Hegel and the Romantic Age
09/08/2018Murray N. Rothbard
[This article is excerpted from volume 2, chapter 11 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995).
G.W.F. Hegel, unfortunately, was not a bizarre aberrant force in European thought. He was only one, if the most influential and the most convoluted and hypertrophic, of what must be considered the dominant paradigm of his age, the celebrated Age of Romanticism. In different variants and in different ways, the Romantic writers of the first half of the 19th century, especially in Germany and Great Britain, poets and novelists as well as philosophers, were dominated by a similar creatology and eschatology. It might be termed the "alienation and return" or "reabsorption" myth. God created the universe out of imperfection and felt need, thereby tragically cutting man, the organic species, off from his (its?) pre-creation unity with God. While this transcendence, this Aufhebung, of creation has permitted God and man, or God-man, to develop their (its?) faculties and to progress, tragic alienation will continue, until that day, inevitable and determined, in which God and man will be fused into one cosmic blob. Or, rather, being pantheists as was Hegel, until man discovers that he is man-God, and the alienation of man from man, man from nature, and man from God will be ended as all is fused into one big blob, the discovery of the reality of and therefore the merger into cosmic Oneness. History, which has been predetermined toward this goal, will then come to an end. In the Romantic metaphor, man, the generic "organism" of course, not the individual, will at last "return home." History is therefore an "upward spiral" toward Man's determined destination, a return home, but on a far higher level than the original unity, or home, with God in the pre-creation epoch.
https://mises.org/library/hegel-and-romantic-age
