In the book Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Susan Buck-Morss wrote the following remark about the paradoxical thoughts on slaves at the time:
By the Eighteenth century, slavery had become the root metaphor of Western political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about power relations. Freedom its conceptual antithesis, was considered by the Enlightenment thinkers as the highest and universal political value. Yet this political metaphor began to take root at precisely the time that the economic practice of slavery-the systematic, highly sophisticated capitalist enslavement of non-Europeans as a labor force in the colonies-was increasing quantitatively and intensifying qualitatively to the point that by the mid-eighteenth century it came to underwrite the entire economic system of the West, paradoxically facilitating the global spread of the very Enlightenment ideals that were in such fundamental contradiction to it.1 …show more content…
Did Hegel belong to this category of Western Enlightenment philosophers who believed in human freedom in theory yet not in fact because of potential profits? Scholars have different opinions about Hegel’s view of racism and the other because Hegel was a complex thinker whose many works can be interpreted as racist or non racist.
Born on August 27th, 1770 and raised in Stuttgart, Germany, Hegel had a Protestant upbringing. With his Christian background and his father’s wishes for him to be a clergyman, Hegel studied Theology at the University of Tübingen from 1788 to 1793. The European Graduate School recounts Hegel’s life in the succeeding
By the Eighteenth century, slavery had become the root metaphor of Western political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about power relations. Freedom its conceptual antithesis, was considered by the Enlightenment thinkers as the highest and universal political value. Yet this political metaphor began to take root at precisely the time that the economic practice of slavery-the systematic, highly sophisticated capitalist enslavement of non-Europeans as a labor force in the colonies-was increasing quantitatively and intensifying qualitatively to the point that by the mid-eighteenth century it came to underwrite the entire economic system of the West, paradoxically facilitating the global spread of the very Enlightenment ideals that were in such fundamental contradiction to it.1 …show more content…
Did Hegel belong to this category of Western Enlightenment philosophers who believed in human freedom in theory yet not in fact because of potential profits? Scholars have different opinions about Hegel’s view of racism and the other because Hegel was a complex thinker whose many works can be interpreted as racist or non racist.
Born on August 27th, 1770 and raised in Stuttgart, Germany, Hegel had a Protestant upbringing. With his Christian background and his father’s wishes for him to be a clergyman, Hegel studied Theology at the University of Tübingen from 1788 to 1793. The European Graduate School recounts Hegel’s life in the succeeding