Standing Athwart Hegel, Yelling ‘Stop!’

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, May 01, 2026

 

The philosopher Georg Hegel was in the Thuringian town of Jena, finishing up the manuscript for The Phenomenology of Spirit.

 

On the night of October 13, 1806, he happened to see Napoleon Bonaparte on horseback doing some reconnaissance on the eve of battle.

 

Hegel wrote to a friend of the experience:

 

I saw the Emperor — this world-soul — riding out through the city to reconnoiter; it is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, concentrated here at a single point, sitting on a horse, yet reaching out over the world and mastering it.

 

If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “world spirit on horseback”—I know I use it several times a day—this is whence it derives (and if you use “whence” more than once a week, stop).

 

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “When I signed up for this ‘news’letter, I was assured there’d be no Hegel.” But here’s the thing. Hegel is in the news, man. And if you read the fine print of our user agreement, I’m allowed to talk about any German philosopher who is in the news. (My Google Alert for Edmund Husserl makes me feel like the Maytag repairman.)

 

On Wednesday, The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, two serious journalists formerly with theWashington Post, begin their piece with a question:

 

“Had President Trump, we wondered, possibly been reading or at least thumbing through—just maybe—the works of … Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?”

 

That’s it. That’s the lede.

 

Now, I’m going to give these accomplished pros the benefit of the doubt, and chalk this up to poetic license, whimsy, insouciant playfulness, or just plain old f’ing with the reader. Because taken literally, this notion is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. I can just imagine these journalists sitting around, when suddenly one says to the other, “You know, Trump’s megalomaniacal ambitions have gotten so specific and so out of hand, I wonder if he’s been reading …” and then at the same time they both say:

 

“Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte?”

 

“Whoa! Jinx! You owe me a Coke!”

 

Regardless of how they got there, the reporters investigated the question of whether Trump sees himself through a Hegelian lens.

 

I must say that, journalistically, the vibe of that effort is a bit reminiscent of that scene in Good Will Hunting where the ponytailed grad student tries to humiliate Ben Affleck by asking him to share some “insight about the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies.”

 

The only thing is, the White House guys didn’t take the bait. “When we asked several White House officials whether Trump had discovered and embraced Hegel’s writings, they dismissed the hypothesis almost laughingly,” Parker and Scherer wrote.

 

Almost laughingly? Really?

 

Look, maybe these anonymous officials restrained themselves because they didn’t want to make the president look bad by really laughing hard. I mean, someone would get in trouble if The Atlantic reported, “When we asked several White House officials whether Trump had discovered and embraced Hegel’s writings, they guffawed so hard one senior aide required oxygen from the White House doctor. Another had an unfortunate incident of laughter-induced incontinence. An intern had to be dispatched to fetch a fresh pair of pants.”

 

The other strange thing about The Atlantic piece is that the writers don’t mention that they are not the first to offer a version of this analysis. Last month, John Judis penned a lengthy essay for NOTUS, titled (and subtitled), “Trump as Alexander the Great: A Theory That Explains Iran (And Everything Else): Hegel figured it all out 200 years ago.”

 

And then, when I looked into it further, it turns out that several other writers have pondered whether Trump qualifies as a “world-historical figure” in the Hegelian sense.

 

So, again, you can see why this amounts to a legitimate loophole to the no-Hegel rule.

 

Hegel for Afflecks.

 

So let’s talk about Hegel for a second. If philosophy were baseball, Hegel went to The Show and racked up big numbers in a bunch of categories. He’d be voted into the German Philosophy Hall of Fame in the first round, probably right after Nietzsche and Heidegger.

 

Reading Hegel is a bit like peeling an onion: There are a lot of layers, it’s hard to figure out where to stop, and your eyes are watery at the end. Indeed, the only reason to start peeling in the first place is so you can refer to an Onion Hegel. But, again, he covered so much territory, it might make sense to talk about an Everything Hegel. It’s fitting that The Atlantic couldn’t find any evidence that Donald Trump has familiarized himself with Hegel’s work since moving to D.C. from New York, because we all know it’s hard to find a good Hegel here. Okay, I’ll stop now.

 

The important thing to know is that Hegel has this whole view of history with a capital H. History is a thing, a process, a movement that unfolds across the whole of the world. Hegel was the foremost German idealist, and so he thought this whole process was about ideas, spirit, consciousness, and their internal contradictions and conflicts being worked out over time. Marx famously “turned Hegel on his head,” arguing that all conflicts derived from material conditions (“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence,” Marx wrote, “but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”).

 

This evolutionary process moves us ever closer to the end of history, where world consciousness would recognize the superiority of the modern liberal state and the ethical superiority of universal freedom. Hegel didn’t mean that in a creepy Invasion of the Body Snatchers-Pluribus-Up With People kind of way. He simply believed that history—sorry, History—was unfolding towards the universal realization that something like an ethical constitutional order was the best way to organize society.

 

In the episode of The Simpsons when the alien Kodos took the form of Bill Clinton, Kodos summarized this Hegelian process well: “My fellow Americans. As a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball. But tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!”

 

We could spend the next thousand words arguing about Francis Fukuyama, but that would be a futile gesture that would cost millions of lives, so let’s keep going. Where all of this becomes relevant is that Hegel believed that certain great men hastened this process. They may not intend to. They may not be good people with good motives. But their impact is so transformative that they move humanity out of one epoch into another. He called these people “world-historical figures.” Which gets us, finally, back to where I started.

 

Napoleon was one such world-historical figure, and Hegel was jazzed to see him in the flesh. Napoleon in 1806 was the Great Liberator (which is why the Polish national anthem gives him a shoutout). The two others most associated with this idea are Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. Again, their motives don’t matter—they are simply catalysts for change, driving the change and representing it. They emerge when the world spirit or global consciousness or vibes are—in Hegel’s words—“ripe for development.” (Now, one must concede that Trump has probably used this Hegelian phrase a zillion times, as in: “Atlantic City is ripe for development. We just gotta eminent domain that old lady out of the way.”)

 

Here’s how Judis put it: “At these moments, Hegel believed, a ‘world-historical individual’ could play a decisive role. Alexander the Great spread Greek culture throughout Asia and North Africa. Julius Caesar transformed Rome from a republic to an empire. Napoleon Bonaparte — Hegel’s contemporary and the model for his theory — ended feudalism, instituted civil law (the Napoleonic Code) and put an end to the Holy Roman Empire, creating a continent of rival states.”

 

And if you want some of that unadulterated Onion Hegel, here’s the man himself:

 

Such are all great historical men — whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World-Spirit. They may be called Heroes, inasmuch as they have derived their purposes and their vocation, not from the calm, regular course of things, sanctioned by the existing order; but from a concealed fount — one which has not attained to phenomenal, present existence, — from that inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface, which, impinging on the outer world as on a shell, bursts it in pieces, because it is another kernel than that which belonged to the shell in question. They are men, therefore, who appear to draw the impulse of their life from themselves; and whose deeds have produced a condition of things and a complex of historical relations which appear to be only their interest, and their work.

 

One irony of all this Hegel discourse is that its emergence is itself kind of Hegelian. Hegel believed that ideas, just like the avocados some writers apparently feel free to steal, ripen all on their own. So we should expect unconnected and dissimilar people to come up with the same idea to talk about Trump as the world-spirit made flesh, sort of like all of those people in Close Encounters of the Third Kind who independently got the idea that they had to go to Devils Tower.

 

So any day now we might expect Jesse Watters to start explaining that, “In Donald Trump, the American people witnessed the Weltgeist achieving Selbstbewusstsein—a nation awakening to its own Begriff, casting off the sterile abstractions of Verstand and realizing its true Freiheit through the concrete Wirklichkeit of America First.” I mean, if you close your eyes, you can hear J.D. Vance explaining to Tucker Carlson that “Trump was not merely a president; he was the concrete Dasein of the American Volksgeist, the historical Subjekt through which the nation accomplished the long-awaited Aufhebung of elite decadence and advanced one decisive step toward the Ende der Geschichte.”

 

So what’s the answer?

 

Is Trump a world-historical figure in the Hegelian sense? Are you high? Of course not. 

 

Parker and Scherer are more interested in whether Trump thinks he’s a world-historical figure in the way that Hegel described. The answer to that is also a resounding no. The dude doesn’t read memos. You think he’s thumbing through Hegel?

 

In fairness to them, the real point of their piece is to illuminate that Trump’s delusions of grandeur are worrisomely out of control. And they succeed. After all, Trump said the only check on his will on the world stage is “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Never mind that’s much more Nietzschean than Hegelian (and Nietzsche hated Hegel like Trump hates Liz Cheney). It’s also really creepy.

 

“He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live,” one confidant told Parker and Scherer. “He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.”

 

I don’t like talk of presidents’ “sheer power and force of will” in almost any context. Still, I think that can be a good impulse in a president who knows what they’re doing and can accomplish it. It would be awesome if he could take that ambition and tackle the national debt he has contributed so much to (debt just broke 100 percent of GDP, by the way).

 

But as with so many things, Trump is less concerned with actually fixing things than he is with the ability to claim he has. He wants the sizzle more than the steak, the headline more than the substance. Wanting to solve the problem of Iran’s regime and nuclear program (two sides of the same coin) is great. Not really having any idea how to do that? Not so great.

 

And this was sort of Judis’ point. Trump’s Iran adventure signifies a leader willing to smash the old order in service to establishing a new epoch. “Trump’s break with neoliberalism and liberal internationalism perfectly fits Hegel’s profile of the world-historical individual standing at the center of a transition from one era to another,” Judis writes.

 

Except for one problem: The whole point of Hegel’s philosophy was that history is progressing towards something more elevated, more ethical, closer to God’s vision for humanity. The point wasn’t that every now and then history produces dudes who smash a bunch of stuff and change things. Judis says, “Hegel saw the stages of history as naturally progressing in a positive direction. But shorn of that Enlightenment optimism, the parallels to today are considerable.”

 

Wait, what? If you take the “Enlightenment optimism” out of Hegel, what’s the point of invoking Hegel at all? Why not go with Thomas Carlyle’s “Great Man” stuff or Time magazine’s old Man of the Year criteria? For Hegel, moving history towards a loftier end is what makes someone a world-historical figure. Sure, you can be an immoral, or amoral, or a generally craptacular person and also be hugely consequential. But if your “own particular aims” don’t “involve those large issues that are the will of the “World Spirit,” then, according to Hegel, you’re just a dude doing stuff and breaking things for your own reasons. It’s sort of like saying someone is a new Jesus because he’s a kind person with a beard who does carpentry. “Oh, he’s not the son of God or anything like that. But he’s just like Jesus.” It doesn’t work that way. There are distinctions you can’t yada-yada past.

 

According to The Atlantic, Trump doesn’t much care for the term “legacy.” When he was advised to pick a running mate in 2024 who could carry on his political movement, he shot back: “What the hell do I care? I’ll be dead.” Again, that ain’t Hegelian idealism, that’s much closer to Nietzschean nihilism. There’s just nothingness after I die, so I should rack up wins for my glory or some other personal desires.

 

Napoleon is supposed to have said that he found the crown of France in the gutter and picked it up with his sword. For Hegel, this made Napoleon a tragic hero. After all, not long after Jena, Napoleon ceased to be seen as a “great liberator” extending the idealism of the French Revolution. He restored monarchy and empire for his own ends. He qualifies as a hero only because the unintended consequences of Napoleon’s life advanced the world spirit.

 

There are people on the right who believe the same thing about Trump. He may not care about grand ideas, but he’s still moving the world forward to something better. That could happen. We could look at the havoc and wreckage of the Trump years and set to work on restoring the norms, institutions, and alliances he’s vandalized. That would make Trump something like a world-historical figure and not just hugely consequential. But that doesn’t make the Trump idolators and instrumentalists Hegelian. Because they do not see Trump moving us forward to something better, but backwards to something lost that was better. He’s the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man they’ve conjured to tear down the liberal order and restore the old system of Great Power conflict or what some call “Neo-Royalism.” Again, this ain’t Hegelianism because you can’t yada-yada away his “Enlightenment optimism.”

 

But it might be a theory of Providence. This is the way-too-popular view that Trump is God’s chosen instrument. I’m not going to pooh-pooh anyone’s faith in God. But if ever there was a time to call God’s will mysterious, this would be it.

 

All of what I’ve said notwithstanding, here is one sense in which all of this, ironically, reeks of Hegel’s Enlightenment optimism because even the people who claim to reject the Enlightenment have a conviction that all of this is fated—destined—to happen. Strip away all the complicated systems and dizzying German terms, and a lot of Hegel boils down to the idea that “this” must mean something, that what is happening must be part of some grand design or process that will lead to something good.

 

My friend Yuval Levin doesn’t like the word “optimistic” because he thinks it removes agency. Being optimistic about the path we’re on is like being optimistic about the weather. Nothing you can do about it, but you’ve got a feeling it’ll be nice. This sentiment is partly why Hegel is considered a Romantic. Viewed through this lens, I think all of this optimism is folly. Whether it’s Marxist materialism or Hegelian idealism, putting your faith in cold, or warm, impersonal forces to make everything all right is a kind of surrender. Whether Trump’s impact will be good, bad, or mixed depends entirely on how people respond to it.

 

It’s not a great analogy. But I keep thinking of that scene towards the end of Saving Private Ryan when Tom Hanks’ character tells Ryan, “Earn this.” The carnage and sacrifice don’t make Ryan a good man. He becomes a good man to give the carnage and sacrifice some greater meaning and nobility. Ross Douthat wrote a brilliant but utterly depressing column suggesting that Trump was indeed a world-historical figure, but in his telling the next stage of historical development is decadence, decay, entropy. For Douthat, Trump looks like “a man of destiny” if our rendezvous with destiny is a hook-up with dissolution and despair. That’s the opposite of optimism, but Douthat’s pessimism has the same metaphysical flaw as Levin sees in optimism: It denies us the agency to make the best of things, to take the good and build on it, and to take the bad and learn from it.

 

I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic about what comes next, because whatever comes next will be in our hands. We can scramble up the slippery slope. We can plant our feet and say, “This stops here.” Decline is a choice, and so is ascent.