What you need to know about Hegel

Hegel’s conceptualized history in a way that was followed by a set of influential theories that took historical change to be teleological, moving ever closer to a goal, not in repetitive circles or by chance (fortuna).

In the early 1800s the goal that theorists believed to be in mankind’s future seemed positive, led by the positive expectations from the English, French and American revolutions. And thus, significant politics was identified with ideas that explained where history was going and  significant political action moved society in that direction. (Later pessimism set in.)

Hegel’s version (there were many) was influenced by Kant’s idealism. Reason was the dynamic. He suggested history was the fulfillment of ideals. History was slow, sometimes full of conflict and reversals and the direction unrecognized by all. But eventually it led to the realization of an ideal, in Hegel’s case, freedom. The lack of knowledge of the goal by the actors meant that Reason operated without conscious intention. It was Hegel’s version of the ‘hidden hand’. He called it the ‘cunning of reason’. He is famous for the saying that “the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk” – in other words one knows the true significance of a clash only after it has happened.

In other words, people ‘s actions, political movements, even war-like conflicts were best described as working (whether they knew it or not) towards freedom. Historical crises – like the French Revolution -  were clashes that, through the working of the Geist (spirit) embedded in their action, that would, at whatever cost, work towards freedom.

The ideal realization of freedom he thought history was producing in his time was the State which realized people’s freedom through sovereignty, law and authority. He says “In a Constitution the main feature of interest is the self-development of the rational, that is, the political condition of a people; the setting free of the successive elements of the Idea: so that the several powers in the State manifest themselves as separate, - attain their appropriate and special perfection, - and yet in this independent condition, work together for one object, and are held together by it - i.e., form an organic whole. The State is thus the embodiment of rational freedom, realizing and recognizing itself in an objective form.”

Further, he thought the genius of the Germanic people (Volk), in its leadership in developing Protestantism, German art and philosophy, produced the ideal form of freedom, most closely realized in the Prussian state. It was, he thought, a new ideal form of monarchy.

He also saw certain leaders, he called world-historical-persons, as producing the change that moved the state to freedom, even if they didn’t know what they were doing, but were seeking their own power in a new way. These world-historical-persons even if they didn’t understand what they were doing, created a new world in which freedom was realized more than before. Caesar was one, for creating the Roman Empire. Napoleon was another of these world historical figures for his creation of the modern state.