Restoring the dialectic: Lucien Herr, Charles Andler, and the French Hegel, 1888--1934 (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Alexandre Koyre)

Is Hegelianism conservative or revolutionary? For Charles Andler (1866–1933) and Lucien Herr (1864–1926), two of Third Republic France's premier Germanists, Hegel's philosophy was tied to tradition and to the past. They respectively argued that Hegel's thought was irrational, illogical, and sentimental. These characteristics yielded, in their view, conservative politics. For this reason, they believed that Hegel offered little to those, like themselves, who were interested in social transformation.; This interpretation was overturned in the early 1930s by a new generation of French intellectuals. Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968), most notably, argued that Hegel's philosophy was guided by considerations of the future. He relied on the work of Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964), his friend and fellow Russian émigré to France in the mid-1920s.; Herr's and Andler's interpretation of Hegel is insufficiently integrated into the literature concerning the French reception of Hegel. The French did not begin to read Hegel with Kojève; an earlier view, represented by Herr and Andler, had first to be incorporated. The dissertation reconstructs their Hegel and analyzes how Koyré surpassed it.