Abstract

This chapter investigates Hegel’s impact on nineteenth-century German thought by reference to the question of freedom that so preoccupied nineteenth-century Russian thinkers. The investigation is articulated into three parts, each dealing with a different kind of freedom and a Russian thinker who addressed that kind of freedom extensively by engaging with Hegel’s thought. Thus it deals with Mikhail Bakunin’s attempts to define freedom in the political sphere, Alexander Herzen’s concern with human freedom in relation to nature and Vladimir Soloviev’s broad notion of human emancipation as a process of deification.