History, for Hegel, is the history of the ‘spirit’. It is the history which the spirit itself creates and in which the spirit takes on an ‘objective’ shape in the world. The objectivity of what Hegel calls ‘objective spirit’ is realized in the form of world history. The term ‘world history’ refers less to the history of the whole world, and more to the historical sequence of ‘worlds’, or epochs. World and history thus have an asymmetrical relationship in the Hegelian understanding of ‘world history’: it is one history, which divides everything on earth into many worlds, into local and temporally limited world cultures. What makes it one history—what makes it unified—is the unitary concept of the spirit. The contributions brought together in this special issue discuss Hegel’s theory of world history, taking different approaches to the question of the relationship between the incomplete and the completed, between ‘actuality’ as a rational state and ‘existence’ as a reality that lacks rationality. In all texts, Hegel’s method of developing a philosophy of history represents a central problem.

Hegel’s ‘science of right’ is a philosophical account of spirit’s ‘world’. Accordingly, in this essay, I propose to take it as the model of what I call a ‘political cosmology’. In Hegel’s dialectic-speculative philosophy, cosmology becomes a practical, worldly science. It becomes the account of the ways in which spirit immanently constructs, produces and comes to know its own world and itself as the actuality of the world.

This paper answers the question of how, according to Hegel, we can do philosophy of right. The first part of the paper deals with a critical dimension of Hegel’s understanding of the method of the philosophy of right. In the second part, it is shown that in the philosophy of right we consciously look at the present as forming a comprehensive context, as something that is resistant to mere thought and as something that is temporal. According to Hegel, what we consider in this way is concrete.

The final pages of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia announce a particularly fraught transition. Hegel is describing a move from the concrete world of social and political institutions to the sublimated spheres of art, religion and philosophy—the transition from ‘objective’ to ‘absolute’ spirit. This transition is intricate, partly because, like all transitions, it works in both directions—in this case, from politics to culture and back again. Transition is always difficult to grasp in Hegel, not least because it takes such a variety of appearances: as an inexorable process, as an unexpected leap, or as an invisible movement that seems to take place behind our backs at moments of greatest stalemate. But this particular transition is especially challenging—not simply because it is so unprepared but also because it complicates the idea of the absolute as consummation of the encyclopaedic system. Hegel clearly explains why absolute spirit requires objective spirit. Art, religion and philosophy all depend on a world of pre-existing social practices from which they must nonetheless wrest a special kind of independence. But why the reverse? Why does objective spirit need to surpass itself in forms of spirit that overreach and may even, as we will argue, undermine it? What is the insufficiency in politics that requires the supplement of cultural practices that will destabilise it? Conversely, what is the specific autonomy that absolute spirit requires for its absolution, and what are the political stakes and risks of this autonomy?