George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831.

German philosopher of the post-Enlightenment Romantic era. Highly influential on both the Marxian School. and the German Historical School. 

Originally from Stuttgart, Duchy of Württemberg, the son of a bureaucrat. Originally aiming for a Protestant clerical career, Georg W.F. Hegel studied theology at the University of Tübingen, where he came into contact with Kantian philosophy and the budding German Romantic movement, principally through his classmates F.W.J. Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin.  After a period as a private tutor in Bern and Frankfurt, Hegel became a lecturer at the University of Jena in 1801, near the Romanticist citadel of Weimar, then at its height under Goethe and Schiller. 

Hegel composed his philosophical masterpiece, the Phenomenology of the Mind while at Jena in 1807, but was forced to move on by the travails of the Napoleonic wars. After a period as editor of a Bamberg newspaper, Hegel became  a schoolteacher in Nuremberg. During this time, Hegel wrote his works on objective and subjective logic (1812-13, 1816). After the war, Hegel returned to academia, taking up a post at the University of Heidelberg in 1816. Finding his works on logic were too advanced for his Heidelberg students, Hegel composed a briefer outline (Encyclopaedia, 1817).  Hegel then moved on to the University of Berlin in 1818, where he would remain the rest of his life. Hegel's lectures on law (1821) were published in his lifetime.  His lectures on the philosophy of religion (1832), history of philosophy (1833-36), aesthetics (1835-37) and philosophy of history (1837) would be published posthumously, organized by his students.

Hegel emphasized the primacy of human ideas in determining the course of history. Hegel articulated a complex metaphysics, which explained the evolution of history in terms of the separation of "subject" (roughly man's consciousness) from "object" (e.g. the human condition). These had once been united in what Hegel called a primordial "Absolute Spirit", but had since become separated, thus man's understanding of his world was imperfect. But it was not static. Hegel had posited that man's understanding of reality is a matter of ideas and concepts.  But these ideas are constantly changing and being re-interpreted by a process Hegel called "dialectic", where an idea (thesis) is proposed, then criticized by an opposite idea (antithesis), yielding a new idea (synthesis), which then becomes the basis of the next thesis.  And the process repeats itself.  Hegel viewed history as the progress of civilization in terms of changing human consciousness, accelerated by increasing human freedom, towards achieving a final reunion ("totality") of human consciousness and the world around him.

Hegel's confidence in teleological progress included the suggestion in his 1821 Philosophy of Right tract that the current Prussian state was the culmination of political perfection. Earlier in his life, Hegel had been an enthusiast of the French Revolution, but had grown disenchanted with age.  Hegel found that it had resolved nothing, that the revolution had not cleared the way to the common good or the "general will" of the Enlightenment philosophers, but merely opened a new chapter of conflict between social classes.  Notably, Hegel saw that the new post-revolutionary bourgeois society was riven with strife between employers (capital) and the employed (labor).  As their perspectives and moral views tended to be specific to their particular interests, Hegel saw that only the State could serve as a disinterested, impartial party. Hegel characterized the State civil service as the class having a 'universal' point of view, that transcended the particular interests of other social groups, and could serve as the agent of the common good.  But Hegel's exaltation of the Prussian bureaucracy seemed much too conservative for his students, many of whom were lured by ideas of liberalism and even radical socialism.  They looked abroad, to Britain and, particularly after the 1830 July Revolution, to France, which seemed to offer freer alternatives to Prussian authoritarianism.  They began raising doubts whether Hegel's idealized state was really embodied in the Prussian state around them, and became critical of the established order.

Shortly after Hegel's death in 1831, his students in Berlin would form the "Young Hegelian" movement, using Hegelian logic to argue for political reform in the Prussian state, arguing for more liberalism, democratization and secularism.  If it is ideas that determine history, then deliberately changing ideas is a way to change society. They were initially encouraged by the ascension of King Frederick William IV to the Prussian throne in 1840, promising a new era of liberalism, but were to be sharply disappointed. .

But some went even deeper, and questioned the direction of causality in his philosophy.  Young Hegelians, like Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach,  adopted Hegel's methods, but turned it against Hegel's relentless idealism. The Young Hegelians began to reverse Hegel's theory, and suggesting that it was the society and the course of history that determined human ideas (what Feuerbach called "naturalism"), rather than the other way around.  The Young Hegelian reversal reached its apex with the "historical materialism" of Karl Marx, which emphasized material economic basis as the prime determinant of ideas, that changes in society were brought not by changing ideas, but only by changing economic conditions.

The German Historical School was less directly connected to Hegel and the Young Hegelians, but certainly drew on them for inspiration.

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