strikes me as hard to show.

One could also dispute the point by arguing that Hegel was not the first to urge state-worship, as you show Aristotle also doing. Of course, as I have said before, Aristotle’s state was far more mundane than Plato’s, and Aristotle had a lot of other things to say in his various works, even the few of them we have. Whereas Hegel is pretty much just state-worship plus windy metaphysical nonsense.

Aristotle also did not live in the 1830s. And before Hegel, the Enlightenment stream of European thought, who definitely claimed for that era the legacy of the classical world, was distinctly innovative in treating government as a human institution, not a divine one. Rousseau as well deserves much of the credit, but Hegel certainly played a significant part in reversing this trend. If you can find the idea that man exists for the state and not vice versa, expressed in so many words after 1750 and before Hegel, I would certainly be quite curious.