Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770, the son of a civil servant. At the Tübingen seminary he shared a room with the poet Hölderlin and the philosopher Schelling; together they hailed the French Revolution, and are said to have planted a 'tree of liberty'. After graduating he worked for years as a private tutor and was thirty-one before he became an unsalaried lecturer at Jena. In 1806, as Napoleon's army entered Jena, he finished the Phenomenology of Spirit to the sound of the guns, and seeing the Emperor ride through the town he called him 'the world-soul on horseback'. He then edited a newspaper and was headmaster of a grammar school in Nuremberg, became a full professor at Heidelberg only at forty-six, and two years later was called to Berlin, where he taught for thirteen years at the height of his fame, with students all over Germany. He died of cholera in 1831. His dialectic profoundly influenced Marx and the whole of modern thought after him.