This work brings together, for the first time in English translation, Hegel's journal publications from his years in Heidelberg (1816–18), writings which have been previously either untranslated or only partially translated into English. The two years Hegel taught at the University of Heidelberg mark an unusually important transition in his life and thought. Following the closing of the University of Jena in the wake of Napoleon's famous victory at the Battle of Jena, Hegel was unable to find a university teaching position. After a decade in which he worked briefly as a newspaper editor and then as a gymnasium rector, Hegel returned to a university teaching position as Professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg in 1816. During his two years at Heidelberg, before he left to take up his final academic position in Berlin, Hegel brought to fruition a number of projects that characterize the mature phase of his work: he published the first version of his mature philosophical system, the Encyclopedia; served as editor of a journal, the Heidelberger Jahrbücher der Literatur (Heidelberg Yearbooks), which published two important contributions of his own; and began to give the first public lectures in which his developed social and political philosophy was on display.

The move to Heidelberg marked not only an important milestone for Hegel personally, but also came – as Hegel himself articulated it in this period – during a crucial generational shift in the larger political and philosophical climate in Germany and Europe. Hegel's generation, which had witnessed the beginning of the French Revolution twenty-five years before, had seen in the intervening years the swift overthrow of old philosophical systems as well as political upheavals stemming from Napoleon's rise and fall.