Simon Gros

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Andrew Cole’s lecture pursues a sharply delimited scholarly stake: it re-reads Hegel’s concept of the world-historical individual at the precise point where its apparent grandeur becomes politically legible as a theory of autocratic formation, and where its theoretical afterlives (in Marxist, Lukácsian, and Frankfurt School idioms) reveal a recurrent strategy of deflection—citing the concept in order to avoid inhabiting its full consequences. Cole’s distinctive contribution lies in combining a philologically exact attention to Hegel’s lecture-text history (editions, revisions, excisions, and late insertions) with a conceptual diagnosis of authoritarian personality as a future that Hegel structurally withholds from the world-historical individual, thereby opening a space in which “world-historical greatness” can return in degraded comic form as the “world-hysterical individual,” at once ridiculous and dangerous.

The lecture’s outer frame—its rhetoric of arrival, affiliation, and disciplinary address—already performs a small model of its thesis. Cole begins by situating himself in Ljubljana as a place whose intellectual image has long mediated his formation, naming an itinerary of influences that includes the “Ljubljana School of psychoanalysis,” and recalling an early-1990s graduate scene in which Fredric Jameson assigned texts by figures associated with that milieu. This opening is not merely convivial; it establishes that “history,” in the sense relevant to the talk, operates through channels of transmission and institutional staging: conferences, seminar lineages, reading lists, and the social choreography of philosophical reception. The title, “The World Hysterical Individual,” is announced as a deliberate provocation within that staging. It proposes that a Hegelian figure—supposedly reserved for decisive historical transitions—returns repeatedly in modernity as a kind of degraded reprise, whose recurrence is inseparable from the very mechanisms by which we “read, teach, and write” Hegel. The lecture thus places interpretation under the same pressure as politics: misreadings are not incidental errors; they are symptomatic formations produced by conceptual discomfort, ideological fear, and the seductive convenience of inherited clichés.

Cole’s first argumentative movement targets the standard caricature of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History as a theodicy, a narrative in which “what the past got wrong the future will get right.” He treats these as clichés that a learned audience can reject with ease, yet he refuses to let this shared rejection settle the matter, because the interpretive problem, as he frames it, persists within critical traditions that are otherwise disposed to treat Hegel sympathetically. The lecture insists that even “the best minds,” when working “sincerely” with Hegel’s philosophy of history, encounter a peculiar resistance precisely at the point where Hegel becomes most concrete: the concept of the world-historical individual. Cole’s guiding suspicion is that this resistance is not explained by the concept’s obscurity alone. The resistance is motivated by what the concept calls forth—autocracy, terror, fascism, genocide—and by the uneasy sense that the Hegelian machinery of historical intelligibility can be made to appear continuous with the legitimations and mythologies of authoritarian power. The lecture’s method thus joins conceptual analysis to reception-history as an index of political anxiety.

This anxiety, for Cole, is visible in a pattern: major Hegelian inheritors cite the world-historical individual in order to speak about something adjacent. Marx sees the figure and translates it into the collective subject of the proletariat. Lukács, captivated by the category, displaces the drama into the novel, as if narrative form could carry what political agency can no longer be trusted to bear. Adorno, in turn, offers a mode of engagement that is itself presented as structurally ambiguous: paragraphs of apparent fidelity culminating in a “fatal sentence” of condemnation. Cole’s selection of Adorno’s well-known image—the “world spirit” no longer on horseback but “on wings without a head,” figured through Hitler’s robot bombs—functions as a test case for the lecture’s central interpretive demand. Cole refuses the convenient move in which Adorno’s apocalyptic modernity simply “refutes” Hegel. He asks why the image cannot equally “support” Hegel, and the question is sharpened by Adorno’s own reliance on a Hegelian trope: the world spirit manifests itself in empirical symbols. The issue becomes: what kind of futurity is latent in Hegel’s conceptual apparatus, and what ethical-political criteria would allow one to decide whether modernity’s technical terror is internal to the Hegelian narrative or breaks it apart?

Cole’s treatment of William Wallace and Karl Popper extends this problem by adding an explicit history of misreading. Wallace—defending Hegel against charges of absolutism, autocracy, and reaction—becomes a marker that the accusation is old and durable. Popper—branding Hegel as the “father of historicism and totalitarianism”—represents the institutionalization of that accusation within liberal self-understanding. Cole notes that such readings have long been “debunked” (he mentions Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution as a major twentieth-century counter), yet he insists on keeping the accusatory statements “in circulation.” The reason is methodological: interpretation is itself historical, and because “history repeats itself,” misreadings return with renewed force when political conditions make them feel plausible again. Cole thus positions the interpretive field as a diagnostic surface on which the present’s authoritarian temptations become legible. He adds a tonal inflection that is philosophically consequential: the repetition grows “louder,” “more obnoxious,” “more ridiculous,” and “more hysterical,” in a manner that can appear “strangely comic” while remaining “deeply dangerous.” The lecture thereby prepares its culminating transformation: greatness returning as hysteria, the sublime returning as farce with lethal capacity.

At this point, Cole introduces what he calls a “boring but important” consideration: the edition of Hegel’s Philosophy of History he will be using, and the textual history that makes edition-choice a philosophical decision. This is the lecture’s most explicit display of method: philology is treated as a condition of conceptual precision. Cole specifies that he uses the second edition initially prepared by Eduard Gans (1837), incorporating transcriptions and notes associated with Hegel’s son, Karl Hegel, and drawing on Hegel’s latest material from the winter of 1830–1831; Karl Hegel published this as a second edition in 1840. Cole remarks that this became the standard English edition via a translation by John Sibree (whose inaccuracies and physical fragility he wryly notes), and he justifies the textual basis as “a good one” for his purposes. The crucial point is that Hegel’s “presentation ideas” and “ordering of points” vary across the 1820s into the final years. Cole argues that the late text “economizes” some arguments while introducing “new terms and problems” elsewhere, and that it contains “distinct political and ideological differences” from earlier lectures, especially regarding the world-historical individual. The lecture’s claim here is exact: the concept’s political valence changes as the text changes, and any interpretation that ignores revision-history risks treating a moving target as a static doctrine.

Cole then reconstructs Hegel’s argumentative sequence in the late lectures. History is made by passions: “nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.” The word “absolutely” matters for Cole, because it marks Hegel’s own sense of categorical necessity. Cole distinguishes two registers of passion. First, the everyday register: ordinary people pursue private interests “selfishly” and “with all their might,” and these self-centered pursuits can still contribute to a larger good within the state, in a way that resembles (without being reduced to) the logic often attributed to Adam Smith and sometimes to Spinoza. This first register already complicates moralism: private passion is not identical with moral failure; it is a motor that can be integrated by institutional forms.

The second register is the decisive one: the passion of the world-historical individual. Here Cole follows Hegel’s own escalation. This passion is “better,” “natural,” and of a different order; its actions are “inimical” to the state, “adverse” to a “fixed system,” and capable of “assailing” and even “destroying” the state’s “foundations and existence.” Cole’s paraphrase stresses the conceptual tension: the state is the site of ethical life and rational order in Hegelian political philosophy, yet the world-historical individual is introduced as a force that breaks the state in order to make history. The logic is not anarchic caprice; it is the emergence of a “new universal,” a universal “of a different order” than the universal on which the permanence of a people depends. Cole emphasizes Hegel’s density here: collisions between duties, laws, and rights realize themselves historically, and these collisions are the medium in which a “creating idea of truth” strives toward consciousness of itself. World-historical individuals are those in whose aims such a new universal lies.

Cole treats this passage as a hinge: it promises a character-portrait, a concrete example, a name. His philological claim then acquires full force. Only in the last version of the lectures does Hegel immediately follow this abstract account by “naming a name.” That name is Caesar. The import is immediate: Hegel’s first example of the world-historical individual becomes an autocrat. Cole lingers on the consequences. Caesar’s pursuit of “position, honor, and safety” leads him to a victory that secures the empire, leaving constitutional form while becoming head of state, thereby “securing the autocracy of Rome.” Hegel presents this autocracy as “independently necessary” in the history of Rome and of the world.

Cole’s insistence is that Hegel cannot be treated as merely careless here. The late insertion of Caesar-as-autocrat reveals an altered judgment. Cole deepens the point by correlating this insertion with other late revisions: while touching up the Philosophy of History, Hegel was also revising the Philosophy of Mind (the third part of the Encyclopedia), where he describes Roman autocracy as tyranny. Moreover, in earlier versions of the history lectures Hegel had reserved the language of autocratic despotism for “non-European” forms of governance, whereas the late text now marks autocracy at the heart of Western jurisprudence and self-fashioning, and within the Renaissance-to-modernity arc. The lecture thereby implies a structural reversal: what had been externalized as despotism returns as an internal possibility of the West’s own political genealogy. Cole’s methodological wager is that this reversal is not accidental; it indexes a late-Hegelian recognition that the dynamics of universality, personality, and political transition can culminate in a concentrated personal rule that modernity is tempted to name as necessity.

From this point, Cole does not simply equate Hegel with authoritarian apologetics; he instead reads Hegel as tightening his own evaluative language in ways that complicate facile condemnations. Cole reports that in the final revisions after the second draft of 1830, Hegel removes the claim that world-historical individuals have “right on their side” and that “whatever they do is right.” This excision matters because it suggests an internal critical pressure: Hegel refuses a moral blank check for greatness. Cole then turns to Hegel’s management of the adjectives “good” and “great.” His discussion is intentionally meticulous and, in its own way, diagnostic: the terms often seem to slide into one another in everyday rhetoric, as if “great” were simply “more good.” Cole argues that Hegel’s text resists this slide. “Great” names scale, immensity, historical amplitude. “Good,” by contrast, belongs to the domain of ordinary ethical life in which private interests can be integrated into a larger good within the state. Hegel reserves “good” for this domain, and he avoids predicating it of world-historical deeds because that would impose an explicit moral evaluation he refuses at this point. When Hegel does speak of goodness in relation to world history, he relocates agency to “world spirit,” and even then he expresses the evaluation in the register of appearance: new possibilities that conflict with the existing system and can destroy its foundations “may well appear good,” and appear “essential and necessary.” Cole’s question is sharp: why the language of seeming? Why is the destruction of foundations framed as a phenomenology of moral appearance rather than as moral fact? The implication is that the world-historical event produces moral optics—compelling images of necessity—while leaving open the possibility that such optics function as ideological cover for violence. The lecture thus identifies a subtle Hegelian restraint that also becomes a site of danger: the refusal to moralize greatness can preserve conceptual clarity, while also enabling a narrative in which the verdict on autocratic rupture is indefinitely deferred.

Cole’s next movement—explicitly introduced as “the policy of personality”—connects this restraint to a theory of autocratic formation. Placing Caesar where the late lectures place him implies that autocracy is an intelligible outcome when intense individuality scales to the level of political transformation, when the personal becomes political in the specific sense that a single personality can crystallize the state. Cole supplements the late history lectures with transcribed material from 1826–1827 (Georg Las(s)on), where Hegel explains autocracy as emerging when individual subjects become isolated, atomized, fragmented into numerous personalities within an estate, with the consequence that the state confronts individuals no longer as an abstract entity but “as the power of an autocrat” over citizens. “Arbitrary power” enters, counterbalanced by internal insurgency as the pains of despotism make themselves felt. Cole also adds a parallel formation: when a state is formed after the family, and a royal family becomes the form in which personalities surrender themselves into a single head, the outcome is a theocracy. The lecture thereby treats autocracy and theocracy as outcomes of a problem of personality: the relation between dispersed personal atoms and concentrated personal unity.

At this juncture, Cole introduces the later critical-theoretical term “authoritarian personality,” not as a foreign imposition but as a conceptual crystallization of what Hegel already partially theorizes. Hegel asks: what is the material in which the ideal of reason is wrought out? The “primary answer” is personality—desires, subjectivity. Cole emphasizes that Hegel himself uses the term “personality” for the world-historical individual. This generates a new question: what does it mean for personality to be world-historical? Cole’s answer is intentionally layered. World-historical personality includes a kind of historically attuned “hunch” for the direction of events, a capacity to “assess the direction of history,” to sense the flow of the new universal, and to lead by refusing bureaucratic counsel. Cole cites Hegel’s claim that whatever prudent councils world-historical individuals might learn from others are limited features; they best understood affairs, and others learned from them and acquiesced in their policy. The world-historical individual is thus constructed as anti-bureaucratic, improvisational, practically political. Yet Hegel also says that these individuals have no consciousness of the “general idea” they unfold; they act without reflective awareness of the universality they incarnate. Cole marks the tension: leadership arises through charisma, a “gravitational subjectivity” large enough to “channel” world spirit while lacking conscious comprehension of what is being channeled. The followers “feel the irresistible power of their own inner spirit thus embodied.” The leader’s personal immediacy is experienced by followers as the embodiment of their own inner truth.

Here the lecture reaches a crucial threshold: it approaches a proto-construction of authoritarian personality without fully naming it as such, and it identifies in Hegel a limit-point. Hegel’s examples—Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon—belong to the past or recent past. Hegel does not speculate on the future of the world-historical individual. Cole frames this as a structural asymmetry: the state has futurity, as political theory, science fiction, utopian writing, and architectural manifestos show. The world-historical individual, by contrast, has no futurity in Hegel; Hegel reaches a “stumbling block.” Cole treats this block as a relief, because to look into the future of such “soul leaders” is to see autocracy and authoritarianism. Cole’s claim is that Adorno and Hannah Arendt, living through twentieth-century catastrophe, see the futurity that Hegel refuses. They identify a collapse in the distinction between state and personality: personality becomes the dominant element.

Cole’s presentation of Arendt is organized around a concise formula: “personality is policy.” The phrase condenses an argument about how authoritarian leaders dislike official policy and party platforms because policy limits improvisation. They prefer decrees that keep civil servants guessing and scrambling to convert extemporized declarations into administrative reality. The resulting chaos energizes followers and sustains a movement responsive to their feelings and demands. Cole then sharpens the violence latent in this structure: Arendt’s analysis of Nazi Germany shows genocide emerging from pre-existing sentiment—fear, hatred toward minorities, hatred toward people with mental disabilities—rather than from a stable policy program. The authoritarian realizes that sustaining a movement requires keeping fears in motion beyond the party and beyond policy. Cole adds Marcuse’s formulation that fascism is bound by no principles; change of course with shifting power-constellations becomes its unchanging program. The lecture’s point is not to offer an encyclopedic theory of fascism; it is to show how Hegel’s conceptual elements—passion, charisma, the anti-bureaucratic leader, the seeming-goodness of destructive new possibilities—form a matrix that later theory recognizes as authoritarian.

This is the moment where Cole introduces his culminating transformation: from world-historical individual to world-hysterical individual. His transition is careful. He asserts that Hegel “put into place many of [authoritarianism’s] elements” and gave them no future; in a sense, Hegel “removed them from history,” and did so in a way that was “self-aware and critical,” albeit without the experiential knowledge of twentieth-century darkness. Cole then cites Hegel’s lone explicit futurity in world history: the United States as “the land of the future,” where the burden of world history will reveal itself. Yet Hegel immediately adds that as the land of the future, America has no interest “for us here,” because history concerns what has been, whereas philosophy concerns “that which is,” strictly neither past nor future. Cole treats this as a conceptual gesture that is itself politically charged: the refusal of futurity for the world-historical individual is mirrored by a refusal of America’s future as philosophical object, even as America is named as historical destiny. The lecture then adds a crucial ethical caveat: Cole does not equate Germany in the 1930s and 1940s with the contemporary United States, nor does he equate present-day authoritarianisms across contexts. His purpose is to foreground the problem of policy and personality and the “new domains” into which authoritarian impulses extend, including the domain of authorship itself (“authors who seem like authoritarians too”). This reflexive aside matters: it signals that the authoritarian personality operates through forms of authority that exceed formal politics, including cultural and literary authority.

Cole’s decisive warrant for “hysteria” is an Adorno remark: fascist leader types are frequently called hysterical. Cole then elaborates, again through Adorno, a cluster of features: such leaders express themselves without inhibitions; they function vicariously for inarticulate listeners by doing and saying what listeners would like to say but cannot or dare not; they violate middle-class taboos against expressive behavior; the “common people” disparage fakeness while simultaneously appreciating the leader’s “cheap antics,” “false tones,” and clowning. The point is structurally paradoxical: the leader’s obvious theatricality is not a defect that followers overlook; it is a feature they recognize and value. Clowning becomes a mode of sincerity, and theatricality becomes a medium of perceived authenticity.

From here, Cole articulates the concept of the “world-hysterical individual” as a specifically modern comic vehicle for authoritarian expression. Comedy becomes a technology by which the autocrat can be perversely humanized, and by which political irresponsibility can be stylized as play. Cole’s empirical anchor, offered in the register of personal observation, is Donald Trump as the forty-fifth U.S. president (2016–2020). Cole frames Trump’s political trajectory as entangled with humiliation and revenge (the Obama-era public mocking that made Trump “the butt of jokes”), and he interprets Trump’s performance style as a systematic technique: deflection through joking, bodily gestures, eyebrow-raising, shrugging off responsibility for words by retroactively classifying them as jokes. The lecture claims that Trump shifts the function of joking in political discourse: the jokes do not primarily target power from below; they issue from power itself, turning the public into the object of the joke. The “joke” becomes a rhetorical structure that licenses stereotype and cruelty while preserving deniability. Cole also associates the authoritarian’s preference for clowning with the refusal of policy: authoritarian personality does not think in terms of policy, and this shapes both media reception and electoral dynamics. Commentators dismissed Trump because he had “no policy” and appeared unserious; that dismissal misrecognized the mechanism of success. The campaign’s status as joke becomes politically efficacious precisely because it saturates the media, generates chaos, and converts attention into mobilization.

Cole’s account of Trump’s comedic-authoritarian repertoire is intentionally heterogeneous, because the lecture’s underlying conceptual claim concerns improvisational excess as a political medium. Cole lists forms ranging from basic obscenity to sexual boasting, from circulating absurdly heroic images (Trump’s head on a muscular body) to derisive nicknaming of political opponents and dismissal of policy discourse (“policy schmalacy”). The point is not moral scandal as such, and Cole explicitly distances himself from partisan identification. The point is the structure: jokes function as decrees in miniature—speech acts that reconfigure the normative field while leaving no stable policy to which one can hold the leader accountable. A further layer is added when “jokes” rewrite history itself: statements about foreign interference, authoritarian emulation, and refusal to leave office are retrospectively redescribed as sarcasm. The leader’s claim “I was just joking” becomes a second-order joke that relocates agency and responsibility. Cole ends the lecture proper by naming “dangling and loose threads” and proposing a “trajectory” from the world-historical individual to the world-hysterical individual. The closure is intentionally non-totalizing: it offers a conceptual vector rather than a completed system, thereby mirroring the lecture’s theme that authoritarian improvisation thrives in spaces where systematic accountability is structurally frustrated.

The question-and-answer period performs a second framing that is not merely supplemental; it exposes the lecture’s own points of strain, and it shows Cole’s method as responsive rather than doctrinaire. The first question presses the meaning of “hysteria,” suggesting that the intended term might be “hilarious.” Cole answers with a double admission: he did think about the terminological problem, and he lacks a stable Lacanian definition of hysteria that satisfies him, partly because Lacan’s own usage shifts across his career and because the term carries a gendered valence that the lecture did not treat. This response is methodologically important. Cole’s concept “world-hysterical” risks importing a psychoanalytic vocabulary for rhetorical effect; the question forces a clarification of its theoretical legitimacy. Cole’s reply indicates a strategy of mediated borrowing: he uses Adorno’s “fast and loose” Freudian-inflected usage as a bridge into a “general” psychoanalytic sense of hysteria as leader hysteria or mass hysteria around authoritarianisms, tied to taboos and expressive transgression. He then tentatively considers a Lacanian motif: the hysteric wants to be the object of the Other’s desire. Cole sees a possible fit with world-historical individuality conceived as split between individual passion and world-spirit universality, and he introduces Jameson’s remark that the world-historical individual is a “channel” through which something like the big Other emerges. Yet he registers his own hesitation: is the universality of world spirit usefully mapped onto the big Other, or is that an over-forcing of categories? The exchange thus reveals a central tension in the lecture’s architecture: it aims to remain internal to Hegel while using twentieth-century critical theory and psychoanalysis as interpretive instruments; the Q&A makes visible the risk of conceptual overextension and the need for careful mapping between vocabularies.

A second question addresses the relation between world-historical individual and monarch. This turns the lecture back toward Hegel’s political philosophy, forcing a more precise differentiation between personal rule as autocracy and monarchy as a constitutional form. Cole answers by invoking a “passive monarchy” in Hegel, vaguely described as independent of aristocracy and democracy, and he agrees that the world-historical individual and the monarch do not “mix.” The exchange is revealing because it clarifies the lecture’s implicit thesis about state form: world-historical individuality lacks a stable state form precisely because it is transitional, destructive, and evental; monarchy, by contrast, functions (in Hegel’s own political architecture) as a principle of unity within a rational state. Cole acknowledges the complexity of reading Caesar as monarchic in one register while calling Caesar autocrat in another, and he notes how representations (he mentions Shakespeare) can generate affective attachment to the autocrat. This produces an important conceptual displacement: the question “what is Caesar?” becomes inseparable from the question “why do we like them?”—a question Cole identifies as central to political theory and to the empirical riddle of mass support.

A third exchange deepens the agency/necessity problem. The questioner proposes that Hegel’s discussion of world-historical individuality engages Kant’s moral philosophy, with extensive “term for term” correspondences, and suggests that Hegel tries to place the world-historical individual within a negative frame that emphasizes choice, contingency, and moral violation rather than historical necessity alone. The questioner points to a proximate textual context in Hegel: discussions of ordinary individuals, ethics of containing passions, the kingdom of ends, and the moral knowledge individuals possess as law-making beings. Against this background, the sudden appearance of the world-historical individual would register as a deliberate rupture that must be interpreted as chosen transgression. Cole’s lecture has already supplied philological evidence that Hegel tightens moral language and removes blanket justification; the Q&A pushes this into a stronger thesis: Hegel’s late revisions may represent an effort to prevent the world-historical individual from being read as the mere instrument of necessity. Even where universality moves through individuals, the individual’s choices remain imputable. The concept tension becomes explicit: historical intelligibility requires necessity, while political responsibility requires imputability. The lecture’s framework allows both poles to remain active, and the Q&A sharpens their collision as a central problem rather than a defect to be smoothed away.

Another participant introduces a distinction from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: individual versus person, where “person” is an empty, abstract legal status, a soulless form. The participant connects this to contemporary “personalization” discourse, suggesting that personalization pretends to address individuality while actually abstracting it, as in the anecdote of a tax office writing to a three-day-old child as a juridical-personal unit. Cole responds by bundling this into a claim: the discourse of personalization, the reification of individuality into personhood as abstract individuality, belongs to the discourse of authoritarianism and autocracy. He adds a further conceptual twist: personalization commits a violence against the idea that the personal is political, because it turns “the personal” into a bureaucratic mechanism rather than a site of emancipatory agency. Cole’s reply also contains a caution against narcissistic specialness: once one thinks oneself special, the philosophical attention collapses into boredom. This remark is not merely comic; it signals that the authoritarian personality’s appeal is bound up with fantasies of specialness and exceptional embodiment, and that resisting authoritarian personalization may require resisting the affective lure of being singled out as “special” by power.

A final exchange proposes the Kantian concept of genius as an analogy for the world-historical individual: genius produces aesthetic ideas that provoke reflection because they are opaque, carrying a felt meaning not fully graspable. The speaker suggests that the world-historical individual supplies “mysterious signifiers,” and that the distance from Napoleon to Trump seems short, as if history reveals an “emptiness” in which “the genius is an idiot.” Cole welcomes the suggestion and connects it to his own developing thought: Hegel strips policy, moral prescription, and cultural pressure away from the world-historical individual; Hegel also repeatedly says the world-historical individual does not know what he is doing, operating with non-consciousness rather than reflective consciousness. This generates a “spontaneous character” that can appear as idiocy. Cole is careful to avoid the posture of technocratic contempt; the point is conceptual: when charisma and spontaneity are structurally detached from policy and reflective knowledge, the leader’s empty performance can appear as the very form of historical agency, and the audience’s recognition of emptiness can coexist with attachment to it. The lecture’s world-hysterical individual is thus illuminated as a figure whose power includes the public visibility of his own vacuity.

Taken as a whole, the lecture’s internal architecture stages a sequence of mergers and displacements that culminate in its titular concept. It begins with the world-historical individual as a Hegelian solution to the problem of historical rupture, grounded in passion and universality. It then displaces moral evaluation by distinguishing “great” from “good,” relocating goodness into appearance and into world-spirit agency. It merges the world-historical individual with the problem of personality as the “material” of reason’s realization, and it displaces futurity by assigning the world-historical individual no future within Hegel. It then reintroduces futurity through Adorno and Arendt, who merge personality and policy and displace the state’s rational-form primacy by showing how authoritarian improvisation dominates administration. Finally, it displaces greatness into hysteria by showing how clowning becomes a vehicle for authoritarian sincerity and mass identification, with Trump as an emblem of comedy issuing from power.

The most distinctive feature of Cole’s method is that it refuses to separate textual micro-structure from political macro-structure. The late insertion of Caesar is treated as a philosophical event, because it reconfigures the concept’s political resonance. The removal of the phrase “whatever they do is right” is treated as ethical-political self-correction internal to Hegel’s system, because it changes what the concept can be made to legitimate. The lecture’s insistence on edition history is therefore not scholarly ornament; it is an argument that the concept of world-historical individuality is historically self-revising in Hegel’s hands, and that its revisions register an awareness—perhaps an anxious awareness—of autocracy as a possible “necessary feature” within world history’s logic.

The lecture also renders visible a deeper conceptual tension that it does not resolve, and that it arguably intends to keep productive: the relation between universality and responsibility. World-historical individuals “channel” universality without consciousness of the general idea; followers experience the leader as embodiment of their own inner spirit; policy becomes personality, and improvisation becomes governance. In this field, universality appears as the ground of historical intelligibility, while personality appears as the medium of political domination. The risk is that universality, when embodied as personality, becomes indistinguishable from the authoritarian’s claim to be history itself. Cole’s “world-hysterical individual” names the contemporary variant of this risk: the embodiment is no longer primarily sublime; it is comic, openly theatrical, aesthetically cheap, and precisely thereby experienced as authentic. The authoritarian’s clowning secures a form of absolution in advance, because any attempt to hold speech accountable can be met with the retroactive decree “it was a joke.” The joke functions as a technology of non-imputability. The political community becomes an audience whose outrage and laughter alike are folded back into the leader’s control of attention.

Cole’s closing gesture—acknowledging loose threads—thus reads as more than rhetorical modesty. It conforms to the lecture’s own diagnosis: authoritarian personality thrives in environments where policy is unstable and interpretation is forced into reactive improvisation. A fully closed system might inadvertently mirror the authoritarian’s fantasy of total capture. Instead, Cole offers a conceptual trajectory that can be tested, corrected, and extended by further philological work on Hegel’s revisions, by more precise mapping between Hegelian universality and psychoanalytic categories, and by more granular analysis of how comic performance translates into administrative chaos. The lecture’s final clarification, implicit in its method and explicit in its ethical caveats, is that diagnosing the world-hysterical individual requires neither reductive historical analogies nor moral panic; it requires a disciplined attention to how concepts mutate across textual versions and historical epochs, and how the return of “greatness” in comic form can intensify rather than diminish the political danger that Hegel’s late revisions, in their very tightening, seem uneasily to anticipate.