Jon Stewart’s Hegel’s Century: Alienation and Recognition in a Time of Revolution represents a detailed and philosophically rigorous exploration of how G. W. F. Hegel’s thought shaped the intellectual landscape of the nineteenth century. In an era marked by immense upheaval—political revolutions, burgeoning nationalism, industrial transformation, and religious crisis—Hegel’s categories of “alienation” and “recognition” served as intellectual anchors that defined the aspirations, anxieties, and critical perspectives of subsequent generations. Stewart’s book is not merely a history of ideas but a panoramic reflection on how Hegel’s dialectical method continued to reverberate through theology, politics, literature, and social theory, creating a constellation of thought so vast and diverse that it can indeed be regarded as “Hegel’s century.”
Stewart begins by situating Hegel’s lectures in Berlin during the 1820s, a period that saw an unprecedented concentration of intellectual energy and fervor. Hegel’s students—direct and indirect—went on to become some of the most revolutionary minds of the nineteenth century: Feuerbach, Bauer, Kierkegaard, Engels, Marx, and Bakunin, to name just a few. What unified this otherwise disparate group was their engagement with the Hegelian legacy, particularly the profound issues of alienation and recognition. Alienation, with its connotations of estrangement from self, society, labor, and even God, became the primary diagnostic tool for understanding the crises of modernity. Recognition, with its demand for mutual acknowledgment and validation, became the prescriptive and aspirational response to this condition of separation.
Stewart shows that these two concepts are not merely abstract philosophical categories but dynamic forces that infused political revolutions, theological debates, and cultural productions with new meaning. In the wake of Hegel’s death in 1831, the intellectual atmosphere of Berlin became charged with a sense of urgency and potentiality. The philosophical debates that erupted among Hegel’s followers—between the so-called “Old Hegelians” who sought to preserve the system and the “Young Hegelians” who sought to radicalize it—were emblematic of a deeper struggle to address the alienation produced by modern political, economic, and social structures. The task of philosophy was no longer confined to the rarefied heights of speculative thought; it was intimately connected with the exigencies of history and the demands for justice, freedom, and self-realization.
Stewart’s study emphasizes that the notion of alienation became an essential part of the critique of religion, most famously in Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity. Here, alienation is conceived as the projection of human essence onto a divine other, a separation that leaves humanity impoverished and self-divided. This line of critique would prove indispensable to Marx’s analysis of economic alienation in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, where the laborer is estranged from the product of their work, their fellow humans, and their own creative capacities. Stewart carefully traces how these critiques evolved and intersected, showing that the theological critique of alienation seamlessly transformed into a socio-economic critique of capitalism.
Yet Stewart’s account is not confined to the political and economic ramifications of Hegel’s thought. He illuminates how the idea of recognition found fertile ground in the existential reflections of Søren Kierkegaard and the anarchist visions of Mikhail Bakunin. For Kierkegaard, the alienation inherent in human existence could only be resolved through a paradoxical leap of faith, a form of divine recognition that transcended finite reason. For Bakunin, alienation was not only a social problem but a metaphysical one, requiring the abolition of all forms of domination and authority for true human self-recognition to emerge. Stewart captures the dialectical tension between these responses, illustrating how Hegel’s method gave rise to both revolutionary atheism and radical theology.
Literature, too, became a battleground for the Hegelian concepts of alienation and recognition. Stewart discusses the works of Heinrich Heine, Ivan Turgenev, and even Dostoevsky, showing how their narratives grappled with the psychological and social dimensions of estrangement. The tragic figures in these literary works often embody the struggle for recognition in a world that denies them agency, dignity, or freedom. Through these examples, Stewart argues that Hegel’s thought did not remain confined to the seminar rooms of Berlin but permeated the cultural consciousness of the age, shaping the way writers and artists conceptualized the human condition.
Moreover, Stewart’s book challenges the notion that Hegel’s philosophy faded into obsolescence by the mid-nineteenth century. He demonstrates that even as the tide of philosophical naturalism and materialism rose, the themes of alienation and recognition continued to haunt the intellectual scene. Figures like Engels and Marx reworked Hegelian ideas into powerful critiques of industrial society, while British idealists like F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet revived Hegelian themes to counter the mechanistic and atomistic views of human nature. Stewart insists that to understand the trajectory of nineteenth-century thought, one must acknowledge the persistence of Hegelianism as a subterranean force that continued to shape philosophical, political, and cultural discourses.
Stewart’s work stands out for its clarity and breadth. It avoids the pitfalls of academic parochialism by connecting Hegel’s legacy to broader European and even global contexts. His analysis spans not only philosophy but also theology, literature, and political theory, demonstrating a profound grasp of the socio-historical forces that shaped nineteenth-century thought. The book’s guiding thread—the dialectic of alienation and recognition—provides a coherent framework that makes the complex web of Hegelian influence comprehensible without sacrificing nuance or depth.
For students of nineteenth-century philosophy, Hegel’s Century serves as both an essential companion and a catalyst for further inquiry. For historians of ideas, it offers a compelling account of how philosophical concepts migrate, mutate, and manifest across different domains of thought. For general readers, it provides a lucid and engaging narrative of how one philosopher’s ideas became the intellectual bedrock of an age. Stewart’s book shows the enduring relevance of Hegel’s thought, revealing how the struggles for recognition and the experience of alienation continue to shape our understanding of self, society, and the world. In Hegel’s Century, Jon Stewart invites us to reconsider the legacy of a thinker who, far from being consigned to the past, remains a vital interlocutor for our own time.
Simon Gros 
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