Marcuse attempts to reinterpret the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, including The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and the Science of Logic (1812), and "to disclose and to ascertain the fundamental characteristics of historicity", the factors that "define history" and distinguish it from other phenomena such as nature.

[1] According to the philosopher Seyla Benhabib, Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity was originally intended to be Marcuse's Habilitationsschrift, which would have earned him the right to teach in German universities.

She writes that some accounts claim that the work was rejected as a Habilitationsschrift, while others suggest that it may never have been submitted, due to Marcuse realizing that he would never be permitted to teach in Nazi Germany.

In 1987, the book appeared for the first time in English, in a translation by Benhabib published by MIT Press as part of the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought.

[4] The book's English translation received positive reviews from Brent Nelson in Library Journal,[5] the sociologist George E. McCarthy in Contemporary Sociology,[6] and H. N. Tuttle in Choice.

[5] McCarthy wrote that the book was "one of those rare jewels which has remained hidden from the English-speaking world for over fifty years" and "an extremely important work for understanding the foundations of Marcuse's own intellectual perspective and his later theoretical developments".

She maintained that it is crucial for understanding Marcuse's relationship to Heidegger, for "illuminating his highly original and creative reading of Hegel", and for assessing his Hegelian form of critical Marxism.

She credited Marcuse with providing "detailed and careful commentary on Hegel's Logic and Phenomenology of Spirit", but noted that the work might have an "initially daunting character for the contemporary reader."

Though pointing to similarities between Marcuse's views and Heidegger's, she noted that there were also differences, and that a "Heideggerian objection" to the work would be "that it contains no clear distinction between the "world-historical" dimension and the "historicity" proper to Dasein.