Time, History, and Necessity in Hegel

G.W.F. Hegel was a radical and incisive thinker, whose ideas have shaped the face of political philosophy. With questions of political agency and free will as urgent as ever, this book reintroduces Hegel’s ideas of freedom and the weight that it carries in the political, economic and social contexts of the 21st century.

Examining the concept of freedom from a Hegelian Marxist perspective, Freedom, in Context argues that the essential relation between self-determination and causal necessity is a multifaceted process to be viewed through historical, temporal, logical and ontological lenses. Using examples from the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental justice, economic inequality, and democratic uprisings in Iran, the value of Hegel’s philosophy is emphasised in contexts beyond the colonial, Eurocentric tendencies of his worldview. Emphasising the central role of temporality and history in the conception of free will gives this new reading of Hegel real practical import for the pressing political issues of our time.