This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Hegel's career did not move in a straight line toward the influence he eventually held. He finished the Phenomenology of Spirit in Jena in 1806 as Napoleon's army approached the city, reportedly mailing the last pages to his publisher the night before the battle, and when the university itself closed in the war's aftermath he was left for a period without a teaching post at all, working as a newspaper editor and then as headmaster of a Nuremberg gymnasium, a secondary school, rather than as a university philosopher.
Only after professorships at Heidelberg and then, from 1818, Berlin did Hegel arrive at the institutional standing later readers associate with his name, and it was from Berlin that he published the Philosophy of Right in 1820, extending the dialectical method of the Phenomenology to political life and arguing that the modern constitutional state, not the individual conscience alone, is where human freedom becomes fully actual and rational, since only a properly organized state can reconcile individual right with the shared ethical life of family and civil society.
By the time of his death from cholera in 1831, Hegel had gone from a philosopher without a university position to the dominant, state sanctioned voice of Prussian academic philosophy, a rise his own dialectic of stages arriving at fuller self understanding could almost be read as describing.