An image of ‘Napoleon Crossing the Alps’ by Jacques-Louis David, also known as romantic propaganda. Photo by Getty Images

Robert Zaretsky April 30, 2025

A specter is haunting America, but it is not — with apologies to Karl Marx — the specter of communism. It is, instead, the specter of Hegelianism, the philosophy of the very philosopher Marx had turned on his head to create his own ideological specter.

On closer inspection, however, the Hegelian specter is not what it seems.

There has lately been a rash of articles, most recently by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, suggesting that Donald Trump has the right stuff for a world-historical individual. Mind you, the moniker “world-historical” has nothing to do with Time’s “Person of the Year.” Instead, it has everything to do with a person who dominates not just a year, but an era. Or, as G.W.F. Hegel first described it in his Phenomenology of Spirit, an individual imbued with a “world-soul.”

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The youngish Hegel, who began his career as a philosophical idealist, used this phrase while drafting his famous (and famously obscure) masterpiece in the university town of Jena. As he was tidying up his manuscript in 1806, Hegel heard a ruckus on the cobblestone street below and glimpsed such an individual from the window of his apartment. In a letter to a friend, Hegel could not contain his excitement: “I saw the emperor — this world-soul — riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it … this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire.”

The emperor, of course, was Napoleon Bonaparte, the heir to a penniless aristocratic family in Corsica. In the years of revolutionary tumult sparked by the taking of the Bastille, this brilliant and ambitious man had clambered from artillery officer to general to First Consul then Emperor of France. Inspired by the principles of the Enlightenment, especially its emphasis on reason and progress, Napoleon revolutionized France, and the world, by unenlightened means: He was an autocrat and nepotist who slowly surrounded himself with mediocrities.

But this darker Napoleon was not yet evident in 1806. The “world-soul” that gob-smacked Hegel was still an electrifying figure as he led his troops from Jena to the battlefield and its clash with the Prussian army. He no doubt still resembled the mesmerizing individual who, astride a stallion rearing towards a stormy sky, towers over us in Jacques-Louis David’s colossal canvas “Napoleon Crossing the Alps.” For those who have already googled the painting, you know that Napoleon made the crossing on a beautiful day, his horse led by a veteran guide riding a mule.

But this hardly mattered. Like White House portraitists today, David was not after photographic realism but propagandistic romanticism. (This is why today’s portraitists would never portray a president astride a golf cart or struggling to climb into a garbage truck.) Hegel’s notion of the world-historical individual was, in fact, no less romantic than David’s. But it was a romantic vision based on what he understood to be the force of reason that drives forward the Geist, or Spirit, to a bigger and brighter future for all humankind.

The problem with Vernunft

This is where it gets knotty — knottier, perhaps, than some commentators now throwing around the phrase realize. For Hegel, world-historical individuals are those who help nudge the Geist towards the realization of its own self-consciousness. This is not Goopist verbiage for the pursuit of pleasure, but the Idealist idiom for the pursuit of freedom.

Hegel’s understanding of freedom is so very important. It is not the sort of freedom that allows the strong to do what they can and forces the weak to suffer what they must. Instead, it is the sort of freedom that an earlier Idealist, Immanuel Kant, meant by his Categorical Imperative. This is the daunting name for a simple principle — freely choose to act in a way you would want that action to be a universal law for all human beings over all of time. Of course, there are logical cracks in this principle. But they do not begin to compare to the real cracks made in our world by those who choose to scorn this principle.

As Lawrence Evans observes, Hegel coined the nifty phrase “cunning of reason” to describe those world-historical individuals who, though pursuing their own selfish ends, are also committed to the cause itself. This is why Hegelian reason, or Vernunft, can lead us to the oddest places with the oddest and not most optimal results.

For instance, take a world-historical individual who is famously and incurably self-interested. But he too is fully committed to his movement, even or especially one devoted to the destruction, not construction of laws, making for a world where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. But keep in mind that Vernunft is very cunning and might use such a world-combustible individual to unknowingly seed not the just means of his fall, but to also seed the shoots of progress. Especially if that individual is American. As Hegel prophesized two centuries ago, America was the country of the future, one whose “world-historical importance has yet to be revealed in the ages which lie ahead.”

Herzl not Hegel

But what if Vernunft is too cunning by half? That it can drive constructive, not destructive, world-historical figures to unintended and unfortunate outcomes? Perhaps such an example is the world-historical founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl.

As a student in Vienna — where he studied Hegel — and as a journalist reporting on the Dreyfus Affair, Herzl had the reality of antisemitism pounded into his bones. These experiences led him to turn to Zionism as the cure. Yet as Derek Penslar, a renowned historian of Zionism, observes, Herzl was not at first committed to founding a Jewish state in Palestine. After all, Argentina had also been a candidate as the chosen land.

But, more importantly, Herzl did not at first embrace the goal of a Jewish state. Penslar notes that, despite Herzl’s pamphlet Der Judenstaat, or The Jewish State — which emerged from a “mess of stuff he wrote, some of it mad, much of it quite lucid” — he never went to the mat for statehood. Instead, a febrile Herzl “changed his mind from one week or month to the next. It could be a state, it could be an autonomous province in the Ottoman Empire, it could be a crown colony, or a protectorate under European control. He was just as willing to make a deal with the Ottoman Empire, as he was to cut a deal with a European empire for Palestine.” It was only in 1942, as the gears of the Final Solution were quickening, that Zionist movements called for statehood.

Slightly more than 75 years after Israel was born, it is hard not to wonder if Herzl would recognize this state as the ideal he worked for. He might well be surprised that this state allows religious parties to play a dominant role. As he wrote in The Jewish State, his Israel would “keep our priests within the confines of their temples in the same way as we shall keep our professional army within the confines of their barracks [and] they must not interfere in the administration of the State which confers distinction upon them, else they will conjure up difficulties without and within.”

He might also be surprised how reason’s wiliness could lead Israel into a Wile E. Coyote-like predicament, one where it runs the danger of out-smarting itself. This, Herzl might conclude, is the predicament in which Israelis and Palestinians now find themselves. But as Hegel would tell us, Geist will always have the last word.

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