The text of this first Philosophy of the Spirit is a manuscript that has come down to us in a fragmentary state, prepared by the author as base material for his classes in the autumn-winter semester of 1803/1804 and published for the first time in 1932, one hundred years after Hegel's death.
In this and other posthumous texts of the Hegel of Jena, questions of modern society are treated for the first time as central philosophical problems, such as the subject of technique, of human work and its dehumanization in industrial manufacturing, the analysis of autonomy of civil society and its conflictive relationship with the State, the systemic functioning of the economy and the global expansion of markets, problems that had been alien to the academic tradition of philosophy. This opens a new paradigm that will be taken up and expanded by Marx and the social and political philosophy of the 20th century.