702 Chapter XXIX
historian Droz is seconded by a recent American writer, is that, despite his un-
doubted knowledge of current events, his philosophy left too impassable a gulf
between the ideas of liberty and political action on the one hand, and the domains
of empirical knowledge and the actual thinking of individual persons on the
other.^40
Fichte and Hegel, born respectively in 1762 and 1770, were young enough for
the upheaval of the revolutionary decade to have a formative effect on their inner-
most thought and feeling.^41 The same, indeed, has been said of Beethoven, also
born in 1770, of whom it may be true that the grand movement for human libera-
tion entered somehow into his music; but it is the nature of music to make such
speculations controversial.^42 Since they dealt in words, the impact of the Revolution
on Hegel and Fichte is easily documented.
The young Hegel found himself at Bern for four years, from 1792 to 1796, dur-
ing which he observed the ruling oligarchy of the Swiss old regime at close hand,
and sympathized strongly with the revolutionary agitation in the Pays de Vaud. In
1797 he went to Stuttgart in Württemberg, where he could watch the conflict be-
tween the duke and the diet. He wrote in 1797 (but did not publish) a pamphlet
marked by a vehement radicalism, which he dedicated to “the people of Württem-
berg,” and in which he attacked both the duke for his absolutism and the diet as no
more than a selfish privileged oligarchy.^43 It was of course the great French Revo-
lution of 1789 that most profoundly impressed him. At the practical level, he could
agree that it had been brought on because the monarchy had proved incompetent,
and “the Court, the Clergy, the Nobility, the Parliaments themselves were unwill-
ing to surrender the privileges they possessed.” In the larger view, the Revolution
embodied the Concept of Right. “Never since the sun has stood in the heavens and
the planets moved about it,” as he later wrote in his Philosophy of History, “had it
been seen that man relies on his head, that is on thought, and builds reality corre-
spondingly.” If it be the chief characteristic of Hegel’s philosophy to see the world
as a succession of historical stages, each moving on to a higher degree of freedom,
each representing the imprint of mind on outer reality, and each exhibiting an in-
terconnectedness among all aspects of culture and society at a given moment in a
common Zeitgeist, then this philosophy seems to have been confirmed in him, in
his youth, by the acute consciousness of living at a great historical turning point,
the grand upheaval of revolutionary republicanism by which everything in the
world of human relations was permeated and affected. In 1802, in his Constitution
of Germany, he called for a revolutionary modernization of the outmoded Holy
Roman Empire. In later years, as is well known, Hegel became a convinced mon-
archist, and held that the Prussian monarchy embodied a higher if not final stage
40 Droz, Ibid., 155–71; L. Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom (Boston, 1957), 124–25.
41 See the special number, entitled “La Révolution de 1789 et la pensée moderne,” Vol. 128 (1939)
of the Revue philosophique de la France et de l ’Etranger, where M. Gueroult writes on “Fichte et la Révo-
lution française” and J. Hyppolite on “La signification de la Révolution française dans la Phénomé-
nologie de Hegel.” The same number is memorable for Ernest Barker’s views on Edmund Burke.
42 See the erratic little book by Bishop F. S. Noli, Beethoven and the French Revolution (New York,
1947).
43 Droz, Allemagne, 125.