Your Weekly Hegel Update

Popper more than thumped the table.  He used propaganda techniques to caricature Hegel.  He twisted his ideals into their opposite, attributing to him false motives, denounced him as pathological.  On all major isues dividing Popper and Hegel, I stand with Popper.  Hegel’s theodicy, his premature reconciliation of liberty and power, favored the status quo and represented a long and dangerous German intellectual tradition.  All the same, he was neither totalitarian nor nationalist and deserved a serious critique, not a caricature.  Popper’s attack remains a showpiece of intolerance and narrow-mindedness.  Writing in the midst of a war that would decide civilization’s fate, Popper understandably “did not mince words,” but this should have reinforced, not waived, critical rationalist maxims.  Resorting to manipulation to delegitimize Hegel, Popper betrayed critical rationalism. ~Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902-1945

This biographer is extremely sympathetic to Popper, but he does not make excuses for him when Popper goes off the deep end in his arguments against those whom he regarded as the fonts of totalitarianism.  One need not embrace Hegel to recognise that he is not what Popper made him out to be.