Hegel's pre-Jena and early Jena writings partly reflect what Nietzsche called a kind of German “homesickness,” a distaste with Enlightenment “positivity,” and an appeal to the models of the Greek polis and the early Christian communities (and, to a lesser extent, to art) as ways of understanding, by contrast, the limitations of modern philosophic, religious, and political life. In these texts, the Enlightenment victory over religion is portrayed as Pyrrhic, as the idealization of a calculating, fragmenting model of rationality, all in a way that merely transferred an oppressive, alien lawgiver from without to within. This Enlightenment is a “hubbub of vanity without a firm core,” a purely “negative” reaction to custom and religion that tries to “turn this nothingness into a system.” On such a familiar view, Hegel represents, together with Schiller, Schelling, and others, a “romantic reaction” to modernity continuous with Rousseau's Second Discourse, united in various attempts to reject the abstract, materialist, “dehumanizing” nature of modern institutions, without a regression into premodern forms of thought.

Yet, it is also well known that during his stay at Jena, although never wholly abandoning these Hellenic and Christian sensibilities, Hegel came to reject a critique of the Enlightenment based on either nostalgia or aesthetic experience. Hegel's reading of political economy and his growing attention to what he theorized for the first time as “civil society” convinced him of the uniqueness and superiority of modern forms of social and economic life.