Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831)

Colin Tyler

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart, Germany, on August 27, 1770. His political writings, including those on political philosophy, owed much to his reactions to the fragmentary nature of the German territories within the Holy Roman Empire and Napoleon's attempted forced unification of them under a common civil code, between the early 1790s and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Hegel's trenchant critique of the abstract universalism of the French revolutionaries in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) did not prevent him from celebrating every Bastille Day until his death on November 14, 1831. His alternative was a form of civic nationalism based on shared traditions and cultural attachments, an ideal that he championed against the ethnic nationalism espoused at the time by many German romantics. In itself, the fact that Hegel allied himself so clearly with the civic nationalists in this particular dispute should do much to Today, ...

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