Famous as it is, Hegel’s philosophy of history is nowadays mostly seen as itself having only “historical importance.” Few doubt its influence (for good or ill), but it seems that nobody really believes it. In particular, the “progressivism” it supposedly espouses (as a version of what later came to be derisively termed the “Whig” interpretation of history) and its “teleological” approach to history finds few, if any, defenders in the faculties of philosophy and even fewer in the faculties of history.1 Moreover, there has always been more than a deep suspicion among practicing historians that Hegel’s philosophy of history occurs at such a high altitude that it simply has to be indifferent to the facts, so that it is in effect a kind of polish that you can spray onto any account of the real facts of history without having to take any of them into real consideration. That is also behind much of the suspicion that it is really just an insupportable “a priori” theory of history. For other scholars who work in the post-structuralist idiom, although Hegel’s philosophy of history may be one of the great stories of essentialism about self-identity, nonetheless, as such a story, it can be of interest only as a cautionary tale about how easy it is to forget that everything is not only contingent but also that forgetfulness of this contingency goes hand in hand with repression and oppression. Hegel’s dismissive accounts of non-European civilizations do not exactly help his case in that regard.
However, one part of Hegel’s philosophy of history still has some currency, namely, the idea that he proposes a decisive break between the ancients and the moderns, and that “modernity” itself represents some basic fundamental break in human time. This thesis is, of course, not specific to Hegel, and others claim to find a similar view in Hobbes, Machiavelli, Descartes, Tocqueville, and so on. Perhaps at best, in Hegel’s treatment something like the view that “modernity” represents some basic, nonreversible turn in human self-understanding nonetheless receives its most explicit formulation. Those who hold some version of this view of Hegel’s thesis about “modernity” need not (and often do not) accept his other views about, for example, the necessity he supposedly finds in history.
The reception of Hegel’s philosophy of history has also been plagued with a set of widespread and lazy interpretations. The laziest of these relies on the long-since discredited idea that his entire philosophy rests on some kind of movement of thesis-antithesis-synthesis and that history is just such a movement. Exactly what is gained by saying that Persia is the thesis, Greece is the antithesis, and Rome is the synthesis (or that Greece is the thesis, Rome is the antithesis, and Germany is the synthesis) has never been made clear, and the fact that Hegel did not say that means that there is little to be gained by attempting to clear it up.
An almost equally lazy reading takes Hegel to think of history as having a goal (freedom, realization of spirit, etc.), and that all moments of history have until around 1807 failed to reach that goal, however much they may have contributed little pieces to the puzzle about how to realize it, and, so the story goes, the goal has now been reached. This makes the philosophy easy to teach (take a period in history, show it failed to reach its goal by virtue of not being modern European, and, voila, one supposedly has Hegel’s theory in hand), and it makes it easy to understand (history is just like any other goal-oriented activity in that it sometimes reaches its goal only through fits and starts). Such a view informed the recent rather vacuous debates about the “end” of history. Even the more sophisticated versions that go beyond this lazy interpretation—the ones that rely on metaphors such as the acorn developing into an oak according to an internal plan—suffer the same flaw. However easy they are to understand and to teach, they ultimately make Hegel’s views both implausible in the extreme and empirically vacuous, however illustrative they might be said to be about the worldviews held by people of his generation.
There has also been a tendency, completely understandable and much more sophisticated, to treat Hegel’s philosophy of history as if he thought history was a single, unitary “thing” or “development.” Thus, people have looked to the rest of his system to get an idea about how this one “thing” developed teleologically, and the “acorn-oak” metaphor has suggested itself quite naturally as the best way to capture that sense. That interpretation, while lending itself to some very sophisticated interpretations of the rest of his system, is, however, false to what Hegel is seeking in his philosophy of history.2 It rests ultimately on a flawed understanding of Hegel’s Logic.
Is there anything to Hegel’s philosophy of history other than its “historical” interest? I shall argue that there is, and it has to do with what Hegel means by saying that it is “freedom” taken as “infinite”—a statement which on its surface is anything but clear—and that this view follows from Hegel’s social conception of subjectivity. Hegel’s social and historical view of the nature of subjectivity, when properly articulated, shows (according to Hegel) that there is indeed an “infinite” end at work in history—that of securing justice—which in modern times has transformed itself into a concern with justice as freedom. Freedom was not the original goal of history, but it has become the principle of modern life.3 This at first looks like it clashes with the way Hegel presents his story, namely, of how the long course of history is mostly a story of unjustified domination disguised under various cloaks of legitimacy and how the use of power to achieve various ends usually have little to do with justice.4 However, behind that story of power and domination is a concern for justice, which in its most general sense involves an abstract conception of the proper, good ordering among people in a collective endeavor, whether that order be interpreted as conforming to a cosmic order that itself constitutes a set of ethical principles or a sense of playing by a set of rules that are themselves fair.5 “Justice” itself makes rare appearances in Hegel’s telling of world history, and, for the most part, history has not been a showplace of justice.6 This does not mean that the struggle over recognition and justice is not the story behind the story.
Most crucially for Hegel, the philosophical comprehension of history is a comprehension of how historically the metaphysics of subjectivity itself—and not merely our conception of the metaphysics of subjectivity—has changed.7 This, as with the struggle over justice itself, has to do with the nature of the “infinite ends” of subjectivity at different points in history. Because of this, our “agency” actually changes its shape over time. (I will also stick, for the most part, to Hegel’s terms, “subject” and “subjectivity,” rather than use “agency” and “person.”8)
As these claims are phrased here, none of those statements are very clear at all, and on their surface, some of them even seem preposterous. Whatever clarity or plausibility is possible for them requires a more careful parsing of Hegel’s own views.
However, so I shall also argue, there are also some crucial flaws in Hegel’s own view of the historical development of modern life when we look at them from within the terms of Hegel’s own views about subjectivity and history, and those flaws affect his own understanding of how necessity in history works. This does not mean that Hegel’s views cannot, on its own terms, be reshaped and reworked. It does mean that they cannot stand on their own merits without such reworking.
My aim here is not primarily a study of how Hegel changed his mind over the years he lectured on the topic. That has already been done.9 Nor is it here concerned with his relations to the other German idealist philosophies of history. That too has been admirably done.10 Nor is it overtly concerned with how Hegel’s philosophy of history connects with what is probably its most famous offshoot, Marx’s theory of history. That is another book in itself. Here my interest has first of all to do with how Hegel’s thought measures up to the standards he set for it and whether it succeeds on its own terms, not in terms we might bring to it from the outside. From that point of view, it is, as it were, a Hegelian commentary on Hegel’s work. Second, it also has to do whether those standards, especially when seen in light of other ways of approaching the material, can be seen to have a basis in themselves.
As Hegel himself envisaged what he needed to say about this topic, he thought that it should start from considerations about the nature of intelligibility itself. His answer to that was his Science of Logic. After the Logic, which concludes with a conception of the intelligibility of subjectivity itself, Hegel took his system necessarily to move on to a more detailed condition of the intelligibility of nature and then of subjectivity as embedded in nature and then as gradually distinguishing itself from other entities in nature, only to come to an end when it finally comprehends its own nature. (These subjects of these latter conceptions constitute the other two volumes of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, the overall sketch of his system for use in his lectures in which he filled in the crucial details and elaborated on the all-too-abstractly presented arguments in those volumes.)
Hegel’s project is not that of an investigation of something like “how we humans must think,” at least in the sense of delineating some species-specific grasp of things that may or may not be as things are from the perspective of another species, nor is it a purely conceptual investigation indifferent to what the world is really like. It is, rather, a direct descendent of Kant’s Critiques and, more especially, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre: Fichte’s “science of science” becomes in Hegel’s Science of Logic a general account of explanatory adequacy, an account of accounts. It is more like what A. W. Moore and Robert Pippin have recently called “making sense of things” (as metaphysics) and “making sense of making sense” (as logic) taken together.11
However, as he also noted of his system, you can begin anywhere within it, and that is what I shall do here—starting in the middle, going back to the beginning, and then jumping to where Hegel himself begins his account of history: the “East.” Readers, on the other hand, are invited to start where they would like, perhaps jumping ahead to the sections where Hegel’s narrative of history begins or to the earlier section on what a history of modernity would look like.