Abstract

In the following article, I shall focus upon Franz Rosenzweig’s brilliant doctoral dissertation, Hegel und der Staat, and will show that this book, whose impact upon the scholarship of Hegel’s political philosophy was and remains considerable, embodies an understanding of political and historical life which departs quite significantly from Hegel’s own conception. I will also show that some of the ideas Rosenzweig ascribes to Hegel in Hegel und der Staat recur, almost word for word, in his later masterpiece of Jewish philosophy, The Star of Redemption; and I shall contend that this recurrence sheds light upon Rosenzweig’s later attitude toward history and politics and also, perhaps, upon the way in which he turned to religion.