Chapter 1 - The Constitutional Question in Post-Napoleonic Germany

Summary

Chapter 1 shows that the discussions which dominated intellectual and public life in the years immediately preceding the publication of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right revolved around the constitutional question as the central and definitive element of political discourse in Germany. It argues that Hegel consciously entered this constitutional debate and that his book constituted a timely intervention in the politics of the immediate post-Napoleonic period. By demonstrating the pan-German and European dimensions of contemporary constitutional concerns, Hegel’s political thought is at the same time lifted out of the exclusively Prussian context to which it has so often been confined.