poses in his Logic, the textbook written 1812–1816 during his years as a
secondary school teacher. Whereas Fichte’s dialectic kept going backwards,
digging more deeply into presuppositions, Hegel’s dialectic goes forward, gen-
erating history.
The dialectical method can be regarded as a self-conscious crystallization
among intellectuals of debates which made up their own history. Traditional
concepts and opposing positions had been subjected to ever more intense
scrutiny; rather than destroying a given position, through these debates phi-
losophy had dug more deeply. Distinctions had been made in concepts pre-
viously taken as unitary (as Kant had divided the a priori into synthetic and
analytic), and on these grounds in turn whole new realms had been discovered.
By the 1790s, the reflexive edge of the philosophical community had become
aware of the changeableness and multi-sidedness of concepts—not only as an
empirical generalization but as a permanent possibility. The dialectic could be
used as a method. Philosophy could take control of its own history, deliberately
creating its next stage.
Hegel was the individual in whom this recognition came to consciousness.
Located at the center of action in a crowded and highly competitive space, he
got virtually the last attention slot available under the law of small numbers.
He found the slot by focusing on history, both of the intellectual community
itself and of its links to the surrounding social world in general. Hegel was the
first creative philosopher since ancient times who had an explicit sense of
building on the entire chain of predecessors. He came to philosophy from an
earlier interest in classical Greek history, which he extended to the less fash-
ionable Hellenistic and medieval periods.^36 Historical studies were the first
wave of the new academic research disciplines, pioneered by classical archeolo-
gists such as Winckelmann, a hero of the 1760s, and institutionalized by the
Göttingen philologists. Hegel joined a historiographical movement well under
way. That movement had already found its ideologist in Herder. But whereas
Herder legitimized the particularism of nationalities, Hegel fused history and
philosophy on the level of general principles. He gave history a theory, and
thereby opened a wide terrain for the intellectuals of the philosophical faculty
to exploit. Not surprisingly, Hegel’s philosophy was routinized in the 1830s
and thereafter by a lineage of pupils who became the great scholarly historians
of philosophy.
Hegel grounded his most systematic pronouncements on the terrain of
intellectual history. He first announced his originality in the section on Self-
Consciousness near the beginning of his Phenomenology of Spirit. He unfolds
the stages of consciousness emerging through social oppositions, first by the
dialectic of master and slave, invoking classical antiquity, then through the
stages represented in late antiquity by Stoicism, Skepticism, and finally Chris-
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^657