Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would have turned 250 today. I enjoyed this story about his stint as a journalist from three new biographies published this month.

It’s March 1806. Hegel has recently used up his inheritance to finish his 600-page magnus opus, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, while working as an unpaid lecturer at Jena University.

But Hegel has also just fathered an illegitimate child with his landlady, and needs money. An offer arrives from a friend: would he like to move to Bamberg and edit the local newspaper?

Hegel accepts and buys himself a fancy Rumford coffee maker, the Nespresso machine of its day. But his new job comes with considerable constraints.

“Reasoned articles” are banned under the Bavarian press law of 1799, so Hegel can only crib together reports from English and French newspapers. During his stint in Bamberg, the philosopher obsessed with the forces of historical progress doesn’t get to write a single op-ed.

Instead, he writes an unpublished essay called “Who thinks abstractly”, an uncharacteristically snappy piece of popular philosophy that eloquently responds to the charge that is writing is deliberately obscure: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/se/abstract.htm

More on modern Germany’s love-hate relationship with Hegel here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/27/germany-finds-it-hard-to-love-hegel-250-years-after-his-birth?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other