On the eve of the French attack on the Germany city of Jena in 1806, a philosophy teacher at the city’s local university was rushing to finish a manuscript. The French victory the next day would devastate the town and destroy the Prussian army. But the book that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) finally finished that night would change history.
Hegel, arguably the most important German thinker of the early nineteenth century, came of age during the turbulent period of European history following the French Revolution in 1789. The Revolution, and the series of wars across the continent that followed, shaped Hegel’s life and, in some respects, his philosophy. His philosophy, in turn, was a significant influence on Karl Marx (1818–1883) and other continental thinkers.
Born in the Protestant enclave of Stuttgart, a city in mostly Roman Catholic southern Germany, Hegel was initially raised to be a Protestant clergyman before switching to philosophy. He attended a provincial university and in 1801 accepted an unpaid teaching position at Jena, where he lived off an inheritance and began writing Phenomenology of Mind (1807), the book that he finished during the war.
Early in life, Hegel supported the French revolutionaries, even planting a “freedom tree” to honor the storming of the Bastille. He edited a pro-Napoleonic newspaper in Bamberg and, like many young Europeans, hoped the emperor would import French-style social change across the Continent. He would lose his enthusiasm for the revolutionaries, however, after enduring the hardships of the Napoleonic Wars.
In and out of financial distress for decades, Hegel was not able to secure a steady academic job until 1816. He was awarded a professorship at the University of Berlin in 1818, and his Philosophy of Right was published in 1820. By then, his youthful enthusiasm for the revolutionaries had abated. Hegel’s later writing celebrated German national unity, denounced revolutionary riots in Prussia, and supported the authoritarian Prussian state that he had opposed as a young man.
Hegel’s philosophy resonated throughout the nineteenth century and was debated for decades after his death at age sixty-one during a cholera epidemic. His approach to the study of history was a major influence on Marx, who incorporated elements of Hegelianism into his political theories.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Hegel’s younger brother, Georg Ludwig Hegel (1776–1812), joined Napoléon’s army and was killed during the French emperor’s invasion of Russia in 1812. Hegel’s illegitimate son, Ludwig, suffered a similar fate, joining the Dutch army and dying of fever in 1831 during an expedition to the Dutch East Indies.
- Although he was baptized with three first names, Hegel didn’t use any of them. His wife, Marie Helena Susanna von Tucher (1791–1855), apparently referred to him simply as Master; friends and colleagues called him the Old Man.
- After leaving Jena following the battle, Hegel worked briefly as a newspaper editor and then was the principal of a high school in Nuremberg from 1808 to 1815.
