Thammasat University students who are interested in philosophy, political science, history, and related subjects may find a book newly acquired by the TU Library useful.

Hegel and the State is by Franz Rosenzweig, a German theologian, philosopher, and translator.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and one of the most influential figures of German idealism and 19th-century philosophy.

The TU Library collection includes many other books by and about different aspects of the life and work of Hegel.

His influence extends across the range of contemporary philosophical topics, from political philosophy to the philosophy of history, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy, among others.

After his death in Berlin, some philosophers such as Karl Marx, John Dewey, Jacques Derrida, Teodor Adorno, and Hans Gadamer have selectively developed Hegelian ideas into their own philosophical programs.

Others have developed their positions in opposition to Hegel’s system. These include, for instance, such diverse philosophers as Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Michel Foucault.

In theology, Hegel’s influence marks the work of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

The publisher’s description notes:

Through careful readings of Hegel’s early handwritten manuscripts, Rosenzweig shows that Hegel was wrestling with the problem of how to reconcile the subjectivity and freedom of the individual within a community and ultimately the political state. According to Rosenzweig, the route out of this conundrum chosen by Hegel shaped his mature political philosophy, where he saw the relationship between the individual and the state as reciprocal. At a deeper level, the significance of Hegel and the State lies in the way that Rosenzweig explains the failure of Hegel’s quasi-communitarian view of the state to emerge, due to the authoritarian direction of the newly unified German state under Bismarck. Anticipating the political and moral disaster that was to follow, Rosenzweig concludes by questioning the very viability of any theory of the state that relies on the pillars of bureaucratic militarism and a government-supported capitalist business culture.

Here are a few thoughts by Hegel from books, some of which are owned by the TU Library:

Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.

• Letters, Nuremberg, 30 September 1809

Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer. One orients one’s attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.

• Miscellaneous writings of G.W.F. Hegel

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

• Introduction to the Critical Journal of Philosophy

The essence of the modern state is the union of the universal with the full freedom of the particular, and with the welfare of individuals.

• Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820/1821)

An Englishman who, by a most careful investigation into the various representations, has sought to discover what is meant by Brahma, believes that Brahma is an epithet of praise, and is used as such just because he is not looked on as being himself solely this One, but, on the contrary, everything says of itself that it is Brahma. I refer to what Mill says in his History of India. He proves from many Indian writings that it is an epithet of praise which is applied to various deities, and does not represent the conception of perfection or unity which we associate with it. This is a mistake, for Brahma is in one aspect the One, the Immutable, who has, however, the element of change in him, and because of this, the rich variety of forms which is thus essentially his own is also predicated of him. Vishnu is also called the Supreme Brahma. Water and the sun are Brahma.

• Lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with a work on the proofs of the existence of God (1827)

What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

• Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832)

Our task does not require us to contemplate Nature as a Rational System in itself though in its own proper domain it proves itself such but simply in its relation to Spirit. On the stage on which we are observing it—Universal History—Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality. Notwithstanding this (or rather for the very purpose of comprehending the general principles which this, its form of concrete reality, embodies) we must premise some abstract characteristics of the nature of Spirit. Such an explanation, however, cannot be given here under any other form than that of bare assertion. The present is not the occasion for unfolding the idea of Spirit speculatively ; for whatever has a place in an Introduction, must, as already observed, be taken as simply historical ; something assumed as having been explained and proved elsewhere; or whose demonstration awaits the sequel of the Science of History itself.

• Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832)

We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without interest on the part of the actors; and — if interest be called passion, inasmuch as the whole individuality, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and claims, is devoted to an object with every fibre of volition, concentrating all its desires and powers upon it — we may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.

• Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832)

And these comments about Hegel’s writings from noted authors in the TU Library collection:

If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.

• Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality (1840)

Hegel’s philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its absurdity becomes obvious. […] When I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however, by discovering that everything he said on the philosophy of mathematics was plain nonsense.

• Bertrand Russell, Philosophy and Politics (1947)

Of the nineteenth-century philosophers, Hegel put me off by his language, as arrogant as it was laborious; I regarded him with downright mistrust. He seemed to me like a man who was caged in the edifice of his own words and was pompously gesticulating in his prison.

• Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Hegel clothed his absolute in the mystical shape of a world spirit, and made the cardinal error of bringing the course of history to an end in the present instead of projecting it into the future. He recognized a process of continuous evolution in the past, and incongruously denied it in the future.

• E. H. Carr, What is History? (1961)

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)