In The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right, Paul Gottfried analyses the ideological evolution of the American conservative movement in the post-World War II era, examining an often unacknowledged debt to Hegelian philosophy within the conservative thought of key intellectual figures.
Gottfried’s exploration seeks to uncover how thinkers like Will Herberg, Karl Wittfogel, Eric Voegelin, Frank Meyer, and James Burnham—who were prominent in shaping American conservatism—adopted a historical and dialectical approach influenced by Hegel, even as they openly repudiated him.
Through this analysis, Gottfried reveals a detailed historical perspective that, while essential to these thinkers’ worldviews, was rarely attributed directly to Hegel but rather rephrased or relayed through sources viewed as more palatable to a conservative audience wary of the Marxist-Hegelian association.
Paul Gottfried’s The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right presents itself as an inquiry into a paradox that cuts through the self-understanding of American conservatism after 1945: the movement’s public repudiation of Hegel as a putative wellspring of collectivism, determinism, and statolatry, and its simultaneous practical dependence upon Hegelian categories of historical intelligibility, civilizational development, ethical life, and dialectical conflict. The result is a study pitched deliberately at the border between intellectual history and the philosophy of history: not an apology for Hegel, nor a polemic against anti-Hegelianism, but a reconstruction of a shared problem-space in which a set of prominent conservative thinkers—Will Herberg, Karl August Wittfogel, Eric Voegelin, Frank Meyer, and James Burnham—could neither inhabit nor entirely forsake the Hegelian inheritance that had helped to shape their formative decades on the Marxist or fellow-traveling left. Instead, Gottfried contends, they translated Hegel into idioms they judged safer for a readership suspicious of any conceptual kinship with Marx; they appealed to sources that were proximate to Hegel’s system while purporting to keep his name at bay, and they elaborated a conservative historicism whose grammar retained Hegelian presuppositions about the temporality of value, the civilizational location of freedom, the dialectical structure of political contestation, and the ethical priority of concrete forms of life over decontextualized moral abstractions. The book is therefore less an intervention on behalf of a doctrine than an argument about a style of reasoning: it describes how, beneath a rhetoric of renunciation, postwar conservative discourse continued to think historically in a recognizably Hegelian key, commonly without acknowledging the debt.
Gottfried’s central claim proceeds from a thesis about historicism understood not as a creed of moral indifference or historical determinism, but as a disciplined attention to the genesis and transformation of meaning within concrete contexts, institutions, and patterns of practice. Historicism so conceived is, for him, a method rather than a verdict: an insistence that values do not hover above time as ahistorical absolutes, but are always mediated by historical forms that simultaneously disclose and constrain their intelligibility. It is precisely this methodological demand that Gottfried finds active—often covertly so—in the work of his subjects. They approached history not as a warehouse of examples to illustrate trans-historical axioms, but as the ethical theater in which values are tested and reshaped, in which freedom appears not as an uncaused premise but as a historically achieved consciousness sustained by specific civilizational arrangements and spiritual breakthroughs. While they would frequently condemn Hegel as a father to Marx, or denounce the “gnostic” structure of modern philosophies of history, they nonetheless relied on models of development and conflict that presuppose a dialectical motion through which antinomies are rendered intelligible and action-guiding. For Gottfried, this is not accidental resemblance but a structural affinity that connects their anti-Communist realism and their defense of the West to an older Hegelian account of how spirit comes to know itself in and through institutions, cultures, and the long drama of historical becoming.
The book’s opening insistence is that historical conservatism—so often misidentified with antiquarianism or an antimodern refusal of conceptual labor—has owed much, in Europe and America alike, to post-Enlightenment philosophies for which history is not a negation of standards but their condition of articulation. Gottfried locates his argument against a twentieth-century American background that had learned to treat “historicism” as the birthplace of nihilism, a learned reflex intensified by the influence of émigré thinkers who read the catastrophes of their youth back into the German historicist tradition. The effect, he suggests, has been to obscure the actual pedigree of conservative argument in Europe and to confuse methodological historical inquiry with the very different millenarianism of Marxist teleology. When American intellectuals of the Right attack “historicism” tout court, they displace attention away from the internal plurality of historical thought and foreclose upon a register that their own heroes otherwise inhabit: a register in which appeals to custom, inherited forms, and civilizational cohesion are meaningful only because one thinks historically about how ethical life crystallizes and persists.
It is within this tension that Gottfried reconstructs the significance of conservatism’s mid-century realist temper, especially in the Cold War’s self-understanding as a conflict between incommensurable principles. The protagonists at the center of his study shared not only anti-Communist commitments but a sensibility for which the period after 1914 is a single arc: the autoclasis of Europe, the Bolshevik revolution, and the emergence of a bipolar contest that raised the stakes of political decision to the level of world-historical antagonism. In this setting, they perceived a “struggle for the world” that is spiritual as much as strategic; a confrontation of values in which the defense of Western freedom required not simply power but a comprehension of what, historically, freedom is. To speak this language at all—to speak of epochs, of principles incarnate in institutions, of spiritual breaks and civilizational thresholds—is to stand closer to Hegel than polemics would admit.
One locus where Gottfried sharpens this point is Will Herberg’s reconfiguration of religious sociology into a philosophy of redemptive history. Herberg’s itinerary—from Marxism to a religiously inflected social thought—did not evacuate the historicist premise; it transposed it into a theocentric key. In essays that Herberg himself prized, the term historical acquires layered meanings: as factual, as theologically saturated (Judaism and Christianity as religions of events), as causally efficacious, as identity-defining, and as openness to futurity in virtue of which persons and communities reconstitute themselves by recovering their past “doings and sufferings.” The effect is to place human action within a temporal dialectic of remembrance and projection: a Janus-faced historicity whose forward-looking orientation is inseparable from preservation of origin, and whose ethical pressure derives from a redemptive narrative that refuses to oppose revelation and history. In Herberg’s rendering of Heilsgeschichte, conflict itself takes on a dialectical form: between divine intent and human self-will, between creative transcendence and corrupting self-interest—a motion that recalls Hegelian descriptions even as Herberg rejects Hegel’s metaphysical immanence and insists on creation and transcendence. The similarity is not a matter of genealogy but of grammar: to think the ethical life of a people as historically constituted, to situate revelation as process rather than timeless deposit, to treat modern fragmentation as a prelude to a higher unity, is to inhabit the Hegelian problematic while transforming its theological commitments.
Gottfried develops the Herberg case further by emphasizing the synthesis Herberg sought between a prophetic eschatology and a modern historicity. Against cyclical cosmologies and quietistic metaphysics, Herberg insists that in Hebraic religion “time is primarily future,” and that this futurity—when taken seriously—generates a “vital drive for social action.” That conviction underwrites a preference for an American welfare state informed by Hebraic norms of justice and a firm rejection of totalitarian experiments that, in his view, substitute scientism for ethics. On Gottfried’s reading, Herberg’s theological politics therefore combines an insistence on the historicity of meaning with a robust critique of leveling egalitarianism, a mixture that resonates with Hegel’s notion that the reconciliation of freedom and ethical life must occur within historically achieved forms rather than by appeal to abstract universals. Even Herberg’s sympathy for some socialist aims in 1951 is framed not as a capitulation to materialism but as a search for institutional forms adequate to a tradition of justice—precisely the sort of institutionalist orientation that a Hegelian could recognize.
If Herberg refracts the argument through theology, Wittfogel brings it into comparative civilizational analysis. Oriental Despotism serves for Gottfried as an exemplary case of how a thinker can move from Communist militancy to libertarian admiration for Adam Smith and Hayek without shedding an earlier commitment to the historical primacy of freedom as a civilizational achievement. Wittfogel’s conceptual armature foregrounds the environmental preconditions of hydraulic organization while insisting that geography does not exhaust explanation; he returns repeatedly to moral resolution, civic practices, and the consciousness of liberty as decisive for a society’s capacity to resist despotic structures. The contrast he draws between the absorption of nomadic conquerors into China’s agro-despotic power structure and the collapse of the Western Roman “marginal hydraulic society” under tribal pressures (thereby clearing space for non-Oriental forms of rule) translates environmental conditions into a historical claim about Europe’s political pluralization and the refusal of “total obedience.” The Greeks remain a fulcrum: their resistance to Achaemenid expansion is not a mere episode but an index of a civilizational wager on freedom that will find echoes in the Germanic rejection of imperial absolutism and in the medieval reluctance to elevate obedience above all virtues. The vocabulary—and the arc—are recognizably Hegelian: an account of world history as the history of freedom’s self-consciousness, elaborated now with anthropological and geographical attentiveness and with a post-Marxist skepticism about revolutionary states that imitate the despotic forms they claim to overthrow.
What matters for Gottfried is not whether Wittfogel name-checks Hegel in Oriental Despotism—he often does not, for tactical reasons given his argumentative target in Marxist and Leninist interlocutors—but whether his explanatory structure echoes a Hegelian typology of civilizational “worlds” or “modes” that connects social organization to the presence or absence of freedom’s consciousness. On Gottfried’s reconstruction, Wittfogel had earlier praised Hegel’s historical discernments, and even his later ambivalence never hardened into a Popperian diatribe. He objected to the rigidity of some Hegelian schemata, not because he regarded freedom as an illusion, but because his own libertarian commitments urged him to accentuate contingency, moral choice, and resistance. Indeed, in Wittfogel’s mature voice, one can detect what Gottfried calls an “uneventful absorption” of Hegel’s thinking into a comparative account that treats the West as the civilization of freedom par excellence—not by natural destiny but in virtue of a sequence of decisions and institutional forms that disclose a distinct spiritual posture toward authority, community, and the limits of power.
Gottfried’s treatment of James Burnham and “conservative realism” situates political praxis within the same grammar of historical conflict. The Machiavellian revival in Burnham’s work—his stress on elites, ruling classes, and the illusions of popular sovereignty; his proposition that “world politics” superseded national or parochial horizons after 1945; his preference for empire as structure over utopian schemes of world government—does not, in Gottfried’s account, contradict Burnham’s later appeals to freedom. Rather, it reveals a continuity of method: a contempt for abstraction and a focus on what historically organized polities can achieve when guided by realistic assessments of power. Burnham’s proposals for “wars of national liberation” against the Soviet sphere, his insistence that the American imperium had to act as the guarantor of Western plurality without pretending to abolish political difference, and his refusal to treat supranational unities as anything but incubators of tyranny extend a conservative historicism into strategic doctrine. The resonance with the “Hegelian Right” is explicit in Gottfried’s framing: a preference for state authority as the locus of ethical unity, a conviction that historical nations possess duties toward their inherited forms, and a refusal to legitimate action by reference to deracinated universals.
Nowhere is the ambivalence toward Hegel more elaborate than in Gottfried’s portrayal of Eric Voegelin. Voegelin’s published invectives against Hegel’s “sorcery” and gnostic immanentism—his characterization of The Phenomenology of Spirit as a grimoire for those intent on divinizing consciousness—have long led disciples to position him as an anti-Hegelian paladin. Gottfried complicates that image by showing how Voegelin’s own architecture of the history of consciousness recapitulates central Hegelian moves, albeit linked to different metaphysical commitments. Voegelin reads Hegel with formidable care, parsing structural correspondences between the Phenomenology’s movement and the Neo-Platonic itinerary of the soul from primordial rest through alienation back to unity; he acknowledges Hegel’s political acumen and draws on the same civilizational contrasts—Oriental cosmological empires, the Hebraic and Classical ruptures, the unfolding of higher forms of consciousness—that shape Hegel’s Philosophy of History. What he rejects is a particular ontological hypostasis of the process, not the enterprise of universal history as such. When he observes that “history is made up of consciousness” and that its temporal order is the dimension of the quest for the ground of being, he inhabits a transcendental idealist terrain whose most familiar modern cartographers include both Schelling and Hegel. The quarrel, in Gottfried’s telling, is therefore akin to an intra-family dispute: Voegelin polices what he regards as Hegel’s metaphysical overreach while reproducing the structural convictions that allow a philosophy of history to be more than chronicle—an analysis of symbolic forms in which universality becomes historically immanent without dissolving transcendence.
This structural proximity is legible as well in the way Voegelin and those who appropriated him on the American Right assisted figures like Meyer in articulating a self-consciously non-materialist account of Western civilizational identity. Meyer’s energetic attempts to synthesize “liberty” and “tradition”—often under the banner of a common Western ethos—depend upon the notion that what unites the West is an historically articulated conscience capable of reconciling plural goods within institutional constraints. His attraction to Voegelin lies precisely in the latter’s refusal of an anonymous mechanism of progress and his insistence that order is the fragile achievement of consciousness under grace, not the artifact of history-as-idol. Yet Gottfried notes that Meyer’s own polemics against Hegel as a determinist cannot dissolve the inner likeness: just as Burnham chides abstraction in favor of historically embedded decisions, Meyer casts the defense of freedom as a project in which spiritual inheritance and civic order converge—a description that presumes, rather than denies, a Hegelian account of how the universal binds to the particular in ethical life.
Against this reconstruction, Gottfried places the waning of historical conservatism on the American Right beginning in the 1960s and crystallizing in the 1980s, when a decontextualized moral universalism gained institutional ground among both Straussians and neoconservatives. The Straussian enterprise, with its telescoping of history into a succession of regimes and founding principles, its suspicion of historical consciousness as the harbinger of relativism, and its fixation on Lockean origins as the explanatory master key to American experience, transformed conservative debate precisely by denuding it of its earlier historicist complexity. Gottfried does not present this shift as intellectual impoverishment per se—Strauss’s school is filled with rigorous thinkers and accomplished polemicists—but as a reorientation that weakened the movement’s capacity to think the relation of institutions and virtues historically. In the process, he suggests, conservatism increasingly forgot how to use a past it claimed to revere: it ceased to regard history as the grammar of meaning and treated it as an obstacle to normativity.
The question that surfaces repeatedly in Gottfried’s analysis is whether the suspicion of historicism is itself a symptom of a deeper presentism. When conservative intellectuals condemn German historical science for corrupting moral life, or identify Hegel as a proto-totalitarian, they tend to conflate method with outcome and (perhaps involuntarily) trade a thick account of ethical formation for a volunteerist epistemology that cannot explain why certain forms of life elicit loyalty and command obedience over centuries. In that sense, the polemical war against “historicism” misfires: the real menace is not the effort to understand meaning as historically mediated, but the millenarian, salvific substitution of History-with-a-capital-H for God—a posture as alien to Hegel’s nuanced concept of Sittlichkeit as it is to Burke’s prudential respect for prescription. For Gottfried the task is to differentiate the two, in order to recover what the mid-century conservative realists knew: that one cannot defend the West except by telling a story of how, when, and at what cost the West came to be what it is.
A further implication follows from Gottfried’s treatment of the American Right’s debt to Central European émigré debates. The very anti-Hegelian tools by which American conservatives sought to cut themselves free—Popper’s indictment of Hegelian “Platonizing” statism, Hayek’s critique of pseudo-scientific social theory—were imported from contexts whose diagnostic energies were directed primarily against Marxist and Comtean scientism rather than against historical consciousness as such. Indeed, as Gottfried notes, Hayek’s later praise of spontaneous orders and inherited rules brings him closer to historical conservatism than to the de-historicized rationalism his epigones sometimes attribute to him, suggesting that the line between Burkean reverence for evolved norms and Hegelian accounts of Sittlichkeit is more porous than a generation of polemics pretended. On this reading, what the American Right rejected under the name of Hegel often included its own best resources for understanding the relation of freedom to institutional form.
Gottfried’s argument gains traction not by simple ascription of influence—he is explicit that much of the thesis requires inference where the protagonists sought distance—but by a close reading of what these thinkers actually say when they are not replying to caricatures of Hegel. Herberg’s fivefold analysis of the historical; Wittfogel’s insistence on moral choice amidst hydraulic constraints and his civilizational topology of freedom; Burnham’s coupling of political realism with a defense of liberty as a moral alternative to universalist ideologies; Voegelin’s elaborate conceptual traffic with Neo-Platonism and German idealism—all such materials disclose a mode of thought in which the historical constitution of meaning is not incidental but fundamental. Even where Hegel’s name is banished, the scaffolding remains.
The book’s portrait, then, is deliberately problematic, not for the sake of difficulty but because the underlying subject—a movement that both needs and fears history—cannot be rendered in smooth narrative. Gottfried’s conservative historicists want values to be binding without being arbitrary, universal without being untethered from the lived patterns that make them intelligible. They resist both the Enlightenment’s levelling rationalism and the millenarian Left’s eschatological politics; yet their own mode of resistance is historical through and through: they appeal to civilizational lineages, to spiritual thresholds, to the sedimented authority of institutions, and to the dialectics that both threaten and renew ethical life. It is unsurprising, then, that Gottfried finds in their ambivalence toward Hegel not hypocrisy but an index of the deeper problem: how to think the historicity of value without collapsing into historicism as relativism; how to acknowledge the mediation of meaning without enthroning History as idol. If the earlier generation managed this equilibrium—sometimes precariously—it is because they treated the West less as a collection of slogans than as an inheritance to be understood and, when necessary, transformed from within.
This diagnosis becomes sharper in Gottfried’s closing reflections on the intellectual right’s “farewell to history.” As a politics of abstract absolutes supplanted the halting, historically informed realism of the 1950s and 60s, the movement’s argumentative repertoire narrowed. Where Burnham could still write of empires and nations in registers that made prudence intelligible, and where Herberg could speak of redemptive history without confusing it with progress-as-dogma, later schools preferred to redescribe political judgment in the idiom of transhistorical moralism, or else to reduce the American experiment to a pristine Lockean founding whose meaning is fixed in advance of interpretation. Gottfried neither romanticizes the past nor demonizes the present; he argues instead that a politics unable to narrate its own origins, crises, and recoveries has abandoned the only plane upon which it can defend its goods. The alternative, he suggests, is a re-immersion in historical consciousness—not the cult of contingency, but an attentiveness to how the universal becomes compelling within the finite.
One can regard the book, finally, as a meditation on the conditions under which conservatism is possible in modernity. If conservatism is not merely the defense of what is, but the defense of inherited forms that have proven themselves as carriers of freedom and meaning, then it requires, as Hegel would say, the labor of the concept. It must know what it loves well enough to explain why it is lovable in its temporality, why it commands allegiance not by nostalgia but by a rational insight into its ethical necessity. Gottfried’s study retrieves that imperative by showing how deeply—even when disavowed—it shaped the benchmarks of postwar conservative thought. The result is not to “Hegelianize” the Right, but to restore to view the constitutive ambivalence that lent its mid-century debates both rigor and depth. In the space opened by Herberg’s redemptive historicism, Wittfogel’s civilizational contrasts, Burnham’s realist statecraft, and Voegelin’s history of consciousness, one glimpses a movement that knew its past too well to live without it, even when it sought to speak in names other than Hegel’s.
If there is a single line that threads through Gottfried’s chapters, it is the simple insistence that historical meaning is not something added to politics after the fact; it is the element within which political judgment becomes possible at all. Those postwar conservatives who intuited this—whether under the sign of Providence, civilization, or prudence—stood closer to Hegel than they wished to concede, not because they surrendered to a system, but because they recognized that what is rational in political life must be what is real for us, historically. To refuse this is to force conservatism to choose between a sterile absolutism and a surrender to fashion; to accept it is to undertake the more difficult task of articulating universality from within inheritance, and thus to vindicate freedom not as assertion but as the achieved self-knowledge of a people. Gottfried’s book makes that difficulty visible and, in making it visible, clarifies why the American Right’s greatest resources for self-renewal may still lie in the historical consciousness it once cultivated and then, too hastily, set aside.
Simon Gros 
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