  In his post-war preface to Hegel und der Staat, Rosenzweig reflects on his initial hopes that the book might serve to “dissolve the hard and limited Hegelian conception of the state … in its coming-to-be through the life of its thinker.” It is indeed the case that in situating Hegel’s mature views of the state within the trajectory of a lifetime of reflection about the relationship between the self and the world in time, these mature views seem to give way before the myriad political ideas and practical possibilities Hegel’s thought might generate.  Perhaps the greatest contribution Hegel und der Staat makes to its time, then, is the way it shows Hegel’s political thinking to be unexpectedly fruitful, just as Dilthey and Nohl had shown Hegel’s theological thought to be in the first decade of the 1900s. For it introduces to its readers a Hegel whose reflections on selfhood, politics, and history are remarkably diverse, and hence available for appropriation in remarkably diverse directions. It is for this reason Rosenzweig had hoped, before the outset of the First World War, that his presentation of Hegel might help “open up the prospect of a German future that would be—both inwardly and outwardly—more spacious,” that it might “play its small part in preparing, insofar as a book can”, the path upon which “the Bismarckian state, its breathing restricted both internally and externally, would expand itself into a free empire breathing the air of the world.” After the War, however, Rosenzweig could only mourn the fact that “a field of ruins marks the spot where the empire previously stood.”