Barry Stocker commenting on my post on blogging, defends Hegel by reference to TH Green. Wikipaedia gives a good summary of the modern debate on Hegel, from which I learn than even neo-conservative thought owes some debt to Hegel.
I confess that as a student I gave up trying to read sentences like "The goal is that it come to be known that [Spirit] presses forward only to know itself as it is in and for itself, that it brings itself in its truth to appearance before itself..." Perhaps it loses something in translation. I dread to think what the original German sounds like. Jung said Hegel's language was "reminiscent of the megalomaniac language of schizophrenics".
However, sentences such as "In the state alone has man rational existence" were enough to persuade me that Hegel was no Liberal. I think it's reasonable to describe him as a state-appointed philosopher, given that Frederick William III appointed him rector of Berlin University in 1830 and decorated him for his service to the Prussian regime.
