Introducing Hegel [Paperback]

Lloyd Spencer (Author), Andrzej Krauze (Contributor)

Book Description

Series: Introducing | Publication Date: May 7, 1992

Increasing numbers of people are looking to the philosophers of the past to shed light on the contemporary condition. Among the most difficult to interpret, still Hegel's theories echo through the writings of Marx, Lacan, Sartre, and others. INTRODUCING HEGEL provides new perspectives on contemporary postmodern debates.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Lloyd Spencer is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media at Trinity and All Saints, a college of the University of Leeds. He has written Introducing the Enlightenment and a biographical study of Walter Benjamin.

Andrzej Krauze is a cartoonist and illustrator whose work is published regularly in the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the Sunday Telegraph.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Totem Books; First Edition edition (May 7, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1874166447
• ISBN-13: 978-1874166443
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #961,230 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a good launching off point to learning about Hegel's philosophy, September 22, 2007

By 

Patrick Regan "Patrick Regan" (Northampton, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Introducing Hegel (Paperback)

Introducing Hegel, like all the introducing series provides only an introduction to the philosophy of Hegel. Still, I found it interesting. I now know that Hegel's philosophy is tied to history. History, and humanities progress through it, represents our becoming aware that we are self conscious. History is a process of taking a whole broken into fragments and piecing it together into a whole. Hegel was very interested in Napoleon and the French Revolution. He believed the struggle by the oppressed was a struggle for recognition. As the oppressed are the ones who have made the world, they are the ones who benefit most from the experience of history. This aspect of his work is represented in the Master and the Slave where one "person" gets control of another "person" and forces him to do work. But in forcing him to do so the Master becomes dependent on the slave and meanwhile the slave learns the self respect that comes from working. So in the end the Master becomes even more dependent on the slave and the slave becomes free. I think the purpose of the introducing series is to whet your appetite for more and this book certainly has done so. Hegel is a fascinating person and his ideas are well worth exploring.

4.0 out of 5 stars Great for today's Youth, March 3, 2010

By 

Sid Salcido "Scholar Reviewer" (CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Introducing Hegel (Paperback)

Although today I am an avid reader, when I was a kid, it was comic books that were my main reading source. I didn't like reading books much (thought they were tedious) but I could read a comic book on just about any subject (although I mostly read Spiderman or another Marvel character).

"Introducing Hegel" by Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze was a book I found in a used bookstore (the first edition) and it was one that was difficult for me to put down. Although it wasn't, obviously, exhaustive, or wasn't necessarily the easiest book to follow, it was interesting enough to teach me things that I never knew about George W.F. Hegel, and did a great thing by tying in his thought with what was going on around him in his life and in the places he lived.

It is my contention that this kind of book can be used by teachers who teach philosophy (or Youth Pastors who want to get their youth to know something about the great philosophers or philosophies around them) to use these to introduce each thinker. For they are fun to read (despite what some reviewers said) and give a good skeleton of the thought of that thinker. It may not be for a college level student, but I think will get people to know more about why they think the way they do than they did previous to reading it, especially young people. This only helps them to shape their thoughts better so they can be more well-rounded thinkers.

I am getting other books in this series just to learn more about the great thoughts and thinkers of the ages!

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars perfectly dreadful!, June 6, 2009

By 

K. Draper (oklahoma) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Introducing Hegel (Paperback)

I picked this up "used" thinking that this illustrated "Intro" might be a fun or useful review of Hegel. It was neither. While the author does hit on most of the main points of Hegel's thinking and his millieu, he does so in such a haphazard, inconsistent way that it ends up being more confusing than enlightening. I was quite aggrevated by way that the author would change tense of the verbs from past to present and back, often on the same page. If a writer cannot maintain consistent use of verb tense, it's hard to take his work seriously. And then I found out that he misused the word "schizophrenia". Twice. I mean, many people misuse that word to mean something like "split personality" or even "thinking two different ways about something", but this is totally inexcusable in a scholarly work, or at least, a work about a scholar.

Page 28 has Hegel remarking: "I sought [past tense] to make amends in the only way I could. My philosophy includes [present tense] a 'schizophrenic' principle of self-division, negation, contradiction...."

Excuse me, Mr. Spencer, only a PERSON can be "schizophrenic", which, btw, means mentally ill (psychotic) with delusions, hallucinations and disordered thinking.

And the artwork is equally distracting because of it's poor quality. Each page is liberally illustrated with pen and ink drawings by Andrezej Krauze, but the drawings are so coarse and poorly done that they further hinder the text, IMHO. His renderings of contemporary philosophers, such as Marcuse and Adorno toward the end of the book are actually quite nice, though, so why does he not take the time to make all the artwork good qualtity?

I'm not even going to go into my opinions about some specifics of the philosophy, except to say that this book does not have special contributions or insights, and, often as not, can be misleading. For a good Introduction to Hegel, I recommend reading the "Hegel" entry of the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the current Wikkipedia article is also good. There, I saved you ten bucks. Good philosophy, it'd say.