Overview:
– In the fall of 1910, Rosenzweig left Freiburg for Berlin, where he began a period of archival work on Hegel’s handwritten Nachlass. Here he gathered the material for what would eventually be his two-volume work, Hegel und der Staat. Rosenzweig earned his PhD in the summer of 1912 for part of this work, and the book was nearly completed before the outbreak of the First World War, but Rosenzweig would only come to publish it in 1920. Rosenzweig’sHegel und der Staat addresses itself to the task Meinecke had delineated, in hisCosmopolitanism and the National State, of understanding the political ideas of the 19thCentury as rooted in the personal and intellectual development of the creative thinkers who articulated them. In the book, Rosenzweig traces the genesis of Hegel’s political thought back to Hegel’s earliest personal and philosophical musings over the relationship between the human being and the world. Through careful readings of Hegel’s early handwritten manuscripts, Rosenzweig attempts to show that the Hegel of the mid-1790s found himself in a state of perplexity over the possibility of reconciling the radical subjectivity of the free individual human being with the objectivity of the world. According to Rosenzweig, the path which the young Hegel finds out of this perplexity, whereby he comes to understand the free self as realizing itself, and at once reconciling itself to the world, in time, enabled Hegel’s own personal reconciliation with his moment in history. More decisively for the history of political philosophy, it determined both the historical character of Hegel’s later thought, and the way he later came to understand the reciprocal relation between the individual and the state in history.