Hegel’s philosophy of history has become a nemesis against which various fields in anthropology, literary theory, sociology, political theory, philosophy and history define themselves. In the philosophy of history, Hegel’s main claims are firstly, that there is necessity in history, and secondly, that history is teleological. These claims are often taken to be extravagant or false. Many intellectuals influenced by Nietzschean or Foucauldian genealogy deny any sense of necessity in history, and instead advocate conceiving history from the point of view of contingency. Moreover, Hegel’s claim concerning the teleology of history is taken to mean that there is a final end in history—namely liberal, capitalist modernity—and that the rationality inherent in history culminates in this end. On this account, non-liberal, non-capitalist societies, either in the historical past or in the present, have failed to achieve the end they are supposed to achieve; they are the stalled versions of liberal capitalist modernity, and thus they are simply inferior. Hegel’s account is taken to represent the philosophical articulation of the most acute form of Eurocentricism, which has justified, and continues to justify, the encroachment of western liberal, capitalist societies on the rest of the world, i.e., colonialism tout court.

In the face of such attacks, the question posed to Hegel scholars is: can Hegel’s philosophy of history be rescued? Terry Pinkard’s answer to this challenging question in this fine book is ‘yes’, but a qualified ‘yes’. Hegel’s Eurocentric, colonial proclamations regarding Africa, India or China should be unabashedly discarded. Yet there is a philosophical core to Hegel’s argument that must be saved. The key, Pinkard suggests, is to interpret Hegel’s philosophy of history in light of Hegel’s conception of the nature of subjectivity. This is why Pinkard devotes the first chapter to Hegel’s account of subjectivity. Pinkard’s goal is to see whether Hegel’s philosophy of history meets the standards that Hegel himself sets for his philosophy in general, and if not, how his philosophy of history should be modified in light of such standards. In short, the book, rather than being a work of scholarship on Hegel’s philosophy of history per se, is ‘a Hegelian commentary on Hegel’s work’ (4).

Let me begin by explaining how Pinkard conceives of Hegel’s teleology in history. Pinkard rebuffs that ‘lazy teleological view, in which we posit some kind of end to life or history, and then see how things do measure up to it, or contribute to it’ (238). This reading indulges in organic metaphors of Hegel, such as that of ‘the acorn developing into an oak according to an internal plan’ (2). Once we accept that such metaphors can be applied to the realm of history, there is a short road to the end-of-history thesis, namely, to the view that history, which began sometime in the remote past, perhaps in ancient Persia or somewhere else, eventually finishes in liberal, capitalist modernity, and that from that point onward, there is no history, there is only repetition of the same.

Rather than interpreting history’s end as an ‘end in the sense of completion’, Pinkard conceives of history’s end or purpose as an ‘infinite end’ (Chapter 2). According to Pinkard, ‘a finite end is one that can be achieved by doing something specific’, and upon doing that specific thing, the end is exhausted and thereby fades away. If I am thirsty and want a drink, after drinking, my desire for drinking goes away. In contrast, infinite ends are non-exhaustible; there is no time when one can say an infinite end is once and for all achieved, and thus can be ‘tick[ed] off the list of things still needing to be done’ (41–42). Examples of infinite ends are happiness (in Aristotle’s sense) and health. They do not expire, but rather ‘require a continual sustaining activity for them to be effective’ (42). Moreover, in contrast to finite ends, there is no one single definite way that an infinite end can be fulfilled. There are various ways to be happy; there are various ways to be healthy (41–42). Indeed, ‘that an infinite end can be specified in many different ways is at the heart of an infinite end’ (156).

Accordingly, Pinkard considers freedom to be the infinite end of history, and takes freedom to encompass justice, social reconciliation and legitimacy. Freedom and justice are not things that can be achieved and then safely put aside; rather they must be constantly regenerated. This is so, according to Pinkard, because the aspiration for freedom and justice are deeply connected to the nature of self-consciousness as such. Invoking the dialectic of mastery and servitude in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Pinkard discusses how self-consciousness emerges from our shared desire for freedom and justice. And he shows how this desire is in turn bound up with our collective attempt at making sense of the world, of ourselves, and of making sense of that making sense. Thus, Pinkard concludes that the infinite end of history is nothing but the ‘collective end of self-comprehension’ (44–45, 167).

Having identified the end of history as self-comprehension of spirit, of collective human mindedness, Pinkard re-interprets the necessity involved in history (Chapter 5). According to Pinkard, the necessity governing history for Hegel is not ‘metaphysical or causal’ (141). Hegel’s philosophy of history does not consist in ‘the explication of any laws of history or any claims about how various regimes inevitably converge at some final point, or inevitably lead to a certain result’ (166). Rather, ‘the necessity that is to be found in history as philosophically comprehensible is only that of the necessity of making sense of things and making sense of making sense’ (167). No matter what the historical forces are, we human beings are not merely objects that are pushed around by them, rather, we are sense-making, self-interpreting subjects that, amidst these forces, desire for self-comprehension. According to Pinkard’s reading of Hegel, this capacity to make sense of things and of ourselves is ‘an unchanging principled core to subjectivity’ that underlies the entire history, and modernity is the phase that allows us to understand and acknowledge this core. As Pinkard puts it,

For Pinkard, a shape of life in history is determined through an ‘order of thought’, which consists of the unity between ‘ethical principle and individual psychology’. And such unity obtains through mediation of various institutions and practices. In accordance with the centrality of sense-making in his interpretation of Hegel, Pinkard argues that the stability of a shape of life primarily ‘has to do with whether the order itself generates a kind of moral psychology that can be successfully lived or put into practice’ (40). Consequently, a shape of life collapses, according to Pinkard, when institutional norms put so much strain on the emotional and psychological capacities of people that they cannot abide by those institutional norms (91).

Thus, it seems to me that we can designate Pinkard’s philosophy of history as deflationary, although he does not use the term. Pinkard accepts that there is teleology and necessity in history, but takes their meaning to involve nothing more than a desire for self-comprehension. On this deflationary reading, the Hegelian concept of the ‘cunning of reason’ does not refer to a law, but just means that ‘despite the setbacks and horrors which appear in human history, there remains the need for self-comprehension’ (103). The deflationary character of Pinkard’s reading of Hegel is also evident in his focus on psychology. Pinkard explains historical changes primarily through psychology involved in sense-making, and not through the contradictions inherent in the institutional framework of a shape of life.

Apart from the general philosophical framework explained so far, Chapters 3 and 4 offer many interesting details that I cannot address in the space of this review. For example, in Chapter 3, ‘Hegel’s False Start: Non-Europeans as Failed Europeans’, Pinkard argues that ‘Hegel’s negative characterization of non-European shapes of life turns out to be less about them…and more about the problems inherent in any collective enterprise’, European ways of life included (67). In Chapter 4, ‘Europe’s Logic’, Pinkard argues that Hegel’s conception of modernity was not monolithic, and that there have been—and therefore, will always be—alternative roads to becoming modern. The Dutch, the Spanish, the German and the British modernity are not all the same, although they all, to varying degrees, embody the infinite end of freedom and collective self-comprehension.

Contemporary scholarship on Hegel has not paid due attention to Hegel’s philosophy of history. This is partly due to the many extravagant, even obscene, empirical claims that Hegel makes in his philosophy of history. Another reason is the difficulty of defending the heavy metaphysical baggage that seems to come with Hegel’s philosophy of history. But this negligence is also due to the contemporary dominance of ahistorical thinking in the departments of philosophy, especially in the Anglophone world. With this excellent book, Pinkard has opened a new way of thinking about philosophy of history, about why history is not merely a battery of facts that philosophers may or may not choose to use in their philosophizing, but is constitutive of the core concepts of philosophy, specifically, of the very nature of subjectivity.

In conclusion, I would like to raise some of my concerns about the limits of Pinkard’s deflationary interpretation. As I said above, Pinkard does not discuss the necessity of history at the level of economic, social or political arrangements, but limits himself to a rather abstract account of sense-making inherent in subjectivity. For anybody who is interested, for example, in the history of the October Revolution—and the current year is its centenary—a series of questions regarding necessity in history inevitably pops up: Was the Revolution necessary? Was it necessary that Stalin, rather than Trotsky, succeeded Lenin? How would the ‘necessary’ course of events have been different if the communist revolution had happened in a country with a more developed industry? What would have happened to the Revolution if the Spartacist uprising in Germany had not been crushed? Pinkard’s conception of the necessity of history does not seem to offer any clue for discussing these questions. Asking such questions might seem to be the sole business of historians or social scientists, but I would like to underscore that Hegel, the philosopher, could engage with such questions. After all, it is undeniable that for Hegel history occurs in the realm of objective spirit, and this is why Hegel regards history as the history of institutions, specifically, of political states. Pinkard’s philosophy of history—with its overemphasis on sense-making and the psychology inherent in it—seems to push history too much towards Hegel’s subjective spirit, and so ignores the fundamental divide that to my mind exists for Hegel between explanation of society and explanation of individuals.

Even recognizing what intelligibility amounts to requires more than an analysis of ‘the form of self-consciousness’ (150) or an investigation into psychology. As regards the example of the Russian Revolution, in today’s academic-industrial complex, scores of books are produced on the history of it—all the so-called details, especially with the archives made accessible after the fall of the Soviet Union, are now being unearthed. But the accumulation of knowledge on the Revolution does not imply that the Revolution is now more ‘intelligible’ to us, that we really ‘make sense’ of it better, than, say, people in the 1960s or 70s.Footnote ¹ That the idea of a workers’ revolution seems so alien, and thus incomprehensible, to us cannot be attributed to the mere activity of sense-making and the psychology that it entails. It is rather the result of the contemporary constellation of social, economic and political forces which determine the possibility of such sense-making. Consequently, unless sense-making is anchored within the framework of objective, institutional analyses, there is a danger that it becomes too indeterminate—and if there is one thing that Hegel wholeheartedly opposed, it is indeterminacy.