Hegel+background

Georg Hegel was born in 1770, early enough to witness the French and American revolutions, and died in 1831, late enough to witness the begining of the Industrial Revolution. It was these events that all his life he aimed to comprehend -- to understand the many changes European states and afar were facing. His work has been described as the first philosophy to make modernity the subject.

Hegel's work is often linked with that of Karl Marx -- Marx having claimed that he transformed Hegel's idealist philosophy into materialist theory. (Hegel: A Biography, Terry Pinkard 2001)