Although this volume has been a joint endeavour from the beginning, each of the editors had special tasks to perform in assembling the volume. The translation was the work of H. B. Nisbet, who has also used the translator's preface and the glossary to explain some of the finer points of rendering Hegel's difficult German into English. The general introduction was written by Laurence Dickey, who was also responsible for the chronology of Hegel's life and career and the editorial notes. Laurence Dickey, however, is greatly indebted to H. B. Nisbet for the many contributions he generously made to each of these parts of the book. Indeed, H. B. Nisbet not only provided suggestions and information that considerably improved the editorial notes but also commented extensively on various drafts of the general introduction. His observations on these drafts – as to style and to the structural balance of the argument – proved immensely helpful.

Laurence Dickey and H. B. Nisbet would respectively like to express their thanks to two colleagues for their friendship and support over many years: they accordingly dedicate this volume to Marc Raeff and Hans Reiss.

Most excellent, illustrious, reverend men, most learned and congenial colleagues, most honourable companions in study, most esteemed listeners of every rank!

The most venerable Senate has instructed me to comment on the occasion and cause of the celebration with which the King has authorised this university to mark today's festival. Since that immortal act which we now commemorate concerned the profession and establishment of religious doctrine, it appears fitting that our admirable Theological Faculty should play the leading part in this festivity. Its estimable Dean will accordingly give us a fitting and learned account of the event in question and profoundly impress its significance upon us. But what happened at Augsburg was not enacted by an assembly of Doctors of Theology and leaders of the Church; nor did they embark on a learned disputation in order to determine the truth and to require the lay community to accept it as certain and observe it with dutiful obedience. On the contrary, the main significance of that day was that the princes of the [German] states and the burgomasters of the Imperial Cities publicly declared that the Protestant [evangelicam] doctrine, freed at last from a mass of superstitions, errors, lies, and all kinds of injustices and abuses, was now finally perfected and elevated above the uncertain outcome of disputations, above the arbitrary will, and above all worldly authority, and that they [i.e. the princes and burgomasters] had now taken up the cause of religion.

1. The state is the true mode [wahrhafte Weise] of actuality; in it, the true ethical will attains actuality and the spirit lives in its true form [Wahrhaftigkeit]. Religion is divine knowledge, the knowledge which human beings have of God and of themselves in God. This is divine wisdom and the field of absolute truth. But there is a second wisdom, the wisdom of the world, and the question arises as to its relationship to the former, divine wisdom.

In general, religion and the foundation of the state are one and the same thing – they are identical in and for themselves.

[On the recent internal affairs of Württemberg, in particular the inadequacies of the municipal constitution]

(1798)

To the people of Württemberg

It is time that the people of Württemberg ceased to vacillate between hope and fear, to alternate between expectancy and frustrated expectations. I will not say that it is also time for everyone who, in the midst of change or in preserving the old, seeks only his own limited advantage or the advantage of his class [seines Standes] and consults only his own vanity, to renounce these paltry desires, to cast aside these petty concerns, and to fill his soul with concern for the general [good]. For men of nobler aspirations and purer zeal, it is time above all to focus their undirected [unbestimmten] will on those parts of the constitution which are founded on injustice, and to apply their efforts to the necessary change which such parts require.

Peaceful satisfaction with the present [dem Wirklichen], hopelessness, and patient acceptance of an all-too-vast and omnipotent fate have given way to hope, expectation, and courage to face the new. A vision of better, juster times has come to life in the souls of men, and a longing and yearning for a purer and freer destiny has moved all hearts and alienated them from the present reality [der Wirklichkeit]. The urge to break down paltry barriers has fixed its hopes on every event, every glimmering [of change] – even on criminal actions.

In 1964, T. M. Knox and Z. A. Pelczynski published their well-known edition of what they called Hegel's ‘minor’ political writings. They claimed that these writings were ‘a most valuable supplement’ to Hegel's major political work, the Philosophy of Right (henceforth PR). In addition, they saw the minor works as in some ways providing ‘a clearer insight into Hegel's basic political ideas’ than PR, a work which, they noted, was filled with metaphysical arguments, esoteric vocabulary, and obscurities associated with Hegel's life-long commitment to the ideals of speculative philosophy. By contrast, the minor writings were ‘relatively free’ from the jargon of metaphysics and addressed in plain language ‘topical political issues’ of the day. The down-to-earth quality of these works, in turn, prompted Knox and Pelczynski to present them as journalistic pieces that showcased Hegel's talents as a ‘publicist’. If, in that capacity, Hegel could be seen struggling with practical rather than metaphysical problems, then so much the better for appreciating his realistic political outlook.

On a deeper level, though, Knox and Pelczynski wished to use the writings in their edition to introduce students to a more ‘liberal’ Hegel, one whose ideas were more in line with the mainstream of western political thinking. This Hegel, they argued, while certainly not absent from PR, is clearly on display in the minor political writings, for in these, he reveals himself as a supporter of constitutional government and as a critic of absolutism, autocracy, and reaction.

Hegel's writings, particularly his more abstract and systematic works, confront the translator with numerous problems. The principles which I have followed in translating the more abstract texts in this collection – especially On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, but also The Relationship of Religion to the State and parts of the extract from the Lectures on the Philosophy of History – are identical with those which I followed in my translation of Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge, 1991; published in the same series as the present volume) and which I described in detail in my preface to that translation (pp. xxxv–xliv). The most important of these principles is the need to adopt consistent renderings of key expressions in Hegel's system and to avoid confusion between similar or related terms with different nuances of meaning; the English equivalents for all such terms are listed, with explanatory comments where necessary, in the glossary towards the end of this volume.

One of the main difficulties in translating the present collection was due to the fact that the texts included in it vary considerably in form and subject matter and were written at widely separated stages of Hegel's career, from his earliest phase as a writer to the last year of his life.

Rulers would like us to accept the maxim that in politics they alone are capable of clearsightedness, and that it is therefore for them alone to have an opinion on this subject. They certainly have their reasons for speaking thus, and the ruled have exactly the same reasons for refusing to accept this principle, which in fact, considered in itself and without the prejudices of either ruler or ruled, is indeed totally absurd. For, on the contrary, rulers – even if we suppose them to be upright – are by their position the most incapable of forming a just and elevated opinion on general politics; since the more one is immersed in practice, the less one is able to have a clear view of theory. A necessary condition for a publicist who wants to form broad political ideas is strictly to abstain from any public office or employment: for how could he be at the same time actor and spectator?

But in this regard men have gone from one extreme to the other. In combating the rulers' ridiculous pretension to exclusive political wisdom they have engendered in the ruled the prejudice – no less ridiculous, though less dangerous – that any man is capable, by instinct alone, of forming a just opinion of the political system, and each of us has asserted the duty to set himself up as a legislator.

By a happy coincidence, the publication of this edition of Comte's early social and political writings coincides with his bicentenary. But, two centuries after his birth, Comte is rarely encountered at first hand by today's readers. He still enjoys an important place in the history of ideas – as Saint-Simon's ablest disciple, as a formative influence on John Stuart Mill's System of Logic, and as the author of the doctrine of positivism which, a generation after his death, shaped the work of the founding fathers of the Third Republic in France. Above all, he coined the word ‘sociology’, and is still commemorated as one of the makers of that discipline. He inaugurated an important sociological tradition – best represented by Durkheim – which took consensus, rather than class conflict, as the discipline's central focus. But few read Comte today, and those that do tend to encounter him in such a ludicrous form – the founder of a secular religion of humanity, with himself at its head as the selfappointed high priest – that the experience brings them no closer to an understanding of the potent influence his ideas exerted in the nineteenth century.

Comte had a host of disciples in his own century, especially after his death; not only or even mainly in France, but dispersed as far apart as Newcastle and Rio de Janeiro. His followers were to be instrumental in the establishment of republics not only in France but also in Brazil, Portugal and Czechoslovakia.

Since the end of the sixteenth century, the human mind has experienced a general and continuous revolution whose object has been the gradual and total recasting of the entire system of human knowledge, which is henceforth to be built upon its true foundations, observation and reasoning. This fundamental revolution, prepared by the successive works of all previous centuries, especially from the Arabs on, was definitively caused and immediately begun by the great new impetus simultaneously imparted to human reason by Descartes's ideas, Bacon's precepts and Galileo's discoveries. Since that memorable time, the human mind, in all the branches of its knowledge, has constantly tended more and more to liberate itself completely and for ever from the dominance previously exercised by theology and metaphysics, completely to subordinate imagination to observation; in a word, to constitute the definitive system of positive philosophy.

The different branches of human knowledge have not all participated at the same speed in this important renovation. They had to undergo it in turn, according to the degree of complexity and of mutual dependence of the phenomena they consider. Physiology, being of all the parts of natural philosophy the one which studies the most complicated and the least independent phenomena, necessarily had to remain longer than any other under the yoke of theological fictions and metaphysical abstractions.

If we study as a whole the phenomenon of the development of the human mind, whether by the rational method or by the empirical method, we discover beneath all the apparent irregularities a fundamental law to which its course is necessarily and invariably subject. This law consists in the proposition that man's intellectual system, considered in all its parts, has necessarily assumed in turn three distinct characters: a theological character, a metaphysical character, and lastly a positive or physical character. Thus man began by conceiving phenomena of all kinds as due to the direct and continuous influence of supernatural agents; he next considered them as produced by different abstract forces residing in matter, but distinct and heterogeneous; finally, he limited himself to considering them as subject to a certain number of invariable natural laws, which are nothing other than the general expression of relations observed in their development.

All those who have sufficient understanding of the state of the human mind in the different ages of civilization can easily verify the truth of this general fact. One very simple observation can guide us towards this confirmation, now that this revolution has been carried out for the major part of our ideas. The education of the individual, insofar as it is spontaneous, necessarily displays the same principal phases as does that of the species, and vice versa. And today any man in tune with his times will readily certify of himself that he has been by nature a theologian in his childhood, a metaphysician in his youth, and a physicist in his manhood.