In 1807 Hegel published his Phenomenology of Spirit, which develops Fichte’s
dialectics as applied to the historical unfolding of the world spirit, especially
in social forms. Now Hegel had found his groove: the Logic (1812–1816) and
Encyclopedia of Philosophical Science (1817) spelled out his system in scho-
lastic detail, and in 1821 his last published work applied the system to law
and the state in The Philosophy of Right.
The intellectual reorganization is paralleled by a split in the networks. The
Jena circle had been breaking up, and Schelling was palpably moving into a
different set of connections: the network of religious and political conservatives
who had been the enemies of Kant and Fichte. Fichte had already departed in
1799, followed soon by the Romantics. In 1803 Schelling went as full profes-
sor to Würzburg in the conservative state of Bavaria, then in 1809 left the
universities entirely to join the Bavarian Academy of Science. Jacobi had
already moved to Munich in the 1790s, becoming president of the Academy
of Sciences, 1804–1812. When Schelling joined him in Munich, the tentative
split from the other Idealists crystallized into an opposition center to the
Jena-Berlin mainline. Other fragments of the old Jena-Weimar camp also
moved sharply to the right in politics and religion; in 1809 Friedrich Schlegel
converted to Catholicism and became secretary to the arch-conservative Met-
ternich in Vienna.
The old wunderkind Schelling had removed himself from the world of
Idealist philosophy, with its rationalism and its system-building tools. He
had removed himself too from Idealist politics, which was a rational refor-
mism, extending to an anti-traditional reform of religion. On every point now
Schelling was in the opposition. When Hegel arrived at Berlin, it was as the
proponent of the rational constitutional state as consolidator of the accom-
plishments of the age of revolution. When Schelling finally made it back into
the Berlin mainstream in his old age, in 1841–1846, it was as the chosen agent
of political and religious reaction. In this too Hegel carried on Fichte’s slot: for
both of them the dialectical tools and the system constructing were turned most
naturally to progressive political reform. A generation later, when the Idealist
hegemony was over and its capital was being redistributed once again among
the factions, Marx and Engels became prominent by reviving the Fichte-Hegel
slot, with all its social and political resonances.
So much for Hegel over Schelling; what of Hegel over Schopenhauer? The
key is the tremendous crowding of intellectual competition during this period,
in a situation which raised extraordinary hopes of intellectual leaps from rags
to riches. Hegel began with polemics against a host of rivals; it seemed almost
everyone had his own system. Under the constraints of the law of small
numbers, most were bound to be disappointed. Characteristic of many was
Krause, a Dresden neighbor of Schopenhauer in 1815–1817. His system of
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^635