Georg W. F. Hegel Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1770. He was educated at the Tübinger Stift, where he became close friends with Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin. During their time in Tübingen, they were inspired by the outbreak of the French Revolution (1789–1799) but horrified by the Reign of Terror that took place during it, in which ideological struggles between rival political factions led to mass executions. After serving as a private tutor in Switzerland, Hegel went first to Frankfurt where Hölderlin lived, and then in 1801 assumed a lectureship in Jena where Schelling was teaching. Together Hegel and Schelling edited the Critical Journal of Philosophy, an organ for their new speculative philosophy. While in Jena, Hegel also wrote his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). With the closure of the university following the battle of Jena on October 14, 1806, Hegel became a newspaper editor in Bamberg and then the head of a college preparatory school in Nuremberg. After publishing Science of Logic in 1816, he obtained a professorial position at the University of Heidelberg and published his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1818). During the same year, Hegel was called to Berlin where he taught until his death in 1831. While in Berlin, he published the Philosophy of Right (1822) and delivered lectures on the philosophy of history, religion, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy— all published after his death. At the time of his death, he was considered one of the most influential philosophers in Europe and exercised a profound influence on many of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Hegel is best known for the development of a dialectical philosophy that combines a Kantian notion of consciousness with a notion of historical development derived from French political thinker Charles-Louis Montesquieu, Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, and others. In the Phenomenology, Hegel traces the development of consciousness as a historical phenomenon, demonstrating that the human intellectual project came to its end in his own time with the realization and reconciliation of everything that had previously been considered dichotomous—subject and object, individual and society, human and nature, and human and divine. This was achieved through what Hegel called absolute knowledge or science. He spelled out the conceptual foundations for this science in his Logic, which constituted the basis for his practical philosophy.

Hegel’s political philosophy is laid out in his Philosophy of Right, which combines a theory of natural or abstract (property) rights, a modified Kantian moral theory, a communitarian notion of the family, a Smithian notion of economic life or civil society, and a bureaucratic model of a rational state that resembles the constitutional monarchy of England. In his Philosophy of History (1837), Hegel attempts to show that history is a dialectic of freedom beginning with the master and slave relationship and ending with universal citizenship; it passes from oriental despotism to Greek democracy, and Roman aristocracy to the monarchical world of modern Europe. A human’s historical task, in Hegel’s view, comes to its practical end in the realization of such rational states, and to its spiritual end in the completion and perfection of knowledge as the systematic science of all that is.

Bibliography:

Kojeve, Alexandre. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.
Moldenhauer, Eva, ed. Werke in 20 Bänden und Register. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970.
Pinkard,Terry. Hegel’s Phenomenology:The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Pippin, Robert. Hegel’s Idealism:The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

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