Major Works

• Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes)

  - Recommended translation: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. First published in 1807.
  Excerpt from the Preface: Besides, it is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the… More

• Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts)

  - Recommended translation: Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. In addition, the translation by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942) is widely used in existing Hegel scholarship. The Nisbet translation is recommended because it is more literal, and includes the canonical "additions" of Hegel's student Eduard Gans in the body of the text where they are relevant. First published in 1820.
  Excerpt from the Preface: This treatise, therefore, in so far as it deals with political science, shall be nothing other than an attempt to comprehend and portray the state as an inherently rational entity. As a philosophical composition, it must distance… More

• Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences Part 3: Philosophy of Spirit (Wissenschaft des Geistes)

  Excerpt: The knowledge of Mind is the highest and hardest, just because it is the most ‘concrete’ of sciences. The significance of that ‘absolute’ commandment, Know thyself – whether we look at it in itself or under the… More

• Lectures on the Philosophy of World History

  - Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
  From the publisher: An English translation of Hegel’s introduction to his lectures on the philosophy of history, based directly on the standard German edition by Johannes Hoffmeister, first published in 1955. The previous English translation, by J.… More

Commentary

• La Philosophie Politique de Hegel

  - Fleischmann, Eugene. La philosophie politique de Hegel, Paris, 1964.

• Introduction a la Philosophie Politique de Hegel

  - Hyppolite, Jean.  Introduction a la philosophie politique de Hegel, Paris, 1964.

• Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives

  - Pelczynski, Z. Ed. Hegel’s Political Philosophy. Cambridge, 1971.
  The following excerpt is from the editor’s own essay, “The Hegelian conception of the state.” It is noteworthy that the concept of the state as Hegel first elaborated it has all the clarity and simplicity of Hobbes’… More

• Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State

  - Shlomo Avineri, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State, Cambridge University Press, 1974.
  […] Hegel has to be seen as the first major modern political philosopher who attempted to confront the realities of the modern age. While many among eighteenth-century philosophers undoubtedly helped to shape the emergent modern world, their basically… More

• Georg W. F. Hegel

  - Pierre Hassner, "Georg W. F. Hegel," History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, University of Chicago Press, 1987 (3rd. edition).
  Excerpt: Against the attitude of a moral, religious, or intellectual consciousness which attempts to take refuge in the inner life and to reject the “sound and fury” of political realities, Hegel justifies political life as such. It is only in and by the… More

• Hegel’s Ethical Thought

  - Wood, Allen. Hegel’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge, 1990
  Excerpt: 5. Does Hegel have an ethics? It is sometimes said, by Hegel’s sympathizers as well as his detractors, that Hegel’s system contains no “ethics” at all, that for Hegel moral philosophy is “dissolved in sociology” or… More

• Hegel’s Practical Philosophy

  - Pippin, Robert. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, Cambridge, 2008.
  Excerpt: … What is important, Antigone implicitly asserts, is what one claims for oneself, what sort of recognition one demands; that the issue of the status of Polyneices as a family member as well as citizen is not independently real, a mere… More