What made Hegel so irresistibly appealing? First of all, his totality as a thinker. His theories didn’t just draw together science, art, history, and philosophy into a consistent (if not always coherent) whole. His vision of totality also embraced, and subsumed, the individual. As with Plato, Hegel taught that the key to human happiness was belonging to an entity larger than ourselves. For Hegel and the Hegelian, the desire of each person to lead his or her life as he or she pleases—the Lockean individual of the Enlightenment—was as morally absurd as it was physically impossible. We are all
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