Historians have long disregarded Hegel as a rigidly aprioristic thinker. However, they have not arrived at this view based on familiarity with his works. Usually, early on in their education, historians are taught that teleology is anathema to their craft, and that Hegel is an exemplar of this approach. As a result, they are routinely advised that his writings can safely be ignored. Nonetheless, ironically, much in Hegel’s narrative continues to be influential. He emphasized a number of seismic shifts that shaped the world over millennia—for instance, the passage from ancient paganism to modern Christianity, and from the Reformation to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. These events, and their pivotal role, still dominate historiography. Yet despite the staying-power of much of this account, its author is still discounted among professional historians.

The common view is that Hegel was somehow hostile to contingency, and so incapable of understanding change. Sally Sedgwick’s rich and multi-dimensional book sets about correcting this assumption. Hegel acknowledged in the Encyclopaedia Logic that ‘certainly there is much that is contingent in what happens to us’ (EL: §147).Footnote ¹ Sedgwick’s goal is to reconcile this facet of Hegel’s thought with the operation of freedom and necessity in his work. In pursuing this task, she challenges many aspects of the orthodox view. The standpoint she queries gained momentum through the nineteenth century, and by the 1960s it had matured into settled dogma.

A distillation of the standard perspective can be found in the introduction to Jacob Burckhardt’s Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, originally delivered as lectures at the University of Basel. There we are told that Hegel advanced a theory of ‘perfectibility’, which Burckhardt construed as an account of inevitable progress. According to Burckhardt, summarizing Hegel, history ‘must’ be rational. This meant that the historical process necessarily took the form of ‘the rational, inevitable march of the world spirit’ (Reference Burckhardt and Hottinger1979: 33). In the luminous central chapters of Time and History, Sedgwick distinguishes Hegel’s position from the fatalism of the ancients and the alienating providentialism of orthodox Christianity (TH: esp. Chapter 4).

Burckhardt’s interpretation drew on older assumptions about the meaning of necessity and rationality in Hegel—disseminated by Friedrich Schelling, the Young Hegelians and Søren Kierkegaard. The basic presupposition was that Hegel thought that reason governed the world. In some sense, of course, Hegel did believe this. After all, in his 1830–31 introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, he wrote that the philosopher of history was armed with one idea—the ‘thought’ (Gedanke) that ‘reason rules [beherscht] the world’ (LPWH: 79/VM: 140). However, everything hangs on what is meant by reason and how it functions. Sedgwick’s book does much to explain how Hegel put such notions to use.

Following in Sedgwick’s footsteps, we need to note that Hegel was fiercely critical of his own concepts. While he recognized the potency of the idea that reason ruled the world, he was adamant that, for the historian, this was no more than an assumption: ‘From the point of view of history as such, this conviction and insight is a presupposition’ (LPWH: 79/VM: 140). That is, it is a perspective brought by the philosopher of history to the study of past events. For their part, however, historians should proceed historically. Hegel could not have been clearer in his injunction: ‘History’, he wrote, ‘must be taken as it is; we must proceed in a historical, empirical fashion’ (LPWH: 81/VM: 142). Preconceptions could play no role in this enterprise. The watchword of the historian was accuracy. Hegel summed up: ‘we must apprehend the historical accurately’ (LPWH: 81/VM: 142).

So, Hegel’s view was that the job of historians was basically to collect data, while the philosopher sifted the material for its meaning. The situation, however, was a little more complicated since Hegel believed that philosophers should proceeded historically themselves, even as they sought to discover philosophical truths. As he memorably put it in the introduction to his 1825–26 Lectures on the History of Philosophy, ‘The study of the history of philosophy is the study of philosophy itself’ (LHP: 55).Footnote ² His approach, one might say, was philosophico-historical. To a certain extent this method was pioneered in the Phenomenology of Spirit, at least in so far as that work included an historical dimension: in a basic sense it traced developments across time. However, the Phenomenology was not concerned with the minutiae of historical sequencing, which Hegel termed the ‘external’ progress of events. Its emphasis, instead, was on ‘logical’ development—on how one logical scheme (or body of thought) yielded to another.

It was in his teaching that Hegel’s work was more conventionally historical. In each of his great lecture courses delivered in Berlin through the 1820s—in his aesthetics, his philosophy of religion, his history of philosophy and his philosophy of history—Hegel traced a discrete trajectory. His treatment covered the passage from the ‘ancient’ to the ‘modern’ world. Historical facts very much mattered here, although Hegel remained dubious about narrow historicism as a practice. Criticizing earlier philosophies of history—exemplified by Jacob Brucker, Heinrich Ritter and Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann—Hegel insisted that ‘One [must] stick with the strictest precision, with historical precision’ (LHP: 186). In general terms he stated that it is ‘justifiable to require that a history of any topic whatsoever recount the facts without partiality, without seeking to validate some particular interest and aim’ (LHP: 186, cf. 246).

The philosopher’s job, then, was in part historical, and this included the duty to reconstruct the past faithfully. From this vantagepoint, on a simple level, ‘History takes the form of considering what has transpired in a sequence of events and deeds’ (LHP: 238). As we have seen, activity of the kind had to be rigorous and dispassionate. But this was just a precondition for a deeper philosophical pursuit. Standing still immersed in a rigidly historical understanding had obvious limitations. For one, it treated the past as a matter of indifference—as, in effect, ‘dead’. Hegel noted that this approach had lately become ‘widespread’ (LHP: 62). Purely historical inquiry was to be found across the human sciences, not least in various fields at the University of Berlin, which Hegel had joined in 1818. This was the age of ‘historicizing’ conceptions of knowledge, which impacted on jurisprudence, classics, theology and philology.Footnote ³ But, as Hegel complained, gains in information often came with a loss of perspective.

By comparison, properly philosophical history, of the kind that Hegel sought to practice, was concerned with the living past. This involved historical study (Historie), but it resulted in more than mere history. It addressed what had happened (das Geschehene), and so included history in the sense of past occurrences (Geschichte) (LHP: 62).Footnote ⁴ However, what had happened was also part of the ongoing present and so became a concern of philosophy. Philosophy sought to recover the truth from the accumulated past by steeping itself in the dynamics of its transmission. This was a temporally grounded task that sought to transcend the contingencies of time. As the preface to the Philosophy of Right put it, philosophy aims to discover ‘in the semblance of the temporal and transient the substance that is immanent and the eternal which is present’ (EPR: 20; cf. TH: 167). For Hegel, truth could only be collected from an inherited past which had unfolded to constitute the present. Securing valid insights from the flow of experience implied an ability to reason about the meaning of what had happened. We are, as Heidegger put it, ‘thrown’ into the flux of existence (Reference Heidegger, Macquarie and Robinson1962: 174). For Hegel, unlike Heidegger, reason promised the possibility of finding our feet in the maelstrom.

That involved asking why things had become the way they were, a theme that was as demanding as it was inescapable. Hegel observed in the Encyclopaedia Logic that ‘When it is said of something that it is necessary, what we ask in the first place is: “Why”’ (EL: §147). When asked about succession in the physical universe, this was of course a question about ‘efficient’ or ‘mechanical’ causation. On the other hand, when asked about the course of human affairs, it was a question about the rationality of history. Since this addressed the purpose of historical endeavour, it was implicated in problems around ‘teleological’ or ‘final’ causation. In the past, this issue had been broached in the context of religion, but it became the leading focus of philosophical inquiry, which Hegel contended was better equipped to deliver a scrupulous account.

Hegel engaged the issue against the background of Kantian thought. Kant believed that Hume had dismantled metaphysics by challenging the pretentions of rationality. Scepticism had thus unseated appeals to dogmatism. However, as Kant saw it, Hume had in the process reduced the laws of nature to happenstance, stabilized by the operation of custom. This was to deny reason any significant role in philosophy, in effect ‘censoring’ rather than ‘criticizing’ its pretentions (Reference Kant, Guyer and Wood1998: A760/B788–A761/B789). For his part, Kant defended salvaging a regulative use for reason. He credited our rational faculty with a constructive role in knowledge formation. Reason strove to extend the bounds of understanding, potentially exposing it to fallacy in the process. But in striving it also expanded the horizons of science, prompting the human mind to systematize its findings (Reference Kant, Guyer and Wood1998: A508/B536ff.). Hegel sought to capitalize on this account of rational endeavour. Reason, he thought, could criticize the limits of understanding in its struggle to render reality intelligible. The alternative was submitting to sceptical confusion or mere ‘truths’ of convention.

Faced with this challenge, the philosopher of history operated with just one assumption, the expectation that the evidence made sense. This was equivalent to the belief that events would fit into a pattern, as opposed to being subject to randomness or pure chance. However, Hegel was also clear that the philosopher as such could not assume this. Philosophy, after all, was a presuppositionless science. Its conclusions could not be taken for granted; they had to be proven. From Hegel’s perspective, the relevant proofs had been carried out in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic. Between them, he contended, these works demonstrated the intelligibility of existence. That is, they showed philosophically that the world made sense: by a process of dialectical development, inherited frameworks of interpretation came to correspond to objective truth and the system of values which oriented action was justified. In other words, empirical and moral science were not mere matters of taste. On the contrary, both rested on rational norms.

In Hegel’s scheme, philosophy proceeded by trial and error. The rationality of the world emerged by a process of struggle in which previous systems of judgment had asserted themselves and failed. With each failure, crippling limitations were overcome. The breakdown of partiality yielded a more capacious vision culminating in triumph over reigning contradictions. In concrete terms, this triumph meant the victory of reason over superstition. Institutionally it entailed the authority of the university over the church, and practically the legitimacy of equality over privilege.

Despite the reputation he currently enjoys for submitting serenely to benign fate, Hegel was not exceptional in drawing these conclusions. Substantively they assume no more than the principle of what we now call ‘Enlightenment’ (Aufklärung), largely thanks to Hegel (Schmidt Reference Schmidt2003). This stipulated the authority of philosophy over church and state. Such a priority meant, in Kant’s phrase, that we could ‘dare to know’ (Kant Reference Kant and Gregor1996). In other words, secular and spiritual powers should yield to argument, at least in so far as freedom of thought was compatible with civil peace. For all the radical divergence between their positions, Spinoza, Hobbes, Voltaire, Rousseau and Hume subscribed to the ‘rights’ of philosophy. Relatedly, they defended the veracity of science, the legitimacy of consent, and the possibility of justice. These ideals were very remote from the authority of birth or charisma. Enlightenment thinkers standardly affirmed some version of these commitments, even when they denied the potency of reason. As a result of this denial, from Hegel’s point of view, their problem was that they could not ground their normative preferences. Dialectical procedure was Hegel’s method for providing such a foundation.

Building on the successes of the Phenomenology and the Logic, the philosopher could bank on the norm of rationality. However, the historian could rely on nothing except factual observation. Nonetheless, the philosopher of history could explore whether the data of the past confirmed the expectations created by philosophical study. Bit by bit, historians pieced together the past, at which point philosophers could ask if the resulting narrative made sense. In other words, philosophy could ask if the overall story was meaningful—whether it pointed to cosmic futility or offered justification. In Hegel’s mind, the overview provided by his narrative of the past showed that ‘world history is the rational and necessary course of world spirit’ (LPWH: 80/VM: 141).

For Burckhardt, such claims were so preposterous that they warranted the abandonment of the philosophy of history altogether. In the place of grandiose speculation, Burckhardt would rely on ‘observation’ alone. For him, history and philosophy were at bottom incompatible. As he saw it, while history synthesized data, philosophy imposed rules. The incongruous combination of both gave rise to the spurious Hegelian scheme of ‘world historical development’. This took the form of unflappable ‘optimism’ (Burckhardt Reference Burckhardt and Hottinger1979: 32–33). However, as Sedgwick shows, Hegel’s goal was to surmount Panglossian complacency, Stoic submission and Christian ressentiment at once—with a view to reconciling the worlds of freedom and chance (TH: 112).

Burckhardt’s view proved influential, helping to shape the precepts of commentators like Nietzsche, thereby feeding into the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵ It legitimized a series of simplifications, which before long would take the form of parodies of Hegel, soon regarded as a befuddled historical logician. Cumulatively, the distortions yielded an image of Hegel as a thinker for whom disembodied ideas determined history in the form of a necessary pattern of events. This pattern was supposed to culminate in the affirmation of the ‘absolute’. Taken together, these propositions were arranged into an overarching thesis. The thesis contended that arrangements in the present—given their necessitation by the past—were categorically legitimate. Their legitimacy was seen as a function of their predetermination. What is, is right—or, the real is the rational. It seemed not to matter that Hegel attacked this position in §3 of the Philosophy of Right.

The intellectual package ascribed to Hegel has three main elements, each of which does indeed play a part in his system. These components are: Hegelian ‘logic’, his idea of ‘necessity’, and his conception of the ‘absolute’. The aim of interpreters should be to re-examine these ingredients in turn, and to consider anew how they can accurately be combined in Hegel’s thought. The place of teleology in the system must stand at the centre of any revisionist enterprise, since the three main factors in the Hegelian synthesis are usually linked by means of this concept.

Despite the prevalence of mechanistic explanations in post-Cartesian epistemology, a lot of seventeenth-century metaphysics relied on a teleological framework of analysis, often in the service of vindicating theodicy. In the 1830–31 introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel famously identified his own project as a species of theodicy: his project, he wrote explicitly, was ‘a theodicy, a justification of God’ (LPWH: 85/VM: 150). Classically, this kind of venture had aimed to solve the problem of evil by showing that the divinely orchestrated universe was just. Since theodicies of the kind implied that the world was animated by reason, they ultimately involved some kind of dependence on teleological judgement: the world was held together by an overarching purpose, and that purpose was taken to be benign.

Given his resort to the language of ‘purposes’, ‘goals’ and ‘plans’, and the related idea that history was at once necessary and justified, Hegel has unsurprisingly been associated with this tradition of rationalist metaphysics. However, in the 1970s and through the 1980s, the identification of Hegel with this style of thought began to be seriously questioned.Footnote ⁶ Since then, the revisionism of the 1980s has itself given rise to attempts to amend the revisionists, sometimes adding depth to Terry Pinkard and Robert Pippin, sometimes finding a place for metaphysics in Hegel’s system again.Footnote ⁷

In many ways, this situation has led to rival camps excavating different portions of Hegel to vindicate a preferred perspective. On one side, the pragmatist dimensions of Hegelian argument have been emphasized, often drawing on the legacy of Wilfred Sellars.Footnote ⁸ On the other, a teleological organicism, influenced by Schelling’s appropriation of Spinoza, is viewed as essential.Footnote ⁹ In the face of these divergent assessments, an uneasy truce has reigned. Sedgwick’s work has long intervened in the midst of these debates. In 2012, in Hegel’s Critique of Kant, she presented a searching analysis of Hegelian epistemology, unsurpassed in its elegance and lucidity. Her latest book takes the discussion forward into more controversial terrain by seeking to reconcile Hegel’s commitment to rationalism with his professed ambition to accommodate the place of contingency in history.

To achieve this, Sedgwick begins by rejecting Marx’s popular charge that Hegelian method proceeds by descending ‘from heaven to earth’—from a realm of eternal ideas to the world of contingent affairs (TH: 3; citing Marx Reference Marx and Tucker1978: 154). Above all, she questions the view that Hegel claimed that fixed rational content determined the historical process, as if quasi-Platonic concepts shaped the character of reality, much as a ‘puppet-master’ might decide the course of events (TH: 3; borrowing the image of the puppet-master from Houlgate Reference Houlgate1991: 38). Reason itself, Sedgwick argues, is historical in nature: ‘Hegel is committed to the assumption that there is a development in human reason […] Hegelian reason has its basis not beyond but rather in our actual world; it is indebted to its past for what it essentially is’ (TH: 2, 4). Taking issue with John Dewey, Sedgwick concludes that the human mind for Hegel is located in history: its content and commitments unfold in time (TH: 3, 178–81).

As Sedgwick further observes, time is the realm of accident or fortuna. This means that human reason, since it develops across history, is affected by the contingency of events. Here we encounter the complexity of Hegel’s approach to philosophy. Whilst reason for him is historical, as Sedgewick shows, it is also free. Obviously it cannot master the course of the world; but it can determine itself as it responds to historical change. On this reading, Hegel successfully reconciles contingency with necessity. Whilst reason is a product of external circumstance it still remains the source of its own laws.

Sedgwick’s argument self-consciously builds on an important insight of Emil Fackenheim: ‘the entire Hegelian philosophy’, Fackenheim wrote, ‘far from denying the contingent […] seeks to demonstrate its inescapability’ (Reference Fackenheim1967: 4; cf. Henrich Reference Henrich1958–59). This leads her to draw a sharp line between Kant and Hegel. Unlike in Kant, freedom in Hegel emerges out of nature. It follows from this that there is no separate ‘noumenal’ or supersensory world set apart categorically from sensibility and temporal succession: ‘Hegel breaks from a long tradition of thinkers who insist upon drawing a sharp line between purely empirical and purely rational modes of inquiry’ (TH: 10).

For Hegel, experience is mediated by the process of conceptualization, while concepts themselves are historical rather than pure in nature. This already shows that logic plays an intricate role in Hegel’s thinking. The ‘logic of the concept’, or the development of thought, is self-determining even as it is empirically responsive. As Sedgwick showed in her first book, this commitment set Hegel apart from Kantian epistemology. For Hegel, reason is not dependent on the material it processes. It remains free to hypothesize, conjecture and theorize, without being tethered to ‘the given’. However, it is equally true that its speculative activity can be contradicted by experience. Most studies of Hegel have tried to make sense of this dual aspect of rationality with reference to the Phenomenology and the Logic. Sedgwick shows that strenuous engagement with the Philosophy of World History brings out the urgency and subtlety of Hegel’s position.

While Hegel clearly departs from Kant, he is also fundamentally guided by his thought. This applies to Hegel’s philosophy of history as much as it does to his theory of knowledge. Part of his orientation derived from Kant’s 1784 essay for the Berliner Monatschrift on the ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, in which Hegel found a conception of reason as a faculty able to free human life from the bounds of sensibility and instinct, and so progressively to develop its technological and moral capacities. As Hegel argued in the Philosophy of Right, the purpose of human life cannot be ‘settled by instinct’ (EPR: §174; cited in TH: 121).

The question for Kant, as later for Hegel, was whether the drama of reason’s progress presented a ‘planless aggregate’ of change or evidence for a pattern of advancement (Kant Reference Kant, Zöller and Louden2007: 8, 29). After all, the short-term supply of incremental improvements might amount to a series of senseless accidents ultimately pointing to futility. However, if this Epicurean conclusion were to apply, practical reason would suffer an outright defeat. If the outcome of human action was subject to pure chance, then it made no sense to try to conform behaviour to moral standards. Kant solved this problem by reverting to faith in the ‘Idea’ of moral progress. As this reference to faith (Glaube) implied, a Kantian Idea was not empirically demonstrable. This meant that no amount of evidence could secure conviction in a final purpose. The best one could do was hope for improvement across the infinity of time.

This outcome looked suspiciously like the familiar Christian promise to Hegel, albeit transmuted into secular expectation. According to this model, belief in rationality was deferred into ‘the beyond’. In response, Hegel’s ambition was to show that the rational could be ‘actual’ (EPR: 20). This was at once a practical and normative assessment. It supposed that the world might exist in the form that it ought to assume.

As Sedgwick shows, the philosophy of history was a crucial means of addressing this conjunction. A key question, to begin with, was how history could function as evidence. To clarify the issue, Sedgwick explores the types of history analysed by Hegel. She argues that his distinction between ‘original’, ‘reflective’ and ‘philosophical’ history reveals a considered approach to the use of data (TH: 47–65). Hegel thought that evidence in historical argument amounted to more than an impressionistic flow of information. He proposed that the phenomena of experience were always framed. Consequently, there were no pre-conceptual facts, only empirically grounded ideas.

Nonetheless, Hegel accepted that our ideas were only as good as the evidence. Any history could be falsified if the facts did not stack up. But Hegel also insisted that reason was driven to ask whether our accumulated narratives added up to a meaningful whole. This was not a question for historians as such. However, it was the central issue faced by the philosophy of history. Reason would always inquire into whether the world was rationally ordered. As Kant had shown, it would inevitably strive to file its conclusions under a more systematic whole, extrapolating from all conditions to the idea of the unconditioned (Reference Kant, Guyer and Wood1998: A508/B536). But while for Kant this exercise was purely heuristic in nature, for Hegel it could deliver more tangible results.

This meant that the historical record mattered deeply to Hegel. It was for this reason that he insisted that historians should proceed empirically, sifting their material with strenuous impartiality. His argument went beyond the Kantian claim that one could reasonably hope for progress. The fact was that the evidence pointed to a pattern of development leading from societies subject to the dictates of custom to the self-reflexive culture of modernity. As we have seen, this culmination brought with it advances in the physical sciences as well as the achievement of moral equality and political accountability. This was not redemption, a final abatement of conflict. But it was an epochal transformation conveying a better world.

By comparison, accounts of decline in Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno tend to assume a process of inevitable deterioration, or else resort to stray examples to bolster a threadbare case, such as Adorno’s depiction of civilizational regress in technological terms as the passage ‘from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’ (Reference Adorno and Ashton1973: 320). Of course, there can be no doubt that the destructive powers of mankind have increased exponentially. However, the question is whether this demonstrates systematic moral corruption.

In Hegel, the search for significance was supported by an exhaustive array of facts. While reason looked at the world in an effort to find meaning, the world repaid the effort by making rational sense. However, Hegel’s point was not that reason imposed its own agenda. Rationality did not rule the world as a matter of wishful thinking. Instead, history confirmed the rational expectation of significance. This outcome might be refuted by new developments, which is why the Holocaust has long been seen as posing a challenge to Hegelianism. To meet that challenge, it would be necessary to show that there is still a point to civilization as we know it. However, assuming this to be possible, such affirmation would not rule out cases of cataclysmic backsliding.

Hegel was clear that historical regression was perfectly possible. As he wrote in 1819, ‘Spirit seems to take great backward strides and only after centuries does it rescue itself from an age of barbarism’ (LHP: 144). This makes plain that history for Hegel did not follow a predetermined path. He certainly saw that there were innumerable cases of retrogression on record. But this is hardly surprising since, on Hegel’s reckoning, history was festooned with acts of violence, passion and unreason, all displaying ‘the evil, the wickedness, the destruction of the noblest constructs of peoples and states, [and] the downfall of the most flourishing empires that the human spirit has produced’ (LPWH: 89–90). Despite Burckhardt, then, it makes no sense to assume that history for Hegel had to be rational. There was nothing ‘inevitable’ about its wayward course.

It follows that while Hegel frequently applied organic metaphors to the progress of spirit—most commonly the relationship between seed and bud—it needs to be stressed that he did not see the historical process as determined by a natural teleology. Hegel did claim, as Sedgwick notes, that the ‘first traces’ of history ‘virtually contain’ what was to follow (IntPH: 21; cited in TH: 70). But statements of the kind require careful interpretation. Hegel viewed each historical event from three distinct angles—‘in itself’ (an sich), ‘for itself’ (für sich), and ‘for us’ (für uns). That is, he analysed occurrences in terms of the potential they contained, what they meant for their agents, and how the outcome looked after the fact. When the result was justified, it became a normative necessity. This is very different from saying that it was fated in advance.

Looking back across time, the philosopher-historian can trace what freedom has produced, recapitulating how the story looks ‘for us’. Human action is characterized by the free pursuit of ends, and so is teleological by its very nature. However, this does not imply that the world was programmed to accomplish our goals, as the acorn germinates the oak. On the contrary, history is the domain of contingency, irrationality and disappointment. Nonetheless, reason has the potential to make sense of its travails. It can show how civilization is justified after the fact, and therefore ‘necessary’ when its virtue is grasped in retrospect. As Sedgwick shows, reason does not rule the world by mastering contingency. History is rather the product of unconscious cunning, realizing freedom without foresight. Providence is the actualization of a better world, brought into existence without a plan.