Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel worked as a private tutor after studying at Tübingen, developing ideas about religion, social life, and freedom. In 1801 he began teaching at Jena and collaborated with Friedrich Schelling while increasingly defining his own position. The Phenomenology of Spirit, completed amid Napoleon's campaign and published in 1807, examined transformations of consciousness and the conditions of self-understanding.

Financial difficulty led Hegel to journalism at Bamberg and then to the headship of a school in Nuremberg from 1808. There he wrote the Science of Logic, published in parts between 1812 and 1816. Its treatment of concepts sought to show how apparently fixed categories reveal internal tensions and require development. The familiar formula thesis, antithesis, synthesis obscures the complexity of his method and should not be treated as a universal rule that he mechanically applied to every subject.

Hegel returned to university teaching at Heidelberg in 1816 and published the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in 1817. Appointment at Berlin in 1818 brought a prominent position and a growing audience. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, issued around 1820–1821, examined freedom through institutions including the family, civil society, and the state. Its relation to Prussian politics and its account of constitutional order have generated competing conservative and reformist interpretations. He lectured on history, religion, art, and earlier philosophy, seeking connections between individual thought and historically developed forms of life.

Hegel died in Berlin in 1831 during a cholera epidemic. Editors subsequently published lecture courses using his notes and students' records, making the precise status of posthumous texts a continuing scholarly concern. His followers divided into different schools, and Marx transformed parts of his historical and dialectical approach while rejecting its idealist framework. His career joined education and public teaching with an ambitious attempt to understand the development of thought and institutions as connected processes. Neither portrayals of him as merely a defender of the existing state nor summaries reducing his system to a three-step slogan adequately represent its tensions. His influence also extended through debates over how individual freedom depends on social relationships and institutions, rather than existing entirely apart from them.