For over fifty years, Hegel interpreters have rejected the former belief that Hegel used thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics. In this incisive analysis of Hegel's philosophy, Leonard F. Wheat shows that the modern interpretation is false. Wheat rigorously demonstrates that there are in fact thirty-eight well-concealed dialectics in Hegel's two most important works-twenty-eight in Phenomenology of Spirit and ten in The Philosophy of History. Wheat also develops other major new insights:<br>• Hegel's chief dialectical format consists of a two-concept thesis, a two-concept antithesis, and a two-concept synthesis that borrows one concept from the thesis and one from the antithesis.<br>• All dialectics are analogically based on the Christian separation-and-return myth: the dialectic separates from and returns to a thesis concept.<br>• Hegel's enigmatic Spirit is a four-faceted, deliberately fictitious, nonsupernatural entity that exists only as an atheistic redefinition of "God."<br>• Spirit's "divine life" begins not with consciousness but with unconsciousness, in the prehuman state of nature-before Spirit acquires its human mind.<br>• Hegel's concept of freedom is not a sociopolitical concept but release from bondage to religious superstition (belief in a supernatural God).<br>• In Hegel's widely misinterpreted master-and-slave parable, the master is God, the slave is man, and the slave's gaining his freedom is man's becoming an atheist.<br>• The standard non-Hegelian base-superstructure interpretation of Marx's dialectics is false. Marx's basic dialectic is actually this: thesis = communal ownership poverty, antithesis = private ownership wealth, synthesis = communal ownership wealth.<br>Wheat also shows that Marx and Tillich, who subtly used Hegelian dialectics in their own works, are the only authors who have understood Hegelian dialectics.<br>Thoroughly researched and exhaustive in detail, this radical reinterpretation of Hegel's philosophy should greatly interest Hegel scholars and students.