Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History

Tibebu, Teshale

Hegel and the Third World

The Making of Eurocentrism in World History

Teshale Tibebu

Publication Year: 2010

Hegel, more than any other modern Western philosopher, produced the most systematic case for the superiority of Western white Protestant bourgeois modernity. He established a racially structured ladder of gradation of the peoples of the world, putting Germanic people at the top of the racial pyramid, people of Asia in the middle, and Africans and indigenous peoples of the Americas and Pacific Islands at the bottom. In Hegel and the Third World, Tibebu guides the reader through Hegel’s presentation on universalism and argues that such a classification flows in part from Hegel’s philosophy of the development of human consciousness. Hegel classified Africans as people arrested at the lowest and most immediate stage of consciousness, that of the senses; Asians as people with divided consciousness, that of the understanding; and Europeans as people of reason. Tibebu demonstrates that Hegel’s views were not his alone but reflected the fundamental beliefs of other major figures of Western thought at the time.

Hegel and the Third World

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Hegel Controversy

Part One: Dialectic of Nature and Spirit

2. Nature and Spirit

3. The Struggle for Recognition: The Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage

4. Race, Gender, and Class

Part Two: Philosophy of History

5. Philosophy of History

6. Africa: The Domain of the Senses

7. The Orient: The Ferment of the Understanding

8. The Greco-Germanic World: The Home of Self-Conscious Reason

Conclusion

References

Index

Back Cover

Research Areas

Recommend

Subject Headings

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