Venturing a re-interpretation of Hegel’s often disputed philosophy of history demands a plausible justification. In the introduction to his dedicated essay, Gilles Marmasse provides a compelling one: the claim that these controversial pages of Hegel’s thought remain largely misunderstood. In order to counter recurring commonplaces, the book proposes a meticulous reading of the most relevant among the philosopher’s texts on the topic: several paragraphs of the Philosophy of Right and of the three versions of the Encyclopedia; the manuscripts of the introductions of 1822–23 and 1830–31; the Vorlesungen edited by Karl Hegel (1840) and Johannes Hoffmeister (1955)—combining the Nachschriften of the five courses that Hegel gave in Berlin between 1822 and 1831—and the new critical edition of the lectures of 1822–23 that Marmasse co-translated into French in 2009 (Hegel 2009).
The first nine chapters of the book tackle the themes that are crucial to Hegel’s grounding of his philosophy of history: the task of philosophy qua speculation and the deployment of the Idea, the relation between reconciliation and Aufhebung, the activity of the Spirit as actual self-realization, the role of peoples, states and ‘great men’ in history, as well as those of progress and providence, the ‘cunning of reason’ and theodicy, and finally the end and goal of history.
A preliminary clarification concerns the theoretical territory defined by the philosophy of history. On the one hand, as Marmasse emphasizes, a philosophy of history does not simply coincide with history as it happens, nor does it correspond to history as it can be reconstructed by its protagonists or written by historians; its goal is rather to grasp how the Idea makes itself actual through the development of historical ages. Thus the philosophy of history ‘breaks with the real that it examines’ and produces new configurations of historical experiences by rearranging them in a speculative form. On the other hand, Marmasse proposes that the lectures on the philosophy of history be read as ‘an extended treatise on moral and political philosophy’, since they imply a manifestly normative understanding of history and a ‘powerful conceptualization of the current norms for human actions and political life’ (9). In spite of its normative assumptions, however, philosophy has no role to play in history except for contemplating and comprehending it. As a consequence, one of the main peculiar features of Hegel’s philosophy of history is precisely its retrospective nature which does not allow for predictions about the future. Accordingly, history is not magistra vitae and the philosophy of history has no chance to change the course of events since it always comes late.
Another essential point that the book has the merit to highlight is the ambivalent position that the philosophy of history occupies in the architecture of Hegel’s system. While history as such is part of objective spirit (it is actually its final section), the philosophy of history belongs to the realm of absolute spirit. By distinguishing between the historical field per se and the philosophical grasping of it, Marmasse is able to dissipate a number of contradictions traditionally ascribed to Hegel’s understanding of history and to challenge the portrait of his alleged cynical optimism.
On Marmasse’s reading, Hegel does not conceive history as the triumphant march of spirit towards freedom that would magically convert evil into good at the expense of peoples’ and individuals’ suffering. The finitude of historical reason, resulting from the finitude of objective spirit, explains why civilizations are fragile, imperfect and doomed to decay. Historical formations may be adequate to the Volksgeist but, precisely because of their historical nature, they still remain inadequate fully to express the fulfilment of reason. Indeed, the concrete forms of objective spirit—family, society and states—are intrinsically inhabited by plurality, rivalry and conflicts. Thus when Geist is incarnated in the spatio-temporal coordinates of objectivity, it is obliged to deal with such limits. However, world history is also located at the junction of objective and absolute spirit, and this justifies its philosophical import.
But how can philosophy account for the existence of evil in history? And what kind of judgement does the ‘tribunal of history’ pass on the world? Marmasse reverses the classical theodical interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of history by arguing that Hegel does not presume history to be just and rational, but rather seeks to reconcile injustices and irrationality from the standpoint of speculation. Hence the twofold character of Hegel’s world history, which is destined, as the title of the book sums up, to both misfortune (malheur)—famously the periods of happiness are merely ‘blank pages’ in history—and speculative reconciliation.
A further question arises about the function of reason on the ‘slaughter bench’ of history—an image to which Hegel’s take on historical matters has often been reduced: to what extent and how Hegel can state in the introduction to his lectures of 1830–31 that ‘reason rules the world’? For Marmasse, an accurate understanding of this issue demands careful distinctions. Reason is neither a given entity nor a transcendent and extra-historical instance, but rather a process that brings about the unity of different determinations (142). On the one hand, since according to Hegel peoples are the main protagonists of history, its rationality has to be measured on that scale: thus history can be considered rational when peoples act to accomplish their aims in a self-determined fashion. On the other hand, history is to be conceived as truly rational only insofar as philosophy grasps its content and provides a unifying account of it.
Nevertheless, as Marmasse remarks, the intervention of philosophical reason does not erase the contingency of historical events. The author digs into the notion of necessity in order to show the proximity between Hegel’s conception of internal necessity—as opposed to contingency qua external necessity—and Spinoza’s conception of freedom, as it is exposed in the first book of his Ethics, namely freedom as self-causation. As he sees it, ‘Hegelian history is not contingent since it is not the effect of external circumstances; and it is internally necessary as it makes of itself a self-determined unity’ (157). Yet Hegel’s philosophy of history cannot be labelled deterministic either, not only because for Hegel history is non-linear and discontinuous, but also because it is not so much governed by causal logic—whereby one term generates another—as by a logic of self-differentiation—whereby a term produces itself against another (53). Necessity thus refers to the self-determining mechanisms that operate in history through the manifestation of contingency. In this regard, Marmasse stresses that the inevitable persistence of contingency is responsible for history’s imperfection and for the presence of evil within it.
In light of the constitutive finitude that characterizes history as part of objective spirit, Marmasse confers a new meaning on Hegel’s emblematic notion of the ‘cunning of reason’. Instead of being shorthand for an instrumental and insensitive reason gaining its goals through the ruin of peoples and individuals, the ‘cunning of reason’ corresponds to the actualization of the Idea in the realm of finite exteriority (172). According to Hegel, both peoples and individuals should legitimately affirm their claims and passionately accomplish their respective aims, even though their historical accomplishments remain only partial and perishable. Therefore, the ‘cunning of reason’ must be understood as a result of this partiality and simultaneously as the necessary overcoming of it through the advancement of history. For Marmasse, it expresses the weakness and inadequacy of objectivity more than it proves the all-encompassing power of reason. The historical role played by ‘great men’ needs to be understood within the same framework: they act in the name of their own inclinations and personal interests, and at the same time they incarnate the unconscious aspirations of their peoples, being eventually both actors and instruments of history.
Chapters X to XIV illustrate how misfortune and reconciliation manifest themselves through the unfolding of concrete historical moments, moving from the Ancient Orient to the Greek world and from the ‘brutal and prosaic’ Roman empire to the Christian era and modern Enlightenment. Hegel admits that the aims of history are multiple and are as many as the peoples dominating different historical cycles. Yet, even though every people as a self-determining subject cultivates and pursues its own goal, namely the realization of ethical life, Hegel clearly conceives the supreme and ultimate aim—the shaping of a world that is adequate to the Zeitgeist—as being only realized by the Germanic people during the post-Lutheran age. As Marmasse maintains, however, Hegel’s over-cited argument about the ‘end of history’ does not imply the disappearance of history tout court, but the beginning of a self-grounded historical process, namely one in which the idea of history—rather than history as such—reaches its accomplishment (225).
Completing the fruitful hermeneutical effort to demystify Hegel’s philosophy of history, the book terminates by exploring its validity and contemporary relevance. Marmasse praises Hegel’s capacity to synthesize the thesis that reason rules the world, namely the normative assumption that world history is progressive, and the thesis that history is a theatre of injustices, namely the acknowledgement that its progress is finite and imperfect. While history appears to Hegel at the same time both rational and unjust, his philosophy of history is not intended to turn injustice into justice; instead it is supposed to re-conceptualize the meaning of historical experience as a whole. Accordingly, the purpose of Aufhebung does not consist in the erasure of evil, but rather amounts to the purely speculative restriction of evil to ‘its own sphere’ (377). Therefore, no reconciliation occurs outside the realm of thought.
Another valuable aspect of Hegel’s philosophy of history underlined by Marmasse is its universalizing and unifying scope. The very project of a world history represents an attempt to tie together what specialist historiographies tend to fragment and oppose. The author also enumerates several theoretical achievements that belong to Hegel’s conception of history. Amongst them are: the appreciation of the leading role of peoples, conceived as juridico-moral subjects, in making history; the celebration of modernity as the age that first acknowledged the infinite value of individuality; the recognition of the right to happiness as a legitimate ground for human actions; and the rejection of a linear understanding of progress (380). Indeed, Hegel opposes the notion of history as an empty and homogenous succession and portrays World History as Peoples’ History, where every people identifies with a self-determined totality. Yet he establishes a spiritual hierarchy in the relationship among peoples, whereby world peoples in turns dominate the globe insofar as their Volksgeist incarnates the Weltgeist.
Some of the most challenging criticisms that could be addressed to Hegel’s philosophy of history in that respect come from postcolonial studies, where the historicist narrative of Western modernity and its hierachical conception of historical development has been a crucial concern. To move beyond the traditional alternative between positivist evolutionism and cultural relativism, scholars such as P. Chatterjee and D. Chakrabarty have attempted to conceive of historical time as one and yet radically polyrhythmic, i.e., to conceive of synchrony within diachrony from a unitary perspective. In his 2000 book Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty tries to combine ‘analytical’ approaches that understand history as the universal expansion of capital with ‘hermeneutic’ readings that focus on peoples and cultures as life-worlds. In this framework, political modernity ceases to be the telos of history compared to which all non-European societies would simply be ‘figures of lack’ haunted by the ‘not yet’ fixed by Western temporalities, or destined to remain on the ‘threshold’ of history proper, as Hegel claimed with regard to Africa.
It is then pertinent to wonder whether and to what extent it is still possible to be Hegelian when it comes to the philosophy of history (387). Marmasse proposes a ‘thick’ definition of what such a task would entail. First, he suggests promoting synthetic approaches to history that do not renounce the principle of totalisation; secondly he pinpoints concrete paths to embrace, such as taking into account the victory of freedom against totalitarianism across the twentieth century and the ‘spectacular though laborious expansion of democracy’ that has occurred in the last decades (387). Leaving aside a balance of the historical achievements of the present, a theoretical objection might be raised at this point. Indeed, reactivating Hegel’s philosophy of history today would inevitably require that we isolate Hegelian principles from his factual statements, in order to be able to accept the former and reject the latter. Yet such an operation can hardly be unproblematic, and to some extent it may be even contrary to the very nature of Hegel’s philosophy. The spiritual hierarchy that Hegel established at the core of his conception of world history is part and parcel of his philosophy of history and cannot be detached from it as a mere side effect. Thus if it might be anachronistic to expect Hegel’s political stances and social judgements to be ahead of their time or to blame Hegel for simply being a man of his times, it may be equally anachronistic to transpose his philosophy of history to our present instead of measuring it against its own historical Aufhebung.
