Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831)

Dudley Knowles

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is one of the pantheon of “great dead political philosophers.” To many, he is best known for his conservatism and his early critique of modern liberalism. For others, what makes him most distinctive is the social idealism that made him such an attractive target for Karl Marx. For neutrals on these issues, his permanent value rests on the distinctive contribution that he made to a wide variety of problems that are the meat and drink of political philosophy. This last is the spirit in which his work is introduced in this entry. Hegel was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1770. His father was a civil servant at the court of the Duchy of Wurttemberg. At the Tubinger Stift, a Protestant seminary that he entered in 1788, he was a close friend of two outstanding fellow students, Friedrich Hölderlin (the poet) and Friedrich Schelling (the philosopher). His ...

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