Richard Bourke’s Hegel’s World Revolutions is fundamentally about the titular nineteenth-century philosopher, but its remit and relevance are wider. Bourke opens the book by painting a bleak picture of the state of academic and public debate today:

A key feature of modernity is the advance it made on previous epochs of world history. Despite this forward movement, the achievement represented by the rise of the West is widely censured within our culture. Hard-won values are cast aside as instruments of coercion. Liberalism itself is denounced as a form of subtle bondage. Correspondingly, universalism is condemned and rights disparaged. The engine of improvement is likewise excoriated: reason is convicted of domineering arrogance and enlightenment dismissed as retrogressive.

Alarmingly, this form of pessimism has migrated from the margins to the center of modern academia. As Bourke writes, “what started as an eccentric tradition of historical reflection—beginning with Friedrich Nietzsche and culminating in Michel Foucault—now occupies a central place on university courses.” His book shows that Hegel’s philosophy of history can inspire us to think critically about this predicament.

Hegel as a Political Thinker

Bourke’s book aims to revive Hegel’s reputation as a political thinker. In the English-speaking world, Hegel is now better known for his epistemology and metaphysics than his political philosophy. Indeed, there have not been many books devoted to his politics since the 1970s (though Elias Buchetmann’s Hegel and the Representative Constitution was published earlier in 2023, and Steven B. Smith’s important Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context came out in 1989). One of the reasons, Bourke maintains, was that mid-twentieth century theorists such as Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper “bizarre[ly]” associated Hegel with totalitarianism. But Hegel’s waning status as a political philosopher is also attributed to the general decline of Marxism as a worldview. As is well-known, Karl Marx was one of several who could be classified as a “Young Hegelian” in nineteenth-century Germany. For many today, the Marxian connection is the main source of Hegel’s fame. But for Bourke, Marxism is certainly not Hegel’s most valuable legacy.

Bourke argues that Hegel revolutionized both the study of history and philosophy. Placing the rise of modern values in the context of world history, he wrote and lectured on the progress of civilization from ancient China, India, Persia, and Egypt to modern Europe. Bourke notes that predictable charges against Hegel of “Eurocentrism” have been voiced to serve the political agenda of those who want the present to be cleansed of, and liberated from, its past. For Hegel, however, change needed to build on earlier achievements as well as learn from past failures. Bourke shows convincingly that Hegel’s political philosophy was not the outcome of any cultural or geographical chauvinism. The modern constitutional state, based on the idea of universal freedom, may have emerged in modern Europe, but its importance is evidently cosmopolitan.

Central to Hegel’s story was the decline of antiquity and the rise of Christianity, which taught the world that all human beings are free. Roman law, by contrast, distinguished freemen from slaves, and thus lacked an appreciation for the human being as such. The birth of Christianity was the beginning of the end of slavery, and it was principally an intellectual revolution—one in the minds and hearts of the people to use John Adams’s description of the American Revolution. In a word, the Christian idea of universal freedom, after a series of long and complex processes, created the modern world.

Far from being complacent about the modern West, Hegel acknowledged the negative consequences of the decline in rigid structures of hierarchy and rank, principally that liberal societies tend to result in isolation and fragmentation. Rather than optimism, his system of thought was based on critique. Yet the achievements of the modern constitutional state were noteworthy, including “the requirement of qualification for public office, the demand for an accountable system of government, the importance of constitutional regulation and the need to balance welfare against rights.” While Hegel was a critic of what he knew as “liberalism” (Liberalismus), Bourke contends that Hegel was acutely aware that “little could be achieved without building on its foundations.” This stands in contrast to much modern political theory, which often treats the achievements of liberalism as “somehow complicit with oppression, or fundamentally compromised, or even as net losses by comparison with earlier times.” By offering a sophisticated antidote, the book demonstrates that Hegel is a highly relevant political thinker today.

The Christian Revolution

Hegel’s World Revolutions is divided into three parts: “The Kantian Revolution,” “Hegel and the French Revolution,” and “The History of Political Thought.”

The Kantian Revolution centered on the insight that transformative ideas could lead to sudden shifts, and more specifically that new ways of thinking could reorient entire systems of knowledge. Immanuel Kant’s examples were logic, mathematics, and natural science. For both Kant and Hegel, Socrates was a revolutionary figure, because he shifted attention from the nature of things to human behavior. But the most significant revolution in thought for both of them was undoubtedly the advent of Christianity.

Hegel was certainly a heterodox religious thinker, who explicitly denied the existence of an afterlife and a disembodied transcendent being. God for him simply meant the supreme value in any given culture. In Hegelian terms, Christianity is thus a moral system rather than a theological one. In the first part of the book, Bourke shows that it was Kant who taught Hegel to appreciate the moral purpose of religion and the immense impact of Christianity. In short, Christianity “replaced a religion of service with a doctrine of moral purity.” In general, however, Kant viewed morality as being an intrinsic part of human reason. By contrast, Hegel thought that moral norms had developed historically. Epochal shifts, according to him, were gradual rather than abrupt.

A key question for Hegel was how the modern world came to supplant antiquity. This entailed explaining the emergence of an “alternative form of life … inaugurated by the teachings of Christ.” Echoing the ethos of the French Revolution, Hegel interpreted Jesus as teaching liberty, equality, and fraternity. But Christ’s life personified the complicated impact of ideas on society. Because of the spirit of his age, he did not manage to effect moral renewal in his lifetime; indeed, Hegel described his plan as a “shipwreck.” Christ had to use several devices to gain authority and convince people of his moral message: the idea of a Messiah, the resurrection, and miracles. As emphasis shifted from personal morality to religious dogma, “the freedom of moral self-legislation gave way to the jurisdiction of confessors and prelates”; the rise of popery and priestcraft, as radical Protestants in early-modern England might have said.

Hegel had no time for Burke’s complaints about the passing of an “age of chivalry.” For him, “the job of philosophy was less to rue these dislocating reversals than to monitor the direction of travel.”

For Hegel, it was the Reformation that had given birth to modern Europe. Notably, he viewed Lutheranism as undermining the difference between laity and priesthood. Luther’s relocation of divinity in the human sphere had far-reaching consequences: “Chastity yielded to the sanctity of marriage; the cult of poverty gave way to the pleasure of work; and unquestioning obedience was replaced by the value of conscience located in the recesses of the heart.” Most importantly, the value of each human being became concentrated on the inner life. But this focus on personal religion led to a conflict between the individual and the world, and feelings of guilt became the price of freedom. As Bourke writes: “In the aftermath of the Reformation, the sovereignty of the will occupied the center of human conduct. Social existence would have to be brought to meet its standards.”

Accordingly, Protestant and Catholic governments diverged in modern Europe. In the former—Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Prussia are mentioned—politics tended to serve the common good and populations were reconciled to public institutions. But in Catholic countries such as France, Spain, Ireland, and Italy, political violence had become the order of the day. This was largely a consequence of the French Revolution and its aftermath. In Kant’s eyes, the French Revolution laid the foundation for a quasi-Copernican revolution capable of transforming the interpretation of the moral universe. It was left to Hegel, however, to make sense of the French Revolution in a world-historical context.

The French Revolution

Bourke’s Hegel sometimes appears as a rather Burkean figure. This is perhaps not surprising since the author of Hegel’s World Revolutions is most recognized as a leading Burke scholar. According to Hegel, we are told, “true reform … had to preserve as well as abolish and transcend.” But Bourke also argues that Hegel had no time for Burke’s complaints about the passing of an “age of chivalry.” For him, “the job of philosophy was less to rue these dislocating reversals than to monitor the direction of travel.” Though the basic framework of the future needed to be accepted, this did not apply to every stage of the process. This encapsulated Hegel’s approach to the French Revolution, which is the focus of the second part of the book.

The second part shows Hegel as being preoccupied by the failure, indeed disaster, of the French Revolution. To be sure, the French Revolution represented the climax of world revolutions. But while he hailed the “triumphant expression of freedom” in 1789, he became disappointed both with the original design and the way events unfolded. In short, Bourke challenges the “standard account of Hegel as a cheerleader for the Revolution.”

One of Hegel’s greatest complaints was the intensification of political centralization in the wake of 1789. As Alexis de Tocqueville would later argue in The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), Hegel diagnosed the French Revolution as the product of longer-term transformations. Feudalism and the power of the nobility did not disappear overnight but had declined for centuries, while the concomitant process of centralization had been underway for just as long. Whereas German history showed that political unity was important, the history of the French Revolution illustrated that excessive centralization tended to endanger civil liberties.

Crucially, the French could not agree on the meaning of the “people.” Though it literally included everyone, in actuality the many had to be governed by the few. When the separation between the rhetoric of the Revolution and its effects became palpable, suspicion and distrust ensued. The population accordingly lacked the necessary respect for the government. Inevitably, accusations of betrayal permeated political life, both within the Assembly and in the nation at large, and eventually suspicion itself became a crime during the Terror. Hegel recognized that political legitimacy was grounded in the people, but also that they could be a destructive force. To avoid collisions and strife, he thought that decision-making had to be rooted in ministerial judgment, assisted by a specially trained bureaucracy.

For Hegel, political change was impossible without religious reform. After the failure of the French Revolution following Napoleon’s rise to power, the future of Europe lay in the Protestant part of the continent. In fact, before the French Revolution, Frederick the Great of Prussia, the philosopher-king, had already challenged the old order by introducing a system of civil rights. Hegel singled out as a landmark the codification of Prussian laws, initiated by Frederick in 1780, and finally put into practice under his successor as the Prussian Civil Code in 1794.

But neither Prussia nor any other existing state was the exact blueprint of the modern constitutional state as Hegel described it in Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Rather, it was a culmination of the most enlightened aspects, ideally conceived, of all the Protestant states. For one thing, the Prussian nobility was still too influential. Rather than the old nobility born to rule, a university-trained bureaucratic elite was a key part of the modern ideal state, as the civil service supplanted arbitrary and errant authority. But while legislation had to reflect the general interest, Hegel believed that a hereditary monarch should play a part in the political process, symbolically representing individuality and subjectivity. For him, constitutional monarchy was the great difference between antiquity and modernity.

The History of Political Thought

The final part of the book—“The History of Political Thought”—has the reception of Hegel in the twentieth century as its point of departure. Here, Bourke surveys the appreciation of Hegel among historians and thinkers such as Friedrich Meinecke and György Lukács in what he terms the “Hegel renaissance,” as well as the turn against Hegelianism by pivotal figures such as Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, and Karl Popper.

Perhaps the most intriguing chapter in this part of the book is the one in which Bourke, the incumbent Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge, engages critically with the historical turn in the study of political ideas. This turn is associated with research carried out at Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s, notably by Peter Laslett, and especially methodological statements by eminent scholars associated with the same institution: J. G. A. Pocock, John Dunn, and Quentin Skinner. It centered on understanding past political thinkers in their own context rather than as participants in perennial debates.

Bourke’s first main point is that the novelty of the historical turn effected by the so-called “Cambridge School” has been somewhat exaggerated. Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, and Sheldon Wolin, among many others, had already taken historic texts as their primary sources and “employed exegetical techniques long established as fundamental to historical inquiry.” In the nineteenth century, the historical study of past texts had already been practiced by Germanic scholars such as Barthold Niebuhr, David Strauss, and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, whose contributions were ignored by the “Cambridge School.”

Hegel teaches us that we should not rely on philosophers for normative instruction. Philosophy is not a legislative activity, but a search for truth and an exercise in understanding.

The major difference, however, was that the “Cambridge School” tended to value history in its own right rather than as a philosophical tool. This approach was essentially a rejection of George Sabine’s notion that the reader of past philosophical texts needed to test the veracity of their theories. Bourke emphasizes that Cambridge “contextualism” generated “both immediate and long-term dividends,” crucially “an obvious extension of historical knowledge” in a swath of areas, including republicanism, liberalism, theories of rights, and political economy.

What the “Cambridge School” struggled to address, however, was the question of what the purpose of studying the history of political thought is meant to be. This eventually led to a dramatic U-turn. Whereas Pocock remained confident in the importance of history for its own sake, Dunn and Skinner moved in the direction of political theory. As Bourke puts it rather bluntly: “Denials, subtle revisions, and recantations followed.” Most conspicuous was Skinner’s promotion of neo-Roman liberty (freedom from being subject to someone else’s arbitrary will), excavated from a forgotten strand within the republican tradition.

Bourke contends that the Cambridge volte-face is problematic, since Dunn and Skinner in their early careers had rightly argued against the applicability of old ideas in new settings. This is where Hegel is helpful, it is suggested, as he emphasized the need to understand why older patterns of thought fell out of favor, and indeed “became impossible.” In other words, the history of political thought, on Bourke’s Hegel-inspired understanding, ought to be “diagnostic” rather than “prescriptive.” At first glance, there may seem to be a tension between this claim and Bourke’s apparent appeal to Hegel as a relevant and useful thinker, notably in the book’s preface, but his point is precisely that we should take inspiration from Hegel to become diagnosticians rather than prescriptive moralists.

A Hegel for Us Moderns

Like Bourke’s most well-known book (Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke), Hegel’s World Revolutions is a masterclass in scholarship. Its conclusions and findings are not only grounded in Hegel’s written works and lectures—including Elements of the Philosophy of Right, The Phenomenology of Spirit, the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and a host of other lesser-known books and essays—but also in his correspondence, notably with philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, as well as other German intellectuals such as Georg Friedrich Creuzer and Friedrich Hölderlin. But in many ways, it is a very different work— less comprehensive and encyclopedic, more succinct and selective, but for these reasons, more direct and with a clearer focus on the relationship between the past and the present. Being an account of the thought of one of the great philosophers, a reception history, and a book about roads not taken, it is in a sense an even more ambitious work.

Hegel’s World Revolutions is a result of Bourke’s long and distinguished career devoted to the study of political ideas, ancient—Plato plays a key role in Part III—and modern. Particular focus so far has been the Enlightenment thought of the likes of David Hume, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Immanuel Kant, all of whom we learn were significant thinkers for Hegel. But though Bourke emphasizes that Hegel is not our contemporary, he seems more prepared than in his earlier work to show that his subject has contemporary relevance.

Hegel’s belief in constitutional monarchy may be seen as indicating that he was very much a man of his own time. Yet, importantly, Bourke argues that “Hegel’s assumptions have more in common with current beliefs than with the worldviews of the ancients.” In the middle of the twentieth century, Strauss, Voegelin, and Arendt turned to the ancients for political and philosophical guidance. More recently, as we have seen, Skinner has championed neo-Roman liberty. A key argument of Hegel’s World Revolutions is that this resort to the ancients is misguided. Though Hegel cannot save us from our present predicaments, Bourke writes that “he sat at the beginning of our age and showed that the only antidote to disaffection lay with values actually to hand.”

Hegel further teaches us that we should not rely on philosophers for normative instruction. Philosophy is not a legislative activity, but a search for truth and an exercise in understanding. The same, of course, goes for history, but whereas philosophy is about the general, or even the eternal, history is about the specific. Hegel and Bourke encourage us to think about how they can inform each other: what we know about the specific will help us grasp the general. Together they can teach us who we are, where we are located in time, and how we have arrived here.

Finally, Bourke informs us that Carl Schmitt claimed that Hegel effectively died on January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor, and German liberal constitutionalism gave way to the FührerStaat. That in itself seems to be a good reason for a Hegel revival in historically grounded political philosophy.