Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 1d

Thanks for sharing - and for your kind words, Caleb!

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 1d

Thank you for your kind words! I was curious about your claim that Hegel's is "suited to a Christian Nationalism" - could you say more about it?

1 1

Reposted by Daniel James

Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 1d

Learn the history of criminalizing antifascists, even by ostensibly liberal states

Working Class History @workingclasshistory.com · 1d

#OtD 9 Oct 1945 the UK Labour govt defended its jailing of 226 Spanish Civil War and anti-Nazi resistance fighters, describing them as "members of an enemy paramilitary organisation". Some killed themselves, others were deported to Spain for execution stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/1094...

2 5

Reposted by Daniel James

Paula Villa Braslavsky @paulita.bsky.social · 1d

why don't I see any critical coverage of this in Germany?

Mark Bray @mark-bray.bsky.social · 3d

Rutgers professor moving to Europe after threats over antifa accusations

Mark Bray says threats intensified after a Turning Point USA petition accused him of promoting political violence

www.theguardian.com

3 9 22

Reposted by Daniel James

RutgersAAUP-AFT @ruaaup-aft.bsky.social · 1d

This week, our colleague Dr. Mark Bray came under attack by Turning Point USA’s Rutgers chapter for his public scholarship. Rutgers AAUP-AFT and the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union condemn this campaign and stand in solidarity with our colleagues. Read our full statement here: https://loom.ly/BDXasRY

7 240 590

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 1d

Thank you!

Reposted by Daniel James

Jannis J Grimm @jannisgrimm.bsky.social · 2d

Gestern gings im Deutschlandradio bei Campus & Karriere um unsere @interactfu.bsky.social
@freieuniversitaet.bsky.social Studie zu Selbstzensur & Einschränkungserfahrungen von Nahost-Forschenden

"Die deutsche Wissenschaft seit dem Gazakrieg"

Nachhören 🎧: share.deutschlandradio.de/dlf-audiothe...

Zunehmend unfreie Debatten: Die deutsche Wissenschaft seit dem Gazakrieg

share.deutschlandradio.de

3 5

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

A slightly longer answer is here: www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20...

Racism and Colonialism in Hegel’s Philosophy: « Philosophy# « Cambridge Core Blog

A Conversation with the Guest Editors of the Hegel Bulletin Themed Issue, Daniel James and Franz Knappik

www.cambridge.org

1 1 3

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

We address this question in greater detail in the book but here‘s one reason why we should: bsky.app/profile/schl...

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

10/ Why does this still matter? Hegel’s ideas of freedom and progress still reverberate today, both in theory and in practice. Yet they’re entangled with a logic of tutelage – the belief that some peoples must be “guided” toward freedom – risking a repeat of his errors alongside his insights.

A 1921 Literary Digest map titled “Map of Palestine (British Mandate)”, depicting the territory administered by Britain under the League of Nations Mandate. The map outlines the borders of Palestine, neighbouring Syria and Egypt, and major cities such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Gaza, and Amman. It marks railroads, principal highways, and regions “below sea level”, with shaded zones indicating definite and tentative mandate boundaries. The image visualises the political geography of a League of Nations Class A mandate: territory carved from the Ottoman Empire and placed under European administration “until such time as [its] peoples are able to stand alone”.

Context: In Hegel and Colonialism, we argue that this form of hierarchical sovereignty echoed Hegel’s philosophy of history, which framed colonial domination as an “educational stage” in the world-spirit’s progress toward freedom. The Mandate system’s logic of tutelage – administering “not-yet-mature” nations until “ready” for self-government – reproduced Hegel’s view that freedom develops unevenly across climates and peoples. British Idealists like Edward Caird and Jan Smuts adapted these ideas, recasting empire as a moral duty to guide “backward” peoples toward civilisation. Article 22 of the League’s Covenant codified this rationale by formalising graded classes of sovereignty, institutionalising a hierarchy of political maturity.

1 4

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

Dear Kai, That sounds like a lovely idea! Perhaps Franz could join us too if we make the event hybrid (he’s in Bergen)?

Reposted by Daniel James

Cominsitu @cominsitu.bsky.social · 2d

reposting this with new URL
www.break-down.org/socialising-...

Socialising Nature

How we can live together without exploiting each other? This is the work of socialising nature.

www.break-down.org

2 5 18

Reposted by Daniel James

Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 2d

I got interviewed for the Deadbeat Philosophy podcast, talking about Audre Lorde's thought and her impact, including why philosophers should care.

Lorde's work makes a demand of her readers, and I think more philosophers and theorists need to answer to it

Audre Lorde as Philosopher (w/ Caleb Ward)

open.spotify.com

1 8 36

Reposted by Daniel James

Daniel Sharp @deeesharp.bsky.social · 2d

I'm sure Du Bois scholars know about this already but was not aware of this online resource of Bu Bois' papers at Umass Amhearst. Absolutely amazing stuff in here. credo.library.umass.edu/view/collect...

W. E. B. Du Bois Papers Overview

credo.library.umass.edu

2 14 27

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

11/ Critically engaging with Hegel means tracing these entanglements: seeing, e.g., how his idea of freedom became bound up with the justification of colonial rule, but also how anti-colonial and anti-racist thinkers like C. L. R. James and Angela Davis turned his ideas toward true emancipation.

Racism and Colonialism in Hegel’s Philosophy: « Philosophy# « Cambridge Core Blog

A Conversation with the Guest Editors of the Hegel Bulletin Themed Issue, Daniel James and Franz Knappik

www.cambridge.org

3 17

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

10/ Why does this still matter? Hegel’s ideas of freedom and progress still reverberate today, both in theory and in practice. Yet they’re entangled with a logic of tutelage – the belief that some peoples must be “guided” toward freedom – risking a repeat of his errors alongside his insights.

1 7 16

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

9/ Hegel’s legacy splits in two. One line turns pro-imperial: British Idealists like Edward Caird cast empire as reason’s outward growth, a moral duty to “raise barbarous races” toward civilisation. The other anti-colonial: C. L. R. James reclaims Hegel’s dialectic through the Haitian Revolution.

Half-length 1871 photograph of philosopher Edward Caird by Thomas Annan; Victorian studio portrait, seated, dark jacket, direct gaze. One of the British Idealists who moralised empire.

Black-and-white 1938 portrait of C. L. R. James, head and shoulders in suit and tie, looking left—author of The Black Jacobins, reading Hegel through Haiti.

1 4 14

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

8/ What holds these judgements re: different colonial regimes together? Hegel links geography and climate to “spiritual capacity”. These determine a people’s place in a racial hierarchy of development, from the merely capable (Africans), to the limited (Asians), to the fully rational (Europeans).

Engraving of five human skulls labelled “Tungusae”, “Caribaei”, “Feminae Georgianae”, “O-taheitae”, “Aethiopissae” from Blumenbach’s De generis humani varietate nativa (1795), a classic racial hierarchy plate from Hegel’s period.

1 1 11

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

7/ India: Hegel praises early Company rule for its “toleration” of local customs yet sees British domination as a civilising mission. India’s agrarian order, he argues, shows property and law, so he grants rights – but not sovereignty. Its “static” spirit, he claims, still calls for British rule.

Eighteenth-century map of India by James Rennell, East India Company geographer, showing provinces, rivers, and coasts. A crisp emblem of Hegel’s praise for Company “toleration” coupled with British rule claimed to serve “freedom.”

1 1 11

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

6/ Hegel echoes pro-slavery arguments refuted decades earlier by abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. In the Philosophy of Right, he repeats the same “educational” and “benevolent” defences Clarkson dismantled in his Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species – redeployed to defend gradualism.

Portrait of Thomas Clarkson, British abolitionist, painted c. 1790 by Carl Frederik von Breda. Clarkson stands beside writing desk with quill and papers, symbolising his campaign against the transatlantic slave trade.

1 2 11

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

5/ Slavery: Hegel repurposes the master–slave dialectic to argue against immediate abolition. Though enslavement is “in itself” wrong, his racial theory permits only gradualism: Africans, he claims, lack the discipline to transcend servitude, making enslavement a “necessary education” in freedom.

1 3 13

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

4/ Jesuit “reductions” in Paraguay: for Hegel, a paternalist best-case for Indigenous peoples. He saw them as too childlike for freedom, fit only for rule by others. We trace how this vision of tutelage and “education” through labour shapes his idea of self-government.

1732 engraved map of the Jesuit province of Paraguay, showing missions and missionary routes along the Paraná, Paraguay and Uruguay rivers, with Latin title cartouches and compass roses — a visual of Hegel’s “paternal” mission regime.

1 4 11

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

3/ The Americas: Hegel sees conquest and settlement as world-historical “progress”. He treats the destruction of Indigenous societies as the “inevitable” effect of Spirit confronting a “new world” still outside history, a view shaped by climate theory and colonial writers like de Pauw.

1 1 12

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

2/ Our central claim: Across his system, Hegel builds an account of colonialism as racial domination, linking world history, freedom, property, and statehood. It’s grounded in the four-stages theory and what he calls the absolute right of the Idea, vindicating colonialism in the name of liberty.

A colour lithograph published as a supplement to The Graphic for the Indian and Colonial Exhibition (24 July 1886), showing the British Empire in pink and centred on Greenwich. Britannia sits enthroned above the globe, framed by banners reading Freedom, Fraternity, and Federation. Around the border, allegorical figures represent the empire’s peoples: Indigenous hunters and labourers at the margins, traders, soldiers, and settlers nearer the imperial core. Insets list trade, population, and area statistics, fusing allegory with empirical data. Animals and crops – elephants and tigers for India, kangaroos and sheep for Australia – mark each region by its resources and stage of economic life (Driver 2010).

Crane’s composition depicts a hierarchy of civilisation. Britannia embodies imperial authority, while her subjects appear as differentiated types of labour and culture. The blend of commercial data and moral imagery turns empire into a story of progress, where freedom, property, and self-government are equated with discipline and productivity. The bent “Asian porter” and Atlas labelled Human Labour expose the burden that sustains this freedom (Driver 2010).

The map’s spatial order mirrors the stadial logic of Scottish four-stages anthropology that also shapes Hegel’s philosophy of world history. Hunters, pastoralists, agriculturalists, and commercial peoples occupy successive ranks in a teleology culminating in Europe as bearer of universal freedom. The banners of Freedom and Federation vindicate colonial domination, echoing Hegel’s historical theodicy in which the “absolute right of the Idea” is realised through European expansion (Driver 2010).

Reference

Felix Driver, “In Search of the Imperial Map: Walter Crane and the Image of Empire,” History Workshop Journal 69 (2010): 146–157.

A black-and-white engraving depicting Hegel lecturing at the University of Berlin. He stands before rows of students, gesturing with one hand while holding a manuscript in the other. His face is animated, suggesting the intensity of oral exposition. The students below him sit closely packed, taking notes or gazing upward toward the lectern, where the philosopher appears framed by a dark wooden pulpit and a high window that lets in a diffuse light.

The scene evokes, amongst others, Hegel’s lectures on the Philosophy of History in the winter term of 1822–1823, when he proclaimed that Europe represents the culmination of world history. In these lectures, Hegel argued that the principle of freedom had been fully realised in modern Christian Europe and that what lay outside it was “intrinsically overcome.” “For Europeans,” he declared, “the world is round” – the globe itself already encompassed by Europe’s spiritual and political dominion.

1 10 21

Daniel James @schlawinerkreis.bsky.social · 2d

1/ I'm excited to share that Franz Knappik’s and my Cambridge Element on Hegel and Colonialism is finally out – open access below! We trace how Hegel defends European colonial rule, including transatlantic slavery, and how that defence runs through his entire philosophical system.

Thread below ⬇️

Hegel and Colonialism

Cambridge Core - Classical Philosophy - Hegel and Colonialism

www.cambridge.org

6 45 90

Reposted by Daniel James

Peter Ullrich @textrecycling.bsky.social · 3d

Mit einem kostenlosen Login bei @blnreview.bsky.social ist der Text zum autoritären Anti-Antisemitismus nun frei zugänglich!

Peter Ullrich @textrecycling.bsky.social · 4d

Erstmal systematischer zum Begriff des "autoritären Anti-Antisemitismus" hier:
Ullrich, Peter. „Bitte keine Polizei – der «Fall ASH» und der autoritäre Anti-Antisemitismus (bearbeiteter Vorabdruck aus Hawel et. al 2025)“. Berlin Review, 24. September 2025.
blnreview.de/ausgaben/202...

1 4