According to a celebrated dictum in the preface to Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, philosophy's concern is to comprehend its own time in thought. Notoriously, this sentence is often misunderstood, as though it were Hegel's intention to sanction and legitimate the Prussian state of the time. Rudolf Haym contributed greatly to this view's lasting influence with his lectures on ‘Hegel and His Time’, published in 1857. Haym could discern in Hegel only the philosopher in service to the Prussian state in the Restoration period, a philosopher who accommodated that state as a matter of course, even ‘cuddling up’ to it. Thus ‘the Hegelian system’ and especially the philosophy of right had become, according to him, ‘the scholarly abode of the Prussian Restoration's spirit’. Friedrich Meinecke, in his major work Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, which enjoyed numerous editions following its first publication at the end of 1907, believed he could detect a nearly direct intellectual historical lineage from Hegel to Bismarck. Meinecke admittedly reveals himself to be influenced more by Ranke than by Hegel. The former acted as the intermediary between Hegel and Bismarck, whom Meinecke greatly admired. On the other hand, Meinecke is concerned that in the work of Hegel, ‘purely empirical knowledge is once again obscured’ and that ‘this material world [is transformed] into a mere shadow play’ as a result of ‘his view of nation and state’. The constitutional legal scholar Hermann Heller drew upon Meinecke in his 1921 book Hegel und der nationale Machtstaatsgedanke in Deutschland (Hegel and the Notion of the National Power State in Germany) when he pointedly characterised Hegel as the ‘first and most thorough herald of the idea of the modern power state [Machtstaat]’. ‘The national ideology of the power state’, Heller explained in the introduction to his treatise, ‘is in fact itself the offspring of Idealist philosophy, and its father is none other than Hegel’., Such a declarative statement does not, however, indicate any retreat from Hegel. On the contrary, Heller revealed his assured belief that several aspects of ‘Hegel's power politics [Machtpolitik]’ would need to become part of ‘Germany's public opinion…if the German nation is to rescue itself from this painful present into a better future’.