Works on Hegel are legion. His philosophy is notoriously difficult, but it isn’t insurmountable, but there are some books and web resources I would recommend.
In choosing the following, I am not saying these are the definitive secondary resources, but that they have been helpful to me.
First, is Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Marcuse was, famously, a member of the Frankfurt School of critical social theorists. A former student of Martin Heidegger - who supervised his doctoral thesis on Hegel - this was Marcuse’s first book in English.
It is written in a helpfully plain English style (useful when it comes to Hegel!) and covers Hegel’s intellectual development from his early to late systems. Each chapter is devoted to a concise summary of different aspects of his thought, for example, the Phenomenology, the Science of Logic, Philosophy of Right and beyond.
Marcuse was one of the first philosophers to comment on The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, written by Karl Marx in Paris in 1844 and published in Germany in 1932. The documents contained an early critique by Marx of Hegel, and in Reason and Revolution, Marcuse provides a helpful summary of the relationship between the two mighty thinkers.
Written in 1940, the work debunks the idea that Hegel provides the inspiration for Nazism and fascism. Subsequent editions contain useful supplementary chapters shedding light on Marcuse’s own relation to Hegelian philosophy.
Second, is a series of lectures by Marcuse’s former mentor, Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Delivered in 1930-31, these lectures have the advantage of being both a major statement by Heidegger on Hegel, and also being surprisingly readable.
I don’t mind admitting that I have struggled with Being and Time (1927), a foreboding work which laid the ground for later twentieth-century existentialism. Yet these lecture notes have been very useful in also shedding some light on Heidegger’s thought at a crucial time after his magnum opus was published.
The only problem with this book is that it is so slight. The lectures stop at the “Self-consciousness” part of the Phenomenology. Perhaps there are further lectures that have yet to be published, but this work is worth reading to see one mighty intellect talk about another.
Third on my list is Shlomo Avineri’s Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (1972). This work, above all, is very useful in quashing many of the continual myths about Hegel’s political philosophy.
Avineri presents Hegel as an essentially modern, liberal and pluralistic political philosopher. Hegel was not a totalitarian (a political concept that Hegel predates by a century), he was not a German nationalist, nor was Hegel blind to social problems such as poverty.
Indeed, the issue of poverty is shown to be a deep concern of Hegel, who, although he accepted Adam Smith’s account of the “hidden hand” of the market, also saw the need for the state to intervene in the economy.
Economic life exists in a public context, but a society cannot countenance the exclusion of some members, who would not be able to become full citizens due to poverty. As Avineri stresses, underpinning Hegel’s political philosophy is his concept of “Sittlichkeit” (“ethical life”), the web of interrelations between the individual, civil society and the state through which freedom - as reason - unfolds itself.
Avineri himself was a one-time Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and published widely on early Zionist philosophers. In this work, he also demonstrates the falsity of some of the accusations of anti-Semitism that have been levelled at Hegel, who defends at some length Jewish claims for social and political emancipation.
There are many more modern works on Hegel. I have particularly found the work of legal scholar Thom Brooks on The Philosophy of Right to be useful. Likewise, Terry Pinkard’s weighty biography of Hegel contains pithy summaries of all the key works, and Stephen Houlgate and Robert Stern have produced excellent work. There is far more besides. I even enjoyed Judith Butler’s Subjects of Desire, her early work on twentieth century French Hegelianism.
Two web resources are worth mentioning too: the Hegel.net website, which is perfect for beginners.
Secondly, the wonderful Half-Hour Hegel lecture series by Greg Sadler, an ongoing project in which he analyses the Phenomenology paragraph-by-paragraph. A wonderful resource.