The Hegel Archive and the Hegel Edition

The Hegel Archive was established in 1958 by Land Nordrhein-Westphalia as the workplace for the historical-critical edition of Hegel's works, originally commissioned by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Since 1968-69, when the Archive moved from Bonn to Bochum, it has been connected with the Ruhr University. The main task of the Archive is to provide all the requirements for the edition of Hegel's collective works and to secure the continuity of planning, methodological reflection and steady execution of the editorial enterprise. For that purpose the Archive has assembled a complete (according to the present state of our knowledge) collection of works published by Hegel, his manuscripts and transcripts of his lectures, many of them in the original but most, as working material, in photocopies. Besides this collection the Archive is steadily developing a specialized Hegel library which comprises all the literature which Hegel himself possessed or knew as well as the steadily rising tide of literature on Hegel. Beyond that the Hegel Archive aims at contributing to the coordination of Hegel research, which is becoming less and less easy to survey. This happens in the first place through the annual Hegel-Studien which provide a survey of newly published Hegel literature by means of reports, reviews of books on Hegel and short summaries of essays. Beside bibliographical reports the Hegel-Studien contain contributions to historical–philosophical and systematic-philosophical Hegel research. The Beihefte (supplements) of the Hegel-Studien publish longer documents, monographs and reports of conferences organized by the International Hegel Society. To guests from abroad – on the average ten to fifteen researchers from various continents – the Hegel Archive offers a place of work.