These struggles for Hegel do not play themselves out primarily as individual journeys into the self, as they did for Rousseau, but politically. The great conflict of his day was the French Revolution, and its enshrining of the Rights of Man. The young Hegel witnessed Napoleon riding through his university town after the Battle of Jena in 1806 and saw in that act the incipient universalization of recognition in the form of the principles of the French Revolution. This is the sense in which Hegel believed that history had come to an end: it culminated in the idea of universal recognition;
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