Readings of Hegel: A Guide for the Perplexed
I’m compiling the main readings of Hegel I know of, along with their reference texts. Any addition is more than welcome!
Here’s what I have so far:
Traditional reading: Hegel as the culmination of German Idealism and the overcoming of Kant.
Suggested reading: Any college textbook will do.
Marxist reading: Hegel as the great thinker of the bourgeois state.
Suggested reading: Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
Kojevean reading: Hegel as the thinker of human history as the history of the struggle for recognition.
Suggested reading: Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.
French reading: Hegel as the thinker of negativity.
Suggested reading: Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Lacanian reading: Hegel as the thinker of lack.
Suggested reading: Slavoj Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan.
Hermetic reading: Hegel as a Hermetic thinker, in whom knowledge is “knowing how to know” like the divinity.
Suggested reading: Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition.
Posted Jan 3, 2026, 7:50 PM UTC