It was almost twenty years since the Frederick William University
of Berlin had opened its doors. By 1830 Humboldt's creation
had attracted many of Germany's best minds: legal scholar Karl
von Savigny; historian Leopold von Ranke; and the great master of
philosophy and current rector of the university, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel. On this June day hundreds of students, professors,
government officials, and well-wishers crowded into the Great
Aula to hear Hegel present a Latin oration in commemoration of
the tricentennial of the Augsburg Confession. Hegel had every rea-
son to be confident. He had received the call to Berlin; his great
works had appeared; admiring students and professorial disciples
had flocked to his side. Prussia, his homeland for the past thirteen
years, was a beacon illuminating the progressive path of the divine
spirit. So Hegel proclaimed confidently that contemporary Protes-
tant culture, with its view of God as self-conscious reason, and the
modern Prussian state, which affirmed the freedom of man as a
self-conscious rational being, together would allow history to
progress peacefully without "unrest" or "rebellion." ¹ There was no
legitimate reason, he declared, for opposing the existing order.

As these remarks indicate, throughout the 1820s Hegel had
drifted toward an accommodationist viewpoint. Increasingly he
saw what was "real" in Prussia, in other words, as "rational." Even

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