1 - Hegel: A Life

Summary

Hegel's birthplace, Stuttgart, lay in the Duchy of Württemberg, the Swabian speaking area of south Germany. In one sense, Württemberg looked like so many other Länder in Germany at the time. The use of the German term, Land and its plural, Länder, is here intentional; it was not a state, not a province, not a department, not even a political unity of elements that would be immediately recognizable today; instead, it was sui generis, a Land. At the time of Hegel's birth in Württemberg, people did not speak of general “rights” (the common discourse of our contemporary politics); there were only particular rights, particular liberties, and the like, which were restricted to particular groups and almost none of which applied to the populace at large. (This or that guild had the right to use metal nails in its carpentry, this or that group had the right to be exempt from a certain tax that other groups had to pay, and so on.) All in all, Württemberg had virtually all the features of what the historian Mack Walker called the German “hometowns,” the odd early modern entities kept alive by the singular oddness of the existence of the Holy Roman Empire: As a set of “hometowns,” the Empire was governed by a mostly unwritten set of customs and mores that included a sense of various communities both having an obligation to take care of their own members and the right to police the mores of their members in fine grained ways (including the prohibition of marriage by a “hometowner” to an unseemly “foreign” spouse). It was, above all, structured by a strong sense of who did and did not belong to the local communities and by the nearly absolute right of the community to decide whom to admit and not to admit.