UC Berkeley

The Dialectical Curmudgeon: Afterlives of Hegel in German Literature and Political Thought asks how Germany’s most ambivalent intellectual tradition can serve as a resource for antiracist and feminist thought and action today. My dissertation begins with the observation of a peculiar consonance between, on one hand, the rise of a right-wing populism in the West that was codified with the election of Donald Trump and continues to threaten women, people of color and queer communities today, and on the other hand, the undercurrent of cultural conservatism running through the tradition of German literature and philosophy that can trace its intellectual lineage back to G.W.F. Hegel, who rejected modern values of democracy and women’s rights as short-sighted and insisted that our attempts to create a more equal society are doomed to failure unless we can see the big picture.

The paradox of Hegel’s influence on our world is that a philosopher with a firmly established reputation for conservatism should have inspired modern history’s most consequential revolutionary thinkers, including but by no means limited to Karl Marx. My dissertation explains why philosophers and literary figures in the tradition of Hegel and Marx are often reflexively skeptical of the moral claims and political action of marginalized groups, dismissing the political centering of race and gender oppression as a distraction, if not counterproductive, and sometimes even adopting framings that align with racist and sexist cultural values.

I also show how this tradition has served and can still serve as a resource for struggles for social justice today. For example, chapter 3 examines the political disagreements between the theorists of the Frankfurt School, contrasting Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s dismissal of anticolonial and progressive movements both in the West and in the global South with Herbert Marcuse’s mentorship of US activists in the Black radical tradition. Examining a broad swath of German literary, cultural, and political-critical work from the early 19th century to the present, I show how this German tradition of progressive thought has the potential to both offer key tools for seeing the big picture and trivialize the concerns of those on its margins. Understanding why a world-famous progressive tradition returns to its conservative roots is indispensable to safeguarding egalitarian values from the intolerance that pervades even those spaces once thought safe.