All tales of Hegel’s philosophy of history begin at the end; this book is no exception. Hegel’s self-styled collaboration of his Phenomenology of Spirit with Napoleon’s victorious entry into Jena sealed a new era of political, intellectual and spiritual liberty in Europe. This was the moment towards which the entirety of world history had been converging, and where it had come to rest, depriving the factual future of any historical significance. Or so the story goes. Dale convincingly urges that this philosophical legend ‘does not do justice to the actual content of Hegel’s philosophy’ (2). Though Dale’s leading aim is to exorcise the end of history myth, he also takes issue with a number of the other apparent ghosts in Hegel’s corpus. The blank pages of peace versus the slaughter-bench of history, the cunning of reason, the identification of the rational with the real: for a variety of philosophical and un-philosophical reasons each of these themes has been given a meaning foreign to the letter or the spirit of Hegel’s works. Dale repeatedly takes the first half of a dictum of Alfred North Whitehead as guidance: ‘It is more important that a proposition be interesting than it be true’, but, ‘of course, a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one’ (14, 22, 80). If only the second half of this dictum were correct, Dale’s book would happily announce its own redundancy. Instead we find that what truly precedes Hegel’s philosophy of history is its reputation, riddled with many interesting false propositions.

The book is divided into two parts. The first discusses three main culprits guilty of seeding the mythic end of history thesis: Nietzsche, Engels, and Kojève. The second part begins by describing two central predecessors of Hegel’s philosophy of history, Herder and Fichte, the polar views of whom Dale takes Hegel to have fruitfully reconciled. The remainder of the second part is dedicated to elaborating Hegel’s philosophy of history directly and in the context of his philosophy in general. The care taken to situate Hegel’s philosophy of history amongst its influences and its reception allows the book to double as an informative intellectual history of the philosophy of history in its own right.

What Nietzsche and Engels share as interpreters of Hegel’s philosophy of history, according to Dale, is a conviction that Hegel’s system ‘required the end of history’ (14). In this respect they differ from Kojéve, in Dale’s eyes, who is drawn to his conclusions about the end of history not by force of the internal logic of Hegel’s position, but by the external force of his own Marxist politics (14, 80–109). As Dale points out, ‘neither Nietzsche nor Engels quotes Hegel on the end of history’ (51). Moreover, Nietzsche, in his Untimely Meditations, explicitly notes that while Hegel should have said ‘that everything which came after him was actually nothing more than the musical coda to the world-historical rondo, or, more precisely, superfluous’, the fact is that ‘he did not say it’ (Nietzsche Reference Nietzsche1967: 3: 1: 304, quoted 51). According to Dale, ‘the first important philosophical occurrence of the end of history myth’ (51), is Nietzsche’s view that the logic of Hegel’s position compels Hegel to accept that all events subsequent to his time are evacuated of any historical novelty.

Nietzsche’s knowledge of Hegel was mostly second-hand, through sources such as Schopenhauer, Burckhardt, and Hartmann, whose influence Dale describes in detail (28–56). The fact that Nietzsche’s first-hand knowledge was poor highlights the breathtaking confidence of his pronouncement that Hegel never said that the future is devoid of any significance, but that he probably meant it: the first proposal would seem to presuppose a detailed first-hand knowledge of the letter of Hegel’s works, and the second would seem to presuppose the same knowledge of its spirit, neither of which Nietzsche could claim to have. And indeed it turns out, according to Dale, that Nietzsche’s Hegel is not Hegel at all. At this point, Dale contrasts the Hegel we find in Nietzsche with the Hegel he wants to remain on the stage. According to Dale, Hegel did neglect to say that history had ended and therefore there is no real future for the world, but only because ‘within the bounds of the system, he could not have intended it’ (52). One systematic reason why Hegel would never have accepted that the future has no historical significance is his firmly stated position that philosophy is forbidden from making any prophetic claims about the future (53). Philosophy is permitted at most to make pronouncements about what is, never about what will be. The limits of philosophy according to Hegel are underwritten by an Aristotelian confidence in the amenability of reality to thought and reason. According to Dale’s reading of Hegel, history is open-ended rather than closed: if Hegel seems indifferent towards the future, it is not because the future lacks promise or novelty, but rather because such promise is not fit for speculation.

The locus of Engels’s contribution to the tradition of interpreting Hegel as an end of history theorist is his late work Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. There, Dale argues, Engels identifies a tension between Hegel’s conservative system and his revolutionary method, i.e., the dialectic (78). Hegel’s system is inherently conservative, as all ‘traditional systems must conclude with some sort of absolute truth’ (Engels 1962: 21: 268, quoted 77). On the other hand, his method is progressive in that it assigns any given historical or philosophical development its proper importance, while recognising that it will inevitably be undone once it has fulfilled its purpose (76). Regrettably, it is the conservative will to a system that wins out in Hegel, according to Engels. Moreover, his view as to the end of philosophy entails the end of history, conceived ‘thus: humanity arrives at knowledge of the absolute idea, and declares that this knowledge of the absolute idea is arrived at through Hegelian philosophy’. Whereas Nietzsche thinks that this is the conclusion Hegel should have reached, but never explicitly did, Engels think that Hegel did reach this conclusion, but never should have (78).

Dale is impressed by precisely the same aspect of Hegel’s dialectical method as Engels, namely, its Heraclitean emphasis on process and renewal (76). However, while Dale concedes that Engels’s is a possible interpretation of Hegel, even an important one, he takes it to be by no means an adequate interpretation. An adequate interpretation would preserve only the processive character of Hegel’s philosophy, denying its dogmatically systematic character. Indeed it is this direction in which Dale’s interpretation heads. Nevertheless, it sets out from somewhere close to Engels. For example, Engels emerges from Dale’s discussion as the first prominent philosopher to truly get to grips with the possible political meanings of Hegel’s notorious identification of the real with the rational in the introduction to The Philosophy of Right (75). To this extent Engels gets to the bottom of Hegel’s relationships, personal and philosophical, with both the progressive and the reactionary institutions who are said to have claimed him as inspiration. Both the ‘gratitude from narrow minded governments and scorn from equally narrow-minded liberals’ are undermined by the simple fact that, according to Hegel, to exist and to be real are not the same thing (Engels 1962: 21: 266, quoted 167). For a state of affairs to be real or actual, it cannot be contingent, according to Hegel, so not every existing state of affairs is ipso facto real (and rational), and a merely contingent state of affairs can never be real (nor rational). Hegel equates contingency with the ‘external necessity’ of outside causes (which includes the coercive forces characteristic of authoritarianism), and maintains that the necessity constitutive of the actual ‘springs from the inner logic of events’ (174). With some amount of augmentation, Dale builds this reading into his interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of history. It is only ‘as history turns from contingent possibility to necessary actuality’ that ‘the rational and the real coincide’ (174). It is the job of the philosophy of history to reflect on the internal necessity in which the contingent events of history have thus far been suspended, not to pre-empt its final destination.

After discussing the reception of Hegel’s philosophy of history, Dale moves on to the influences exerted upon it by Herder and Fichte. This is not done in order to trace the end of history myth backward to an earlier source, but rather to present the philosophies of Herder and Fichte as the two extremes between which operates the emerging picture of Hegel’s. Herder is painted as being completely opposed to ‘the idea that history is some monolithic and inevitable thrust towards the future perfection of the human race’; for Herder, the real differences between cultures are not to be sidelined as the passing manifestations of a single, eternal human nature (118).

By contrast, the particulars are wholly irrelevant to Fichte’s philosophy of history: ‘Fichte’s verdict is clear: history can only be grasped through a priori means, and all possible epochs are potential deductions which the philosopher might well understand in their entirety before they ever occur’ (139). The goal of human history, according to Fichte, is ‘that in this life [human beings] may order all their relations with freedom, according to reason’ (Fichte Reference Fichte1965: 7: 7, quoted 143). To fully comprehend this goal is to grasp the procrustean Weltplan of world history.

According to Dale, Hegel must navigate a path between ignoring the particular facts of history, on the one hand, and stopping short at those facts, on the other. Hegel departs from Herder by claiming that the inner workings of history are amenable to philosophical reflection; nevertheless, these inner workings are not placed outside of history itself, as in Fichte, but can only be apprehended by paying attention to actual history. ‘The philosopher must know history via the facts of history;’ Dale argues, ‘he must combine the a priori and the a posteriori in a single, absolute knowing’ (166). Accordingly, Hegel’s interpretation of world history in The Philosophy of History is not intended to be a ‘distortion of the facts’ for the sake of some pre-set narrative goal, as Russell suggests (84), but constitutes an honest reading of the rationality history makes of the contingent facts.

It is in Dale’s reading of Hegel’s account of world history that we find Hegel’s actual conception of the end of history. For Dale makes a distinction between the mythic end of history which has broken loose from Hegel’s works, his true target, and a sense of the end of history which can actually stand up to the text. According to Dale, Hegel uses the phrase ‘end of history’ only once in his lectures on the philosophy of world history, namely, when claiming that Europe is essentially the end of world history (177). Dale accounts for this remark as an artifact of the sustained geographical metaphor of a sweep from east to west in the lectures on world history. He consistently refers to the geography of Hegel’s philosophy of history as metaphorical, which helps to consign Hegel’s Eurocentrism to the realm of myth; an unfashionably literal reading of the geographical unfolding of spirit is barely countenanced, and thus sidestepped. The direction of Hegel’s geographical metaphor has an end, namely Germanic Europe, but this should not be taken to mean that history literally ends in Europe. That would be contrary to the open-ended dialectical spirit of Hegel’s philosophy, at least as Dale paints it. On his account, by portraying Europe as the end of history Hegel was carried away by his own metaphors, a condition to which he takes Hegel to be especially prone. Take, for example, the further metaphors of Asia as the ‘childhood of history’ and Germanic Europe its ‘old age’, and of Asia as the ‘dawn’ of history and Europe its ‘dusk’. Both have the awkward consequence that history has reached the point of a final, fading anticlimax in Hegel’s own time (194–7), which is hardly consistent with either the mythic view of Hegel as cultural triumphalist or Dale’s view of Hegel as the philosopher of open-ended dialectical processes. Dale adduces Hegel’s hopes for the Americas as proof that history has not finally retired in Europe even for Hegel. Even though the fate of the Americas is not a proper object of philosophical history, the mere fact that it had a meaningful future at all in Hegel’s view would be a point in Dale’s favour, for which he argues convincingly (224–7).

Dale submits that Hegel’s philosophy of history is expressly intended to function as a theodicy. However, at the end of his book, he denies that it can fulfill that function. The reading of Hegel that Dale argues for deliberately preserves in Hegel’s thought a ‘tension between Hegel’s desire to see contingency overcome at all costs … and his determination to hold the system open at the very places where one would expect it to close’ (231). The tension is not intolerable because it is fruitful for the very dialectical character of Hegel’s philosophy which Dale values. It is in virtue of this tension that Hegel’s philosophy of history cannot support the end of history thesis, indeed that history ‘is not a sort of thing that could end’ (205). However, by the same token, his philosophy of history cannot maintain its theodical character either, ‘since theodicies as traditionally understood cannot be provisional but must deal with necessity’ (232). There can be no final accounting for evil, if to do so means expelling all contingency, because although history is precisely the process of expelling contingency, the process is never finalized. This consequence of Dale’s reading is significant in that it is the clearest point at which his insistence about what Hegel’s philosophy is not conflicts with what Hegel undeniably claims that it is.

There is a lingering mystery about who exactly is the intended audience of this book. The blurb suggests ‘scholars and advanced students of Hegel, the philosophy of history, and the history of political thought’. However, one wonders how many modern scholars of Hegel actually buy into the end of history in its mythic form. Granted, fanciful stories are still told about how Hegel took himself to have ended all history, but how often are they told by serious scholars of Hegel, as opposed to his more casual readers? However, the blurb also advertises that this is ‘the first book in English to thoroughly critique this entrenched view’ of the end of history myth, which is perhaps where its true novelty will lie for the scholars of Hegel. For anyone who really does take seriously the end of history myth, this book is an effective antidote. Yet even if one arrives at this book already unmoved by the end of history myth, one can still fully admire the level of depth and detail in which Dale roots and uproots it.