Hegel and the New Historicism

Abstract

… intellectual and moral process (is) a history of increasingly useful metaphors rather than of increasing understanding of how things really are.” (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 9)In an engaging recent paper, Ian Hacking has argued that Hegel is “speaking to us” once again, after a long period (in Anglo-American philosophy, at least), in which he appeared to be speaking to another audience, located in another world. He has our ear once more because our philosophical thought has once again begun to incorporate Hegelian themes, after decades in which our respective paths did nothing other than diverge. The aim of much Anglo-American philosophy has been to combine a Kantian “conceptual scheme” idealism with a late Wittgensteinian picture of the individual subject as embedded within a system of shared norms, practices and understandings; this has meant that it is now receptive to a form of “internal realism”, which also has a social, historical, contextual dimension, and it is this that many claim to have found in Hegel. As Richard Winfield has noted recently, after decades in the wilderness, Hegel is now an inspirational figure for the anti-foundationalism, anti-Cartesianism and anti-realism of the “new orthodoxy”: