This study of Hegel began as a Ph.D. thesis in intellectual history at the University of California, in 1974. At the time, I thought my research project had a manageable focus: All I wished to do was make some historical sense of Hegel's intellectual development prior to the completion of the Phenomenology in 1806. Very quickly, however, I realized how naive my initial expectation had been; I discovered that a historical study of Hegel's development required a highly complex and elaborate explanatory structure. There was, I learned, much truth to Weber's distinction between aktuelle Verstehen (“direct” or “observational understanding”) and erklärendes Verstehen (“explanatory understanding”). Or, to put it another way, I realized there was a difference between a philosophical explanation of the historical development of Hegel's thought and a historical explanation of his philosophy as a process of development.

Of course, one could argue in commonsensical fashion that the best way to understand any thinker is to read him, but when it comes to Hegel that is not an altogether satisfactory procedure. For not all thinkers can be understood with equal ease, and this caveat is especially true of Hegel not only because of the density and complexity of his thought but also because he came out of a German and European cultural tradition that has become quite foreign to the twentieth-century Western mind. Thus, a beginning student is likely to find Hegel's thought almost incomprehensible on first reading.