Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (27 August 1770 to 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher who belongs to the period of German Idealism in the decades following Kant. His first mature work, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), traces the development of consciousness through successive, self-correcting shapes toward what he called absolute knowing, using a method of internal critique now called Hegelian dialectic: not the popular thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula, which Hegel himself used only once, in passing, when discussing Kant, but a process he more often described through determinate negation and through immediate-mediate-concrete and abstract-negative-concrete triads, in which a position's own internal contradictions drive it toward a fuller, more concrete position that preserves and transforms what came before. He completed the Phenomenology's manuscript in Jena in October 1806 as Napoleon's army occupied the city; in a letter to his friend Niethammer he described watching the Emperor ride out on reconnaissance as seeing this world-soul concentrated at a single point on horseback, reaching out over the world and mastering it. Hegel later gave civil society (burgerliche Gesellschaft) its modern philosophical structure in Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), positioning it as an intermediate ethical sphere between the family, where individual particularity dissolves into sentiment and love, and the state, organized instead around the system of needs and market relations among self-interested individuals who nonetheless remain bound together by law and mutual dependence.