The Young Hegel: Studies in Dialectics and Economics | MIT Press | Philosophy Books for Academic Research & Marxist Theory Studies

Just like other masters of German philosophy, Hegel is notorious for the inaccessibility. Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, all call for reader to master the history of Western philosophy before deciphering their works. When it comes to Hegel¡¯s ¡®Phenomenology of the Mind¡¯, the author¡¯s demand on reader goes too far. Every chapter in the part of ¡®Consciousness¡¯ is, in fact, the history of philosophy with no referring any specific names. Moreover, ¡®Introduction¡¯ is not at all introducing reader into anything. It¡¯s the recapturing of the whole work. It must be the most difficult part in the book. So it¡¯s incomprehensible until you reads through the final page of the book. Reading Hegel is like swimming through wet sand. Moreover, Hegel published absolutely nothing preceding ¡®Phenomenology of the Mind¡¯. This fact compounded the difficulty immensely. So much so that one is forced to regard that complex work so something that sprung full-grown, like Athena, from the head of Zeus.But with Lukacs¡¯s help, you can manage to read Hegel with much more ease. I think Hegel¡¯s contemporary readers had no such difficulty in reading his works. Kant¡¯s propositions and the problem of British empiricism and continental rationalism were the common sense to them. But that kind of knowledge should be obtained, to us, with hard work through reading history of philosophy. Moreover, we can¡¯t sense the historical events like French revolution as vividly as Hegel and his contemporaries felt. We can¡¯t share the same horizon with Hegel. To overcome such obstacles, Hegel¡¯s time should be reconstructed. To do so, Lukacs traced back unpublished manuscripts from Hegel¡¯s gymnasium days to just before writing ¡®Phenomenology of the Mind¡¯. And that, he links Hegel¡¯s personal history to his contemporary events, to show why Hegel thought so. Lukacs¡¯s illustration is easy and graphic enough to grasp who Hegel is. It¡¯s the touch of master. As you know Lukacs is a celebrated Hegelian Marxist philosopher. He opened up the track Frankfurt school and other Hegelian Marxists followed. This book is so much aged. Lukacs wrote this book when he escaped from the hand of Nazi to Moscow. But I haven¡¯t heard of any big name with Hegelian trait since World War II. Only Marxist reads Hegel now. And in the field of philosophy, Hegel and Marxism is out of fashion. So you can¡¯t expect any master like Lukacs write a intellectual biography on Hegel. If you try Hegel, this book is ¡®must¡¯.