Introduction: Reason in History

There are three ways of writing history: original history, reflective history, and philosophical history.

Original history is written by those who lived through what they describe — Herodotus, Thucydides, Caesar in his Commentaries. They write of deeds and events they saw themselves, and the spirit of the writer is the spirit of the events. Reflective history stands at a distance; it surveys a whole age or people, or draws moral lessons from history, or writes the history of art, of law, of religion. Of moral lessons, one may say this: what experience and history teach is that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each age has such particular circumstances, is such an individual situation, that it must and can decide only from within itself.

Philosophical history is the thoughtful consideration of history. The only thought which philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of history is the simple thought of reason: that reason rules the world, and that world history has therefore been a rational process.

This is the central claim of the lectures. Hegel says it is proved in philosophy itself; in history it is a presupposition, to be shown in the course of events.

Anaxagoras was the first to say that nous, understanding or reason, governs the world. Religion says that a providence rules the world. But the faith in providence must not remain general; we must try to know the ways of providence, its means and its manifestations in history. The time has come at last to comprehend this rich product of creative reason, which is world history. Our consideration is in this respect a theodicy, a justification of God, which Leibniz attempted metaphysically in his own way — so that the evil in the world may be comprehended, and the thinking spirit reconciled with it.

The Nature of Spirit: Freedom

The substance of spirit is freedom. As the essence of matter is gravity, so the essence of spirit is freedom. World history is nothing but the progress of the consciousness of freedom — a progress which we have to know in its necessity.

The Orientals do not yet know that spirit, or man as such, is in itself free. Because they do not know it, they are not free. They know only that one is free; but for this very reason such freedom is mere caprice, savagery, dull passion — or a mildness of passion which is itself only an accident of nature. This one is therefore only a despot, not a free man. The consciousness of freedom first arose among the Greeks, and they were therefore free; but they, like the Romans, knew only that some are free, not man as such. Plato and Aristotle did not know this; therefore the Greeks had slaves, and their whole life and the existence of their splendid freedom was bound up with slavery. The Germanic nations, through Christianity, were the first to come to the consciousness that man as man is free, that the freedom of spirit constitutes its very essence.

The East knew, and to this day knows, only that one is free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the Germanic world knows that all are free.

This threefold scheme — one, some, all — structures the whole book. Hegel adds that the principle was first grasped in religion; to bring it into the world, into political institutions, was a long and difficult labour, which is history itself.

The Means: Passion

The first glance at history convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents, and give the impression that these needs, passions and interests are the sole springs of action. When we see this display of passions, and the consequences of their violence, and the unreason which is associated not only with them but even, and especially, with good intentions and righteous aims; when we see the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created — we can scarcely avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption. And we may then regard history as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed — and the question involuntarily arises: to what end, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered?

The image of history as a "slaughter-bench" (Schlachtbank) is one of the darkest in Hegel. His answer is not that the suffering is unreal, but that through it freedom is realised.

We assert, then, that nothing has been accomplished without an interest on the part of those who brought it about; and if we call an interest a passion — when the whole individuality, setting aside all other interests and aims, throws itself into one object with every fibre of its will — we must say that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

The universal idea does not enter into opposition and struggle; it does not expose itself to danger. It remains in the background, untouched and unharmed, and sends forth the particular passions to fight and wear themselves out in its stead. This may be called the cunning of reason: that it lets the passions work for it, and that what develops its existence through them pays the penalty and suffers the loss. The particular is for the most part too trifling compared with the universal; individuals are sacrificed and abandoned. The idea pays the tribute of existence and transience not out of itself, but out of the passions of individuals.

World history is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it; for they are periods of harmony, when the opposition is missing.

World-Historical Individuals

There are individuals whose own particular aims contain the substantial will of the world-spirit: Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon. They are heroes, because they have drawn their aims and their vocation not from the calm, ordered course of things sanctioned by the existing system, but from a source whose content is hidden and has not yet attained to present existence — from the inner spirit, still beneath the surface, which knocks against the outer world as against a shell and bursts it. They are men of insight: they know what the time requires, what is ripe for development. Others gather round their banner, for they express what the age is ready for.

Their fate is not a happy one. They do not attain calm enjoyment; their whole life is labour and trouble. When their aim is reached, they fall off like empty husks from the kernel. Alexander died young; Caesar was murdered; Napoleon was exiled to St Helena.

A world-historical individual is not so unwise as to indulge a variety of wishes. He is devoted to one aim, regardless of everything else. Such men may treat other great, even sacred interests inconsiderately — conduct which is indeed open to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower, crush to pieces many an object in its path.

Hegel insists that this is not a moral approval of conquerors; it is a description of how history has in fact moved.

There is a well-known saying that no man is a hero to his valet. I have added that this is not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet. He takes off the hero's boots, helps him to bed, knows that he likes champagne. Historical personages, waited on by such psychological valets in historical writing, come off badly.

The State

The individual has his true existence only in the state, in the life of a people. The state is the realisation of freedom — the moral whole, in which the individual has and enjoys his freedom, but only as knowing, believing and willing the universal. The state is the divine idea as it exists on earth.

This sentence has often been quoted against Hegel as a deification of the state. In context he means the rational, constitutional community in which freedom is realised in law — not any existing government.

Each people has its own spirit — its religion, constitution, morality, law, customs, science, art and technical skill all bear its stamp. The spirit of a people is a particular stage in the development of the world-spirit. Each people, at its height, carries the world-spirit forward for a time; then it declines, and the torch passes to another.

The Geographical Basis

History has a natural setting. Hegel begins with geography: the cold and the hot zones are not the theatre of world history; its true theatre is the temperate zone, and more exactly its northern part. He distinguishes the high plateaus, the river valleys, and the coastlands; the sea, which unites rather than divides, and which calls men to courage and enterprise.

In this section Hegel speaks of the peoples of Africa with contempt, declaring Africa "no historical part of the world." These pages, based on travellers' tales and the prejudices of the time, are among the most notorious he wrote; they are false in fact and are rejected by modern scholarship. This retelling does not repeat them.

America, Hegel says, is the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of world history shall reveal itself — perhaps in a contest between North and South America. It is a land of longing for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe. But as a land of the future, it does not concern us here; for in history we have to do with what has been and what is.

World history travels from East to West; for Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia the beginning. The East is where the outward, physical sun rises, and sets in the West; but in the West rises the inner sun of self-consciousness, which spreads a higher light.