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Hegelianism in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

David Watson
David Watson*
Affiliation:
Oxford Polytechnic
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Abstract

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.

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Articles
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Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 3 , Issue 2: number 6 , Autumn/Winter 1982 , pp. 18 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1982

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References

Notes

1 See, for example, Smith, John E., The Spirit of American Philosophy (New York, 1963), 187–97Google Scholar; Bernstein, Richard J., ‘In Defence of American Philosophy’, in Smith, J.E. (ed.). Contemporary American Philosophy: second series (London and New York, 1970), 293–311 Google Scholar; Murphey, Murray G., ‘Toward an Historicist History of American Philosophy’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 15 (1979), 3–18 Google Scholar; Watson, David, ‘The Identity of American Ideas’, Cross-Currents 2 (1981), 1–12 Google Scholar.

2 For a survey of this development see Watson, David, ‘The Neo-Hegelian Tradition in America’, Journal of American Studies 14, 2 (1980), 219–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 The best general account is in Meyer, D.H., The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See, for example, Murdock, James, Sketches of Modern Philosophy, Especially Among the Germans (Hartford, Connecticut, 1842)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Mahan, Asa, A System of Intellectual Philosophy (New York, 1845)Google Scholar.

5 Rauch, Frederick A., Psychology; or, a View of the Human Soul; including Anthropology (New York, 1840)Google Scholar. See also Ziegler, H.J., Frederick Augustus Rauch: American Hegelian (Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1953)Google Scholar.

6 Hedge, F.H., Prose Writers of German (Philadelphia, 1848), 446 Google Scholar. See also Muirhead, J.H., ‘How Hegel Came to America’, Philosophical Review 37 (1928), 226–240 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted with other useful material in his The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy: Studies in the History of Idealism in England and America (London, 1935)Google Scholar.

7 Easton, Loyd D., Hegel's First American Followers, The Ohio Hegelians: John B. Stallo, Peter Kaufmann, Moncure Conway, and August Willich, with Key Writings (Athens, Ohio. 1966)Google Scholar.

8 The main sources for western Hegelianism in this period are Anderson, Paul R., Platonism in the Midwest (New York and London 1963)Google Scholar; Flower, Elizabeth and Murphey, Murray G., A History of Philosophy ih America (New York, 1977), 463–514 Google Scholar; Goetzmann, William A., The American Hegelians: An Intellectual Episode in the History of Western America (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; and Pochmann, Henry A., German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences (Madison, Wisconsin, 1957)Google Scholar. For more detail on the St. Louis Philosophical Society and its members see Forbes, Cleon, ‘The St. Louis School of Thought’, Missouri Historical Review 25 and 26 (1930–1931), 83–101, 289–3057 461–73, 609–77Google Scholar; Riedl, John O., ‘The Hegelians of St. Louis, Missouri, and their Influence In the United States’, in O'Malley, J.J. et al. (ed.), The Legacy of Hegel: Proceedings of the Marquette Hegel Symposium of 1970 (The Hague, 1973)Google Scholar; Snider, Denton J., The St. Louis Movement In Philosophy, Literature, Education, Psychology with Chapters of Autobiography (St. Louis, 1910)Google Scholar, and Watson, David, ‘Social Theory and National Culture: The Case of British and American Absolute Idealism, 1860-1900’, Social Science History, 5, 3 (1981), 251–74Google Scholar.

9 See Leidecker, Kurt F., Yankee Teacher: The Life of William Torrey Harris (New York, 1946)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harris, W.T., Hegel's Logic: A Book on the Genesis of the Categories of the Mind (Chicago, 1890)Google Scholar; and Warren, Austin, ‘The Concord School of Philosophy’, New England Quarterly, 2 (1929), 199–233 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 See Schneider, Herbert, A History of American Philosophy (2nd edition New York and London, 1963, 373–400 Google Scholar.

11 See Fisch, Max, ‘Philosophical Clubs in Cambridge and Boston’, Coranto, 2 (1964), 1, 12–23, 2, 12–25, and 3 (1965), 1, 16–30 Google Scholar; Kuklick, Bruce, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven and London, 1977), 46–62 Google Scholar.

12 See Kuklick, , Josiah Royce: An Intellectual Biography (Indianapolis and New York, 1972), Chapter 2Google Scholar, The Rise of American Philosophy, 140–58 and 435–47; White, Morton G., Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (Boston, 1957), 147–60Google Scholar.

13 Quotations are from Dewey, John, ‘From Absolutism to Experimentalism’ in Adams, G.P. and Montague, W.P. (eds.), Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements (New York and London, 1930), 2, 13–27 Google Scholar, ‘The Philosophy of Thomas Hill Green’, Andover Review, 9 (1889), 337–55Google Scholar, ‘On Some Current Conceptions of the Term “Self”’, Mind, 15 (1890), 58–74 Google Scholar, ‘Green's Theory of the Mora'l Motive’, Philosophical Review, 1 (1892), 593–612 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ‘Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal’, Philosophical Review, 2 (1893), 652–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coughlan, Neil, Young John Dewey:-An Essay in American Intellectual History (Chicago, 1975), 67–8Google Scholar.

14 See Holt, Edwin B. et al., The New Realism (New York, 1912)Google Scholar; Drake, Durant et al., Essays in Critical Realism (London, 1920)Google Scholar.

15 Barrett, Clifford (ed.), Contemporary Idealism in America (New York, 1932), vii– viii, 20, 297–326 Google Scholar.

16 Adams and Montague, 223; Kuklick, , Rise of American Philosophy, 315–37Google Scholar.

17 The best survey is by Reck, Andrew J., ‘Idealism in American Philosophy since 1900’, in Howie, John and Buford, Thomas O. (eds.), Contemporary Studies in Philosophical Idealism (Cape Cod, Mass., 1975), 17–52 Google Scholar.

18 Reck, A.J., Speculative Philosophy: A Study of its Nature, Types and Uses (Albuquerque, 1972), 107, 181–4Google Scholar; Smith, (ed.), Contemporary American Philosophy, 61, 185, 248, 308 Google Scholar.

19 Schilpp, Paul A. (ed.), The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (La Salle, Illinois, 1980), 3, 57, 132 Google Scholar.

20 Brodbeck, May, ‘Philosophy in America, 1900-50’, in Brodbeck, et al., American Non-Fiction, 1900–50 (Chicago, 1952), 70 Google Scholar.

21 Bernstein, Richard J., The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Oxford, 1976), xix–xx Google Scholar.