Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a German philosopher whose life spanned the last third of the eighteenth and the first third of the nineteenth centuries. For Western Europe this was a period of great commercial expansion, combined, especially in England, with industrial revolution. Politically, European history at this time was dominated by the French Revolution of 1789, and hence also by the growth and development of the modern state and its eventual transition into the liberal democratic state of today. Hegel was greatly interested in the significance of the revolution for the German states and especially for Prussia where, at the end of his life, he taught philosophy at the University of Berlin.