The Nation and Its Citizens : Of Identity, Property and Other Forms of Tyranny

In rounding off an account of nations and nationalism, the historian E.J. Hobsbawm refers to Hegel’s nineteenth-century dictum that the owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, flies out at dusk. This maxim summarises a broader Hegelian observation on the nature of philosophical activity. Philosophy is the ‘thought of the world’, said the Germanic sage who has earned renown from the deference Karl Marx showed him in later years, though always with the proviso that his perception of reality was decidedly mixed-up. This is not to be confused with the thinking of contingent and mortal beings, but of the world itself. And the remarkable quality of this variety of thought is that it ‘does not appear until reality has completed its formative process’.