Hegel's letter to Immanuel Niethammer, dated April 19, 1817, indicates that he consciously intended his lengthy and for the most part positive review to help effect a reconciliation with Jacobi, whom his scathing remarks in Faith and Knowledge (1802) had deeply estranged. Hegel writes,

Just a few months later, Hegel was instrumental in persuading the University of Heidelberg to grant Jacobi's close friend Jean Paul, the novelist, an honorary doctorate, and no doubt this new friendship between Hegel and Jean Paul also helped facilitate the rapprochement between Hegel and Jacobi. In any case, in a letter dated September 3, 1817, Jean Paul confirms Jacobi's impression of a convergence, writing, “Hegel has come much closer to you, except for just one point concerning the will.”

The reviewer is pleased that a new volume of Jacobi's collected works has appeared so soon after the last, and wishes both that noble elder and his readers all the best for the uninterrupted continuation of their publication. This third volume contains four writings which, in the words of the preface, “to a certain extent originated simultaneously and are but divergent parts of a single whole that recapitulates itself differently in each of them.” They are: (1) Jacobi's Letter to Fichte, first published in 1799; (2) an essay which first appeared in Reinhold's Contributions (no. 31, 1801), with the title On Critical Philosophy's Attempt to Bring Reason to Understanding and to Transform Philosophy as Such; (3) On a Prophecy by Lichtenberg, first printed in 1801; and (4) the text On Divine Things and their Revelation, with a foreword written for this new edition. An interesting appendix of twenty-three letters to Johann Müller, Georg Forster, Herder, Kant (among them one from Kant to Jacobi), Privy Councillor Schlosser, J. G. Jacobi, and several unnamed recipients concludes the volume.

[SPINOZA]

One might have wished that in the order of publication of these collected works Jacobi's earlier Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza5 had preceded the treatises contained in the present volume, for these Letters respond to an historical interest that is older and prior to the forms of philosophy dealt with by these treatises, namely the metaphysics of Leibniz and Wolff, which at the time of the Letters was at its last breath.

This work brings together, for the first time in English translation, Hegel's journal publications from his years in Heidelberg (1816–18), writings which have been previously either untranslated or only partially translated into English. The two years Hegel taught at the University of Heidelberg mark an unusually important transition in his life and thought. Following the closing of the University of Jena in the wake of Napoleon's famous victory at the Battle of Jena, Hegel was unable to find a university teaching position. After a decade in which he worked briefly as a newspaper editor and then as a gymnasium rector, Hegel returned to a university teaching position as Professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg in 1816. During his two years at Heidelberg, before he left to take up his final academic position in Berlin, Hegel brought to fruition a number of projects that characterize the mature phase of his work: he published the first version of his mature philosophical system, the Encyclopedia; served as editor of a journal, the Heidelberger Jahrbücher der Literatur (Heidelberg Yearbooks), which published two important contributions of his own; and began to give the first public lectures in which his developed social and political philosophy was on display.

The move to Heidelberg marked not only an important milestone for Hegel personally, but also came – as Hegel himself articulated it in this period – during a crucial generational shift in the larger political and philosophical climate in Germany and Europe. Hegel's generation, which had witnessed the beginning of the French Revolution twenty-five years before, had seen in the intervening years the swift overthrow of old philosophical systems as well as political upheavals stemming from Napoleon's rise and fall.

[INTRODUCTION]

The task that was begun two and a half years ago – of introducing a representative constitution and thereby bringing to completion a German monarchy that has arisen in our time – awakened from its beginning such a universal interest in the German public that nothing could be more agreeable to it than the publication of the Proceedings of the Württemberg Estates Assembly. In place of the hopes which accompanied the beginning and the progress of this effort, there must appear at the end a result and the judgment of it. The thirty-three volumes with which this review is concerned of course do not yet contain the completion of the main goal, but they do form an historical whole. For, on the one hand, they present the progress up to the death of the king who founded the monarchy and who began the second step – the inner, free structuring of that monarchy – and the characteristic development of this event in its principal features falls within his reign. On the other hand, the work of the Estates appears to have been brought to completion, since a representative committee is finished with its draft of a constitution, which likewise has appeared in print.

Of course, these Proceedings present only one side of the efforts of that endeavor: the public efforts, insofar as they enter into the Estates Assembly.