Nietzsche and Foucault on Hegel and History

An Introduction to the Hegel 13/13 Seminar with Cornel West (Feb. 11, 2026)

In this essay, I will provide a short introduction for our forthcoming seminar with Cornel West on the question of history in the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault – or, another way to say this: Nietzsche (and Foucault)’s inversions of Hegel.

This is a huge topic. Here, I will briefly introduce the theories of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault on history as background for our seminar with Cornel West. This is intended to lay a common groundwork for the seminar discussion.

Before proceeding, though, let me actualize the topic – to give you an idea of how these materialize speak to the present. As you know, one of the key questions is how the inversions of Hegel can help us understand the present and formulate praxis.

In last week’s Sunday edition of the opinion pages in the New York Times, the columnist Lydia Polgreen published a remarkable essay analyzing the current political crisis in the United States, the ICE raids, the two homicides of citizens in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the scenes of chaos and violence against peaceful protesters. Polgreen titled her piece “The Clash in Minneapolis Reveals What Kind of America We’ve Become,” and in it, she decries a growing cleavage in the American polis and the American spirit. She describes the violent polarization in the country, which she says, reminds her of “the chaos and violence in civil wars I’ve covered in other countries.” And she contrasts the different ways people are responding, some by egging on the conflict, others in tuxedos and ball gowns simply profiting from it, and still others engaging in mutual aid efforts to lessen the harms—escorting immigrant children to school, delivering meals to people who are afraid to leave home.

Polgreen asks what kind of America we’ve become, and she worries that the efforts by those who are trying to mitigate the harm—and who maintain that “this is not America”—do not have control of how the American spirit is understood or perceived. “Who we are,” she writes, “is not just the idea we have of ourselves.” And here, she returns to Hegel:

The 19th-century German philosopher Hegel elucidated this truth: The essence of our identity is not something we make on our own — it requires the recognition of others to be real. How we are perceived by others doesn’t just reflect who we are. It constitutes it.^[i]

There are two Hegelian ideas that Polgreen is channeling. The first is that there is an American spirit that evolves in time. An American spirit that has a history and a future history. One that we are shaping every day through all of our collective action. The second, that the American spirit emerges from interactions with others, through conflicts with other countries, through struggles of life and death as Hegel said. It is not just a question of self-consciousness in isolation, but of the clash of different self-consciousnesses. Polgreen ends on this second point. “No matter how selfless our Minnesota martyrs, no matter how valiant our resisters, the kind of America we will be won’t be of our choosing alone.”

The second question relates to Hegel’s lord-bondsman dialectic and its eventual prominence in interpretations of Hegel following the 1930s lectures of Alexandre Kojève. It concerns how self-consciousness emerges in conflict with others.

My interest here, though, is in the first claim. The idea that there is an American spirit that evolves through history. This is an important claim. I discussed it in the Marcuse seminar when I explained that “these are Hegelian times.” And it grounds the seminar we are about to have with Cornel West. It is this idea of an evolving spirit that is at the heart of the matter.

So let me start with Hegel first.

Hegel on History

Hegel places the historical element—or historicity, as Marcuse would say—at the core of his philosophy, such that history gives meaning to our world. With Hegel’s concept of Spirit and his philosophy of history, we can understand best our present situation through the lens of its historical development. Hegel gives meaning to our present in relation to that historical development.

For Hegel, history has a direction. There is progress. So, for instance, liberty has progressed from the liberty of the single despot, to the liberty of the few aristocrats, to a form of widespread, self-conscious liberty modeled on the Protestant religion.

World history—or what is also called universal history—stands at the culmination of Hegel’s system. It stands at the culmination of his discussion of the State in the Philosophy of Right. It caps the system of what he calls “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit) which, as you recall, is composed of family, civil society, and State—with State at the capstone. World history is, in effect, the capstone of the capstone.

I privilege Hegel’s published books over the lecture notes—as I do for Foucault as well—and thus will turn, first, to the concluding section of the Philosophy of Right on world history.

For Hegel, world history comes at the tail end of his philosophy of international law, which itself comes at the end of his discussion of domestic law (property, contracts, penal law) and the State. International law and international relations are where the different “Spirits” of nations confront each other—where for instance, today, a more bellicose American Spirit, with a renewed Department of War and a War Secretary who sports an American flag in his breast pocket, confronts leaders of foreign nations like Iran or China, with their centuries-old religious and cultural traditions and histories (Persia, or ancient China to post-revolutionary, post-Maoist, now state capitalist China).

This is the ultimate sphere of contestation of the spirits of peoples—and recall that the State is nothing but the spirit of a people. These contestations necessarily and inevitably lead to wars (Philosophy of Right, §334). By contrast to Kant, Hegel does not believe in the possibility of perpetual peace. In this regard, Hegel is a “realist.” He does not subscribe to simplistic notions of “just war,” where all the justice would typically lie on one side of the conflict (§337-338). He does not believe in a neutral international arbitrator.

Instead, it is his philosophy of history that adjudicates the conflicts between nations or peoples. Certain peoples at certain periods represent the cutting-edge spirit of the world, and they have the right or privilege to lead the world spirit forward. So, for instance, the French Revolution and, following the Terror, the Napoleonic era were at the forefront of world history for Hegel. In that sense, they are entitled to lead history forward. The normative value that we typically associate with international law is replaced, for Hegel, by the normativity of historical progress. He articulates this in the conclusion of §340: the “‘history of the world,” as he says, is “the world’s court of judgment.”

I must admit, on these questions of international law and relations, I tend to agree with Hegel. But in part because the victors write history. For Hegel, there is an authenticity or veracity to that world history and its final judgment. I am slightly more cynical. I think it is the product of the victory itself.

In any event, for Hegel, historical facts provide the material for a development (once again) in three (or so) parts—ancient Asia, the Greek and Roman period, and the Germanic present.

This schema of historical progress is captured in Hegel’s famous passages on world history at the end of the Philosophy of Right, where he discusses the evolution (or dialectical unfolding) of freedom through different periods and geographies:

1. First, the ancient oriental world, by which he is referring to ancient Asia, and which he caricatures as constituting the model of despotism or the freedom of only one person, the despot (§355). This is the patriarchal or theocratic model in which all power is undivided and takes the shape of commandment. Apart from the divine leader, individual personality “disappears,” Hegel writes, and society becomes divided in rigid classes that take on the shape of castes (§355).

2. Second, the ancient Greek world, in which the principle of individuality emerges, but in a primitive form, leading to the exclusion from that sphere of liberty of the entire class of enslaved persons (§356)

3. Third, the Roman world, in which there is a fatal conflict between the aristocratic tendency toward private personality or individuality and the democratic urge for generalized freedom (what Hegel refers to as “abstract universality”) (§357). Hegel contends that this conflict leads to forms of equality that he describes as “monstrosity” (§357).

4. Fourth, and finally, the Germanic world. Hegel silently draws on Protestantism to describe an internal reconciliation of self-consciousness and subjectivity that ultimately leads to the possibility of genuine freedom (§358).

It is probably rereading these final passages of the Philosophy of Right. Once you understand the progression, they become clearer and capture well the “spirit” of Hegel’s thought, to borrow his term. And it is in this sense that, for Hegel, history gives meaning to our present. Historicity is at the heart of our being. In that regard, Marcuse was right (as we discussed at the last seminar on Marcuse).

Now, as you can tell, this reflects a distinct philosophy of history. In the 1822 and 1828 draft introductions to his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel famously posits three styles of doing history. The first he calls “original.”^[ii] This corresponds to the immediate chronicling of events. It represents the brute account of facts. At this stage, the person recounting events is practically one with the facts themselves. Hegel gives the example here of Herodotus and Thucydides—whom all of you have read in the Core at Columbia College! These are historians who, in his words, “have themselves witnessed, experienced and lived through the deeds, events and situations they describe.”^[iii] With these historians, there is an absolute unity of the event and the person—between the spirit of the actions and the spirit of the writer. Hegel gives ample other illustrations, including French memoirs by statesmen such as the Cardinal de Retz or in Germany, the memoirs of Frederick the Great.

The second he calls “reflective,”^[iv] and it occurs when the historian starts to take a step back and begins to reflect on the historical facts. Here, the historical object becomes “the past as a whole.”^[v] These can produce histories of a country or nation. They may cover long periods and start to make abstractions or portrayals. There are several internal stages in reflective history as it evolves and grows. Hegel mentions a “pragmatic”^[vi] style, which starts to focus on the meaning of event, and later a “critical” style—a critical phase in which the historian starts drawing histories of histories, schemas to understand how histories evolve and to judge them, and that can serve to impose present concerns onto the past history.^[vii] Then there is “specialized” history, such as works on Roman law or Germanic law.^[viii] In each of these, the historian is beginning to understand the raw historical facts and put them in context. Facts are no longer immediate, they have to be understood.

The third and final stage is “the philosophical history of the world.”^[ix] At this stage, the historian realizes how historical development leads to the present. History makes sense of the present. This is the moment of full self-consciousness in history and of the fulfillment of freedom. Insofar as the entire Philosophy of Right is the coming into being of freedom, and world history caps the final stage of the final section on the State, it is in history’s unfolding that Hegel identifies the final, highest stage of freedom.

The movement in Hegel’s development of historical consciousness should remind you of the similar movement in the Phenomenology of Spirit or the Logics (both of them). These historical stages resemble the movement from perception to understanding to reason. There is the same progression toward a fully rational comprehension of the world—here of universal history. The first stage of original history, like sense perception, is one in which the subject is entirely immersed in the material. The second begins to produce some understanding. The third is the apex of reason. As the stages develop, there is a movement toward reason and universality—toward the absolute.

There is a stunning passage in the 1830 draft introduction of his lectures on the philosophy of history: “The sole aim of philosophical enquiry is to eliminate the contingent.”^[x] Hegel continues:

In history, we must look for a general design, the ultimate end of the world. […] We must bring to history the belief and conviction that the realm of the will is not at the mercy of contingency. That world history is governed by an ultimate design, that it is a rational process—whose rationality is not that of a particular subject, but a divine and absolute reason—this is a proposition whose truth we must assume; its proof lies in the study of world history itself, which is the image and enactment of reason.^[xi]

Or later:

The overall content of world history is rational, and indeed has to be rational; a divine will rules supreme and is strong enough to determine the overall content. Our aim must be to discern this substance, and to do so, we must bring with us a rational consciousness.^[xii]

This gives a good sense of Hegel’s project. It also offers a stark opposition to what would emerge with Nietzsche, and then Foucault.

Nietzsche on Hegel

Nietzsche tears into Hegel in his second Untimely Meditation in 1873. Hegel’s conception of history is the single most detrimental philosophical contribution to modernity, Nietzsche contends.

Why? Because it undermines the will to life, to action. It goes against the most vital instincts. Hegelian “philosophical” history is a form of hagiography that makes Germans just feel good about themselves, that renders them complacent or paralyzed. Nietzsche writes:

I believe that there has been no dangerous change or turn in the German education of this century which has not become more dangerous through the enormous influence, continuing to the present moment, of this philosophy, the Hegelian. Truly the belief that one is a late arrival of the ages is paralyzing and upsetting: terrible and destructive it must seem, however, if one day such a belief, by a bold inversion, deifies this late arrival as the true meaning and purpose of all that has happened earlier, if his knowing misery is equated with a consummation of world history. Such a way of looking at things has accustomed the Germans to talk of the “world-process” and to justify their own time as the necessary result of this world-process; such a way of looking at things has established history in place of the other spiritual powers, art and religion, as solely sovereign in so far as it is “the self-realizing concept,” in so far as it is “the dialectic of the spirit of the people” and the “Last Judgment.”

Nietzsche is here, of course, referring to the final passages of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, from § 340 discussed earlier. Nietzsche goes on:

History understood in this Hegelian way has been contemptuously called God’s sojourn upon earth,—though the God was first created by the history. He, at any rate, became transparent and intelligible inside Hegelian skulls, and has risen through all the dialectically possible steps in his being up to the manifestation of the Self: so that for Hegel the highest and final stage of the world-process came together in his own Berlin existence. He ought to have said that everything after him was merely to be regarded as the musical coda of the great historical rondo,—or rather, as simply superfluous. He has not said it; and thus he has implanted in a generation leavened throughout by him the worship of the “power of history,” that practically turns every moment into a sheer gaping at success, into an idolatry of the actual: for which we have now discovered the characteristic phrase “to adapt ourselves to circumstances.” But the man who has once learnt to crook the knee and bow the head before the power of history, nods “yes” at last, like a Chinese doll, to every power, whether it be a government or a public opinion or a numerical majority; and his limbs move correctly as the power pulls the string. […] To take everything objectively, to be angry at nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything—makes one gentle and pliable.^[xiii]

Nietzsche on History

Nietzsche is far more instrumental with regard to history—and that ultimately introduces certain ambiguities, as we will see. In the second Untimely Meditation, Nietzsche treats history as a form of rhetoric. Like styles of argumentation, there was ways to use history—there are styles of historical argumentation (monumental, antiquarian, critical). There is an instrumentality to history. Being ahistorical has its advantages. And there are harms associated with being too historical. Nietzsche ultimately advocates for using history for life.

That is, famously, how he opens the second meditations: “we require history for life and action, not for the smug avoiding of life and action, or even to whitewash a selfish life and cowardly, bad acts. Only so far as history serves life will we serve it.”^[xiv]

Nietzsche presents himself as tortured by the Hegelian approach to history. Writing in 1873, he immediately, on the first page, but indirectly, references and distances himself from Hegel, which he describes as “the mighty historical orientation of the age.”^[xv] We know it is Hegel he is referring to because he date-stamps that orientation as going back “two generations particularly among the Germans.”^[xvi] Writing in 1873, two generations would take us back to 1820, when Hegel published the Philosophy of Right. We will come back to Hegel in a moment.

For Nietzsche, then, history does not have autonomy or truth. It is a rhetorical device that should be used for the true goal of life, of activity, of action, of vitality. The only correct relationship to history is one that uses history to advance that vitalist will to power.

There are times, then, when the past must simply be forgotten, for the benefit of all humanity. There are times it must be forgotten so that, as Nietzsche writes, it does not “become the gravedigger of the present.”^[xvii] For Nietzsche, both the unhistorical (which he associates with the life of the animal, of the herd, of the grazing cow who has no memory of what happened a moment before) and the historical have their place—but only “for the health of an individual, a people and a culture.”^[xviii]

The objective is to promote “the health of a man, a people, a culture,” Nietzsche says.^[xix] And that requires using history properly, not too much, but in the right ways. It requires understanding the ways history can be used—and it is here that Nietzsche develops those three styles of doing history: the monumental, which inspires us to strive for great achievements; the antiquarian, which makes us admire and preserve great things; and the critical, which can lead us to liberation by condemning the past and pushing us forward. It requires avoiding the pitfalls of the surfeit of history—five in particular, which he sets out in §5:

An excess of history seems to be an enemy to the life of a time, and dangerous in five ways. Firstly, the contrast of inner and outer is emphasised and personality weakened. Secondly, the time comes to imagine that it possesses the rarest of virtues, justice, to a higher degree than any other time. Thirdly, the instincts of a nation are thwarted, the maturity of the individual arrested no less than that of the whole. Fourthly, we get the belief in the old age of mankind, the belief, at all times harmful, that we are late survivals, mere Epigoni. Lastly, an age reaches a dangerous condition of irony with regard to itself, and the still more dangerous state of cynicism, when a cunning egoistic theory of action is matured that maims and at last destroys the vital strength.^[xx]

History is disconnected from truth (in a Hegelian sense, in the sense of Absolute Knowledge). Nietzsche instrumentalizes history for his truth, which is life. History becomes a rhetorical form.

Nietzsche and Genealogy

What is needed, then, is a proper use of history—one that allows a people to advance their true needs, as the ancient Greeks did. The Greeks offer “a parable for each one of us: he must organize the chaos within himself by reflecting on his genuine needs.”^[xxi]

And this is precisely what Nietzsche does in his genealogy of morals, using history to advance his needs, his agenda.

On the Genealogy of Morals is full of historical (genealogical) claims. For instance, the enslaved peoples mastered their oppressors by putting into effect a slave morality that favors the vulnerable and the underdog, with the idea of turning the other cheek and the last being the first. Those are (wild) historical claims that ground his morality and will to power and life force. Here is a remarkable passage in On the Genealogy of Morals, first essay, § 7:

Human history would be much too stupid an affair without the spirit that has entered into it through the powerless:—let us turn right to the greatest example. Of all that has been done on earth against “the noble,” “the mighty,” “the lords,” “the power-holders,” nothing is worthy of mention in comparison with that which the Jews have done against them: the Jews, that priestly people who in the end were only able to obtain satisfaction from their enemies and conquerors through a radical revaluation of their values, that is, through an act of spiritual revenge. This was the only way that suited a priestly people, the people of the most suppressed priestly desire for revenge. It was the Jews who in opposition to the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) dared its inversion, with fear-inspiring consistency, and held it fast with teeth of the most unfathomable hate (the hate of powerlessness), namely: “the miserable alone are the good; the poor, powerless, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly are also the only pious, the only blessed in God, for them alone is there blessedness,—whereas you, you noble and powerful ones, you are in all eternity the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless, you will eternally be the wretched, accursed, and damned!” … We know who inherited this Jewish revaluation … In connection with the enormous and immeasurably doom-laden initiative provided by the Jews with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I call attention to the proposition which I arrived at on another occasion (“Beyond Good and Evil” section 195)—namely, that with the Jews the slave revolt in morality begins: that revolt which has a two-thousand-year history behind it and which has only moved out of our sight today because it—has been victorious …^[xxii]

This is stunning work, in the form of a genealogy—a historical account that traces lineages—and makes a powerful argument for the morality of the noble, the lord, the aristocrat.

But does it have the truth value of Hegel’s world history? Does Nietzsche believe it? Does he think it is absolute knowledge? The answer is, well, it certainly functions well as rhetorical argument. And Nietzsche is not going to tell everyone he is simply making it up! He’s not going to tell people it is fabricated from whole cloth. So of course he writes history, or genealogy, as compelling argument.

In the end, it does not have the truth-value of Hegel’s historical account. It is using history instrumentally—rhetorically. And it is powerful and brilliant. Now, do I buy it? Well, not really, although there is something there that he has captured. But I do not think that the underdogs have prevailed. On the contrary, the overlords are victorious. The noble tech billionaires, they remain on top.

Slave morality is relegated to the margins. James Talarico, Texas state representative now running for the U.S. Senate, is perhaps the best embodiment of what Nietzsche calls slave morality. He is the most “powerful” of them all—but he still remains, for now, at the margins of power.

What I would say is: If only Nietzsche were right! What a better world we would live in!

Foucault on Nietzsche and History

At this point, I will only be able to telegraph. Having just edited and published Michel Foucault’s previously unpublished lectures on Nietzsche at the experimental university at Vincennes, at SUNY Buffalo, and at McGill University, in a volume called Nietzsche (Gallimard, 2024), there is far too much for me to say in this short introduction. So let me telegraph and later develop this more fully.

First, Foucault’s intellectual trajectory went from Hegel to Nietzsche. The young Foucault wrote his masters’ thesis on Hegel’s conception of history, arguing for the concept of the “historical transcendental,” or what became later the concept of a “historical a priori.” In a way, like Marcuse, he was trying to insert historicity into the core of Hegel’s ontology. This work has recently been published as La constitution d’un transcendental historique dans la Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel, ed. Christophe Bouton (Paris: Vrin, 2024). Foucault completed the work in 1949 under the supervision of Jean Hippolyte. I personally do not view the effort as entirely successful.

But in any event, Foucault turns against Hegel pretty quickly, in conjunction with other young philosophers at the time, such as Louis Althusser. This is the moment of the birth of anti-Hegelianism in a certain current of young post-war French philosophy—especially Althusser, Foucault, and Deleuze. Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod has written about this in a book titled Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod, La Naissance de l’anti-hégélianisme. Louis Althusser et Michel Foucault, lecteurs de Hegel(Paris: ENS Éditions, 2022).

Foucault quickly starts to view Hegel as the beginning of the anthropological turn in philosophy, which he decries. Hegel is responsible, Foucault argues, for the centering of the human subject at the heart of philosophy—thus turning the human into the measure of all things. And, it turns out, Nietzsche is the one who began to bring that to an end.

Foucault develops this historical account in the early 1950s—especially in his manuscript La Question Anthropologique, and elsewhere—and account in which Hegel and Nietzsche play the role of book ends: Hegel began the turn to the anthropolization of philosophy and Nietzsche ends it with the death of God and with it, the death of man. As a result, Nietzsche begins to play an important role for Foucault in the 1950s, but less his writings on history than his critique of man and his call for overcoming man—by means of the Übermensch.

At the end of the 1960s, though, Foucault pivots to Nietzsche’s historical writings. It is about 1968, at the time of the uprisings in France, Tunisia, and elsewhere. Foucault finds in Nietzsche’s historical sensibilities a gold mine for thinking about knowledge and power, and critical praxis, which will lead him to the method of genealogy that blossoms in Discipline and Punish.

I will have to stop here for now, in anticipation of our seminar with Cornel West on Wednesday, February 11, 2026 on Hegel, Nietzsche and Foucault on the philosophy of history—and its relevance today. Please join us. RSVP here. And welcome to Hegel 13/13!

View on YouTube here:

Notes

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^[i] Lydia Polgreen, “This Week Has Revealed 3 Types of Americans,” New York Times, “Sunday Opinion,” February 1, 2026, at p. 7.

^[ii] G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction: Reason in History. Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1822-1828 and 1830-1831 versions), trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), at p. 12.

^[iii] Hegel, Introduction: Reason in History, at p. 12.

^[iv] Hegel, Introduction: Reason in History, at p. 16.

^[v] Hegel, Introduction: Reason in History, at p. 16.

^[vi] Hegel, Introduction: Reason in History, at p. 19.

^[vii] Hegel, Introduction: Reason in History, at p. 22.

^[viii] Hegel, Introduction: Reason in History, at p. 23.

^[ix] Hegel, Introduction: Reason in History, at p. 23.

^[x] Hegel, Introduction: Reason in History, at p. 28.

^[xi] Hegel, Introduction: Reason in History, at p. 28.

^[xii] Hegel, Introduction: Reason in History, at p. 30.

^[xiii] Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” (1873); using the Hackett Publishing Company, trans. Peter Preuss, 1980, for the first paragraph; using trans. Adrian Collins 1909 edition, which is online, for the second (again, tired of typing!).

^[xiv] Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” (1873) using the Hackett Publishing Company, trans. Peter Preuss, 1980, here, at p. 7.

^[xv] Nietzsche, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,” trans. Peter Preuss, at p. 7.

^[xvi] Nietzsche, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,” trans. Peter Preuss, at p. 7.

^[xvii] Nietzsche, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,” trans. Peter Preuss, at p. 10.

^[xviii] Nietzsche, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,” trans. Peter Preuss, at p. 10.

^[xix] Nietzsche, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,” trans. Peter Preuss, at p. 14.

^[xx] Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” using trans. Adrian Collins 1909 edition, which is online, because tired of typing!.

^[xxi] Nietzsche, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,” trans. Peter Preuss, at p. 64.

^[xxii] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), pp. 16-17.