No philosopher of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries has had as
great an impact on the world as Hegel. The only possible exception to
this sweeping statement would be Karl Marx – and Marx himself was
heavily influenced by Hegel. Without Hegel, neither the intellectual nor
the political developments of the last 150 years would have taken the
path they did.

Hegel's impact alone makes it important to understand him; but
Hegel's philosophy is in any case worth studying for its own sake. His
profound ideas led him to some conclusions that strike the modern
reader as bizarre, even absurd. Whatever one thinks of his conclusions,
however, there are arguments and insights in his work that retain their
force to the present day. The effort required to understand Hegel is
repaid by them, and also by the satisfaction of having mastered the
challenge to our comprehension that Hegel represents.

That Hegel does present a challenge is undeniable. Commentaries on
Hegel are studded with references to the ‘Himalayan severity’ of his
prose, to his ‘repulsive terminology’, and to the ‘extreme obscurity’ of
his thought. To illustrate the nature of the problem, I have just now
picked up my copy of what many consider to be his greatest work, The
Phenomenology of Mind, and opened it at random. The first complete
sentence on the page on which it opened (p. 596) reads: ‘It is merely