Hegel’s philosophy is the monument of a suspended revolutionary moment before class closure

Evidence

Thus Beethoven’s reconciliation between the subjective and the objective faithfully registers the enlarged horizons of the revolutionary transition period itself, when the positive and universalistic thinking of the middle class during its struggle for power has not yet given way to the esprit de sérieux of money, business, and Realpolitik; when the abstract idea of human freedom, whose optimism and heroics are eternalized in Fidelio, has not yet been transformed into an ideological defense of class privilege. And what is true for music holds for thought as well: philosophy, freed from the long constraint of theology, has not yet undergone the positivistic reduction to scientific empiricism, has not yet abdicated its rights to such newly invented academic disciplines as sociology or psychology, let alone begun to question its own validity in the manner of twentieth-century logical positivism. At this point in history thought is still out for the largest things, and it is to such a moment of possibility, such a moment of suspension between two worlds, that the philosophy of Hegel is the most ambitious and profoundly characteristic monument. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 100

Categorization

• XREF: This exemplar of mediation—musical reconciliation registering class-historical shifts—echoes Adorno’s reading of Beethoven in his philosophy of music fragments.
• DEFINE: Defines a historical window in which thought could aim at the largest things, prior to positivist reduction.