Hegel Among the Culture Warriors

“Battle of Jena “ colored litho by Antoine Charles Horace Vernet (called Carle Vernet)(1758–1836) and Jacques François Swebach (1769–1823) Wikimedia Commons

Review of Molly Farneth, Hegel’s Social Ethics: Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of Reconciliation (Princeton University Press, 2018)

What has Jena to do with Jerusalem? Or Washington D.C., for that matter?

Plenty, it turns out. It was in Jena, as Napoleon’s armies were advancing on the city, where Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel completed The Phenomenology of Spirit, the introduction…