V. F. Asmus and criticism of the fascist interpretation of Hegel
The article is devoted to the Soviet philosopher Valentin F. Asmus (1894–1975) and his criticism of the fascist (including Nazi) appropriation of Hegel's thought. The question of the interpretation of the Hegelian heritage was one of the main ones in the Marxist-Leninist theory in the Stalin era. Unlike many other Soviet authors of this era, Asmus did not acknowledge that German fascism was associated with any great intellectual tradition. In particular, Asmus strongly criticized attempts to interpret Hegel as a pro-fascist thinker. Many Soviet philosophers tried to defend only the method – dialectics, but Asmus defends both Hegel's social and political views as humanistic and liberal. The first part of the article describes the context of the Soviet "official philosophy" in which Asmus worked. The second part contains an analysis of the criticism of the fascist interpretation of Hegel in Asmus' essay "The Fascist Falsification of Classical German Philosophy" (1942).
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The research has been performed within the project supported by the Russian Science Foundation No 19-18-00100 “Domestic Philosophy of the 19th-21st Centuries in the Intellectual Space of the West: Criticism, Reception, Dialogue” (https://rscf.ru/project/19-18-00100/).