{"id":903139,"date":"2026-09-17T15:51:37","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:51:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/?page_id=903139"},"modified":"2026-09-17T15:51:38","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:51:38","slug":"was-hegel-the-prussian-state-philosopher","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/was-hegel-the-prussian-state-philosopher\/","title":{"rendered":"Was Hegel the Prussian state philosopher?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The charge is as old as it is famous, and it has a precise origin: Rudolf Haym\u2019s book Hegel und seine Zeit<\/em> of 1857. Haym read the sentence about the rational and the actual as a justification of the Prussian Restoration, and Hegel as its appointed thinker. The formula has held; it drove Hegel out of German legal scholarship for half a century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What speaks against it \u2013 in the text itself<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Whoever reads the Groundlines<\/em> as the programme of the Prussian state of 1820 has to explain why it demands institution after institution that Prussia at that time precisely did not<\/em> have:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trial by jury and public proceedings<\/strong> (\u00a7 228<\/a>), grounded not on utility but on the right of self-consciousness \u2013 whoever is judged must be able to take part in the proceedings with his own knowledge. The opposite, Hegel says, places people in \u201ea kind of serfdom toward such a profession\u201c.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A code of laws, publicly promulgated<\/strong> (\u00a7 215<\/a>). \u201eTo hang the laws up so high, as Dionysius the Tyrant<\/em> did, that no citizen could read them\u201c is, he writes, the same injustice as burying them in learned apparatus. Prussia did not get its code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Civil rights for Jews<\/strong> (\u00a7 270<\/a>, note) \u2013 and with a grounding that places the state under obligation, not those affected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An assembly of estates deliberating in public<\/strong> (\u00a7 314<\/a> f.), so that public consciousness may have any knowledge of universal affairs at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Above all, though: in the note to \u00a7 258<\/a> Hegel attacks the leading theorist of the Restoration, Carl Ludwig von Haller, by name and over several pages, with a sharpness that occurs nowhere else in the book. Haller\u2019s principle that it is \u201ethe eternal, unalterable order of God, that the more powerful rules\u201c Hegel calls the expression of \u201ea complete lack of thought\u201c; hatred of law he calls \u201ethe shibboleth by which fanaticism, feeble-mindedness, and the hypocrisy of good intentions reveal themselves\u201c.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What speaks for the other side<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One makes it too easy for oneself by exculpating only. Hegel was a Prussian official, the book appeared under censorship after the Carlsbad Decrees, and the preface attacks Jakob Friedrich Fries, who had just been suspended \u2013 a man who was down. That is unlovely, however one explains it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1973 Karl-Heinz Ilting made this into the thesis that between the transcript of 1819\/20 and the printed book there lies an accommodation to the censorship: Hegel dissembled. In 1983 Dieter Henrich replied with the edition of precisely that transcript \u2013 the fundamental positions are the same throughout, and the sharpening is Hegel\u2019s own. The dispute is open. On this website you can conduct it yourself: the transcripts stand beneath the paragraphs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The verdict<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Groundlines<\/em> are the book of the Prussian era of reform<\/em>, not of the Restoration \u2013 in detail they pursue the aims that were being defeated after 1819. Whoever declares Hegel the state philosopher must further explain why Haller, the actual philosopher of the Restoration, is treated in the book as an opponent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A true kernel remains, but a different one from the one asserted: Hegel holds the rational state to be knowable and wants to comprehend it, not to design it. Whoever turns that into a readiness to take whichever state happens to exist for the rational one has performed the short circuit on which the German reception of Hegel did in fact later break \u2013 only it was not Hegel who performed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sources.<\/strong> Rudolf Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit<\/em>, 1857 \u00b7 Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat<\/em>, 1920 \u00b7 Joachim Ritter, Hegel und die Franz\u00f6sische Revolution<\/em>, 1957 \u00b7 T. M. Knox and Shlomo Avineri in Jon Stewart (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends<\/em>, 1996 \u00b7 Karl-Heinz Ilting (ed.), Vorlesungen \u00fcber Rechtsphilosophie<\/em>, 1973\/74, against Dieter Henrich (ed.), Die Vorlesung von 1819\/20<\/em>, 1983 \u00b7 Klaus Vieweg, Das Denken der Freiheit<\/em>, 2012. \u2013 In detail on this website: Hegel and German legal scholarship<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n