Hello
I am reading Hegel at the moment and was wondering if anybody could recommend any books which would help me. I have already read Stace's book on Hegel, which was very good, but which makes me want to read it all for myself, and have read at least 4 or 5 of these books which claim to offer an introduction to him, all of which were complete rubbish. That includes the 'Hegel for Beginners' and so on. I think it is probable that the intellectual types who wrote these books didn't even understand the guy in the first place. Well, what do you expect? They are intellectuals!
Also, I was reading Strauss, but stopped, as I thought that because he was influenced heavily by Hegel, I ought to study Hegelian thought first, to help me understand him. But do people have any recommendations as to what I should read about Strauss?
Also, (fucking hell!), has anybody read Wortofsky's work on Ludwig Feuerbach? I have been studying Feuerbach's thought and have so far read, the Essence of Christianity, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach (by Kamenka). So do you think Wortofsky's book is worth reading?
Also, anybody with an interest in Blanqui, please get in touch with me as I want to write a pamphlet on him.
Cheers
Can comment on articles and discussions
Pretty much anything by Stephen Houlgate and Jean Hyppolite are very useful and intelligent. Houlgate has one of the few truly interesting discussions of Hegel and Nietzsche I know of.
There is a fair amount of stuff from CLR James (his Notes on Dialectics, if one can find a copy), Raya Dunayevskaya wrote a lot, though a lot of it is IMO quite a mess and very dicey stuff. Very hard to sort through and not for someone not familiar with Hegel already. Cyril Smith has many good articles on the Hegel-Marx relation on the web and his Karl Marx and the Future of the Human has some good stuff too, but it is broadly construed.
Lukacs has a book on Hegel, not sure how good it is.
H. S. Harris is the doyen of British Hegelianism, but so far I do not find him too interesting. He has a decent short overview of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I would also largely avoid Findlay. Both might be useful after a first go-round.
Ken Westphal's Hegel's Epistemological Realism is supposed to be quite good. I liked a shorter book of his.
Other than that, one can always read Hegel's detractors, the one's who have read him at least (like Marx, he is much-maligned and little read.) Deleuze, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, etc are all in a shadow fight with dialectic, both Hegel's and Marx's.
cheers,
chris