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

• Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom

  - Rosen, Stanley. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom. New Haven, 1974.
  Excerpt: Stoic and Skeptic We have now arrived at the threshold of history in the proper sense: the war and work of self-consciousness. This is the history of the unhappiness or homelessness of the human spirit. The unhappiness, of course, is not unmitigated.… More

• Hegel’s Philosophy of History

  - Wilkins, Burleigh T. Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Ithaca, 1974.
  Excerpt: How Contingency is “Sublated” in Necessity It has frequently been argued that Hegel’s fear of contingency was so great that he sought either to explain it away as mere appearance or to explain it in terms of its contribution to some… More