Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Overview

Hegel did not write this book. He gave the lecture course five times in Berlin between 1822 and 1831, and it was assembled after his death from his own notes and from students’ transcripts by his editors, first Eduard Gans and then his son Karl. That matters. The text is clearer and more quotable than anything Hegel published, and it is also, in places, not exactly his.

It is about four hundred and sixty pages, and the proportions are strange. The introduction runs to around a hundred and contains the entire philosophical argument. The remaining three quarters are a survey of world history, oriental, Greek, Roman and Germanic, which exists to illustrate what the introduction has claimed.

Most readers should treat it as two books. The introduction is a major philosophical text and repays close work. The survey is nineteenth-century world history of variable quality, some of it perceptive, much of it dated, and parts of it indefensible.

Compared with the Phenomenology this is almost easy. The sentences are long but they are lectures, and Hegel is explaining himself to students who have not read his other work.

The argument

The premise. Hegel begins by dividing history-writing into three kinds. Original history is written by people who were there, like Thucydides. Reflective history is written later, at a distance. Philosophical history, which is his subject, asks what the whole thing amounts to, and it proceeds on one assumption: that reason governs the world, and therefore governs world history.

He knows this cannot be proved in advance. It is offered as a hypothesis to be justified by the survey, which makes the structure of the book circular in a way he acknowledges and does not think fatal.

The thesis. History is the process by which spirit becomes conscious of its own freedom. Freedom is not a given and not a natural condition; it is an achievement, and it has to be worked out in institutions, law, religion and art before anyone can be said to possess it. So the history of the world is the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and Hegel means the phrase literally: what changes over time is how many people are understood to be free, and what freedom is understood to be.

This produces his periodisation. In the ancient East, one is free, the despot, and even he is not free in any developed sense because his freedom is arbitrary. Among Greeks and Romans, some are free, which is why their societies rest on slavery and why their freedom is bound to a particular city rather than to being human. In what he calls the Germanic world, meaning Christian Europe after the Reformation, all are free in principle, because Christianity introduced the idea that every person has infinite worth, and the modern state exists to give that idea institutional form.

The mechanism. How does this happen, given that nobody is trying to bring it about? Hegel’s answer is the cunning of reason. Human beings act from passion, ambition and interest, never from a desire to advance world history. Great men, the world-historical individuals, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, pursue their own aims with ferocious single-mindedness and happen to be doing what the age requires. They do not know this. They are used, and they are generally discarded once they have served: murdered, exiled, or dead early. Reason works through the passions and lets them pay the cost.

The cost. Hegel does not disguise it. He calls history a slaughter-bench on which the happiness of peoples and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, and he states plainly that history is not the soil in which happiness grows and that its happy periods are blank pages. The justification offered is that the process produces freedom, and that this is worth what it costs. Whether that is an argument or an alibi is the permanent question about the book.

He is also explicit that this is a theodicy. The object is to reconcile us to the world by showing that what has happened was rational, and he says the wounds of spirit heal without leaving scars.

The survey. The three quarters that follow take the thesis through China, India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Christian Europe. Some of it is acute, particularly on the Greek city and on the Reformation. Much of it is a European reading the available travel literature. And some of it is worse than dated: Hegel places Africa outside history altogether, on the ground that it has no development to show, and the passage is racist in a way that is not a matter of period vocabulary but of the argument itself. It cannot be separated from the scheme, because the scheme requires a bottom rung.

How to read it

Read the introduction and stop there unless you have a reason to continue. It is a hundred pages and it is the whole philosophy.

Use Nisbet’s Cambridge translation of the introduction if you can. It works from a better manuscript than the old Sibree version, which is the one that is free online and the source of most familiar quotations.

Read it after the Phenomenology if possible, or at least knowing what that book claims. The lectures assume the earlier account of spirit and are a historical application of it.

Test the cunning of reason against a case you know. It is a genuinely interesting idea, that individual motives produce collective outcomes nobody intended, and it survives detachment from Hegel’s metaphysics; something very like it turns up in Adam Smith and in evolutionary explanation.

Do not skip the objectionable passages or treat them as a separable flaw. A philosophy of history that ranks peoples by their contribution to the development of freedom is going to rank peoples, and Hegel’s judgements about who is behind are the system doing what it was built to do.

The common misreading is the end of history, which is not really Hegel’s phrase and is not a claim that events stop. What he argues is that the principle of freedom has been reached in modern European institutions, so there is nothing further of that kind to discover. That is still an enormous claim, and it is the one to argue with.

Questions it raises

• Reason governs history is assumed at the start and demonstrated by the survey it organises. Is that a vicious circle?
• If world-historical individuals do not know what they are accomplishing, in what sense is history rational rather than merely retrospectively legible?
• Hegel calls history a slaughter-bench and says the result justifies it. Who is entitled to make that calculation, and on whose behalf?
• The consciousness of freedom is said to advance. Does the twentieth century fit into that scheme, and if not, does the scheme survive?
• The ranking of civilisations is not incidental to the argument. Can the structure of the theory be kept once its hierarchy is rejected?
• Marx kept the shape and changed the engine. Was the shape the good part or the problem?