The career of American Hegelianism, as might be expected, reveals almost as much about the distinctive features of the native cultural and intellectual tradition as it does of the theoretical contribution of Hegel to professional philosophy in the English-speaking world during the last century and a half. In this brief essay I have divided the story of American Hegelianism into four periods, on the understanding that these are thematically suggestive rather than chronologically exact. Each marks a changed estimate of Hegel's importance within the United States, and each includes some discussion of an influential or ‘modal’ figure with loyalties to Hegel or to derivative absolute idealist doctrine. The intention is to provide an historical ‘map’ with bibliographical and biographical landmarks, which may prove to be of use or interest to students of Hegelianism at other times and in other places.
For several reasons, independent of his own estimate of America as ‘the land of the future’, the United States should have proved receptive to Hegel's ideas. American philosophy, in a remarkably continuous tradition from dissent within Puritanism to contemporary logicians, has consistently returned to the tenets of idealism and voluntarism; stressing the. essential spirituality of the material and social world and the decisive role of the will in the forming of that world. Hegel and later absolute idealists assisted significantly in maintaining these preoccupations, but theirs was not the most persuasive voice. In several senses American idealism, as measured by the origins and development of the most important indigenous doctrine – the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce and his successors – has remained more consistently Kantian than Hegelian, more epistemological than metaphysical, more concerned with the individual human conscience than the grand formal and historical design.
Reflections for a Sociological Representation of the Eater
