Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) came of age as a person and an author at the same time that the triumphant proclamations of the arrival of the age of reason promised revolutionary transformations of human thought and action. In 1787, when Hegel was seventeen years old, Kant declared his own philosophy to be the epistemological equivalent of the Copernican revolution: arguing that the possibility of metaphysical knowledge cannot be explained if one assumes that the cognizing subject must conform to the object of cognition, Kant inverted this assumption. The result was transcendental idealism, with which Kant claimed to have determined the means, extent and limits of truly rational cognition. Only two years later, in 1789, when Hegel was a student in Tübingen, the practical equivalent of this theoretical development manifested itself in France: arguing that freedom is impossible if one assumes that political subjects must conform to the will of the ruling authority, the revolutionaries inverted this assumption and promised to establish a truly rational system of government.

Hegel celebrated both the Kantian and the French revolutions, but not uncritically. Hegel's enthusiasm stemmed from his agreement with the revolutionary insistence on the right of reason: modern theoretical claims and practical arrangements must be, above all and by definition, rational. Hegel's criticism, however, stemmed from his view that the age of reason failed to live up to its name: neither Kantian philosophy nor the French Revolution was truly rational, because both rested on a misconception of rationality itself.