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His name is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

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Hegel influenced writers of widely varying positions, including both his admirers (Bauer, Marx, Bradley, Sartre, Küng), and his detractors (Schelling, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Russell). Hegel discussed a relation between nature and freedom, immanence and transcendence, and the unification of these dualities without eliminating either pole or reducing it to the other. His influential conceptions are of speculative logic or "dialectic," "absolute idealism," "Spirit," the "Master/Slave" dialectic, "ethical life," and the importance of history.



Totalitarianism


(Søren) Kierkegaard, one of Hegel's earliest critics, criticized Hegel's "absolute knowledge" unity, not only because it was arrogant for a mere human to claim such a unity, but also because such a system negates the importance of the individual in favour of the whole unity. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, one of Kierkegaard's main attacks of Hegel, he writes, under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus:

So-called systems have often been characterized and challenged in the assertion that they abrogate the distinction between good and evil, and destroy freedom. Perhaps one would express oneself quite as definitely, if one said that every such system fantastically dissipates the concept existence. ... Being an individual man is a thing that has been abolished, and every speculative philosopher confuses himself with humanity at large; whereby he becomes something infinitely great, and at the same time nothing at all.
– Johannes Climacus, alias Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript I

Popper suggested that Hegel's system forms a thinly veiled justification for the rule of Frederick William III, and that Hegel's idea of the ultimate goal of history is to reach a state approximating that of 1830s Prussia. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, he argued that Hegel's philosophy eventually inspired both Marxism and fascism.

Indeed, Hegel points out that all personal relations can thus be reduced to the fundamental relation of master and slave, of domination and submission. Each must strive to assert and prove himself, and he who has not the nature, the courage, and the general capacity for preserving his independence, must be reduced to servitude. This charming theory of personal relations has, of course, its counterpart in Hegel's theory of international relations. Nations must assert themselves on the Stage of History; it is their duty to attempt the domination of the World.
– Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

In agreement with Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, Popper accused Hegel's philosophy of being essentially vacuous, labelling it "bombastic and mystifying cant".

Santayana also interpreted Hegel as defending whoever held power, the position that might makes right.

The worship of power is an old religion, and Hegel, to go no farther back, is full of it; but like traditional religion his system qualified its veneration for success by attributing success, in the future at least, to what could really inspire veneration; and such a master in equivocation could have no difficulty in convincing himself that the good must conquer in the end if whatever conquers in the end is the good.

– George Santayana, Winds of Doctrine, I

To read more about Hegel you can visit the links below:


http://hegel.marxists.org/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel

http://www.friesian.com/arthur.htm

http://www3.baylor.edu/~Scott_Moore/hegel.html

http://www.gwfhegel.org/

http://marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/

http://www.hegel.org/links.html

http://www.gwfhegel.org/books.html

http://www.cola.wright.edu/Dept/PHL/Class/gwfh/reply2.html

http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/logic.html

http://www.jgora.dialog.net.pl/OnTheAbsoluteRationalWill/

http://www.wpunj.edu/cohss/philosophy/courses/hegel/

http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/h/hegelsoc.htm

http://www.hegel.net/

http://www.hsgb.group.shef.ac.uk/index.html

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/sefd0/bib/hegel.htm

http://wiki.hegel.net/

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/index.htm

http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/hege.htm

http://www.cola.wright.edu/Dept/PHL/Class/gwfh/bib.html